by Xavier Mayne
Fox needed new friends.
Hey. Yeah, it was a little weird. Their note said our getting matched up was a computer error.
He stood with his thumbs frozen over the phone’s keyboard for a long moment, then resumed. But then I saw you’re getting a PhD at the university. I almost majored in history when I did my undergrad there. I majored in business, but I still read a lot of history. So maybe the computer wasn’t completely wrong.
He took a deep breath and finished the message before he could second-guess himself. If you’d like to grab coffee sometime, that’d be cool.—Fox
The realization that he had punched the Send button without even reading the message over nearly knocked the wind out of him. He stumbled into a chair, caught it before it fell, then slumped heavily into it.
What had he done?
“MRS. SCHWARTZMANN? Are you there?” Drew knocked again. “Hello?”
Finally he could hear her shuffling footsteps approaching. “Who is there knocking?” she demanded in her gruffest voice.
“Mrs. Schwartzmann, it’s Drew.”
“Oh, Drew,” she called back as she began unlocking the door. She pulled it open. “How nice to see you twice in one morning.” Her smile was warm, though her eyes scanned him for the reason for his return to her apartment.
He held his laptop out in front of him. “Can I get your advice?” This was like asking a cat whether he might like a little catnip, a dish of warm milk, and a mouse with a gimpy leg.
“Of course, of course,” she sang out happily. “Please come sit. Coffee for us I will make.”
He sat at the kitchen table and opened his laptop. “He wrote back to me.”
“Who did this writing?” she asked.
“The guy the dating site said I should meet.”
“But you said that was a mistake. You seemed very certain.”
“It was a mistake. And then I got a message from them a couple hours ago confirming it was. But I’d already written to him to see if he might want to, you know… be friends.”
Her eyes lit up. “Ah, so you take my advice. Good.”
“But now he’s written back to me, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, what did he say?”
Drew read Fox’s message aloud. He practically knew it by heart, despite having only received it ten minutes prior.
“What are you talking, you don’t know what to do? You know to go get some coffee with him.” She shook her head and made a gentle clucking noise. “And you wonder why so few friends you have.”
“But doesn’t that sound like”—he lowered his voice and leaned confidentially over the table—“like a date?”
She blinked three times at him. He’d noticed she often did this when she thought he was being an idiot. “Are you planning to marry this man?” she asked flatly.
“No, I’m not planning to marry this man.”
She shrugged. “Then it is not a date. It is coffee—coffee with a friend.”
“What should I say to him?”
Again the three blinks, this time even more slowly. “You should say to him, ‘Yes I would like coffee very much.’ And then you maybe suggest a nice place for getting coffee. And wear that striped shirt with the blue tie. You wear that and your eyes, they sparkle.” She smiled and nodded like a proud grandma.
“But this isn’t a date.”
“Okay, okay, it is not a date,” she replied with her hands raised in surrender. “It is simply friends meeting for a coffee. But still you could look nice for your new friend is all.”
“I guess. It seems weird if I’m dressing up for this guy, but I guess it makes sense. Okay.” He looked up at the ceiling, wishing the exact right words would simply fall onto his keyboard. But that didn’t seem to be happening.
The whistle of the kettle startled Mrs. Schwartzmann into action. “And now, we have coffee. Because, my dear boy, we are friends.”
“We are, Mrs. Schwartzmann. We are.”
COFFEE SOUNDS awesome.
He stared at the words, his lip curling with disgust. He deleted the first sentence of the message to Fox once again.
Coffee would be cool.
Ugh, that was exactly what Fox had written to him. How stupid would it look for him to say the very same thing back?
Delete, delete, delete.
Coffee? I love coffee too. What a coincidence!
“Fuck it, this keeps getting worse.”
He backspaced over the line one more time, then got up and walked a few laps around the apartment. A few hundred “What the fucks” later, he was ready to try again.
Coffee would be nice, but I know a guy who tends bar at a kind of sophisticated-but-dive-y bourbon bar near the university. He keeps some small-batch stuff under the bar that will blow your mind.
He read this over several times, then added another sentence.
Busy tonight?
Then he read the entire thing a dozen more times, reading it out loud the last few times to hear how it sounded. With a deep breath, he hit Send.
He had asked a guy out on a date.
“It’s not a date,” he scolded himself.
Of course it wasn’t a date. They were just going to see if they could be friends.
It wasn’t a date.
Chapter SIX
“HE DID it on purpose?”
“He did it on purpose.”
Edwin blinked twice and pursed his lips. “He did it on purpose.”
Veera nodded and spoke more slowly. “He did it on purpose.”
They were the only ones in the kitchen area, a rather dull grouping of tables and chairs next to the espresso machine that Edwin had turned on as soon as he arrived in the office, an hour after Veera. They sat opposite each other, with two steaming cappuccinos between them.
Edwin mirrored her nod, which Veera took as progress, and downed half his coffee in one go.
“For what purpose, exactly?”
“He ran discordant success models until he identified a couple dozen people who were likely to hit the high nineties if they were simply willing to waive Parameter Three.”
“Simply willing to waive their sexual orientation?” Edwin asked slowly, as if he had trouble even forming the words, much less understanding the sentence they made together.
“Yes.”
“So something is seriously wrong with him.”
Veera winced. “Not really.”
His eyes widened. “He sent match notifications for the wrong gender to twenty-two people this morning. How is that not seriously wrong?”
“He has models that predict success for those matches.”
“And I have an inbox full of angry emails, flaming tweets, and not one but six vicious memes already on our Facebook page that say differently.”
“I’ve made it very clear that he’s not to do it again. He knows Parameter Three is absolute.”
“Are you sure?”
“I built him. I screwed up and made him think I had relaxed the operational guidance. It was my fault, not his. It won’t happen again.”
“Good. We can’t treat people this way.”
Veera sipped her coffee. She never drank coffee as a rule, but she partook because Edwin had made it for her, and she didn’t want to offend him. She had sweetened it enough to pretend it was a cup of her grandmother’s chai. They sat in silence for a long moment.
“It’s too bad, really,” she said.
“Don’t get caught up in blaming yourself. What we’re doing is way out on the bleeding edge of relationship discovery tech, and we’re bound to screw it up once in a while.”
“Oh, you’ll never be able to talk me out of the guilt I feel for waking all of those people up on a Saturday morning and causing such a fuss,” she said. “But I meant it’s too bad for the people Archer tried to match up.”
“They’ll get over the shock eventually. A free year of service will smooth over a lot of things.”
“No, I meant it’s too bad they w
on’t give themselves a chance to see if Archer was right.”
“You mean a chance to see if they were wrong. About their own sexual orientation.” He raised a critical eyebrow. “Because an epistemology engine that scrapes their social media certainly knows their sexual identity better than they do.”
“Archer didn’t do this on a whim. The epistemology engine created dozens of models for how people experience a change in sexual orientation. He only sent matches to people he predicted would be happier if they dated someone of a different gender than the one they said they were interested in. The models showed a more than ninety percent chance they’d be happier if they tried it.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“I don’t joke about psychoheuristics, Edwin. You know me better than that.”
“No one jokes about psychoheuristics, Veera. No one.”
The tension between them lightened when they shared a chuckle.
“Seriously, though,” he said, “how would you feel if Archer told you you’d be happier dating women?”
“How do you know I don’t already date women?”
He drew back, clearly startled. “Oh, I’m sorry, I—”
“No worries,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t actually date anyone right now.”
“You don’t have to explain,” he said, color coming into his cheeks. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine. I don’t mind talking about it.” She smiled, to let him know it really was okay. “Once I’m ready for a relationship, my parents will arrange an introduction for me. To a man they think I will like.”
“Oh,” Edwin said, blinking several times as if trying to get that information to sink in. “Oh.” He passed his empty coffee cup from hand to hand for a moment, sliding it on the table like a slow-motion hockey puck. Then he looked up at her. “And that’s okay with you?”
“It is. Who better to choose a mate for me than my parents, who know me so well?”
“And yet here you are, trying to replace them with a computer.”
“Not really. I mean, it would be nice if everyone had a loving family around them to help them make what is probably the most important decision they will ever make. But that’s not really how people in this culture live. I’ve met people here who haven’t seen their parents in years.”
“So, let me ask you, then,” Edwin said, leaning closer and lowering his voice. “If you showed up at home and your parents introduced you to a woman they thought you would like, how would you react?”
She laughed. “I’d be very surprised, but I would also be intrigued. Our families often know us better than we know ourselves. I would probably give it some serious thought. And that’s what I wish these twenty-two people would do rather than tweeting angrily at us. Archer didn’t do this because he thought it would be funny. He did it because the best models ever created for relationship discovery showed a great promise of success. It’s too bad that no one seems willing to even consider it.”
“We are human, after all, Veera,” Edwin said with a sigh. He got to his feet. “Now, let’s go make sure we have everything buttoned up. I have a date on the soccer field in an hour, and my little goalie is going to be very upset if I miss seeing her play.”
FOX READ the message out loud several times, trying to hear in it what Drew meant when he sent it. Fox had proposed coffee, and Drew had raised the stakes to bourbon. Which was fine—he enjoyed a good bourbon—but was getting a drink what he really wanted to do with this guy he didn’t even know? Didn’t it start to seem more like a date than a friend thing?
No, it wasn’t a date, he scolded himself, because they were both guys and they both dated women, and no matter what Chad said, it wasn’t gay to spend a hundred bucks on a haircut. Fucking Chad.
Busy tonight?
Fox stared at those two words for so long that his coffee went cold. He dumped it out, rinsed the cup, and put it in the dishwasher. Then he went back to staring at the words.
Tonight. Was he busy tonight?
That simple phrase made the whole thing seem more urgent—more real. Like he needed to decide, right here, in his kitchen, whether he was going to go have a drink with some guy he’d never met.
It’s not like he had plans, of course. With no women in his match queue who netted out any higher than the low eighties, there wasn’t exactly a bumper crop of likely candidates for the evening.
This thought stopped him in his tracks. For the last two years—probably three—he had never let a Saturday evening go to waste. If he was drawing breath, he was dating. And yet this was the first moment it had occurred to him that it was now noon and he had no plans for the evening. He couldn’t recall a Saturday that wasn’t Christmas when he hadn’t had a date.
It was because of Drew. The sudden appearance of a guy in his match queue had thrown him completely off his game. If this had happened to anyone he knew, he would have told him exactly what Chad had recommended: delete the guy and get on with life. There were women out there to vet and analyze and perhaps, eventually, fall in love with.
His phone buzzed. Video Call from Chad, the notification said. Calling to hear Fox run through the numbers on his Saturday night date. It was a ritual of theirs going back several years, remaining an ironclad appointment even after Chad and Mia got engaged.
Fox closed the notification.
He swiped through his queue to see if there were any that he might want to, even at this late stage, ask out for a Saturday night. He had his standing reservation—the same table every Saturday night, to control environmental variables—so all he needed to do was start working the list to see who would be sitting across the table.
The first picture was, of course, Drew.
Fox’s mother used to joke with him that he was like a turkey with a thermometer that popped out when it was cooked through. But in his case it was a timer that only allowed him to be in a state of indecision for a certain period, at the expiration of which he would commit to a course of action and never look back. It was time for a decision.
He tapped Reply and started typing.
Tonight, he typed, sounds good.
TONIGHT SOUNDS good.
Drew wished he knew how he should feel about that. Tonight. Too soon? Had he made himself too available? Did he come off as overeager? Why was a guy who looked like Fox not busy on a Saturday night? Sounds. Like he wasn’t sure. That’s something you say if you’re not sure. It gives him a way out, like “it sounded like it was going to be fun….” Good. Not great, not awesome, good. Way to set low expectations, buddy. Thanks a lot.
He took a deep breath and paced a few circles around the living room before going on to overanalyze the next line of Fox’s message.
I’ve always said artisanal bourbon is about the best hobby a man could have.
Drew smiled in spite of his angst. That was not something anyone would ever have said. The guy was reaching out, trying to make him feel better about how weird this situation was. The smile faded when he realized that this Fox person was the kind of guy who could contemplate having a hobby, not to mention a pricey one like artisanal bourbon, while Drew himself was trying to live on the small research stipend he got from the university and free rent by being the building super. God, what was this computer thinking when it decided they had anything at all in common.
Let me know when and where.
The last sentence sent a shocking rush of terrifying possibility surging through Drew’s chest. What the hell was that about? He hadn’t felt this way since high school.
And yet his fingers, taking matters into their own hands, quickly typed out the name and address of the bourbon bar and suggested 6:00 p.m.—late enough to be drinking, but early enough that it wouldn’t seem like a date.
Which, Drew mused as he watched the little mail envelope icon spin, it kind of was.
AT A quarter to six, Drew walked up to the battered wood door that constituted the entrance to the Barrel Proof, a place which might char
itably be described as “rustic.” Its location between the university and the financial center of the city was ideal; the former gave it access to cheap labor, the latter to a moneyed clientele. He pulled the door open and stepped inside.
As it was still relatively early in the evening, even by rustic bourbon bar standards, there were few people to be found within. Some cranky looking academics held court at the bar (these Drew recognized by their unironic suede elbow patches and refined chortling at some erudite jape), while several knots of investment-banker types in expensive suits were celebrating or commiserating their getting and spending with top-shelf spirits.
“Hey, Drew,” his friend Carlos called as he approached the vacant end of the bar. “Been a while.”
“My alcohol budget doesn’t stretch much beyond Wild Turkey these days,” Drew replied with a grin.
“You kidding me?” Carlos said with a laugh. “The way you helped me with that paper on monetary policy in fourteenth-century Florence? I keep telling you, man, your money’s no good here.” He set a heavy glass tumbler in front of Drew.
“Better not let the boss hear you say that,” Drew joked.
“The boss won’t say anything,” Carlos said, then leaned over the bar. “He can’t, not with his mouth full of my dick.”
Drew laughed. “When people say getting a PhD is a grind, I don’t think that’s what they have in mind.”
Carlos burst into laughter as well. “You don’t know what you’re missing.” He reached back for a bottle, then poured a generous amount into Drew’s glass. “I offered to pay you back for helping me with that paper in other ways….”
“Which, as I said at the time, I appreciate. Still straight, though.” He raised his glass and then took a large, welcome sip.
Carlos nodded, though a sly grin remained on his face. “That’s a loss to mankind.” He turned and put the bottle back on the shelf. “It’s a shame to waste all that adorkable hotness on the ladies.”
“That wasn’t quite as smooth as whatever you poured for me, but I appreciate the compliment.”