Q*pid

by Xavier Mayne

  “Well, you are so thoughtful to come so quickly.” She led him into the kitchen, where a kettle steamed busily on the stove and a freshly baked pastry ring with fruits and syrups wafted its rich aroma into the air.

  Drew had no idea what to call the massive pastries Mrs. Schwartzmann conjured every Sunday morning; they were thick, flaky rounds nearly a foot across, filled with fresh fruit in its season and topped with a mysterious clear glaze that hinted of vanilla and rosewater and about a dozen other scents he couldn’t identify. It was pretty much what he’d had for breakfast every Sunday morning since they’d moved into the building.

  “I happened to have this in the fridge, and I hoped you might help me eat it,” Drew said, handing her the tidy butcher-paper packet.

  “Oh, my,” she said, taking the packet from him gingerly, as if it contained rare porcelain artifacts. “I hardly eat much anymore, such an old woman I am. But since you brought….”

  This too was part of their ritual. Every Friday on his way back from his last class of the week, Drew stopped by the shop of a cranky old butcher from Leipzig who made rough, authentic sausages from the old world, where he would pick up a couple of Mrs. Schwartzmann’s favorites. Then he would bring them with him on Sunday morning and casually ask for her help in cleaning out his fridge. She always protested her bird-like appetite, which would not prevent her from laying waste to the better part of three fat links over the course of breakfast. This meal, he was convinced, supplied most of her calories for the week.

  The kettle whistled, prompting Mrs. Schwartzmann to pile a massive charge of coffee grounds into the French press he’d given her for Christmas several years ago. Prior to this innovation, she had brewed coffee like tea, stirring the grounds into boiling water and then pouring the mixture through a tea strainer into cups. When he tired of chewing her coffee, he’d bought her the press.

  She plopped the sausages into the skillet that somehow was already on her stove top, then sat the coffee press on the table and motioned for him to sit.

  “So tell me, how was coffee with your new friend?” She brandished an ornate silver cake server and carved out two large sections of the pastry ring, one for him and one for her.

  Drew took a breath to tell the story, then let it out without making a sound. He tried again but could not find a single word to begin with.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Schwartzmann said, leaning over the table to study his face. “Did he break the table at the coffeehouse?”

  He chuckled despite his angst. “No, he didn’t. In fact, we didn’t get coffee. We met at a bar, a bourbon bar that a friend of mine works at.”

  Her eyebrows shot up, but her knowing nod revealed no surprise. “I see.”

  “We had a couple of drinks—three, actually—and then we went to dinner. He took me to dinner.”

  “You mean he took you in his car?”

  “No. I mean, yes, he took me in his car, but he also took me to dinner. He… paid for dinner.” He huffed out a confused breath and fell silent once again.

  “So a date it was.” She said this without judgment in her voice, simply stating a fact. “Good for Drew.”

  “It wasn’t a date.”

  “Because buying dinner is something friends do for friends?” she asked. “I should have such friends as that.”

  “He bought dinner because he makes a lot of money—a lot more than I do, anyway. And I paid for the drinks before dinner. Sort of.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Sort of? What is sort of?”

  “I have a friend who works at the bar, and I helped him write a paper for this class we have together.”

  “Ah, another friend,” she smiled. “You have more friends than you were thinking you do.”

  Drew shoved the kind of friendship Carlos offered out of his mind lest Mrs. Schwartzmann read it there the way she seemed able to.

  “Did you have a nice time with your new friend?”

  The question was innocent enough, but heat rose in Drew’s cheeks nonetheless. “It was a nice time,” he replied, carefully filtering any emotion out of his answer.

  She sat back in her chair and looked him up and down for a long moment. Then she nodded as if she’d decided something internally and got up to tend to the sausages that now sizzled in the little pan on the stove. She poked at them, rolling them carefully over and muttering encouraging, unintelligible words to them. Clearly satisfied with their progress, she resumed her seat.

  “Now, Drew,” she said.

  He knew that tone. She was about to poke a hole in some self-delusion he held dear, then fill that hole with nitroglycerin and calmly detonate it.

  “When I met Mr. Schwartzmann, I was a girl of sixteen, going on seventeen, who had been sheltered from the world by my doting father and the governess he hired to look after myself and my sisters and brothers after my mother died tragically. I was totally unprepared to face a world of men.”

  She was casting herself as Liesl in The Sound of Music. He refrained from pointing that out.

  “The first time I saw him, I knew we were destined to be together, no matter what storms would come. And my dear father knew it as surely as I did. He could read it on my face. No matter what I did, when he asked me about my beloved, my cheeks would burn as the streets of Dresden later would.”

  He waited for her to continue her story, hoping there would be more. He would listen to any amount of invented recollection if it meant he didn’t have to think about why his cheeks were as hot as she imagined hers to have been when Rolf would come dancing in the gazebo.

  But continue she did not. She sat and stared at him, eyebrows expectantly up for an uncomfortably long moment. Finally, she lowered the boom. “My cheeks then looked like yours now.”

  He blinked, scalded by her implication. “Mrs. Schwartzmann, I am not in love.”

  “That is what my father to me said. ‘Magda,’ he said, ‘you are not in love.’ But I was, and he knew I was because the cheeks, they tell what is inside.”

  Drew pictured ice cubes stuck to his cheeks. He dreamed of an arctic wind slashing at him, imagined the cold grip of death as he lay in his coffin.

  None of it was working. And still she gazed at him from across the table.

  He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, and when he opened them, she was no longer sitting across from him.

  “Too much talk,” she said from where she stood before the stove. “Sometimes when the thinking and the talking do not bring us the thoughts and the sayings we want, we must surrender.”

  “Surrender to what?” Drew asked. Surrender didn’t seem like a word Mrs. Schwartzmann would use lightly, if ever.

  “To appetites we cannot think and talk our way out of.” She turned from the stove with a plate full of sausages, steaming hot from the pan. “Admit it, my dear boy,” she said as she set the plate before him, “you could do with a nice hot sausage.” She smiled innocently at him, then stabbed one of the links with her fork and bit the end from it.

  He shook his head slowly at her, unable to determine to his satisfaction whether she was actually saying what he was hearing. In the end, he decided it was better, perhaps, not to know. He stabbed a sausage and joined her in enthusiastically eating it up.

  THE VIDEO call rang several times before Fox was able to shake off sleep and answer it. He picked up his phone to see who it was, but of course it was Chad. As it always was on Sunday morning.

  Fox knew that if he declined the call, Chad would assume he had put his phone on Do Not Disturb because Saturday night at Table had turned into Sunday morning in bed. Then he would be on the hook to tell the story of a successful date later in the day, which he certainly did not have to tell. So he rubbed his eyes, sat up, and accepted the call.

  “Hey there, Foxy,” Chad called in greeting. Then he leaned forward, peering into the camera. “Are you in bed?”

  “Yes, I’m in bed. It’s eight thirty on a Sunday morning,” Fox groused. “Where else would I be?”

 
“You’re never in bed at eight thirty. If Saturday night goes badly, you’re at the table eating those horrible fiber rocks you call cereal and running the numbers to plot your next move. If it goes well, you don’t answer because there’s some hottie still in the sheets next to you. You’re never just in bed.”

  Fox shrugged, hoping Chad would let it go.

  “What the hell happened last night?”

  So he wasn’t going to let it go. “I didn’t have a date,” Fox said. “That’s all.”

  Chad twisted his finger in his ear as if he were a cartoon character who had misheard a punchline. “Wait, wait,” he said, “what? It sounded like you said you didn’t have a date last night. You.”

  “I didn’t have a date last night.”

  Chad’s mouth dropped open. “Why not? You always have a date on Saturday. Even when you’re crushing to get the quarter wrapped up and work straight through the week you have a date on Saturday.”

  “I didn’t have a date last night.”

  “And you didn’t text me?”

  “Why would I text you to tell you I didn’t have a date last night?”

  “So I could snag your table at Table, duh. We’ve been trying to get in there for weeks.”

  “Oh, uh—”

  “And they probably gave your table to some joker in a shiny suit who wanted to impress a bimbo. I could really have used that table, buddy.”

  “Trying to impress a bimbo, Chaddy?” Fox cracked, glad to turn the conversation back on his friend.

  Chad looked quickly to the side, then back at the camera. “I kind of fucked up yesterday,” he whispered. “I said I didn’t have an opinion on whether our new crêpe pan should have a nonstick coating.”

  “Why would that matter?”

  “That was my point. But apparently there are significant ramifications to the choice of crêpe-pan cooking surfaces of which I was blissfully unaware, and my being blissfully unaware was apparently a clear demonstration of how ill-prepared I am to have children in the mid- to long-term.”

  “What. The. Fuck?”

  “You had to be there. Oh, that’s right, you weren’t there… for the three hours of intense discussion that ended at that conclusion. And by discussion I mean Mia talking and me nodding and saying I’m sorry every seven minutes. A dinner at Table would have brought that whole miserable machinery to a complete halt, and I will never forgive you for abandoning me that way.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I did use the table.”

  Chad’s shoulders drooped dramatically. “Oh shit, Foxy. Don’t tell me you went and had dinner all by yourself. What, did you sit there and eat alone while playing Fruit Frenzy or whatever people have on their phones these days? You might as well have brought along a knitting basket and three cats.”

  “I didn’t have dinner alone.”

  Chad stared at the camera for a long moment. “Then… what?”

  Fox swallowed, unsure why this was hard to say. “I had dinner with… a friend.”

  Chad’s brow furrowed. “You have friends?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Who was it?”

  “No one you know.”

  “Now I know you’re bullshitting me. I know everyone you know.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Chad’s nose wrinkled. “You had dinner with some loser from work, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t some loser from work. But now that you know I didn’t have dinner alone with my knitting and my cats, you can get on with your life. Go do more crêpe-pan shopping perhaps?”

  “There are two things I am sure of in this life, my friend. I will never again shop for a crêpe pan, and you are really trying not to talk about who you had dinner with last night.”

  Fox sighed. He had long relied on Chad to be usefully obtuse when it came to relationships, but his time with Mia seemed to be actually giving him some rudimentary skills at interpreting the emotional states of others. He found it inconvenient for his current purposes, but he could hardly wish that Chad continue his caveman ways.

  “I had dinner with the guy from Q*pid.”

  Instantly Chad’s face stiffened into an expressionless mask. It was the face Fox imagined him using with a tax client who wanted to write off expenses incurred in a Thai brothel and had brought comprehensive documentation of the services rendered. “Oh,” he said, as if that were appropriate output generated by the grinding of every gear in his brain.

  “It wasn’t a date.”

  Chad nodded vaguely—certainly not convincingly.

  “He messaged me and said how weird it was that we’d been matched up and then asked if I wanted to get coffee and talk about it. So I said yeah, that seemed… good.”

  “I see,” Chad said mildly. “And how did coffee turn into dinner?”

  “He suggested this dive bourbon bar downtown, and I’d heard of it but never been, and he knows the bartender, so I said okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then I remembered I hadn’t cancelled the table at Table, and they were going to charge me for it anyway, so I asked him if he wanted to have dinner, and we had dinner. That’s it. That’s all.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Chad had continued his nodding.

  “Stop doing that. It was dinner. I’m not dating a guy.”

  “Okay.” The nodding had not stopped. “I just want you to know, Foxy—”

  “That you love and support me, and as soon as I come to terms with being gay you’re going to be the best damn ally anyone can be, and you’ll march with me and, uh, Bruce in the pride parade, and this doesn’t change anything between us, right? Is that what you wanted me to fucking know?” He was shouting now.

  “Can I march with you too?” Mia’s voice called out as she flopped onto the bed to poke into the camera’s view. She was wearing a bathrobe, and her curly hair was wet. “Can we double date sometime? Can I watch you and your boyfriend make out? That would be so hot.”

  Fox closed his eyes and counted to ten.

  “Thanks for your support, Mia, as creepy as it is. But I’m not now, nor have I ever been, gay.”

  Her brow furrowed dramatically. “Does Bruce know?” she asked.

  “I’m not having this conversation with you two,” Fox said. “I had dinner with a friend who wasn’t Chad, and now Chad’s all butthurt and lashing out. I hope you two have a lovely day together.”

  He tapped the End Call button before either of them could offer a rejoinder.

  With friends like these…

  Chapter NINE

  IT HAD not been a great week.

  Every day Fox consulted his Q*pid queue, and every day he saw the same thing. Women who scored in the mideighties. For two years Fox had followed his plan for finding the woman he would marry: he would fill at least every Friday and Saturday night, and some Sundays, with a date, starting from the highest-scoring woman and working his way down. He’d add weeknights as needed to keep his queue current. It was sometimes exhausting, but he was driven to maximize the time he had left of his late twenties.

  This week was different.

  On Sunday, after his awkward conversation with Chad and Mia, he had not opened his dating app at all. It was the first time since he’d signed on with the service that he had gone a full day without looking at his queue. On Monday he threw himself into his work and was surprised to realize on Tuesday afternoon that he had still not opened it. He did so once he got home, and though there were now a couple of women who scored in the upper eighties, he tapped on no profiles. Normally, an eighty-seven would be enough to make him call any of his other already scheduled dates and announce the passing of his grandmother to clear the deck for whatever night the eighty-seven was available.

  He closed the app.

  Friday afternoon, after he confirmed his schedule for Monday and shut down his laptop, he opened the Q*pid app. If he didn’t cancel his reservation at Table twenty-four hours in advance, he would be charged for it, so he needed to get Saturday sorted out so
on. His queue appeared, and leading the pack was an eighty-nine. She had leapfrogged the eighty-seven from earlier in the week to land at the head of the class. She was beautiful, he had to admit, and according to her profile summary, she was an accomplished professional who had also been state champion in water ski jumping. She would very likely set a new record in his spreadsheet.

  He opened his texting app.

  “Want the table at Table tomorrow? No good prospects.”

  He knew the response would be immediate.

  “Hell yeah! Thanks, buddy.”

  He wasn’t expecting a follow-up.

  “Worried about the future of humanity if you don’t have anyone to date. Shit’s messed up.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate your concern.”

  He called Table and let them know his reservation would be taken up by another couple. Then he sat and stared for a long time at his phone before pocketing it and heading home.

  After a solitary dinner—on a Friday!—he opened the Q*pid app, mostly out of habit but also because he wanted to try to figure out why he hadn’t messaged the eighty-nine. He gazed at her a long while, trying to imagine having a conversation with her. Was she literate? Did she have more to talk about than what had happened in her Facebook feed that day? Would they find themselves talking so much after dinner that they would have three desserts just to make the date go on longer?

  Fox closed his eyes. Shit.

  The “new message” tone nearly scared him out of his skin. He wondered who could possibly be messaging him—he had turned off notifications after Drew had landed in his queue, and the only people who could message him through the app were those he had already been in contact with. Again, there had been no one new since Drew.

  Which had to mean it was Drew who was messaging him.

  He grabbed his phone and held it for a moment before looking at it. How did he feel about Drew messaging him? Or, more to the point, why did the idea of Drew messaging him make him a little—maybe a little, somewhere inside—happy?

  Fuck.

  He flipped his phone over and saw the message notification. It was Drew.