Goodbye for Now: A Novel

by Laurie Frankel

  Sam was a romantic, yes, but he was also a software engineer, and since he was better at the latter, he played to his strengths. For two weeks straight, he worked obsessively on an algorithm that figured out who you really were. It ignored the form you filled out yourself in favor of reading your spending reports and bank statements and e-mails. It read your chat histories and text messages, your posts and status updates. It read your blog and what you posted on other people’s blogs. It looked at what you bought online, what you read online, what you studiously avoided online. It ignored who you said you were and who you said you wanted in favor of who you really were and who you really wanted. Sam mixed the ancient traditions of the matchmakers plus the truths users revealed but did not admit about themselves combined with the power of modern data processors and made the algorithm that changed the dating world. He cracked the code to your heart.

  His teammates were impressed. Jamie was pleased. But BB was thrilled with the algorithm, especially once he saw the proof of concept demos and how incredibly, unbelievably well it would work.

  “We’ll get you down to just one date!” BB enthused. “That’s all it will take. Talk about killer apps!”

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  The next step for Sam, of course, was to try it himself. He wanted to know if it worked. He wanted to prove that it worked. But mostly, he wanted it to work. He wanted it to search the world and point, to reach down like the finger of God and say, “Her.” How good was this algorithm? First time out, it set Sam up with Meredith Maxwell. She worked next door. In the marketing department. Of Sam’s own company. For their first date, they met for lunch in the cafeteria at work. She was leaning against the doorframe grinning at him when he got off the elevator, grinning helplessly himself.

  “Meredith Maxwell,” she said, shaking Sam’s hand. “My friends mostly call me Max.”

  “Not Merde?” Sam asked, incredulous, appalled with himself, even as he was doing so. Who made a joke like that—pretentious, scatological, and French—as a first impression? Sam was awkward and off-putting and a little gross.

  Incredibly, Meredith Maxwell laughed. “Je crois que tu es le premier.”

  It was as if a miracle had occurred. She thought it was funny. She thought Sam was funny. But it wasn’t a miracle. It was computer science.

  “So where did you learn French?” Sam recovered after they were seated in an out-of-the-way corner with their cafeteria trays.

  “I spent a year abroad in college in Bruges. I also learned Flemish.”

  “That must come in handy,” said Sam.

  “Less than you’d think. The only people I speak Flemish to are my dogs.”

  “You have dogs?”

  “Snowy and Milou.”

  “You named your dogs after a Belgian comic book.”

  “Well, a Belgian comic book and its English translation,” said Meredith Maxwell.

  Sam was wildly impressed with himself. Though she’d offered nothing in her dating profile about the names of her dogs and Sam nothing of his childhood obsession with Tintin, somehow he’d written an algorithm that knew anyway. He was some kind of genius. Meredith Maxwell, meanwhile, was beautiful and funny and evidently smart, thirty-four years old (Sam liked older women, even if they were only seven months older), a world traveler, a polyglot, a dog lover, an enjoyer of cafeteria-style strawberry ice cream, and possessor of skin that smelled like the sea.

  “This was fun,” said Meredith as they bused their trays. But she didn’t sound sure.

  “Should we do it again?” said Sam.

  “Maybe off campus?” Sam observed that this was not a no but was also not an of-course-don’t-be-absurd-yes. Was this thing not as good as he thought? Was it good on paper (well, in code) but not in fact? Or more appalling still: was she his perfect match, the one soul in all the world who fit with his, the boiling down of all humanity to his Platonic partner … and she liked him sort of okay? He scrambled to think up impressive first dates. Was he insane? The cafeteria at work wasn’t a good first impression. This one shouldn’t count. He needed a do-over. “Let’s go somewhere special for dinner.”

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “Um … Canlis? Campagne? Rover’s?” Sam named expensive restaurants aimlessly. He’d never been to any of them. “We could take the Clipper over to Victoria? Canada’s very romantic.”

  “Boats make me throw up,” she said.

  “That restaurant at the top of the Space Needle?”

  “Do you like baseball?” she said.

  Sam stopped breathing. Was this a trick question? “I like baseball.”

  “How about dinner at the ballpark? Saturday night? Hot dogs and a game? Might be more fun.”

  The ball game was fun. So was dinner out, somewhat more casual than Sam had suggested in the first place but still what passed for fancy in Seattle. So was the play Meredith picked out for them to see and her interrogation of him afterward, which was like an English exam but with more pressure (the stakes being higher, after all). So was the Korean horror film at the three-dollar movies, and so was the day hike at Hurricane Ridge. But it still hadn’t clicked right away. Or maybe it was the opposite.

  “I can’t help but notice,” Meredith observed after all-day hiking, after separate showers and towel-dried hair and red wine and candles and carryout Thai on the floor of her living room, “that you haven’t kissed me yet.”

  “I haven’t?” said Sam.

  “Nope.”

  “What a strange oversight. Why, do you think?”

  “Could be you don’t like me,” Meredith suggested.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” said Sam.

  “Could be you like me but think I’m hideous.”

  “I don’t think that’s it either,” said Sam, scooting a little closer toward her across the floor.

  “Could be that you’re a lousy computer programmer and this algorithm doesn’t work and we’re totally mismatched, a crappy couple, star-crossed, ill-fated, with no chemistry.”

  “I am a brilliant computer programmer,” said Sam.

  “Maybe you’re scared,” said Meredith.

  “Of what?”

  “Rejection.”

  “Not much chance of that. Maybe you’re scared.”

  “Me?” she said.

  “Yes you,” said Sam, scooting a little bit closer still. “Maybe you’re too scared to kiss me. Maybe you’re lily-livered.”

  “What does that even mean?” she said. “Like your liver is flowery? Like a little girl? Like all the toxins it filters out of your blood are flora?”

  “It’s from humors. You know, bile, blood, phlegm,” Sam murmured romantically. “You lack enough to color your liver, so it’s all white and pale and cowardly, hanging out down there in your digestive tract talking you out of kissing me.”

  “You know a lot of things, Sam,” she said.

  “Is that a bad thing?” he asked, coming upright. He’d been leaning so far toward her, eyes half-closed, he felt almost dizzy. Or maybe that wasn’t why.

  She considered. “I do like my men smart, but perhaps the less talk of phlegm right before our first kiss, the better.”

  “I didn’t know it would be right before our first kiss,” Sam said.

  “Well then, I guess you don’t know everything after all.”

  Did she kiss him then or did he kiss her? Or were they so close by that point that the next inhale pulled their mouths together, that the ferocious beating of Sam’s heart rocked him actually into her? Or was it fate or compatibility or chemistry or computer science? Sam forgot to care. Sam forgot to think about it. Sam forgot to think about anything at all.

  They kissed for a while. Then they stopped kissing for a while and just sat and breathed together. Meredith’s apartment was decorated with model airplanes hanging all over the ceiling. The shadows they flickered in the candlelight made Sam feel like he was flying. Or maybe that wasn’t why. Then Meredith said, “Well that was nice. What took you so long?
”

  Sam tried to say lightly, “What took you so long?” He tried to work “lily-livered” back into conversation while his heart rate came down. Instead he accidentally answered honestly. “I think … I’m pretty sure this will be my last first kiss. Ever. I wanted to savor it.”

  “How’d it go?” asked Meredith.

  “I forget,” said Sam, and she smiled, but that was accidentally honest as well. “Let me try again.”

  LONDON CALLING

  Sam rolled over the next morning to fully consider the still-asleep, teeth-unbrushed, bed-headed Meredith for a minute or two before he said, “So, should I move in or what?”

  “What?”

  “Should I move in now? Or do you want to wait?”

  “I was thinking brunch,” said Meredith.

  “Then packing?”

  “I was thinking brunch then maybe a walk. Are you kidding?”

  “It’s a top-notch algorithm, Merde,” said Sam.

  “Top-notch?”

  “It’s not wrong. I made it myself, you know. You’re dealing with a quality product here.”

  “Still. I think I’d like to be more than twelve hours out from our first kiss before you move in.”

  Sam thought about it. “Should you move in with me then?”

  “I’m not sure that’s exactly the issue here, but don’t be insane—I’m not moving into your studio apartment.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your bedroom is a platform. Your kitchen is a burner. I have two dogs.”

  “And a lot of tiny airplanes. Here it is then.”

  “Go to London. Then we’ll talk.”

  Sam was going to London for the annual international social networking technology conference, this one dubbed, “London, City of Love: This Is Your Heart on Tech,” a title which was both stupid and confusing, London being the city of many things (tea, mummies, and jacket potatoes sprang immediately to mind), but not, per se, love. The meeting had been scheduled, of course, long before he knew that this would be the week he would fall in love himself. He lobbied to bring Meredith with him. “Marketing should have a presence,” he said to Jamie and then tried, “My presentation’s on the algorithm. We’d be a great advertisement for it.” But these requests were denied. “I believe I will have more of your undivided attention if you come alone,” Jamie said.

  This was only sort of true. It was a busy trip. There were endless meetings and investors to present to, talks to attend, cocktail hours and breakfasts at which to make an appearance, plus all the technology glitches to fix, the ones that are inevitable on borrowed equipment far from home when lots of money and clout are at stake and all your competition is looking on and everything has to go exactly right. It didn’t make a lot of sense to Sam that there should be so many technical glitches—and that so many of them should be his problem—when everyone in a three-block radius was a computer person and the whole point of the conference was technology, but there wasn’t much time to ponder that. There was all of that to do plus museums to explore, churches to visit, markets to wander, pints to drink, and theater to see. There was all of that plus wandering city streets in the rain and gazing into the river and drinking tea in cafés while longing for Meredith. He felt bereft to be apart from her for even two weeks. He felt her absence physically. He felt as if he were missing a lung. And he was loving every minute of it.

  He stopped for late-night Chinese food on Tottenham Court Road on the way back to his hotel the first night and got a fortune cookie that read, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” This he texted to Meredith.

  “They’re wrong,” she wrote back. “Absence makes you insane.”

  He floated back to the hotel. Then he got ready for bed and called her.

  “Insane how?” he said.

  “I’m at work,” she said.

  “Really? It’s after five there. Go home and call me.”

  “I’m going out with Natalie. Can we chat tomorrow?”

  “Only if you tell me insane how,” said Sam.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, and he went to sleep. At five thirty in the morning, his video chat rang. It had been ringing for some time before he woke up, morphing Sam’s dream about being trapped in an underwater obstacle course into being trapped in an underwater obstacle course where he got a prize at the end by ringing a bell.

  “Mmm …’lo?” he managed.

  “Heyyyy,” she sang, all sweet and soft. And drunk.

  “Mmfff,” he said.

  “Are you there?”

  “Mmmffff.”

  “It looks like you’re in a cave.”

  “Not in a cave.”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s night.”

  “No, it’s night here. It must be morning there.”

  “Technically, perhaps,” said Sam, dawning slowly into consciousness. “But not like the sun’s up.”

  “It’s summer in London,” Meredith protested. “The sun is always up.”

  “I think you might be missing the point here,” said Sam. “It’s dark because I have the curtains closed. Because it’s night.”

  “Shouldn’t you be jet-lagging?”

  “I am a gifted sleeper.”

  “Shouldn’t you be more excited to talk to me?”

  “There are very few things that make me excited at five thirty in the morning.”

  “Want to know how absence makes you insane?”

  “Sure. How?”

  “Turn on a light so I can see you.”

  He rolled over and did, squinting hopelessly at her from around the globe and half a day away.

  “It makes you insane because you go out with your favorite girlfriend who you haven’t seen in weeks to your favorite bar where you haven’t been in months to watch your favorite baseball team beat the Yankees eleven to one, and you still feel like something huge is missing all night long.”

  “Missing me is not insane. It’s just good sense.”

  “Good night, Sam.”

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t have a wake-up call coming in half an hour.”

  “Your presentation is tomorrow?”

  “Today. Yeah.”

  “Your Major Presentation?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “In front of hundreds of really smart people?”

  “Maybe thousands.”

  “With the whole future of the company—our company—at stake?”

  “I am very important.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “More and more.”

  “Jeez, Sam,” said Meredith. “You should really be getting some sleep.”

  When Sam drew the blinds not very much later, he found his room wasn’t much lighter than it had been when they were closed. An hour later, he met Jamie in the lobby. Jamie was from London. He’d come to Seattle at the direct behest of BB to run Sam’s department a year ago. Jamie claimed it was because of his superior leadership talent and technological know-how. Sam suspected BB was lulled into liking Jamie by his British accent, which made him sound smart and worldly as he gently explained the practical impossibilities of BB’s pompous, overblown ideas. He’d trained as a Shakespearean actor before he turned to computers, and so he voiced the minutiae of everyday business ins and outs with a drama, cadence, and gravitas BB found appropriate to his own sense of importance. On this trip, Jamie was playing both boss and tour guide. And defender of the queen.

  “Your weather’s shite, dude,” Sam greeted him in his best Monty Python accent.

  “Your weather’s shite, mate,” Jamie corrected. “And what do you know? You live in Seattle. Your weather’s just as shite as ours.”

  “But we deal with it better.”

  “Pray tell how so.”

  “Coffee shops,” said Sam.

  “Pubs,” Jamie countered.

  “Right, because what you need on top of all the rain is cold beer and depressant.” />
  “Beer’s not cold here,” said Jamie.

  “I rest my case,” said Sam.

  “We can get you a coffee,” said Jamie as they walked toward the tube stop.

  “Yeah, a shite coffee.”

  Jamie shoved him into a puddle, and Sam had to give his Major Presentation in sodden shoes. Despite this fact, Sam and his algorithm were greeted with raucous applause and Q & A that had to be cut off after an hour and a half because someone else (to whom Sam was eternally grateful) needed the room.

  Jamie took him out for a celebratory lunch at a gastropub near St. Paul’s where Sam drank a room-temp pint of what he had to admit was the best beer he’d ever had in his life. Then they walked across the bridge to the Tate Modern to have a look at the exhibit filling its giant-size entry hall: a scale model of the city of London. It was made from foam, so if you found yourself accidentally tempted to tread on the National Theatre or literally tripped up by Big Ben, you wouldn’t hurt the art or yourself. It was about waist-high and so exquisitely detailed that they could see the scale model of London through the windows of the Turbine Hall of the mini-Tate. They wandered its city streets, much drier than the ones outside, until Jamie found the flat he’d grown up in and accidentally snagged his jacket on a restaurant he’d forgotten about entirely but was now convinced he had to take Sam to for dinner.

  “Aren’t I a good boss?” he noted.

  “You are.”