The Undateable

by Sarah Title

  And then there was whatever corner Makeda, the fashion editor, had commandeered as her samples closet. The interior designers didn’t believe in closed doors, or doors at all, or spaces that could theoretically hold a door. Instead, they had installed built-in closet rails at various random intervals around the office walls. It would make designer samples like a showpiece, they said. And it was kind of cool, when they were full, except that the layout had Makeda running back and forth across the office whenever she was working on a spread or planning a shoot or trying to fit models.

  Makeda’s compromise was an unlimited number of rolling wardrobe racks with special removable shelves for shoes. Because there was no actual storage, the empty racks lived in the stairwells behind the fire doors, which was definitely a safety hazard, but it was aesthetically pleasing.

  Colin always felt there was something cosmically appropriate about that.

  He really hated coming to the office. Not because he was always tripping over stilettos in an effort to find an unclaimed work space—although that was not great either. There was just too much chaos. He couldn’t write around the noise of the people shrieking about whether or not the bolero jacket was coming back for spring or which rose-scented towelette absorbed the most oil from your T-zone. Especially now that he knew what bolero jackets and T-zones were. He was a writer, dammit. He was a man. He didn’t care about that stuff.

  Except, as Steph pointed out, he was a writer for a women’s fashion and lifestyle Web site. So he should care about that stuff. He didn’t have to care about that stuff to write about nightlife, he argued. He was there to offer a male perspective. You’re right, Steph said. You should not care at all about the things women care about when you’re offering your perspective on those things.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t care about fashion and makeup. He just didn’t get it. He appreciated it when women put in the effort, and he’d spent enough time around fastidious women to recognize the art and the work involved. He could understand the appeal of an eye enhanced by the application of mascara. But telling the difference between thick and super-thick and mega-thick mascara?

  That was where Maria came in.

  Maria was his beloved, crotchety, no-nonsense, advice-wielding alter ego.

  Maria was way more successful than Colin was, than he would probably ever be. Not financially—definitely not financially. But her blog had a cult following online and name recognition that sites like Glaze would kill for.

  Too bad he couldn’t tell anyone.

  Besides, Take a Letter, Maria was just a hobby. It had started as a lark, and that was all it would ever be. He liked the mental and emotional stretching it took to channel Maria, but he wasn’t interested in becoming a real-life advice guru. He wasn’t really interested in anything except having a good time. The only reason he even had his job at Glaze was that his parents insisted. Which sounded pathetic, to be pushing thirty and still following the orders of your parents. But when they sold their law practice and retired down South, they agreed that he and Steph could continue to live in the house, rent-free, on the condition that they both remained gainfully employed. Steph had dutifully graduated with a degree in horticulture—ha, horticulture!—and landed a job with the city as the Assistant Green Spaces Coordinator. Colin had abandoned his sporadic attempts at novel writing (it just wasn’t in him) and bartending (he preferred to be in front of the bar) and joined a just-starting-up online beauty magazine as their Resident Guy.

  He didn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten into that headspace the first time. He supposed he was cranky. His parents were breathing down his neck, Steph was wearing him out with her success, and he’d just broken up with a girl who told him that he was just stringing her along. Which he wasn’t; he just didn’t always immediately reply to her 16,000 daily text messages. So he did what any self-respecting millennial did.

  He started a blog.

  He wasn’t into navel-gazing—or at least he wasn’t into obvious navel-gazing, so he thought long and hard about a framing device, one that would let him air out his issues without him just writing paragraph after boring paragraph about how his life was so hard. He knew his life wasn’t hard. He was very grateful for that. But sometimes . . .

  Then he heard a little voice. Well, not a little voice, a loud, brassy, used-to-smoke-a-pack-a-day voice. The voice slapped him upside the head and told him to pull himself together, he was being ridiculous. Which he knew. He knew he was being ridiculous, but sometimes, he thought, it helps to have someone remind you of that.

  And maybe the voice could help other people. With great power and all that. So he started.

  Dear Maria,

  Why won’t my man write me back?

  Desperate on Divisadero

  Dear Desperate,

  Because you write too many texts. Send one, and if he doesn’t respond, it wasn’t meant to be. Send another, and he was never yours to begin with.

  Kisses,

  Maria

  THE NEXT DAY, someone e-mailed his blog, asking Maria a question.

  So, he figured . . . why not?

  For his day job, he got paid pretty well, considering how little work he did. He had some friends who were actual reporters, and he couldn’t imagine having to stay up all night during election season, or tracking down interviewees who did not want to be interviewed. All Colin had to do was meet with Makeda and Jeanaeane, find out what was hot, and talk about what guys thought of it. The most extensive research he ever had to do was to find out which of the new restaurants that sprouted up in San Francisco like mushrooms was the best place for a date. He’d just finished his series on Date Deciphering, which included such meaningful insights as what it meant if your date takes you to a food truck (he’s a hipster with no game) or a rom-com (he’s hoping to get laid; that’s the only reason men ever, ever go to rom-coms).

  But that series reached its natural conclusion by addressing the issue of to kiss or not to kiss. (“If he doesn’t try to kiss you on the first date, there’s not going to be a second. No man has ever considered whether or not he should kiss on the first date. If he wants a kiss, he’ll go for it. If not, it’s not because of manners.”)

  He also had his weekly assignment of piggybacking on one of the other features, from his “guy’s perspective.” Once he accompanied Makeda to Fashion Week. His guy’s perspective was that it was nuts and he didn’t get it. Another time he went on a tour bus through Napa Valley. Most of the time, though, his features had more of an editorial feel. Usually he got to do this from the comfort of his own home, or a coffee shop, or the bar on the corner. But not today. Today was—

  “Okay, everyone, time for pants!”

  Dali, assistant to Clea, Glaze.com’s editor-in-chief, was a gender-fluid New Age musician with blue and pink hair and an obsession with office supplies. She also reveled in the weekly editorial meeting—Colin suspected it was because she got to take color-coded notes—which she dubbed “pants” because all of the staff writers had to come in from their cushy, comfortable non-office work spaces and dress in a manner presentable to the public.

  One day, Colin swore, he was going to come in in his boxers. Except he didn’t want to give Clea a reason to fire him. She probably had enough of those already. If it wasn’t for his winning charm, or, more likely, the fact that he was the only straight man on staff and the only writer who more or less respected a deadline, he expected he’d be out the door.

  This was the one thing that made his cushy job a little less cushy—the fact that it could disappear at any moment. All he needed was for some other dude to come in with great ideas and an actual work ethic.

  The staff made its way to the large, white conference table in the center of the room. Whatever makeup samples Jeanaeane had been toying with were long gone, and it was just chairs, table, and a plate of bagels no one but Colin would touch.

  Clea was in her usual spot, perched on the corner of the table, sipping green tea from a glass mug, waiting for
them all to arrive. Back in their old office, she’d taken that spot because it gave her the perfect vantage point to unleash her death glare on anyone who dared walk in the door late. Now they didn’t have doors, and they didn’t have wall space to waste on a wall clock. Anyway, the new conference table was so slick and high that all of her time-management energy seemed to now be devoted to not falling on her butt every time she moved.

  Sitting at her right hand, of course, was Pia Wallington, former intern and current pain in Colin’s ass. Pia was five feet tall when she wore her signature platform heels, had a short, Mia Farrow-style pixie cut dyed silver, and wore so much jewelry, Colin was sometimes worried she would topple over. She was also a twenty-year-old college dropout who’d had a fashion blog in high school, which qualified her for the job of junior staff writer. This meant she wrote a lot of product descriptions and small stories and spent a lot of time wondering aloud why Colin was the one who got to go to Fashion Week.

  If she was a fellow straight guy, Colin would be worried.

  But under the circumstances, he had nothing to worry about.

  “Okay, folks, what do we have this week?” Clea asked from her perch.

  “Blue lipstick,” said Jeanaeane. “It’s hot.”

  “Great. Fashion?”

  “Clothes that go with blue lipstick?” Makeda hedged.

  Clea sighed. “Anything that is not blue?”

  “Well,” said Pia. “I want to talk about the Internet.”

  “Sounds like a great scoop for an online magazine,” Colin muttered. Makeda laughed. Jeanaeane pursed her blue lips at him.

  “I’m starting the pitch nice and slow so people who weren’t born digital can keep up,” said Pia.

  Nothing at all to be worried about.

  She stood, her giant platforms clomping on the polished concrete floor. “I was doing some research over the weekend,” she began. Colin snorted. Pia’s idea of weekend research was celebrity-spotting at trendy restaurants and pitching features on whatever pet projects they had sold her on.

  Totally different from what Colin did.

  Colin just went out to try new bars and ended up sleeping through someone else’s threesome.

  He didn’t deal with celebrities.

  Pia swiped a few screens on her tablet, and the office projector buzzed to life. “Clea, you’re always talking about how we are positioned to become the boutique for every part of a woman’s life.”

  Clea’s eyebrows were raised so high in expectation that they disappeared under her Wintour-esque bangs. Colin shot a quick look to Makeda, who looked as astonished as he felt. “Lifestyle boutique” was Clea’s mantra. It was her dream to grow the site from fashion and beauty to include travel and work and relationships. That was what Colin did, more or less. Relationships. Well, dating. He did that because Clea was nudging him in that direction, because that was where she wanted Glaze to grow.

  He hadn’t thought that Pia was paying attention.

  Still. Nothing to worry about. Probably.

  Pia nodded at Dali, who hit a button on the office remote, dimming the lights. Everybody scooted their laptops and coffees back a little as a presentation projected onto the center of the table. Pia pushed the bagels toward Colin.

  The Beauty Business is War, Clea had told them the first time she showed them the cutting-edge projection unit. This is our War Room. Someone had pointed out that, no matter which way the presentation was oriented, someone would be reading it upside down. That person did not work at Glaze.com anymore.

  “Webster’s Dictionary defines a meme as—”

  “We know what a meme is,” Colin interrupted.

  Pia just shrugged, her statement necklaces clanking. “Just making sure.” She reached over and took the remote from Dali. The image on the table flickered between cats and babies and horses with their lips flopping around. “Usually these are cute animals being hilarious.” A husky gave them a bright smile from the center of the table. Grumpy Cat cut them down to size. “But sometimes, memes are people.” She brought up some classics—Overly Attached Girlfriend, Ehrmahgerd Girl. “What is that like, to be a meme?” Pia clicked again.

  It was the face of the Disapproving Librarian.

  Colin flinched. It was funny, sure, but he couldn’t help but feel bad for this girl. Maybe it was some of Steph’s sympathy rubbing off on him. Whatever it was, this was not a flattering picture. Being projected large on a glossy white table did not improve it.

  It was too bad, really. She probably wasn’t bad looking. Her hair was pretty tragic, and the face she was making was definitely unflattering. But he’d bet she wasn’t completely hopeless when she smiled.

  “This meme is pretty new, so you guys might not have seen it yet,” Pia said, picking up on the surprised laughter around the table.

  “Poor girl,” said Makeda.

  “Poor girl’s eyebrows,” said Jeanaeane.

  “I’ve heard rumors that she lives here,” Pia said, her eyes lighting up with mischievous glee. “I’m going to track her down—”

  More power to ya, Colin thought as the librarian disapproved of them all. I wouldn’t want to meet that glare in a dark alley.

  “God, has she totally gone into hiding?” Jeanaeane asked.

  “I would—”

  “That’s the story!” Pia interrupted. “What’s it like to be a meme? To have your face involuntarily the butt of a joke?”

  “I read that on Buzzfeed a few months ago,” Clea said.

  “Cyberbullying!”

  “One unflattering picture is not cyberbullying.”

  “It is unflattering,” Makeda agreed.

  “I’d love to get at those cheekbones,” Jeanaeane said.

  “The pout would go down a little easier with some lipstick,” Clea agreed.

  “I’d be pissed if I had to wear a shirt like that,” said Makeda.

  “Colin?”

  Colin looked up at Clea, not sure what she wanted him to contribute. The librarian didn’t look great; he agreed with that. He had no idea how to make her better. “Maybe if she smiled?”

  “Ugh, nothing worse than a man telling me to smile,” Makeda grumbled.

  “But you can sit here and talk about how tragic her face is?”

  “She can still scowl,” Jeanaeane said. “But she could work a little harder on giving us her best scowl. With lipstick. And eyebrow shaping.”

  “What’s wrong with her eyebrows?”

  Jeanaeane just rolled her eyes at him.

  “That’s it!” Clea shouted.

  “What’s it?” Colin asked.

  “Making Over a Meme.”

  Pia beamed with pride. “Exactly!”

  “She doesn’t look like the kind of woman who’d be interested in a makeover,” Colin said. He didn’t know why he said it, or why he thought it. She just looked like . . . like maybe she thought about other stuff.

  And yet . . . there was something about that face. He was curious about that face.

  “The woman clearly needs help,” Jeanaeane said. “At the very least, she needs to learn what her best angles are.”

  “It’s gonna take more than angles,” Pia said. “This is probably something that’s more suited for a senior writer.”

  Colin’s ears perked up. Was Pia . . . giving him her story?

  “I can see this being a series of articles, one on each aspect of her disastrous face. Jeanaeane, we can do a whole spread on eyebrows.”

  Jeanaeane’s eyes lit up.

  What was the deal with her eyebrows?

  “I can see the potential,” Clea said, squinting at the Disapproving Librarian. “I like the idea of a series. Colin, what do you think?”

  “Well, this isn’t really Colin’s wheelhouse, is it?” Pia asked, her face completely artless. If Colin wasn’t mistaken, she was batting her eyes at Clea.

  Now would probably be the time to start feeling threatened, he told himself.

  “I mean, maybe this would be easier i
f I was just made a senior writer.”

  And there it was.

  Colin braced himself for the speech, that they had only budgeted one senior writer for features, maybe that could be expanded in the future, but for now it was one senior and one junior, although there were opportunities for freelancing.

  That was the speech that saved his ass every time Pia brought up the great idea that she should also be a senior writer, despite her lack of experience and the lack of a budget.

  “I know there’s only room in the budget for one senior writer,” Pia said, and alarm bells went off in Colin’s head. “I’m not suggesting you change that.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?” Clea’s expression indicated a mix of annoyance and curiosity. Colin was most worried about the curiosity.

  “Nothing, really. Just that, well, there’s only room for one senior writer, and I’m the one with all the good ideas.”

  “I know the librarian!”

  All eyes turned to Colin, who was only barely aware that he had spoken. He just felt the panic of losing his cushy job and the hot breath of Pia’s ambition breathing down his neck, and he blurted out the ace he didn’t realize he was holding. Probably because it wasn’t much of an ace, what with it not really being true and all.

  “Do you?” Clea asked, very, very interested.

  “Sure. Pia’s right. She’s local.”

  Pia looked momentarily panicked, but she recovered quickly. She was quick, the little sneak. “Great. You can put me in touch.”

  “Um, no.” He could also just hand her his job, which he was not interested in doing.

  “My idea, my story,” Pia said, and it sounded like she was starting to whine.

  “My contact,” Colin said. God, was he really trying to steal Pia’s story? This was a new low for him.

  Dear Maria,

  I knew I didn’t have much professional integrity, but today I learned the depths of my desperation. What should I do?

  Soulless in SoMa

  Dear Soulless,

  A man’s gotta eat.

  Kisses,

  Maria