by Xavier Mayne
“It would be the most ridiculous food truck this city’s ever seen.”
They laughed together as Fox threaded through the city traffic toward their evening at Table.
Which was still, to be clear, not a date.
RIGHT UP until the moment he pulled up to Table’s valet parking podium, Fox hadn’t fully considered his situation. He’d been on a kind of autopilot, as if his car knew the way it should go on Saturday night regardless of who was in the passenger seat.
He and Drew had laughed and joked all the way across town, so it wasn’t like he was unaware that this was not the usual Saturday night. But when he came to a stop at the valet station and the doors were pulled open by the Jeffs—two valets who almost always worked Saturday night at Table (Fox often joked with them about how their having the same name made it easier on guests)—it finally hit him. Instead of a beautiful woman stepping out of the passenger seat, they would find Drew. Suddenly this was unlike any Saturday evening ever. Ever.
Fox took a deep breath and got out of his car.
“Evening, sir,” Jeff said jauntily. “Good to see you again.”
Fox was hardly aware of handing him a twenty-dollar bill, so automatic was the gesture.
“Thank you, sir,” Jeff replied, as he always did. “We’ll keep it up front for you.”
On the other side of the car, Drew stood, looking a little baffled, as if he’d never imagined such a thing as valet parking.
Fox exhaled a breath he wasn’t aware he had been holding. He was going to make it through without attracting any notice—after all, valets must see all kinds of shenanigans, so they probably wouldn’t even notice a regular showing up with a guy in the passenger seat instead of a woman. But then he saw it: Jeff, on the driver side, shot the other Jeff a look. It was a look that said, “Dude, that’s a dude.” The other Jeff glanced over at Drew, then back to Jeff. “Yeah, it’s a dude. What the fuck?”
Anger rose like a clot in Fox’s throat. Yes, he was here to have dinner with a new friend, who happened to be a guy. Not a fucking thing wrong with that. And he wasn’t going to be made to feel awkward by a couple of dead-end car jockeys whom he always tipped very well. They didn’t matter at all.
Fox pulled his cuffs down even with his jacket and walked around the back of his car. “Shall we?” he asked, pointing the way into the restaurant. This was what he always said to the women he brought here, and he was saying it to Drew because fuck off, Jeff. Fuck off both of you. He wasn’t going to let them get to him.
Drew smiled and nodded, completely clueless about the drama that had played out at the valet stand. Fox wondered, as they walked up the broad marble steps of the building, how it would feel to be an academic without a clue about how the world really works.
They approached the imposing, twelve-foot-tall doors at the top of the stairs, arriving at the top step at the same moment. Drew, however, lunged ahead and grabbed the brushed-nickel door handle. He pulled it open and graciously motioned for Fox to enter.
“I can manage a restaurant door,” Fox said gruffly as he passed by Drew with his obsequious smile. But he couldn’t keep from smiling himself, despite the fact that Drew was effectively parodying the chivalry that Fox deployed without irony every Saturday night. This was what guys did—gave each other shit about stuff.
Fox paused in the foyer, as his dates always did, for Drew to catch up to him. Not because he needed an escort, but because he wanted Drew beside him when he approached the host’s podium.
“Ah, Mr. Kincade,” the maître d’ said suavely. “Your table awaits.”
Fox couldn’t help but steal a sideward glance to check if Drew had heard this greeting. And honestly, he couldn’t tell—Drew was gaping in wonder as he took in the admittedly luxe surroundings. Table was not a venue that hid its very expensive light under a bushel. Every imported fixture gleamed immaculately, and the only sound was the soft hush of money. It was why he brought Saturday night dates here—the day he saved for only the most promising prospects, the women he really wanted to impress.
And Drew, apparently.
He held out his hand to point the way for Drew to follow the hostess, who had been conjured by the maître d’s subtle gesture, putting Drew back in the ladies’ position. Fox’s satisfaction at having turned the wheel of gender roles back on Drew, though, was tempered by the way the young woman who led them to their table glanced at Drew, then Fox, then back at Drew. The hint of a smile that graced her otherwise uniformly professional mien troubled him.
With the Jeffs outside, it had been a knowing smirk, as if he were some old senator out on the town with a boy toy while his wife was doing charity work somewhere. But on her, it was something else, as if she admired both his boldness in suddenly bringing a guy on a date as well as his taste in men.
Fuck.
They reached his weekly table, and he motioned for Drew to sit first. Then he slid opposite him onto the soft leather of the booth. He had chosen this table when the restaurant opened because of both its location (in a secluded corner) and its configuration: it was a table for two, but it was surrounded on three sides by u-shaped booth seating. That way he and his date could either remain on opposite sides or, if the date were going especially well, slide closer as the night went on.
Fox and Drew sat opposite each other.
“This is…,” Drew said, looking around the room. “Well, it’s far more expensive than I could possibly expect you to pay for. I’ll just have an appetizer or something.”
Fox smiled at the look of overwhelmed innocence on Drew’s face. “Shut up. You covered the predinner cocktail hour, the least I can do is take care of the meal.”
“The bourbon was nothing compared to this place.”
“We drank stuff from unmarked bottles made in unlicensed stills. You can’t put a price on that kind of bootleg moonshine. The experience was worth every penny I’m going to spend on dinner.”
Drew smiled, shyly at first, but then more broadly as he seemed to convince himself of what Fox had said.
Fox, for his part, was shocked to feel a warmth in his chest. Seeing Drew smile made him happy. It had been a long time, he reflected, since he’d been out with another single friend. He’d forgotten what it was like to be out to dinner without the weight of having to impress a date. It felt… freeing.
“Mr. Kincade,” said the sommelier who had suddenly appeared, “May I be of service?”
Fox smiled in greeting. The same sommelier had seen to his needs every Saturday night since the restaurant opened more than two years prior, and they had developed a kind of code. If Fox could already tell that the date wasn’t all that promising, he would ask for “a bottle of champagne,” which would prompt the sommelier to bring an unremarkable bottle of the house domestic bubbly. If he was feeling like he wanted to impress her, he would order “something sparkling and French,” prompting the sommelier to retrieve a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Tonight, though, he went off script.
“Want to stay with the hard stuff, or are you in the mood for wine?” Fox asked Drew.
The sommelier’s eyebrows flicked, almost imperceptibly, upward. He was far more discreet than the Jeffs, of course, and his face instantly returned to its professional posture of attentive blankness as he turned to Drew.
Drew, for his part, looked almost panic-stricken, glancing with wide eyes from Fox to the sommelier and back again. “I…,” he began but swallowed hard and fell into a helpless silence.
“Why don’t you bring us something sparkling and French,” Fox said.
The sommelier’s eyebrows, which had discreetly returned to their neutral position, this time shot up and stayed there. Fox didn’t really care. He did what he did in the closing moments of negotiations with a challenging customer: he remained silent and fixed his gaze dead on the eyes of the other person, not blinking until it was thoroughly understood that he had uttered the last word that would be spoken.
As if ashamed by the uncouth inferences of their
owner, those peaked eyebrows dropped sheepishly, withered by Fox’s serene silence.
“Yes, sir.” The sommelier bowed stiffly and backed away from the table.
“Something sparkling and French?” Drew said with a tinge of irony.
“It is not polite to give the person who’s buying dinner shit for the way they order,” Fox scolded, in the manner of an exasperated etiquette instructor.
Drew sat back as if he’d been slapped. “I wasn’t giving you shit. If that’s a line you use to impress your dates, then I have to say I can see it working. Working pretty damn well.”
“Thanks, I guess?” Fox replied. “What do you do to impress dates? What’s your move?”
“Move?” Drew said with a laugh. “I have got not a single move. Never have.”
“You must have something that’s worked in the past.”
“Only two things have ever worked,” Drew replied. “Cooking dinner for a woman and accidentally having a coffee table with malign sociopolitical intent.”
“Sounds like a fun story,” Fox said. “I may force you to tell it.”
“It’s only a fun story if you hate casual furniture and love three-inch splinters.”
Fox winced. “And where did those splinters end up?”
Drew rolled his eyes ruefully. “Let’s say I skipped leg day for the whole next week. Hard to squat when you’ve been impaled.”
“Oh, man,” Fox exclaimed. “Ouch!”
“You got that right.”
“But did you at least get to do any impaling of your own?”
“I couldn’t let that coffee table die in vain,” Drew said with a dignified sniff.
“So both of you got impaled with three inches?”
Drew’s eyes widened; then he burst out laughing. “Fuck you,” he whispered, then laughed again. “Well played, but fuck you.”
“That’s a very kind offer, but I’m not sure I’d even feel three inches,” Fox said, piling on.
They were still laughing when the sommelier returned with the ice bucket and a bottle of Veuve. He showed the label to Fox, who nodded, and then he opened and poured.
Fox lifted his glass. “Cheers,” he offered.
Drew touched his glass to Fox’s. “To accidental friends,” he said, with a warmth in his voice that surprised Fox.
“I’m not certain it was an accident,” Fox said as he lifted the flute to his lips.
Drew swallowed, then paused, his eyebrows raised. “You said you thought it was a computer error that we got matched up.”
“I thought it was. But now I’m not so sure.”
Drew’s cheeks pinked up, but rather than offering a response, he simply pursed his lips as if he had no idea what to say—or didn’t want to say what he thought. Fox felt the pressure to put into words the thick feeling growing inside his chest.
“I mean, look at us,” Fox said, surprised to hear the words emerge from his mouth, for he had no conscious awareness of choosing them. “We’ve known each other for less than two hours at this point, and we’re already… I mean, I’m already kind of… I mean, it’s kind of—”
“Nice to make a new friend?” Drew prompted.
Fox beamed, the weight lifting. “That’s it exactly. It’s nice to make a new friend.” Fox heaved a sigh of relief. “I think that’s what that computer is good at—making friends. The dates were a little creepy, but this….” He was back to not knowing how to describe this.
“This is really nice,” Drew volunteered. Fox seized gratefully upon his characterization.
“Yes, nice. That’s what this is.” He took another drink of champagne, warming to his subject. “Most of my friends are married now, and it’s always such a pain in the ass to get one night—one fucking night—out with my buddy, you know?”
Drew nodded emphatically. “At least you have friends you want to spend time with. Everyone I know is in grad school, too, and can only talk about one thing: the topic of their dissertation. You know what makes a good dissertation topic? The thing that no one else is interested in. Not one little bit. Coins of the Roman Empire? Not a good topic. People collect those—normal people. Silver content of the coins of the Roman Empire? Better, but still not a good topic because, again, silver is something people are interested in. Strategic diminution of the silver content of coins of the Roman Empire? Sounds boring, but not quite boring enough. How about the manipulation of specie to gain competitive advantage in domestic trade under the Edict of Prices of Diocletian? That boring enough for you? Well, it needs to be about ten times more soporific, but it’s a good start for a dissertation proposal.” Drew heaved a weary breath. “Such are the concerns of everyone I know at the moment. And they will speak of nothing else. So being taken for a night on the town in a midlife-crisis car to an unbelievably posh restaurant with an improbably handsome friend is a damn sight better than I ’a’ been gettin’, laddie.”
Fox burst out laughing.
“Sorry, my monetary history professor is a Scot,” Drew explained. “I kind of slip into it when I rant about specie manipulation. He’s a ranter.”
“He sounds a lot more lively than my professors were, that’s for sure.”
Drew nodded emphatically. “You should hear him go off on seigniorage ratios. He can bring the house down.”
“So how is it that all of your grad student friends end up boring each other to death? Cause you’re kinda worked up about this currency thing.”
“You know how it is. People start something with good intentions, and then it becomes their whole world. Pretty soon it’s like they’re defending it from anyone who might get interested in it too.”
“You’ve pretty much described the problem with my married buddies. They find a woman who they think is going to complete their lives, and suddenly she becomes their complete life.”
Drew nodded thoughtfully. “Does it make them happy?”
Fox pondered this for a moment, before recalling his conversation with Chad that morning. “I guess it does, in some ways. But expecting one person to be everything for you is putting a lot of pressure on them, and on the relationship you have with them.” He sighed and consulted the bubbles spiraling to the surface of his champagne flute. “But not having any time at all for your friends? I can’t imagine doing that.” He grunted in frustration. “Not that I have any friends left.”
Drew smiled slightly. “You got me.”
“We just met.” Fox didn’t intend to be rude, but he thought it should be pointed out. “We hardly know anything about each other.”
“But the computer says we’re perfect together.” Drew’s smile hadn’t wavered. “So let’s get to know each other. What do you do, Mr. Kincade?”
Fox’s smile spread across his face, a mirror image to Drew’s. Normally when he was on a date, he would roll out his career presentation over the main course. It was a tightly scripted six and a half minutes that he had developed and refined over the years, even recording it when he worked in new details and reviewing his performance to ensure it didn’t look scripted. It began with an anecdote from a recent project he’d worked on—updated quarterly—that positioned him as having a strong work ethic while being humble about the success he’d achieved.
Setting all that aside, he simply said, “I work in marketing.”
“Marketing what?”
“Business intelligence systems for the hospitality industry.”
Drew looked at him blankly. “I have no idea what that means.”
“You’re a scholar of some pretty obscure facts-and-figures stuff about coinage, so you’ll get exactly what that means.” Fox replied. “What if I told you that a guest who stays in a hotel room will spend, on average, 23 percent more money on the minibar if you stock it with their favorite brands of liquor?”
“Although I’ve never so much as had a jelly bean out of a hotel minibar, that would not surprise me at all.”
Fox nodded. “But how do they know what to stock the minibar with?”
&n
bsp; Drew squinted thoughtfully for a moment. “Demographic profiling?”
“You mean taking the guest’s age and hometown and guessing what they’ll like?”
Drew shrugged. “It would be an educated guess.”
Fox shook his head. “That would be a cutting-edge approach in, like, the 1980s. Your mom-and-pop bed-and-breakfasts can get away with that because they have three guest rooms and people book well in advance. But with a large property, there’s no way you could make that work.”
“Then how do you do it?” Drew asked, frowning slightly.
“With an end-to-end business intelligence system.”
Drew chuckled darkly. “That’s what you call it? A bunch of business buzz words hooked together that you try to convince a potential customer actually means something?”
“It actually does mean something,” Fox protested. “It means that at every point of interaction with the guest, information is recorded and added to a profile. The kind of credit card that’s used to make the reservation, the kind of liquor he asks for in his drink before dinner, whether he asks for a town car instead of grabbing an Uber out front. All of that, and a ton more, is added to his profile, and from that you can make all kinds of more educated guesses about what he’ll spend money on. So if he takes the bottle of Tanqueray from the minibar in Chicago, what do you think he’s going to find in the minibar in Houston?”
“Tanqueray?” Drew volunteered, sounding not terribly confident in his answer.
“No,” Fox answered. That got Drew’s interest. “Not only Tanqueray, because maybe he’s a gin guy and Tanqueray was what he drank because what he really wanted wasn’t there. In Houston he’s going to find Bombay Sapphire as well, plus a bottle of Hendrick’s, to see if we can get him to come up to the next tier. He’ll also find artisanal tonic water and perhaps even a little bowl with two fresh limes—for three dollars each. He’s delighted, and he spends thirty bucks on the minibar where previously his average had been seven.”
“So you exploit people’s behavior to get them to spend more money.”