Working It (3 page)

“Ah.” He leans back in his chair. “Except Q was an industrial scientist who developed hardware that could be used in the field, and I am a computer engineer who develops software. Not quite the same, technically speaking.”

“Right.”

An awkward silence stretches between us. Is he always a stickler for precise language?

“So you work in a clothing store?”

“Not exactly. I work for L’Heure.”

“Isn’t that a clothing store?”

“Boutique. Yes, but the phrase ‘work in a clothing store’ implies a sales position. I am a regional manager, responsible for several boutiques.” I grin. “Not quite the same, technically speaking.”

He continues to stare at me, and a wicked little voice in my head whispers,
Does not compute.
My playful jab simply does not register.

Sorry, Ethan. Half a point docked for inability to detect sarcasm. I am French. Sarcasm is an inherited trait. It’s in our DNA.

“So,” I say, changing the subject, “how long did you live in Paris?”

“Twelve weeks and two days.”

“That’s all?”

“I attended a language immersion course.”

Three months? A three month language immersion course hardly qualifies. Minus two, Ethan.

If I can’t date a Frenchman, I at least want to date someone with an understanding and appreciation of my culture. Acid churns in my belly. Clearly, disappointment and wine do not mix.

The bartender arrives, hands Ethan the wine list, and promises to return in a few minutes. Ethan studies the list for several seconds. He frowns and his brow knits together, as if the menu were written in Greek. He looks over the top of the menu at me.

“What are you drinking?”

“Chateau de Beaucastel Coudoulet Rouge. It’s a Rhône Valley red. It has notes of plum and blackberry.”

“Is it good?”

“
Oui!
”

“Can I try a sip?”

And just like that Ethan, morphs from a great catch into a catfish.

The uncouth creature reaches for my glass, and I have to quell a sudden impulse to slap his hand away. I stare at his lips pressed against the rim of the glass and wonder if he brushed his teeth. He finishes swigging my pricey pick and hands me the empty.

“Huh,” he says, smacking his lips. “It tastes a little…gamey. Like the grapes were stomped on by a herd of wild boar.”

C'est quoi ce bordel?

English translation: What the fuck?

“Perhaps that’s the truffle.”

“Truffle? As in mushroom?”

Wine connoisseur, my ass. Minus one. Game over, Ethan. You lose.

“Chateau de Beaucastel Coudoulet Rouge is made with Mourvèdre grapes, which take on a certain earthy flavor as they age.”

He raises his hand in the air and snaps his fingers.

I am cringing. Inwardly. Outwardly. Cringing. Who does that?

Nobody.

Next, he will be saying, “Oh gar-son.”

The bartender hurries over.

“I’ll take a glass of the Yellow Tail Sparkling Rosé.”

Cringing. Again.

Yellow Tail? Sparkling Rosé? I look around to see if anyone else heard Ethan order. Maybe this is an elaborate prank. Maybe Vivian met Ashton Kutcher and talked him into punking me.

I was stuck in an airport lounge in Omaha once, and the televisions were set to a
Punk’d
marathon. Yeah, my idea of hell is being stuck in Nebraska and forced to sip Yellow Tail Sparkling Rosé while watching endless loops of
Punk’d
.

The bartender looks at me, widens his eyes a fraction, and returns to the bar.

If Vivian were here, she would say, “
Ain’t no shame in drinking pink wine
.” I would vehemently disagree. Pink is
not
the new white.

“So, Ethan”—I plaster a fake smile on my face—“what do you do in your free time, that is, when you’re not developing James Bond software?”

“I volunteer at a soup kitchen near the Tenderloin.”

Tenderloin? His mention of that seedy area reminds me of Nicola and her snarky comment implying I worked it in the red light district.

I groan.

“Not into volunteering?”

“What?”

“You groaned when I said I volunteer at a soup kitchen.”

“Sorry.” I wrap my fingers around the stem of my wineglass and tip it back and forth. The residual wine moves like a tiny claret wave. “Your comment just reminded me of something my boss said about the Tenderloin—”

The bartender returns with Ethan’s sparkling wine, rescuing me from having to lie or recount my most humiliating professional encounter.

Ethan takes the glass from the bartender, lifts it in the air, studies the streaming legs in the light, brings the glass to his nose, sniffs, and then takes a sip, swishing the pink wine around in his mouth as if it were Listerine.

I would cringe, but I am all out of cringes. So I decide to keep the conversation rolling until I can toss my catfish back in the dating pond and forget I ever snagged him.

“I read in your dating profile that you are an avid rock climber.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“I love climbing. Do you have any climbs planned?”

He grabs his right shoulder and rotates his arm, groaning. “I’d love to, but I messed up my shoulder ’balling with some college buddies last week.”

“Balling?” I smile. “You play basketball?”

“What?” He frowns and then chuckles. “No.”

“What is balling then?”

“Paintball.”

Putain!

What do you even say to that?

Somewhere, out there in the vast sea of people, there is a paintball-playing, soup-ladling, Rosé-swilling female just yearning to catch this catfish. I am not that woman. No yearning going on here.

Somehow, I keep the conversation going for another hour before offering a flimsy excuse about needing to be up early for an important meeting.

Ethan looks genuinely disappointed, which perplexes me. There has been no connection here. Zero. I haven’t even felt the tiniest jolt of sexual electricity flowing between us. Is it possible he has?

“I am so glad we did this,” he says, smiling. “I really feel a connection.”

He stares at me. I stare back.

What is wrong with me? Why aren’t I racked with guilt or suffering the pin-pricks of embarrassment?

“I brought you a little something,” he says, reaching into his jacket. “A first date gift.”

“Oh, that’s okay.”

“It’s just a little something I made for you.”

Please, please tell me he didn’t knit me a paintball jersey.

He pulls out a folded square of papers, unfolds them, and hands them to me.

I take the papers and stare at the images of two mutant looking children, a boy and a girl. They have big brown eyes—like those Japanese cartoon characters—and pouty expressions. The girl has a sharply angled asymmetrical bob, curiously like my own.

I look at him, frowning.

“They’re our children.”

“Excuse me?” Bile bubbles up my throat.

“I morphed your profile picture with mine.” He grins. “This is what our children would look like.”

“What? How?” I drop the papers onto the table. “Why would you…?”

My mouth suddenly feels dry and my thoughts fuzzy, like someone shoved cotton in my head, like I drank too much cheap pink wine.

“I developed a software program that analyzes the genetic history and images of two people and digitally recreates their offspring.”

“Morphing?”

“Technically, yes. But Morphenetics is far more complicated than the average morphing software, which merely takes two shapes and morphs them into one image, often accomplished by utilizing cross-fading film techniques.” He leans forward, resting his arms on the table. “Morphenetics analyzes multiple faces, scans them for commonalities, and comes up with a complex mathematical algorithm that results in the creation of a new face. It’s a sort of digital DNA. Just as geneticists have been able to analyze and isolate DNA to detect the probability of a person inheriting certain diseases, my program analyzes and isolates facial DNA to detect the probability of a person inheriting a particular hair color, eye shape, moles, dimples—”

“Wait a minute.You said multiple images. How were you able to come up with this”—I point to the image of the wide-eyed mutant girl-child—“
this
if you only used my profile photo?”

“I didn’t only use your profile photo. I used several of your photos, as well as photos of your father and cousins.”

C'est quoi ce bordel?

“I only loaded one photo onto the dating site.”

Ethan grins. “I was able to access your Facebook photo albums and downloaded images of your family. You don’t have many pictures of your family in your albums. I couldn’t find one of your mother.”

Ma mère.

An invisible band tightens around my chest, violently pushing the air from my lungs. Several seconds pass before I am able to inhale.

I am not sure what pisses me off the most: that this freaky little catfish accessed my personal photo albums, that he mentioned my mother, or that he exercised tremendous presumption in assuming I would ever want to commingle our DNA—sexually or digitally!

I open my mouth to speak, but close it again for fear I will lacerate him with the full force of my sharp tongue. I don’t care that his software is being used by law enforcement agencies all around the world to track missing and abducted children. I don’t care that he was punctual, effusive in his compliment of my appearance, and eager to meet again. My skin is crawling. He could have said he was a foot-fetishist or that he loves anal sex, and I wouldn’t have been more creeped out than I am right now. I’ve been there, done that with dates who confess freaky predilections, but never with one who got off on morphing my face.

I simply reach into my purse, pull out a twenty dollar bill, toss it on the table, and walk out of Snob, leaving Morph2Perfection without even saying, “
Adieu
, Freak Show.”

Drunk Dial

What do you do with the rest of your evening after a crap-crap-crappy day at work, and a crap-crap-crappy date? Drink wine,
bien sûr!

After leaving Snob, I grab some comfort food from Happy Bamboo, my favorite vegetarian restaurant, and two bottles of wine, and head back to my place.

I am halfway through my Pho Rice Noodle Soup and Seaweed Salad when I remember I promised to text Vivian about my date.

Text to Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Home. Alone. My date morphed our profile photos & brought pictures of what our children would look like.

Text from Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Jesus, Mary, and John Wayne Gacy!

Text to Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Who is John Wayne Gacy?

Text from Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Was. Serial killer. The kind that dressed in clown costumes and chopped up little boys. He probably would have morphed photos—if the technology would have existed. I am totally creeped out.

Vivian sends another text before I have a chance to respond to her first one.

Text from Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Unless you liked getting photos of your future offspring…and then I am not totally creeped out, just a little creeped. (Please tell me you didn’t like it.)

Text to Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Loathed it. Loathed him. Loathe kids. Loathe clowns. It’s early there, what are you doing?

Text from Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Working on my book.

Text to Vivia Perpetua Grant:

Then, stop texting me & write that bestseller!

I mute my ringer and toss my phone on the table. I have a queasy, greasy feeling in my stomach, and it’s not from the Pho Noodles.

I am jealous of my best friend. It’s the ugly kind of jealousy, too. The kind of jealousy that makes me secretly wish something a little bad would happen to her, something that would tip her scale from über-happy to mildly content.

C'est tout simplement horrible. Je suis horrible!

I push the soup bowl away, too sick with shame to eat another noodle. What kind of person wishes ill-luck on her best friend?

The worst kind.

I empty the contents of the first bottle of wine into my glass, lift the crystal glass to my lips, and finish it in one gauche gulp. It takes a lot of wine to get me drunk. Fortunately, I have a lot of wine.

Halfway through the second bottle, I take my Pinot-fueled pity party into my living room, collapse on my expensive but uncomfortable leather couch, and stare out the window at the amber lights of the Golden Gate Bridge reflected in the smooth black waters of the Bay.

I have a penthouse apartment with a killer view, a heavily padded trust fund, a great job, a couture wardrobe, a loyal best friend, yet…

Yet I am not happy. I do not feel fulfilled. Something is missing from my life, but I don’t know what.

I finish the second bottle of wine, and I don’t even care that I will have to pound the treadmill for one hundred and seventy three minutes at six miles per hour to burn off the calories I’ve consumed tonight in wine alone. I am
that
miserable.

I came to the United States ten years ago to attend Parsons School of Design, but I hated New York so I transferred to the Art Academy of Fashion in San Francisco. I felt lonely during those first few months at the Academy. My comprehension of American slang was embarrassingly deficient, and my finishing school manners gave me a haughty air—or so I was told. I felt as isolated as an Ebola patient. In a rare moment of vulnerability, I asked a girl in my History of Costume class why the other students didn’t approach me.

She had this whole rockabilly thing going on—kohl-lined eyes, sausage roll bangs, bandana tied around her artfully pin-curled raven hair, and a swingy polka dot dress.

She tilted her head and pouted her crimson-painted lips, staring at me through her narrowed cat eyes. Then she shrugged and said, “It’s probably because you have resting bitch face.”

I graduated with a dual degree in Business Management and Apparel Technical Design and started working for LVMH the very next day. I kept myself so busy grasping for each new rung of the corporate ladder, I had little time to feel lonely.