Love at First Like

by Hannah Orenstein

  A few minutes later, two users like my comment. A third replies solely with an emoji featuring a skeptical face—damn it. I need to convince my followers that this is real. But there’s also a stream of people asking for details about the necklace I’m wearing in the bathrobe shot. I respond that it’s available on our site. Ten minutes later, when I’m done with my pasta, I get a string of emails from our e-commerce platform. That necklace? The eight available ones in stock are sold out.

  It’s hard to celebrate a victory when it’s tinged with fear. I make it through the rest of the day in a minor panic, wavering between triumphant moods—the necklace sold out! Blake seems to like me!—and utter misery—my scheme could be uncovered on a massive, publicly humiliating scale at any moment, and what if Blake and I don’t wind up working out? Three times that afternoon, Sophie shoots dagger eyes at me because I’m drumming my fingers too loudly against the glass counter. I can’t help it. Fidgeting gives me something to do.

  I tell Sophie and Jess that I’ll go ahead and close up on my own. Sophie’s more than happy to skip out early—she says that she and Liv are looking forward to trying out a new zucchini noodle recipe. I need a moment to be truly alone, and I secretly enjoy the mindless, physical work of storing away jewels and wiping down the counter with Windex. I take my sweet time as I close up, playing electronic music as I work. I turn the locks on the front door with force, relishing the satisfying clunk as each one clicks into place.

  I could go straight upstairs and go to bed, but I feel restless. I walk across the street to Golden Years, the bar where I discovered that Holden was engaged. (I cannot get over that.) There’s nothing particularly special about Golden Years—it looks like any beloved local watering hole: glossy dark wood floors, lights strung up over the bar, well-worn booths with black-and-white posters hung above each one. But it’s my go-to bar because it’s nearby and reliably chill—I never have to shout over loud music or dodge heinous crowds. In this neighborhood, that’s a feat. The cheap but perfect mozzarella sticks are simply an added bonus.

  When I push open the door and feel the sweet rush of air-conditioning, I glance at the booths, but take a seat at the bar. I don’t bother grabbing a drink menu—this isn’t the place for a froufrou cocktail or a glass of wine, unless you’re okay with up-charged screw-top bottles of Chateau Diana. I have a usual beer order here. I scroll through Instagram on my phone until a bartender comes by.

  “Hey, what can I get you?” he asks.

  He looks vaguely familiar: a mop of dark hair; sweet, brown eyes; a hoodie with the sleeves pushed up. It takes me a moment to place him, but of course, I know him from here. He was the bartender who served me and that awful date. His name is Raj.

  “Hi, one Brooklyn Bel Air Sour, please,” I order.

  He nods and goes to retrieve it. When he returns, he pours the bottle into a glass for me and keeps steady eye contact with the drink while he asks, “What, no whiskey this time?”

  So I’m not the only one who remembers that night. Raj slides the bottle and the glass across the bar to me and finally looks up, giving me a small, tight smile.

  “I think you were my bartender last time,” I say.

  “You were here with that short, drunk, angry dude who left you with the whole bill, right?” he asks, narrowing his eyes.

  I take a heavy sip of my beer. The fruity, sour notes make today’s stress fizz away. “That’s me,” I say.

  He shakes his head slightly, like he’s holding in a laugh. “How’d that go for you?”

  “Oh, we’re very much in love,” I deadpan.

  “So, what, you’re meeting a date here tonight?” he asks.

  I slurp down a healthy amount of beer so I don’t snort. “Uh, no.”

  “Meeting a friend?”

  “Nope. I just wanted to chill with a beer. And maybe talk to someone?”

  “Chill as long as you’d like,” he offers. “I like when customers hang out. Keeps things interesting.”

  Raj opens his mouth like he’s about to say something more, but a burly dude in one of the booths on the other side of the bar summons him over with a graceless, “Hey!” Raj holds up a finger. “One sec, I’ll be right back.”

  One second turns into one minute, which turns into a solid ten. I like watching him scuttle around the bar. It’s like reality TV—as long as it lasts, you can tune out whatever’s happening in your actual life. He takes a whole round of orders from the guy in the booth, pours each one, loads them up on a tray, and sets each drink down in front of the correct guy; he runs checks; he drops by what looks like an awkward first date at the bar to see if they need refills.

  “Are you new here?” I ask when he swings back by my seat. “I mean, aside from recently, I haven’t seen you around here.”

  “You’re here often enough that you notice when the bar staff changes?” he says, smirking.

  I can’t help but laugh. “Yes.”

  He fidgets with the left sleeve of his hoodie. “Yeah, I, uh, I’m new. Got hired about a month ago.”

  “Congrats. Where were you bartending before?”

  “Nowhere. I’m in between gigs right now,” he explains. “I was the senior engineer at a tech startup. At first, I loved it. But I got burnt out after three years. It felt like I was tethered to writing code that didn’t actually help anybody. And the meetings—” He groans and goes slack-jawed. “Pointless. The worst. So I left. I’m figuring out what my next move is. I thought I’d pull in some extra money here while I work that out.”

  “Wow. It’s cool that you’re making a change.”

  “Thanks. Just gotta figure out the next thing. I want to do something meaningful this time, you know?”

  “Totally, yeah. It’s best when you love what you do.”

  He leans his elbows on the bar and looks down, smoothing his hands over his head. When he looks back up, his cheeks are flushed.

  “You’re, like, the third person I’ve told, aside from my old coworkers.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Easier to tell a stranger. You’re not letting them down,” he says, shrugging. He pauses, then adds, “Though, I guess if you’re here as often as you say you are, you won’t be a stranger for long.”

  I take a long sip of beer and weigh what I’m about to do. It’s not a difficult choice—Raj’s honesty stirs something in me. I want to be real with him.

  “I have a secret, too,” I offer.

  He raises one thick eyebrow and drums his hands across the top of the bar. “Shoot.”

  “I accidentally led my Instagram followers to believe that I’m engaged,” I say.

  “But you’re not. . . .” he says, looking confused.

  “No,” I say. “You know the jewelry store across the street? My sister and I own that.”

  “Whoa, really? You’re pretty young to own your own business, aren’t you?”

  I shrug. “I’m old enough.”

  “Impressive,” he says, whistling.

  “I realized that if people think I’m engaged, my business does even better than it did before,” I explain.

  “So you’re just not going to correct them,” he finishes for me.

  “Exactly.”

  He shakes his head and laughs, but then stops short when he figures out the problem. “Wait, but aren’t people going to wonder who you’re engaged to? And like, eventually, when you’ll be getting married?”

  I hadn’t planned on revealing anything further, but it’s not like Raj is going to blow up my secret. Even if he knows the truth, who is he going to tell? I hesitate, then dive into the story.

  “Okay, so I’m fully aware this sounds preposterous, but I met this guy Blake at a bar the night after that whole Instagram thing went down. He’s in the jewelry business like me,” I explain, amping up my voice with bravado. I want to sound confident, even though I’m not. “We went out once and he was cool, but I don’t know if the chemistry was fully there. But then a hotel offered me a free wedding six m
onths from now. I said yes, and so I needed to rustle up a good fiancé, and Blake obviously made sense to step into that role.”

  “Obviously,” Raj says. His eyes twinkle; he’s humoring me.

  “I haven’t filled Blake in on my plan yet . . . and I’m not sure I will?” I feel guilty saying this out loud, so I skip quickly to my next thought. “A six-month timeline is fast, but it’s not unheard of, right?”

  “My parents got married two months after they met,” Raj says.

  “See!” I say, a little too excitedly.

  “I mean, different circumstances,” he counters. “It was an arranged marriage. They met just a handful of times before they decided to get married, and it wound up working for them. They’ve been together for thirty years.”

  “I love that it worked out.”

  “In a way, you know, you’re kind of arranging your own marriage,” he points out.

  “I think of it more as a business arrangement that happens to involve a wedding?” I say, sounding as uncertain as a I feel about the entire scheme.

  Raj throws his head back to laugh. I like it. Unlike Sophie or my parents, he doesn’t have anything at stake, so his opinion is real. Unlike Carmen, he didn’t forge an oath in tequila in an NYU freshman dorm room to be my best friend forever, so he won’t sugarcoat anything to spare my feelings. He could reprimand me for my callous treatment of Blake. Whatever Raj’s verdict is when I finish telling the story, I know it’ll be honest and unbiased. That sounds even more refreshing than this cold beer.

  “You’re nuts,” he says finally, pushing off the bar, stunned. “But I admire your balls.”

  “Really?” I ask. It’s a hair too fast. I sound desperate.

  He grips the bar and leans over it toward me. “Life’s too short to play it safe. You want to win big, you gotta take risks.” He grabs my empty bottle. “Tonight’s drinks are on me.”

  • Chapter 9 •

  The weekend goes by in a crowded blur of customers. But on Monday, the shop is quieter than I’d like. Sitting in the back room, I can hear the blow of the air-conditioner—business is really that dead on a weekday morning. And that’s when a plan strikes me. It’s so beautifully simple, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I pitch it to my sister, who’s hunched over her desk, examining a new order of stones one by one with tweezers.

  “What if we email Roy and ask for an additional six months at our current rent if we promise to renew the lease for at least the next year, and pay the new, raised rent once the deadline’s up?” I propose. “This way, he gets the money he wants, and we get a few more months to raise it.”

  She looks up with a blank expression. I’ve pulled her out of her work.

  “That’d give us nearly a year,” she muses.

  “Right—a whole year to apply for grants, court new investors, expand our e-commerce shop, grow our following.”

  “But what if doesn’t go for it?”

  I shrug. “Then he doesn’t go for it. But at least we tried.”

  “He won’t be mad at us for asking?” She picks at her nails at she talks, her telltale sign that she’s stressed. She hates talking about money.

  “He could be annoyed, maybe, sure. But I’d rather have him feel slightly bothered by us than kick us off the premises when we can’t pay.”

  “You’re so dramatic.”

  I hesitate before going in for the kill, because I know this will convince her for good. “Another year at this rent means another year before we have to even consider laying off Jess or cutting our salaries.”

  Sophie stops picking at her cuticles and we lock eyes. Before we formally made the decision to launch the shop, we sat down together, each with a sheet ripped from her designer’s sketchpad and a marker. She said we should map out our ideal next ten years so we could both be on the same page about our goals and values, especially if we were tying our finances and livelihoods to each other for the foreseeable future. She completed a detailed outline in under two minutes: marrying Liv that next summer, one kid by their second wedding anniversary, and another within the next two years; she wanted a brownstone in Park Slope with a yard for a Labrador to run around in; she had even noted how much money she needed to set aside every month to maintain regular appointments with her colorist. I pointed out that the shop wasn’t even mentioned in her outline.

  “Well, obviously, it’s a goal,” she had said back then, rolling her eyes. She scrawled it in with her marker. “Such an obvious goal I didn’t even need to write it down.”

  Here we are, three years later: she has one company, one wife, no kids, no dog, no yard. She has a half floor in a brownstone, but not even close to the whole thing. Her colorist still does a great job.

  Sophie had leaned over my sheet to see what I had written and balked. I had written the name of our company ten times over in slightly different looping cursives, like an eighth-grade girl trying out her first name with her crush’s last in the margins of her notebook. It’s not that I never wanted anything besides this business. It’s just that I wanted it so badly that the outer fringes of my life turned hazy. Maybe I wanted a relationship, but I couldn’t tell you with whom, or what it’d look like. On Sunday mornings, would we run together in McCarren Park or would we call each other “babe” while passing pages of the New York Times back and forth? Would we move to an old walk-up with a leaky faucet but plenty of charm or one of those sterile high-rises going up on the waterfront with a lap pool and a sauna? Would we even want a baby?

  Sophie’s always wanted a baby. This company is mine. We’ve both known that for years.

  “Email Roy,” Sophie says finally. “It’s worth a shot.”

  I type up the email and press send right in front of her, before she can change her mind.

  I’ve kicked my outreach to editors, bloggers, and producers into high gear, pitching Brooklyn Jewels for every press opportunity I can dream up. I figure that our strategy should be full-speed-ahead right now. It seems worth the effort to pursue every idea that sounds even remotely within our reach, because that’s just one more tool for attracting new customers.

  So that’s why I’m sitting next to Haley Cardozo, host of the radio show Head Bitch in Charge, a weekly feature on “powerful women who get shit done,” as her slogan says. We’re sitting in a glass-walled studio at the Sirius offices in a dizzyingly tall tower in Midtown. This is one of three press opps I’ve set up this week. An assistant instructs me to slip on enormous padded headphones and adjust the microphone so it’s level with my face. She says I’ll be on right after the show’s first commercial break.

  I thought I dressed boldly, but Haley’s clad in a mint green pantsuit over a pale pink T-shirt printed with a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her canvas tote bag is from the New Yorker, and a gold nameplate necklace that spells out “HBIC” rests against her chest. The magenta highlights in her hair could probably be seen from Mars. By comparison, my purple slip dress, striped blazer, and stacks of Brooklyn Jewels wares—engagement ring included—are positively bland.

  “You ready for this?” Haley asks. “It’s live, you know.”

  “Let’s do it,” I say.

  I try to push away my nerves. This only goes out to a million people or so. No sweat. Haley signals her assistant, who counts backward from three, then presses play on the show’s intro music, which sounds like what would happen if Taylor Swift recorded a pop song about the joys of feminism under capitalism. Once the recorded intro is over, Haley jumps in with an animated promise to “deliver an ah-MAY-zing show to you guys today” featuring an interview with “young hotshot jeweler to the stars Eliza Roth.” I mean, when you put it that way, it almost sounds like my life isn’t on the verge of utter disaster.

  In a honeyed voice, Haley zips through a segment she calls “A Broad Abroad,” in which she summarizes a string of thirty-second news stories about notable women around the world, recites her personal finance tip of the week, and hits play on a prerecorded ad about tee
th whitening strips. It’s over sooner than I expected, and then I’m on. Haley reads notes off her phone to describe my career path, Brooklyn Jewels’s launch, and the Meghan Markle success story from that Elle interview.

  “So, Eliza, let’s talk about funding. It’s the biggest hurdle for so many female entrepreneurs. How did you get started?” she asks.

  I don’t love this question. It feels uncool to admit that getting a company off the ground is a hell of a lot harder when you don’t have an inheritance to cover a chunk of your starting costs. But I have to acknowledge it, because it’s an enormous privilege. It would be unfair at best, irresponsible at worst to gloss over that fact and let other aspiring entrepreneurs think Sophie and I got here solely based on our own grit. So I spit that out first, then describe the years of legwork, how I won us funding in a business plan competition, and the challenges of finding exactly the right location for our storefront. Talking about the shop makes me anxious; I still haven’t gotten a response from Roy yet.

  “You’ve gotten a ton of great press lately,” Haley notes. She holds her eye contact steady as she delivers a killer next line. “Don’t you think it’s unfair that it all comes right on the heels of your engagement announcement?”

  “Oh!” I sputter. My heart begins to pound. I hadn’t anticipated this question. I swallow and launch into a rebuttal. “I sell engagement rings, you know. It’s only natural that people would be curious about my personal life. My fiancé and I are flattered by the attention, and I’m excited for this next step in our lives, but ultimately, my focus is and has always been on my work.”

  Haley narrows her eyes. “But isn’t it kind of anti-feminist bullshit that you’ve worked this hard for so many years, and that this is the moment that people finally care about you?”