“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.
“So are you coming straight from work?” I ask her.
“Yeah, I just got done,” she says. For three long seconds it seems as though neither of us will think of anything else to say and we will finish our drinks in silence and then go home. “How about you? Do you have a regular schedule, or are you writing your own ticket now?”
“I make my own hours, pretty much,” I say. I don’t go into what those hours are filled with. Since the sale I have been learning how much dead time a day can hold. At some point I’m going to have to tell her about being rich, but I don’t know when: too soon and I’m showing off, too late and I’m hiding something.
I want to ask her a question she hasn’t been asked a million times before — otherwise she goes straight to her prepared answer and the two of you are just acting out a script. But obviously you can’t ask her a job-interview question like In a fight between a bear and a shark in a neutral, jellylike medium, who would win? because then she’ll think you’re a dork.