The Unknowns (6 page)

“What’s up?” she says. “Eric, right?” The fact that she remembers my name must be a good sign, unless she remembers it from talking to Lauren on the phone the day after I met her.
I love you, Mom
. Jesus.

“Yeah, Eric,” I say. “And you’re Maya.” It comes out as a statement of fact.

“How’s it going?” she says. “This is the lovely Rebecca Grady.” The lovely Rebecca Grady smiles sardonically at Maya and makes a curtseying gesture. She is in fact not unlovely; she looks a lot like the actress Helen Hunt, who is of only average loveliness for a TV actress but certainly 98th-percentile by civilian standards. It’s a shame for Rebecca Grady that Helen Hunt became recognizable, because now instead of her beauty what you see is her resemblance to Helen Hunt. We stand there for a minute in this awkward triad. I don’t have any Maya-specific conversational hooks, so I ask how her weekend is going.

“I’ve been chained to my desk,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve left the office since Wednesday.”

OK, we’re going to start with a work conversation. “What do
you do?” I say, shifting my feet slightly so I’m facing Maya foursquare instead of splitting my focus between the two of them. It’s a little rude to Rebecca Grady, but it has the advantage of diminishing the chances that I’ll end up going home with her and making ill-advised confessions.

“I’m a reporter,” Maya says. She names one of the local alternative weekly newspapers: left-wing politics in the front, phone sex ads in the back, record reviews in the middle. A month ago, feeling rich and lonely, I called one of the phone sex numbers and made it as far as entering my credit card number, although as soon as the person answered I got embarrassed and hung up.

“So what’s the story that’s kept you chained to your desk?” I ask.

“Big dull investigation,” she says. “Frisco Tow, the company that tows your car when you park in a bus stop. Graft, corruption, the usual.”

“You’re a muckraker. You rake the muck.”

“I do. I’ve been raking muck for three weeks straight. It gets kind of messy. How about you? You do some kind of Internet thing, right?”

Christ, how does she know? “Yeah, I make software,” I say, because I’ve tried all the synonyms and that one is the least bad. “So how did you get started with the raking of the muck? Were you a freelancer?” The fact that she has made no move to include Rebecca Grady in the back-and-forth qualifies as a good sign.

“No, I got hired right out of college as an assistant administrative assistant,” she says. “There’s a lot of turnover. Did you study, like, computer science?”

“No, I, uh, I didn’t go to college,” I say. “I learned on my own, basically.” This information can be presented as a badge of shame or a badge of pride, depending on nuances of tone, expression, and gesture. Shame is never attractive, and pride raises the possibility that I don’t know anything about anything except computers, so I aim for neutrality, although this risks sounding defensive.

“Did you not want to go, or you couldn’t afford it, or what?” she says. I have told maybe one hundred people that I didn’t go to college, and they were all wondering the same thing, but she’s the first to come out and ask.

“I really wanted to go,” I say. “It’s a—well, it’s a medium-length story.”

Maya gives me a go-ahead nod, and Rebecca Grady, demonstrating that there is more to life than failure and humiliation, slips over to the buffet table to refill her wine and dip a baby carrot in hummus. I almost thank her.

“I was set to go to college,” I say. “I’d been accepted by Stanford. And then my dad lost all his money and there was no way my mom could pay the tuition. So I got a job doing computer stuff, and I was going to apply to the University of Colorado, and then my friend Bill asked me to come out here and do a startup with him.”

“Damn,” she says. “That’s great.” I’m not sure what part of it is great; I suspect she means that it’s more interesting than she had anticipated.

“So what about you?” I say. “Where did you go to college?”

“No, we’re not switching back to me yet,” she says, and I feel like I’ve caught an eighty-yard pass on national television. “What does your startup do?”

“We built a web service to track and synthesize people’s buying habits,” I say, “and then we sold it to a bigger company so they could run it into the ground.”

“And what was your role?”

“I designed the interface,” I say. “I built some of the back end, too. Are we switching back to you yet?”

“Not yet. How did your father lose his money?”

“He started a stupid business and put everything he had into it and burned through it in about two years.”

“Were you worried about the same thing happening to you?”

Terrified
. “I tried to learn from his mistakes. We did everything as cheaply as possible. No company cafeteria and no pinball machines and no advertising budget. And we spent other people’s money.”

“Smart!”

“Thank you. We are now officially done with me and moving on to you. Do you like being a reporter?”

“Yeah, basically. I mean, day to day I hate it, it’s one heartbreak after another, but it’s the right thing for me to be doing. I like asking questions.”

“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 hand. “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.