The Unknowns (7 page)

“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.

“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:

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.

“So what’s the best story you’ve ever written?” I ask. It works: she stops and thinks about it, and there’s a public answer and a private answer, which is always good. She tells me about the story she won awards for, the one she sends to magazine editors when she pitches them—a two-month investigation into the shady dealings surrounding a lucrative waterfront development contract, involving the ambitious son of a casual-footwear magnate, a mayoral aide, and the aide’s partner, who was running for DA. (Even I was vaguely aware of this when it broke: there were headlines in the
Chronicle
, and people lost their jobs.) But then she tells me about the story that meant the most to her, the one that she remembers when she gets
discouraged: a story about a Catholic church in Ingleside whose priest made some odious remarks about gay marriage, and the activists who picketed outside the church dressed as nuns.

“It was supposed to be a quickie,” she says of the story. “Get a couple of quotes from each side, a photo of these wacky transvestite nuns. But I wound up spending three days talking to people in the congregation, watching them feed soup to homeless people, going to services, understanding what it meant to them to have, you know, guys in nun costumes outside their church every day. And once I’d done that, I had to spend time with the nuns too, and they were the coolest, funniest, most sincere people I’d ever met. Most of them had grown up Catholic and been terrorized by it. And I was so nervous while I was writing it, because all these people on both sides had really opened up to me, had taken me into their lives, and now I was trying to do right by all of them, except they hated each other.”

“How did it turn out?”

“I totally obsessed over it,” she says. “Right up to the last minute I was adding things and taking things out and counting the number of words quoting each side, trying to make it balanced. I got a little carried away. And then the day it came out, I got to the office and there were two messages. I’m always so worried the day a big story comes out, I dread checking the messages because it’s usually someone threatening to sue. But that day there were two messages. One was from the priest and the other was from the head of the protesters, and they both said, basically,
Thank you
.”

“That’s awesome,” I say, because it is in fact awesome, and because I have a huge crush on her and am glad to be able to tell her that I think she’s awesome by pretending I’m talking about her story.

“So what about you?” she says. “Do you get obsessed over your work that way? Do you have a, like, a favorite program that you wrote or anything like that?”

The answer to both questions is yes, of course. But the joy of
hacking doesn’t translate. If she’s like most people, computers are alien to her, mysterious electronic totems that require the ministrations of a shamanic caste of surly gnomes who live in the basement of her office building.

“I get pretty deep into it,” I say. “And the work I did for the startup, the interface I designed, I’m proud of that. I mean, I think it’s a good solution to a particular set of problems. But talking about it gets really boring to a non-programmer.”

“You worry a lot about keeping people on your side, huh?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“If you were to answer my question, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I don’t think I’d be bored, but what if, worst case scenario, what if I was bored for a minute? Would that be the end of the world?”

I have to think about this. “Well, I don’t want to bore you. I mean…” This is hard, because the reason I don’t want to bore her is that I want her to like me, and obviously I can’t say that directly.

“I know, you don’t want to bore me, because you want me to like you,” she says.
Whoa
. “But you know, I’m going to make up my own mind about whether I like you, just like you’re going to make up your mind about whether you like me. And anyway, liking you is different from liking a TV show. The reason I like people is not that they never bore me. So why don’t you tell me about it, and if I don’t understand I’ll stop you and ask questions, which is what I do all day in my job, and if I get bored I’ll try to hide it until we’ve moved on to something else. OK?”

She drains the end of her drink, sets down the glass, and turns to face me. I look at her, and she looks at me, and that thing happens when you look at each other and realize,
Hey, here we are
. I ride it out, and then I jump in.