Dwight had discovered sex, drugs, EDM, and smartphones when he went to college. He had embraced them with the same enthusiasm with which he’d mostly abandoned Mormonism, though some ideas were deeply entrenched, like playing bocce. He behaved the way I imagined certain young, naive men had approached the American West at one time: as a vast wilderness for the taking. I suppose he was also, at least at first, good to me and good at showing me a stratum of the city that I had so far had no contact with. He liked the notion of taking care of me, even if he didn’t have the faintest idea what it was that might be wrong. He was solutions-oriented. He believed absolutely that technology was a force for good. I think he thought of me as he had once been—a native Utahan discovering the city—which I suppose was fair enough, because when we met I was hanging out with two senior citizens.
We walked to the viewing platform of the miniature Belvedere Castle and looked at the brown turtles swimming in the green lake below. From above you could see their flippers paddling under their shells. Then we went and found a spot on the grass to spread out a picnic blanket. He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich’s music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren’t meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn’t immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.
He didn’t seem to feel that I believed him enough. A lululemon yoga rep was going round to each little settlement of picnickers and sunbathers and promoting something. I could feel Dwight twitching.
“Let me show you what I mean,” he said, leaping up.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I think I get it.”
Interacting with people, I thought to myself, remembering one of Silvia’s criticisms of Susy, means finding ways to make them do what you want. I watched him sprint towards the lululemon man, turned to my phone, and scrolled through Dwight’s Instagram pictures, which, if one started from the beginning, described a stark transformation from Mormon Boy to Tech Man.
After ten minutes he came scurrying back with flushed cheeks and a manic shine in his eyes. “We’re going to collaborate on something. Boom. A workshop, with some other brands.”
I nodded as if this were wonderful news. “Good job,” I said. It was what Silvia said to me when I managed to do a task for her particularly efficiently.
“See what I mean? It just comes naturally.”
“Yup. You’re obviously a natural.”
I realised that it was primarily this itch for interaction with strangers, rather than romance or the weather, that was his reason for taking me to the park. Buoyed by his earlier demo, he fist-bumped all seven of a group of boys in basketball uniforms and long white socks with backpacks, who were going around among the sunbathers and picnickers asking for donations. Then he followed the sound of a trumpet playing on the wind and insisted we move to a spot next to the player. He told me he was very sensitive to sound—could be hypnotised and tormented by it in equal measure. We folded the blanket in half and carried most of the things inside it, a manoeuvre that made me feel as if we were a couple making a bed together, though I had never been in such a relationship. Then we sat down again next to the trumpet player and I laid my face on the ground, just off the blanket so that the grass could cool my cheek and I could, at close quarters, watch the bees going up and down at work on the grass, soothing me with their slow, undulating movement.
Dwight brought out his business cards. I studied their heraldic symbols. Innovation Consultant, App Developer, Apiarist. The back had a wood-panel effect like the station wagon Lux Lisbon commits suicide in. When I noted this, he replied only, “Skeuomorphism,” and winked as if we were two Freemasons greeting each other.
I liked it that he thought, at least initially, I was in on whatever it was he was in on. I guess he thought I was because I’d posted a picture of the incubator site, and I’d been there on the site tour. He liked to categorise people quickly, but in a different way from Nat. He thought about people from the perspective of what he’d learned in his business studies and digital marketing course. People were early or late adopters. I asked whether there was an adopted category, a special one for me, because I had already mentioned, when he asked about my relation to Nat, that I was adopted. I could see he didn’t get my joke.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, musing as though I had said something quite profound, “in the sense that some people are so resistant to change at first, or so passive, but then it finally happens to them whether they like it or not, because they can’t even pay a parking ticket without a smartphone.”
He had names for every demographic. If he were telling this story, he’d say that three generations—Silent, X, and Y—all collided when I arrived in New York, no longer in its Age of Innocence, but in an age of connectivity.
It was the day that Maya Angelou died. When we finished the picnic, we walked from Central Park up to a restaurant in Harlem that Dwight said a former president had been photographed dining at, and on the way we saw the news on a sign outside the Apollo. Dwight thought she was a singer, and when I corrected him, he said quickly, “Novels were never really my thang.”
I had to pause to ascertain whether he had definitely said thang or it was just his Utah accent, but he definitely said thang.
“Really, what I want to do now is, I want to do another degree, in thought.”
He would segue like this, away from whatever it was he didn’t know about and into territory he felt surer of. He warned me that he liked to champion new thinking. For example, he liked Korean beer and some things that had a carbon fibre base. I could not stop thinking how Silvia, a bastion of his so-called Silent Generation, the one before the baby boomers, would have been dismayed. I told him his was a new New York for me and he seemed pleased, and then we kissed for the first time. This, I remember thinking, feels like a mushy apple.
Next we went to a bar with jazz musicians. I tried to sit down at the end of a table but the people at the other end said there was no room. “No room!” they cried when they saw me coming, even though there was. The tables were covered in paper tablecloths, with men in baseball caps and flat caps sitting at them on plastic folding chairs. We drank from miniature bottles of alcohol originating, I assumed, from a hotel minibar or a plane. I thought this would mark the end of the date, but then we went to a club after the bar. Some of Dwight’s friends were there, and he seemed more anxious to show me off than to talk to me. I heard him informing one of them that though I was not his usual type, as ever he wanted to try something new. I couldn’t tell if their presence there had been planned or not. I didn’t yet know how easy it is to bump into people in New York, because I hadn’t had anyone to bump into except ghosts.
Emile with the potato head, Dwight’s musical collaborator, came over and was slimy. “I like to be a provocateur,” he said. “I might just say a thing like men are less intelligent than women, or blacks are more intelligent than whites, just to get a debate started. Do you see?”
Did I? I could not stop thinking of his comment when I lost my virginity that night. At least until about three quarters of the way through, when Dwight said, “If it’s your first time, you might wanna just be quiet so you can hear my dick.” After which I could only think about that.
I had not been making a sound anyway, and there had already been a spongy silence all around us as I tried to ensure that the pitch of my breathing was not too loud, but from then on it was completely silent in the room, except for the strange sucky noises I obediently listened for as he made exaggerated L-shaped movements.
I can’t remember how it ended. It feels like one second he was on top of me and then the next he was passing me his device as he lay next to me and telling me to look at something on it about Edward Snowdon or Isr
ael or whatever the fuck it was, and I pretended to see but didn’t. He gave me a shirt to wear in bed that said, WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, SAY WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH ALL THESE LEMONS?
In the morning I noticed how he laughed too easily. He laughed when I said things like This coffee is really hot. He would laugh carelessly on the phone when someone said How are you? Later on it bugged me even more, because it was usually impossible to make Mizuko laugh. On the rare occasions I managed it, it was often by accident, and for reasons which mystified me. When she asked me how I met Dwight, for example, I said I’d met him on Roosevelt Island on a site tour of the new Cornell Tech campus and we’d been on a date to a place called Red Rooster, the American Legion bar, and then to a club called Shrine. And this was somehow hilarious. So much so that I tried to laugh too: He he he. Lusty and low. This made her laugh harder and higher. And then I began laughing for real too, pleased and yet anxious at the same time.
I didn’t mind sleeping with him. The whole time I hadn’t slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.
On our second date, he explained to me a very cool dating app for threesomes he had just done a piece of brand strategy for, mainly around naming and positioning. It was called TriMe. It had the suggestive pun—did I see?—the connotation of three, and the evocation of a salubrious TriBeCa penthouse. I said I saw. He wanted me to go to the launch party with him that evening, but I said I had to get back because Silvia had an appointment. He assured me that everybody in New York was going to be there, and that then everybody was going to be using the app. Eighty thousand people had signed up before it had even launched. It was going to do for threesomes, he promised, what Uber had done for cabs.
“How does it work?”
“It connects to your Facebook friends and their friends, like most of the other dating apps, but you can use a made-up name, you don’t have to use your real one, and there is a mode which hides you from friends and family who are using it.”
“But I mean, how does it work? What do you do?”
“Haven’t you . . .” His mouth hung open—food mulch visible—in amazement. “Tinder?”
“No.” I waved my hand vaguely. “I’ve heard of it, obviously.”
“It’s pretty much Tinder. You swipe yes or no on singles or couples, depending on what you’re after.” He said this as if he were explaining email to an old person. “So you can connect with people who share the same fantasy as you.”
“How do you know what their fantasy is?”
“It says,” he said impatiently. “Up front on their profile. You find out more when you get messaging. You’ll see the ads for it now I’ve told you. They’re all over the subway—going down and getting crowded.”
I shook my head. I still walked everywhere if I could. The subway map terrified me compared to the grid.
“We want people to be sitting on the subway looking at all the faces thinking who they might match with and who they want to hook up and form a trio with.”
“And it’s about making a threesome like getting a taxi?”
He breathed hard through his nose as though I were being particularly dense, entirely missing the nuances of the proposition.
“Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?”
I shook my head. I’d only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.
“What are you supposed to do, just walk over to some couple in a bar and ask them to their face? Oh hey, you don’t know me, do you want to have a threesome?”
One of his easy laughs.
A waiter came to take our order. I noticed how Dwight said, “Can I do the . . .” instead of “Can I have the . . . ,” and every time he said it my buttocks clenched together.
“Can I do the Be Balanced Bowl? Thank you. I mean”—turning back to me—“do you have any idea how fucking weird that would be?” He began to crack himself up.
Overall, things improved for a while after I met Dwight. It felt like progress of some kind, like I was getting closer to something. He provided a lot of material and a lot of likes for Instagram. He liked everything I did, and prompted me when I neglected to do the same for him. Sometimes, when he was at work, I even made little collages of what we had been up to and posted them as I had seen strangers do, and then all his friends liked them, so that our relationship was formally approved by committee. The collages were the modern equivalent of lovesick needlepoint, perhaps.
I thought about this strange new pastime when we went to an exhibition about quilts. It was held at the New York Historical Society. We went to lots of exhibitions together. Dwight felt they were crucial to his personal development, and in the time we dated we went to an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, a pearl exhibition, a shunga exhibition at the Met, and to see the quilts. He was always full of plans and day trips and itineraries, booking tickets to everything with an app that suggested stuff you might like based on stuff you already liked, which, I suggested, despite his unwavering commitment to novelty, didn’t really count as new.
I took about three thousand pictures and posted about five a day. Each time I took out my phone it was like playing a slot machine. In my journal I compiled lists of those we met up with or shared cabs with or went for drinks with and made diagrams of where they sat and what I ate in restaurants. None of that seems at all relevant now, but at the time I thought I’d cracked New York. I forgot all about the contents of Silvia’s three crates, which I now used as a stand for a bedside lamp. I started following people we met—Dwight’s friends, Emile, two girls he used to message constantly, blond identical twins called Hatta and Hae—and even the ones who routinely liked Dwight’s pictures of me on Instagram despite never having met me. Some of them started following me back so that suddenly my audience expanded significantly. I was afloat. Swallowing and spitting, spluttering and retching sometimes, but still being borne along.
“Alice Hare,” I imagined people I no longer knew saying to each other, “is living in New York, is definitely not a virgin, has a boyfriend in tech, and hangs out with tattooed young people who drink black drinks that have charcoal as an active ingredient.”
We ate only in new bars and new restaurants, due to Dwight’s insatiable appetite for new experiences. He was always talking about these from the perspective of the user, and the main criterion of a good or bad user experience appeared to be his sensitivity to noise. At some restaurants he had to specify that he did not want his food brought to him on a slate. Once he found a squeaky door so unbearable in a lunch spot that he took the olive oil off the table and oiled it himself. Even outside of Jettisoned Airplane, as an innovation consultant he was constantly being asked to do naming work for brands because of his sensitive ear, and he was especially skilled at portmanteaus.
“The word portmanteau comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass,” he explained, “when Alice discusses language with Humpty Dumpty. Originally it described a suitcase in two halves.”
I thought of mine overflowing on its back in my old bedroom. Pushed the reminder of Susy to one side.
“Now it means the way that words can be blended, as opposed to compounded—even words that are total opposites—into one new word.”
I nodded.
To him, everything in the world could be portmanteaued—people, places, time, and space. He liked separate things to converge like that—to be seamless.
I thought of him today when a barnacled chunk of the missing plane, a flaperon (portmanteau), was found washed up on Réunion Island. Then, of course, I thought of her.
Dwight never officially said I was his girlfriend. He claimed that he did not like defining such things, which was clearly an absurd thing for him, of
all people, to say. Only a few hours before he told me this, I had asked him to repeat something he had said, a word he had used to describe something, and he had informed me that AOAC stood for “always on, always connected,” shorthand for a marketing demographic who expected seamless communication between work and home. He had a name for everything.
As much as being with Mizuko made me look back on this period with loathing, at the time I did think it was kind of cool. It can be hot when someone is downloading things for you all the time. Taking care of you. Splitting the bill for you using an app called Spleat (split + eat = spleat), so you don’t have to even think about spleating for yourself, and then ordering a car and then finding a bar (cabbar), and you can just glide through to the next thing and the next.
But I wanted whatever was happening between us to have a proper name, in order to mark the transition from who I had been before to who I was now, and I didn’t want it to be a portmanteau of the two. I tried to explain this to him when we went to see the shunga exhibition. Without directly commenting on what I had just said, Dwight told me that now that he was no longer a Mormon, he liked to be very free. He said it like a foreign, maybe Italian word I might not know the meaning of. He said he liked going to Burning Man, did I see? and a night called Kinky Salon when he was in the Valley. In general, he said, he was a fan of radical free expression and did not want to be tied to anything or anyone. He said confidently that he could pick up the same vibe from me.
Even though I was the Japan fan, it had been he who’d suggested going to the shunga exhibition. His device was constantly sending him those alerts whenever something was happening in the city that was his thang, and we’d been to a lot of Japanese fusion restaurants recently. Shunga are very explicit erotic images; that much I knew already. We hovered by the introductory explanation on the wall. The scenes we were about to see depicted sly-faced women engaged in all sorts of “duplicity,” cuckolds, “nubile ingenues,” fantastical contortions as if the figures were invertebrates, “virgins in the snow,” spurned wives armed with snowballs ready to pelt them, a cunnilingual octopus, a salesman having sex with six women, bald nuns in suitcases, “torrid nights under mosquito nets,” visible, sometimes shocking age gaps, and “wild orgies during hanami.” We were the youngest people there, moving about behind a scandalised group from the South who were never coming back to the Met, and audio-guided men too ancient to know about the expediencies of Internet porn.
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