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.
“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.