by Gabriel Roth
“I’d never have guessed.” Look! I am teasing her affectionately!
“I like getting to the bottom of stuff. It’s just my nature.”
Probably time to pull out before I mess up somehow; I’m almost in a position to ask for her email address, even without a pretext. And then I feel a dark shadow across my soul, and before I have consciously registered any specific sensory evidence I am aware that someone is approaching from behind me and that this person’s presence is a very, very bad thing. And then I’m turning fifteen degrees to the right, and my smile freezes into a terrified rictus, and there is Lauren.
She’s still dressed as if for work, even though it’s Sunday. We all say polite things to one another, and Lauren and I ask each other how it’s going as though we had an interest in each other’s lives, but there’s no sign she’s any happier to see me than vice versa. I wish Cynthia and I had a special signal transmitter where I’d push a button and she’d hurry over and say We really need to get out of here if we’re going to get to that other thing on time. The task now is to find out how much information has passed from the girl on the right, with whom I have disgraced myself, to the girl on the left, with whom I am in love.
“So how do you guys know each other?” I say as casually as I can manage, i.e., not very.
“We went to college together,” Lauren says.
“Lauren was my WPC,” says Maya, smiling. “That’s women’s peer counselor.”
“See, this is the stuff I missed out on,” I say to Maya, picking up a thread from earlier and thus exiling Lauren to the conversational margins. “I never had a WPC.”
“What, because you’re a man?” Lauren asks.
“Uh, no, because I didn’t go to college,” I say. “I have a whole list of things people talk about that I don’t get. The dining hall is one. Also something called discussion sections, for which no one has ever done the reading.”
“It seems like you have a pretty good sense of it,” Maya says. “You didn’t miss much.”
“Really? You wouldn’t say My college years were the best years of my life, or God I miss having all that time just to read and hang out and do theater? Because lots of people say stuff like that.”
“I would basically say that,” says Lauren. “If I didn’t think it might sound insensitive.”
“Mine wasn’t really like that,” Maya says, and Lauren’s face shows a sudden flush of sympathy. I get the impression I’m not supposed to ask, so I don’t.
“I think we’ve got to get out of here,” I say, gesturing at Cynthia on the other side of the hall. A thin woman in suit trousers is giving her a tour of the exhibits. “But, hey, great to see you again.” I throw this out to the pair of them, let them take what they want from it, and head over to grab Cynthia like a life raft.
When I get home, the two kids from the high school are sheltering in the doorway of my building. They wear the kind of sports gear that is never worn for athletic activity and sit on the stoop, him reclining against her chest. In the way of teenagers, they are strange-looking. She has olive skin and a widow’s peak, and the blue rubber bands in her braces make her mouth look like a marionette’s. His cheeks are carpeted with gemlike pustules. They spend their afternoons sitting in the doorway in the rapture of adolescent love.
Inside, it takes less than a minute to find her paper’s website, and from there to discover that her last name is Marcom: glamorously alliterative, like Greta Garbo or Lois Lane. Her stories fall into the investigative genre she described and speak in the reflexively cynical voice of the alternative press. My whole life I’ve ignored city politics, the province of idealists and racketeers, and as I survey Maya Marcom’s work my inattention seems juvenile, unserious, a failure of citizenship. I consider reading her entire oeuvre and constructing a list of questions for use during future conversations, but that would be too much. Instead I scan the archive for something intimate, an unjustified opinion or a sentence in the first person, but whether from heavy editing or an instinct for privacy her prose is an impersonal fortress of elegantly presented research. At the bottom of each article is a link to her email address at the paper, which I protectively store in my mail client’s address book.
I leave it there until Tuesday evening, when I should be preparing for dinner with my father. I’m wearing my most obviously expensive shirt, made of silk so slick and luminous it looks like a cliché. Since I last saw my father I have purchased an adult wardrobe, and I want him to know this, but some archaic guilt or fear has me frozen in front of the mirror reconsidering the shirt. To escape this loop I turn to my laptop, which is sitting on my bed, its weight causing a sinkhole in the duvet. This is the time to write her. Emailing the day after our conversation would have been too eager, obviously, but waiting three days would suggest too sustained an interest.
We’d just finished with me, but we were interrupted before we got to you. Refers to a shared joke; alludes gently to the Lauren embarrassment; invites a response. Please now tell me three things I don’t know and wouldn’t guess about you. Gimmicky, sure, but that’s the point: the obviousness of the gambit, the absence of any pseudoplatonic justification for contacting her—these convey boldness, decisiveness, as though I’m in possession of a natural confidence that obviates the need for ruses and stratagems. If she’s not interested, she won’t respond, which would be disappointing but not humiliating, and disappointment is within my risk-tolerance profile. I have no idea how anyone managed to have sex before email. I hit Command+Shift+D and cast this latest plea for affection out into the world, and then I finish buttoning my expensive shirt and call a cab to take me to meet my father.
He’s chosen an absurd fusion restaurant that I suspect he learned about from a magazine. I find him sitting at the bar in a golf shirt, drinking the closest thing they have to a Budweiser, gazing around uncomfortably. When he sees me approaching he looks relieved, and his handshake is gentle and sincere.
“How are ya?” he says. “Good to see ya!” His hair is markedly grayer than it was, and so is his skin, and rather than allow his expansive belly to flop over his belt he’s hiked his pants up to his navel.
“Yeah, you too,” I say.
He looks toward the door and fails to catch the eye of the hostess. “I’ll just let her know we’re all here,” he says, the all making me wonder if he’s brought someone else. On my seventeenth birthday he took me to a steakhouse where, to my surprise, we were joined by a nervous middle-aged woman, an archivist at the college, who he was apparently dating.
But the hostess leads us through the crowded dining room to a small table for two, one of a long row against the restaurant’s rear wall. All the other tables are occupied. Along the banquette sits a line of women facing their male counterparts. The walls are brushed metal, and the trebly din of reflected conversation is massive and complex.
The hostess pushes our table to one side to open a path to the banquette, but the diners are tightly packed and the guy next to us has to stand and move his chair to allow my dad to squeeze through. When he lowers himself onto the cushioned seat his hips practically touch the women on either side.
“So,” he says when he’s settled. “Mr. Dot-Com Startup! The boy genius himself!” I sit there and take it. “Maybe you should be teaching me, huh?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“So what was it like?” he says. “Must have been pretty exciting, huh?”
Writing and fixing code for sixteen hours a day was, in fact, exciting, but the excitement was of a kind that’s hard to see from the outside. “It was a lot of work,” I say. “But we got to make our own hours and wear jeans and drink as much soda as we wanted.”
This seems to satisfy his expectations. “So how come you didn’t do an IPO?” he says.
“We looked at it,” I say. “But we got a good offer, and it seemed like the product had more value to a bigger company than it had on its own.”
He bats this assessment away with the back of his ha
nd. “They’re going to ruin the culture that made your startup so dynamic!” he says.
I don’t think he even knows what our software does. “No, you’re probably right,” I say.
The waiter approaches our table, introduces himself as Roy, and crouches to tell us about the specials in a rich baritone on which he rightly prides himself. My dad has to lean in to hear him above the ridiculous noise. We order, and Roy goes away, and there’s a little pause while Dad smiles nervously.
“Well, so I’ve got a proposition for you,” he says, with the off-kilter enthusiasm of a salesman who has steeled himself to make the call.
“What’s that, Dad?” I say, moving the bowmen and the cauldrons of oil into position on the battlements of my heart.
“I can’t tell you about it just yet,” he says. He reaches down for his briefcase, leaning into the woman on his right, a brunette with a weathered face. “We need to get you under NDA first.” He looks around to see if anyone has heard him, then pulls out two pages, laser-printed and stapled, a generic nondisclosure agreement he got off the Internet. He reaches into his pocket and proffers a fat fountain pen. How is it that of all the men in the world my father is this one, grinning and waving his pen at me in a restaurant? I don’t want to sign this piece of paper; I want to be excluded from my dad’s confidence. I search it for an excuse to decline, maybe a clause giving him the rights to everything I’ve ever made in perpetuity. But it’s just an NDA. I take his fountain pen, struggle to get the ink flowing, and scrawl my name across the bottom. When I hand it back I feel like I’ve just signed something more significant than a pledge of confidentiality.
“So what’s the big secret, Dad?” I ask him.
“Well so I’m starting a dot-com company!” he says, smiling as if the happiness of this news is self-evident and universal. I become very aware of the proximity of the people at the neighboring tables.
“That’s great,” I say, trying my best. “What’s it going to do?”
“We’re going to sell stereo equipment over the web!” he says. “How about that? Stereo equipment! I know all about that stuff!” I just nod. “Because, see, no one owns that space yet,” Dad says. “When you think of buying books online you think of Amazon. When you think of buying toys, you think of Toys.com. But when you think of stereo equipment, who do you think of? No one. Well, that’s going to be us!”
“Cool,” I say. “Congratulations, Dad. That’s great.”
“It is great,” he says. “It’s gonna be great. So that’s why I’m here.” He takes a dramatic pause, enjoying himself, and extends his hand, palm up. “I want you on board!”
I can’t think of a word to say to this. Dad remains frozen, hand out, for several seconds, until I become aware of Roy standing behind me with our appetizers. “All right, here we are,” he says as he lowers my dad’s pan-fried noodles. Dad, his moment interrupted, looks blankly at his plate while Roy sets down my Thai beef salad.
“It sounds like a really interesting idea,” I say, stalling. “So how far along are you?”
“We’re just in the initial stages right now,” he says, uncharacteristically ignoring his food. “Right now we’re putting a team together, a really great team. Then we’re going to go looking for financing, and then we start development. And I’m seeing you as a key player on the team.” He leans in over his noodles and says, in an intimate voice, “How does chief technical officer sound?”
I concentrate on spearing a bite of beef, onions, and lettuce with my fork. “I’m not really looking for a job, Dad,” I say.
“Well, I’m headhunting you!” he says happily. “Hey, I’m not just some twenty-five-year-old MBA. I teach those guys what they know, and I know it better than them. I’m building a real company here, a serious company.” Finally he grabs a thick clump of noodles in his chopsticks and ferries them to his mouth. “But I need you to make the website, otherwise this won’t get off the ground. Now, I could hire some consultant to do it, if you have any idea what these guys cost, but I want to keep the whole thing in the family, you see? I want—”
Something occurs to me. “Dad,” I say, “do you even have a domain name?”
“A what?”
“A domain name,” I say slowly. “A web address. Like, uh, stereo dot com or audiophile gear dot net.”
“No, we’re not at that stage yet,” he says, still eating. “See, I wouldn’t even know how to do that! This is why we need you on the team! I think stereo dot com would be good. It’s easier to remember.”
The woman next to Dad stifles a smile. When I glance at her she looks away.
“Dad,” I say. “Who is we?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“It’s always We’re going to start a company, we’re going to make a million dollars selling this and that.” I’m doing my best to control my voice. “So who’s the we? Who’s in this with you?”
Dad looks at me as though he’s never seen me before and he’s not happy about what he sees. “I was hoping you would be,” he says.
There’s a silence, and I realize that Roy will be back soon to clear the appetizers and bring my sea bass, and I can’t bring myself to sit here for one more second.
“I gotta go, Dad,” I say. “I’m sorry.” There are other things I could say, things that include the words alimony and tuition and asshole, but by the time I’ve thought of them I’m already out on the street.
I am queasy the following day. My dad is fragile, held together with chicken wire and hopeless dreams, and I’ve just sliced through the whole structure with a Ginsu knife and left it flapping in the breeze. But he walked out on my mom and me, and now that I have become a man I can walk out on him. No reply from Maya. Just after five o’clock, when it’s time to turn on the lights, I call my mom and present the events of the previous evening to her as a comedy. I skip the part about walking out, because gestures of confrontation are frightening to my mom.
“When normal men turn fifty they get hair transplants or sporty cars,” she says. “Barry gets a dot-com company.”
“I know, Mom,” I say. “What can you do?”
“You can start by not marrying Barry Muller, is my advice.”
“The women of America seem to be taking your advice.” I cough. The anti-Dad conspiracy always starts to make me uncomfortable after a few minutes. “So how’s it going, Mom? Are you feeling OK?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she says. “One day at a time.” I take this to mean she’s still off the painkillers. “Eric, I want to thank you for everything. And I’m really sorry for all the stuff I said.” Mom has apologized for this “stuff” at least four times, and I have no idea what she’s referring to. I’m glad she’s clean, but I wish conversations with her didn’t inevitably slide into step-nine work.
We wind down and sign off, and I turn out the lights again and stare at the blackening sky and the sparkling bridge. Looking at the city feels different now that my dad is here, as though something of mine has been repossessed. And then my computer pings and the name Maya Marcom appears at the top of the stack of messages, and in the preview pane the words:
1. I have a hunting license.
2. I prefer the desert to the mountains or the beach.
3. I’m not telling you this one.
Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to send her another email, using this information as the foundation for a delicate rapport, and then she’s going to send me one, marginally increasing the level of intimacy, and then our exchange will culminate with me proposing some kind of date, ostensibly to discuss some of the issues raised in the correspondence but in fact not for that purpose at all. (The sender of the initial email makes the pitch on the third move.) The flirtatious email exchange is the moment at which physical appearance and confidence temporarily give ground to wit, good judgment, and the ability to punctuate. It’s the next part that’s hard.
I’ve suggested meeting in a bar on a weeknight. The after-work drink is low-pressure—
it gives her a chance to pull out after an hour or two—but it’s easy to convert: you can always say Do you feel like getting some food? as though food were a personal interest of yours that she might happen to share. My default first date is an uncrowded Valencia Street bar called Lazarus, one block from a medium-expensive neo-Cuban restaurant with the kind of desserts that have names evocative of Catholicism: sinful chocolate torte, pure vanilla ice cream with virgin peach coulis. It’s the optimum implementation of the specs.
I arrive a couple minutes late, figuring she’ll be a couple minutes later. The bar’s your standard fake dive, decorated with big forties-style signs advertising discontinued brands of soda and cigarettes. There’s only a dozen people here, in three or four platonic after-work groups. I recognize the bartender, Freya: I had a semi-flirty conversation with her once about how she’s named for a Norse goddess. A name like Freya is a gift passed down through the decades from a girl’s parents to any guy who wants to flirt with her, as long as he’s reasonably up on world mythology.
“What’s new with you?” she asks as she pulls my beer.
I scan my brain for some piece of news that might be interesting to a near-stranger. “I got a dog last week,” I tell her, which works perfectly—prompts some obvious follow-up questions, portrays me as both masculine and nurturing—apart from the fact that it’s not true.
“Neat,” she says. “What kind of dog?” and we’re off. The lying sharpens my wits, and I feel ready to deal with any situation, outsmart any adversary, until Maya walks in and smiles at me, at which point I’m gripped by the fear that I’m about to get thrown out of the bar for being underage.
I greet her without attempting any physical contact, because the available physical-contact greetings at this point are a handshake, an air-kiss, and an upper-body hug, and none of those is a good way to start a date. Instead I pull out a barstool for her, a display of chivalry that I pretend to pretend is ironic. Maya orders a gin and tonic, the same drink she asked me to fix her at the party the night we met. Her subtle invocation of that night makes me feel like we have a history, and I smile in recognition before it occurs to me that it’s probably what she always drinks. Freya, who is a professional, fades discreetly away after pouring, which is a relief, because it would be problematic if the dog thing came up.