The Unknowns (26 page)

My line on “Surviving the Crash” is
Just build the best thing you can and if it’s good enough someone will pay you money for it
. That’s true as far as it goes, but it leaves out the one million accidents that are necessary ingredients in any success story. For instance, this incredible girl who seems to like me. We might never have met, or she could have had a boyfriend or been a lesbian. But let’s not discount the role played by my own perspicacity and adroitness. I used my native wit to track her down and my carefully honed charm to beguile her. I triumphed over every obstacle, and if most of those obstacles were self-generated, that only underscores the difficulty of the triumph. And this last hurdle, this level boss, this mental loop that I was almost trapped in… No, I
was
trapped in it, and I jolted myself out and made it home. And now I just have to answer a few more questions from these aspiring entrepreneurs, all of whom want to be
where I am, young and rich and basking in new love, and then I can go buy some new clothes and take Maya somewhere expensive, with fancy cocktails in specialized glasses. The panel ends, and there’s clapping, and I hustle out quickly, avoiding eye contact with the scrum of would-be founders.

It’s already dark when my cab pulls up outside Maya’s building. The streetlights are high and weak and the block has a ghostly feel. I tell the driver to wait, let myself in, and call up the stairs to warn her of my arrival. She steps out of her room applying a final coat of lip gloss, and when it’s done she looks at me with a smile that’s somehow both calculated and innocent—it recognizes and enjoys its own devastating effect.

Her final steps down the hall toward me might almost be choreographed: as she moves she slides on a heavy coat, grabs her purse from a hook, slips the lip gloss into it. I’m on the second stair from the top—our spot—and when she reaches me she leans in and kisses me just enough to let me know she means it without messing up her lips.

In the cab we talk about what we’re doing, the occasion.

“So this is Fancy Eric,” she says, giving me the once-over. “I like it.”

“These shoes are made from opossums,” I say.

“Sustainably harvested opossums, I’m assuming.”

“You could harvest these opossums for a thousand years, you’d end up with more opossums than you had at the beginning.”

“Mine are vegetarian,” she says. “They’re made from kale.”

My hand is on her thigh. “A special kind of high-tech kale.”

“A kind of kale that’s tanned and dyed to look like black leather.”

“How does it taste?”

“You have
no idea
.”

In front of the restaurant I climb out and extend a hand for
Maya. Presumably somewhere there are people who can perform the man-helps-woman-out-of-cab bit with no ironic flourishes on either side, but we have never met those people.

We are half an hour early because we want to wait in the bar, where we sit in a booth whose back rises above our heads and makes us feel cocooned in velveteen. A gentleman in his forties, who knows as much about liquor as I do about Unix, hands us lists of specialty cocktails that cost sixteen dollars and contain at least five ingredients. Maya chooses something involving gin and muddled blueberries; I order the second-oldest whiskey, which is a more masculine approach to spending a lot of money on alcohol.

“So!” she says after we clink glasses. “You were such a rock star today! I had no idea you were good at stuff like that.”

“I’m not, really,” I say. “You know how sometimes when you’re feeling good you can do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do.” I am trying to say that she gives me special powers without quite saying it, although by the end of this whiskey I’ll probably just be saying it.

“With me it’s totally an either/or thing,” she says. “When I go on the radio, I can tell from the first minute how it’s going to go. Like with that school budget story—I knew it was going to be hard to sum up, and then I started talking and two minutes later I’m still trying to explain it. Two minutes is
forever
.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I say. I don’t think I told her I was listening.

“The thing is—and thanks, you’re sweet—but the thing is, even if it was fine, it threw me off for the rest of the show. I couldn’t give simple answers to any of the questions. And then when we started getting calls—did you hear the whole thing? There was this one terrible guy, this racist guy…”

“I don’t think I heard that far,” I say. Of course I heard the whole thing.

“So this guy calls in, and he was like,
The problem is they’re spending all this money on trying to equalize the test scores, because the blacks always score lower than the whites, and we’re going to spend all this money trying to make sure all the groups score the same
. And usually I know how to handle these guys, but—”

“I totally heard this,” I say, because why the hell not? “You got a bit more heated, there was a little more fire in your voice, but you were still totally articulate and convincing. You said,
You invest in the underserved areas because that’s where the need is greatest, but it’s also where the returns are highest
. And the way you said it, it was like,
Good morning, sir—I’m going to be totally courteous and professional while I carve you into pieces
.”

She’s a bit taken aback—she wasn’t expecting a direct quotation from a radio appearance she made more than three weeks ago—but I think in a positive way. “Well, thanks,” she says. “That’s kind of what happened to you with that privacy guy.”

“I guess so,” I say. “I mean, he’s not actually harmful like a racist, he’s just irritating.”

“Yeah, but you got some mileage from that irritation,” she says. “And you were the underdog. If some racist nutjob wants to pick a fight with me, literally everybody listening to public radio in the Bay Area is on my side. You were there representing big scary corporations.”

“I know—it’s weird,” I say. “I started this thing that was basically a supermarket loyalty-card program, and now somehow I’m the guy inside your computer watching you undress.”

“Well, you did great,” she says.

“Thanks. How’s the drink?”

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. How’s yours?”

“It’s just like normal whiskey only without the part where it burns your throat.”

“I didn’t realize you were such a connoisseur!”

“That was actually a quote from my forthcoming review in
Whiskey
magazine.”

And then she does this amazing thing: she scoots around the booth to me and leans into my side, tipping her head onto my shoulder. We sit like that for a minute as the whiskey reaches my fingertips and everything is perfect.

“So we’re getting serious about this, huh?” she says.

“Yeah, we totally are,” I say. “I mean, I am. I’m serious.”

“OK then,” she says, sitting up and looking me square in the eye. “I’m serious too.”

At some point maybe this will feel like simple contentment rather than giddy euphoria, but that’s hard to imagine.

“It’s weird, right?” I say, as though we’re just two people having a conversation about some normal thing. “You meet someone, you fall for them, you do stuff together and it’s great and everything, and they’re still basically a stranger.” She’s nodding and grinning. She’s with me on this. “And at some point you have to decide,
OK, I’m not just on the outside of this trying to figure it out, I’m on the inside now
.”

“I was wondering when you were going to decide that.”

“Really? You saw me being on the outside?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’m not a mind reader, but it seemed like at first you wanted to put me under an X-ray machine, and then that got really intense and hard to deal with, and then it kind of peaked and you got it out of your system.”

“You know you are in fact kind of a mind reader, right?”

She laughs. “Nah, you’re just not that great at hiding what’s going on with you.” Unbelievable. “So what was it? Just normal fear-of-commitment stuff?”

“Yeah, basically,” I say. I get a weird metallic taste in my mouth at my impulse to dissemble at this of all moments. It’s a bad taste and I’m sick of it. “No, actually, not just that. It was to do with the stuff from your past, with your father, the abuse.”

She looks sympathetic. “What were you feeling about that?” she asks.

“Well, I didn’t know if it was true or not,” I say. “I mean, really, that’s the thing about it, is that there’s no way to know. So I got all wrapped up in this idea that I had to figure it out, I had to find the truth. I went and talked to your dad about it, is how worked up I was about it!”

That was probably a mistake. “What the fuck,” she says.

“That’s what I’m saying!” I say helplessly. “I was so wrapped up in this stupid way of thinking, having to figure out the, you know, the
facts
instead of concentrating on what’s important, which is how you feel about it. And so I did this dumb thing and I…”

“You called my dad?”

“No, I, uh, I went to see him. In LA.”

She just sits there looking at me. A certain amount of astonished bafflement appears on her face alongside the anger. I don’t know how long it lasts, us sitting there with her visibly adjusting her feelings about me in light of this new information. Maybe a long time. Minutes.

“So what happened?” she says, working to minimize the emotion in her voice.

I’m not sure if the specifics make me come out looking better or worse. Probably a wash. Not that it matters. “I made an appointment to see his gallery, and I flew down there. I—”

“When was this?”

“Last week. Friday.” She nods. “I just asked him what happened, and he told me his version.”

“Which is what?”

“He talked for a long time. He really wanted to persuade me that you were wrong, that you’d been brainwashed or confused or something.”

“And what did you think when he said that?”

“I thought I didn’t know, and there was no way to know, and I was looking for some kind of certainty that didn’t exist and I should
forget about it and concentrate on, you know, you and me, and being in love, and the stuff that’s important!”

The hostess is hovering just behind my right shoulder, which means our table is ready. Maya is ignoring her. Obviously we’re not about to head into the dining room, look over the menus, order the pork shoulder, which is only available for two people and which seems to stand for everything I have just lost.

“How long did you sit there and listen to him?” she says.

“I’m not sure.”

“More than an hour?”

“Probably.”

Those are actual tears coming to her eyes. I’ve never seen her do that before:
welling up
. She doesn’t want to break down and sob, but the tears won’t stop coming. Also the look of hatred and betrayal. Never seen that either.

The hostess leans in and says, “We’re ready for you in the dining room.” She’s smiling—she’s been standing there long enough to read our mood and has chosen to ignore it. Probably I should tell her that we won’t be needing our table after all, but what if Maya’s about to start laughing, shake her head at my stupidity, and then tell me it’s all part of why she loves me, and are we getting the pork shoulder?

I look over at Maya. “Do you want to…” She looks back witheringly.

I stand and tell the hostess, “I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to have dinner.” She walks off in silence. Maya hasn’t moved, so I have to sit down and let this go on.

“So he told you about the false memory bullshit. You got the whole line.”

“Yeah.”

“That must have been right up your alley.”

I don’t know what to say to this.

“I told you about him, Eric. I told you about the interrogations,
and the constant discussion of my sex life, and all the bullshit of living with him.” Her hands are on the table, and she keeps squeezing them into fists. “So now you’ve decided that what happened isn’t the
point
? You’re just going to shake your head at the ineffable mystery of my childhood? Believe me, I know how little I know. I have a hole in my memory and I have to live with that every day, but at least I can own what I’ve got. Do I know for sure that my father raped me in my bed when I was eleven? No, I don’t know that for sure, because I wasn’t taking notes at the time. I think he did and that’s enough to stop me talking to him. But I know he hurt me, and I know he hurt me sexually, and I can guess how old I was when it happened, because I know what I was like before and I know what I was like afterward.”

The bar waiter chooses this moment to set down the bill in a thickly padded leather booklet. The room has filled up since we sat down.

She takes a breath. “I have to get out of here,” she says. “It’s important that you don’t call me.” She’s speaking with exaggerated calm, trying to say what she needs to say before she breaks down.

“Look, I understand you’re upset,” I say. “Can we just talk about this?”

“I’m going to have to be alone right now,” she says.

“That’s fine,” I say. “But can we just say we’re going to talk? It could be tomorrow, or whenever, but let’s just make a plan to talk when we’re not both worked up.” Everything rides on whether I can convince her of this.

“Play out that conversation right now,” she says. “You think it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. But it matters to me. Am I going to decide it doesn’t matter to me? Or are you going to start believing me by force of will? This is your thing, Eric, figuring this stuff out. Is there a solution to this?” She’s no longer at risk of crying; the effort she put into summing up the logic of her position has
steadied her. She gives me a few seconds to exhaust the possibilities, and then she gets up and leaves.

The only thing to do now is to contain the panic and despair for a few more hours, which is why, twenty minutes later, I find myself exiting a cab across the street from the I-Hole. It’s a solution that presents itself fully formed, but if I had to show the working it would look something like,
What can possibly stop me from thinking about what just happened? Pretty girls taking their clothes off. Where can I find them
?