Back After This

Chapter Four The Influencer

Chapter Four

The Influencer

I went back to my desk in our open-plan office and looked up Eliza Cassidy. Her Instagram bio called her “your partner in getting to your future—get going, mama!” Her hair was a dark blond, shadowed at the roots, and in almost every picture, it was exactly the same: smooth on top, wavy at the bottom. My sister, Molly, actually referred to this style as “Instagram hair,” best achieved with direct-to-consumer tools that cost hundreds of dollars. Or, of course, with a blow dryer and a round brush from CVS.

Eliza had sponsored posts in her feed featuring, just in the last few weeks: a skincare line, something called “adaptogenic vodka,” a $400 smoothie blender, a fragrance “inspired by human pheromones,” and a company with whom she had released a set of workout leggings that said “ECFitness” across the ass in gold script. “MY COLLAB HAS ARRIVED!!!” she had announced in an unboxing video. I was pretty sure Molly could have made the same thing with her cutting machine and some glitter vinyl, just like she did with my World’s Best Sister mug, but who would pay $80 for that?

No cat toys. No ethically sourced cemetery plots. Eliza was on the right side of something that I had found myself on the wrong side of.

She was photogenically married—a TikTok highlight showed them running into the ocean in their wedding clothes—to a guy named Cody with dark, slightly scruffy hair who wore band T-shirts and always looked like he didn’t entirely want to be in whatever picture was currently being taken. She looked like an artificial intelligence image result where the prompt was “attractive white lady,” and his prompt was maybe “guy who likes to play Halo but not too much.” She hashtagged all their photos #myman and #codycassidy and #reallove and #findyourreallove.

On her YouTube channel, there wasn’t much about official relationship coaching just yet. There were a lot of videos where she reviewed eyeshadow palettes or cleaned out her makeup drawers or tried TikTok’s favorite concealer tricks. Sometimes she reviewed clothing brands or hair products or fifteen funny things she got for under ten dollars on some garbage e-commerce site. Sometimes she answered questions from her viewers. Once, she tried out skincare products for men on Cody. There were a few videos where she talked about their wedding, which had been about three years back. She had given a tour of a snazzy and roomy new house in Bethesda a year or so ago. Bethesda meant she really was making money.

Her TikTok was similar, but shorter. Her Instagram was similar, but more photogenic.

I was surprised she even had a regular website—who needs one?—but she did. It was in pure white with modern gray lettering, and there were light blue accents, like you were about to squeeze her from a fresh tube of minty organic toothpaste. She did seem well-positioned for self-help, since I suspected that once you took out protein powder and pickup artistry, an overwhelming percentage of self-help was marketed to straight women, which seemed to be her deal as well.

Eliza’s history, as told by her website, went back about seven years. She’d been sailing along as an influencer until a couple of years ago, when she’d done a TikTok from her apartment kitchen in which she announced that any woman who wasn’t married by the time she was thirty would never get married unless they took some kind of drastic action. This had gone viral and led to a back-and-forth I vaguely remembered among people who thought she was just telling the truth, people who thought she was up to her perfected hairline in internalized misogyny, and people who thought she was just saying it for attention, which they gave her. She started doing live chats where she gave advice to her fans, who would write in with relationship questions and other personal problems.

Since then, she’d been steadily rising. A year ago, she had been on morning television. Not local morning television, national morning television. She had a book out called Get It Together! Her second, called Get It Together! Again was set to go on sale “soon.”

She had even very briefly tried making a podcast of her own called Get It Together: The Conversation, but it looked to be on hiatus. She’d published episodes—or someone had—irregularly for three months or so and then given up, which put her about two months and two weeks ahead of the average podcast when it came to output. As Julie always said, Apple Podcasts is figuratively littered with the bodies of people whose last words were “How hard can it be?”

I was fully engrossed in her TikTok when my phone rang. The number came up as “CASSIDY PRODUCTIONS LLC.”

“This is Cecily.”

“Cecily! This is Eliza Cassidy. How are you?”

I am trying to save my friend’s job by documenting my humiliating efforts to offer myself up to an indifferent buyers’ market like a Beanie Baby on eBay, how are you? “Eliza, hi. I’m well, thanks, how about you?”

“Amazing. Is this an okay time to talk?”

It was as good as any other time was going to be, so I closed my browser window. “Sure.”

“Great, great. So, Toby just texted me and told me that you’re ready for us to meet.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“You don’t sound excited; I want you to be excited.” She sounded…not high, exactly. She sounded like she was on camera, in front of her ring light, wearing her single gold bangle. Even over the phone, I knew exactly how her hair was positioned as we spoke.

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m just now figuring all this out, that’s all,” I said, hearing my own nervousness, which was generally not the way to have the most interesting conversations with people, so I dug deep for some enthusiasm. “But yeah, let’s do it, I’m game.” Julie, Julie, Julie, I thought. Projects, projects, projects. Pilot, pilot, pilot. Money, money, money. Suck it, Justin; suck it, Justin; suck it, Justin.

“Okay, love that. Do you want to meet at Sophie’s in like an hour? Have you been there?”

Sophie’s was a coffee shop that had just opened at the site of a defunct tea shop, which had been built on the site of a defunct coffee shop. Whoever Sophie was, I had to admire her optimism. “I have. That would be great.”

“What are you wearing? So I can recognize you?”

I looked down. “I am wearing…gray jeans. And a gray sweater.”

“Oof. What’s your bag look like?” she asked.

Did she just react to my description of myself by saying, “Oof”? Oof?

My eyes went to the tote that was under my desk as I tried to think of an answer besides It looks like I bought it at Target maybe four years ago and whatever it’s made of is flaking off and quite possibly poisoning me. Finally, I told her, “Black shoulder bag.”

“Great, great. I’m sure you know what I look like.”

My eyes started to roll, because what kind of a person announced first thing that she was sure you had already gazed upon her glorious visage? On the other hand, though, how many people did Eliza meet in a business context who didn’t already know what she looked like? What her bio said? What Cody looked like and what their hashtags were? Had I not, in fact, gazed upon her glorious visage? Was I not guilty of having engaged in first-degree felonious glorious-visage-gazing from the minute I had gotten the chance? And so I just said, “I’m sure we’ll find each other.”

—

I had only been to Sophie’s maybe twice; I was a person who made coffee at home in the morning, drank that, made more, put it in a steel green thermos, and threw it in my bag with the snacks and the flashlight and the recorder and the lip balms and the tissues and my wallet and my keys and my charger and my iPad and my headphones and all the stuff that collected at the bottom of the bag—a padlock, a little screwdriver, a pair of knotted wired earbuds I rarely wore, my sister’s birthday card. I did not typically wander out in the middle of the day for coffee.

Sophie’s had an array of two-person tables within a few steps of the counter where you ordered, and most were occupied by people on laptops or pairs of people passing short break times until they returned to laptops awaiting them elsewhere. At the table in the corner, closest to where the counter was, a thin woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail tapped away at her phone from under a ball cap pulled low. The air seemed different around her, as if molecules were slowed. I walked closer until I recognized her. “Hi!” I said, in a clanging chirp, way overshooting my goal of sounding friendly. I did this all the time in my job. I talked to strangers, I used my normal voice. Surely, I could do it again.

She looked up from her phone. “Oh, hi hi hi!” she said. She stood up, revealing a loose aqua sweatshirt that dangled off one shoulder like in Flashdance and a pair of black yoga pants that I suspected, but could not see to verify, said “ECFitness” on the ass. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but she extended one hand, and we shook. I had been afraid she was going to hug me, and I was not in a guru-hugging mood.

“Well, geez,” she said, “you look fine! You’re doing a tone-on-tone thing. I thought you were going to look like a rain cloud! You undersold yourself. Never undersell! We’ll make that lesson one. Do you want to go get a coffee at the counter? I’m working on a green tea latte.”

I might have looked like a rain cloud, I might have been in gray, I might have been carrying a bag of detritus, and I might have been about to sell my privacy and my dignity, but by God, I would not sit and occupy a table in a bustling D.C. coffee place and not buy anything. Even a flawed and teetering society is still a society. I fetched a vanilla latte, and when I got back to the table, Eliza had pulled off her cap and was sliding her phone into a pocket in the thigh of her leggings. I sat across from her and rana hand over my hair. “Thanks for doing this,” I said, putting on my interviewing tone in case it helped at all. “You picked a good spot.”

“I love it here. When I’m in the city, this is my favorite place for meetings or just sitting and working.”

“So you don’t live in D.C.?”

“My house is in Bethesda,” she said. I pretended not to know, and not to be impressed. But truly, you couldn’t unfold a chair in a closet in Bethesda for a price I would be able to afford. “Cody grew up there, his mom and dad still live there. But we also have an apartment in Manhattan, and he works remotely, so we divide our time. We take the train. Like I always say, I really live in three places—the house, the apartment, and the Acela. Where are you?”

I described my neighborhood to her, feeling the whole time like I was auditioning to play myself. Did my one-bedroom apartment sound right? Was I single enough? Established enough? What was she going to make of me? What was she going to ask me to make of myself?

“Okay,” she said after I had described my neighbors and their pets to the best of my ability. “So you’re established, you’re independent, you have friends and this great job. What’s missing?”

“I don’t know that anything is missing, ” I said.

“Are you interested in a relationship?”

“Yes. I guess I just haven’t quite…stumbled on the right person.”

“Well, no wonder, right? The only thing you stumble on is obstacles. The right person is something you go and find.” I had a feeling that by mentioning “stumbles,” I had accidentally set her up, like one of those old “It’s sooooo hot”/”How hot is it?” jokes.

I nodded tentatively. “Okay.”

“Okay. Perfect. Now, I want to make this work for you, for your life. Tell me how to make you comfortable with me. Your team told my team you had some concerns.”

I had a team? Her team was probably this Marcela; was my team just Toby? “My skepticism isn’t personal,” I said. That was maybe fifty percent true. I would probably not have trusted any dating/life coach operating on the internet. But she did give off vibes that made me suspect she would want me to do squats and exfoliate until I got to the point where I was abrading my skull directly. “I’m just not sure I’m the right candidate for this.”

She smiled. “I get it. Everybody is afraid of the possibilities.” Her teeth were really white.

I tried to match her smile without looking like a happy clown. “Oh, I’m not afraid of it.”

“Everybody worries that they’re not up to what I’m going to ask of them.”

“It’s not that either.” After all, I had a belt sander I could use if the exfoliating did get that far.

“You think I’m going to tell you that you’re not attractive enough.”

Did she hear me gulp? Did the rest of the coffee shop hear me gulp? Did I just gulp, or did I say the word “gulp” out loud, and was there now a cartoon balloon floating next to my head that said “GULP”? As I was coming to suspect was her habit, she kept going. “You are attractive enough. You’re quite attractive. Like I told you, you’re just underselling. You told me you were wearing a gray sweater and gray jeans. It makes you sound dull, which you aren’t. That’s probably exactly the vibe you’ve given when you’ve had a dating profile. I’m assuming you’ve had a dating profile before.”

I had two as of this conversation. And when I had to go to a wedding by myself or something else happened that convinced me the world was simply too hostile to exist in as a single person, I’d go back and use them again. I’d look for four weeks here, six days there, each time right up until I realized I was never going to say yes to anyone because none of them used punctuation and too many of them, at least around here, described their work in ways that made them sound like lobbyists or spies. “I have, yes. Wait, how was I supposed to describe a gray sweater and gray jeans?”

“Well,” she said, “since I’m a woman, you should have told me, maybe, that you were wearing a gunmetal cashmere pullover and steel gray skinnies.”

“Oh, it’s not cashmere.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s soft-looking. You’re not making an inventory for your insurance, you’re just getting the general idea across.”

“And the general idea would be different if I were talking to a man.”

“Oh, of course. If I were a man—like a man you were interested in dating—you would tell me you’re wearing, maybe, a V-neck dove-gray sweater and slim-fit pants.”

“But this isn’t dove gray, and dove gray isn’t the same as gunmetal.”

“Oh, straight men won’t distinguish between grays. That’s just a fact.”

I wondered exactly where that research had been done. Presumably the University of Unsupported Hunches, where I was guessing she was a tenured professor. “It’s also not a V-neck,” I said. “It’s a scoop neck.”

“Sure, but men haven’t heard of scoop necks. They think a V-neck sounds like something low-cut and dove gray sounds soft, but you can’t say cashmere to them because it makes it sound like you have expensive tastes, and that might freak them out. Before the first meeting, you’re just trying to make the sale.”

“What am I selling?”

She looked at me like she was waiting for me to get it, and I wished she would just accept that I was never going to, because it would save us a lot of time. “You’re selling the first meeting.” She fiddled with her bangle bracelet. “Speaking of which, I’m guessing you need new pictures taken. What pictures are you using?”

I took out my phone and opened up a folder where I kept a few pictures of myself that I liked. I handed it over to her and she scrolled through them. She held the phone up, comparing the pictures to my live human form. “Oh, yeah, you’re way better-looking than these.” She frowned. “These are a no. We’ll get you good ones.”

“And those are for…dating apps?”

“They could be, but for now, they’re for me, for when I arrange dates for you. So new pictures are going to be early on the to-do list.”

I had technically not agreed to do this yet. But I could see the train pulling out of the station, with me hanging on to the caboose. I took a long sip of my latte and sat up straighter. Back to reporter voice. “Speaking of steps, what do you do, exactly? Your website is a little nonspecific. And it doesn’t say what anything costs.”

She smiled. “Pricing is flexible. We customize everything, so the prices don’t make any sense outside the context of the specific plan that we come up with for every person depending on her situation. In your case, what we’re putting you on is a version of what’s called the Platinum Goddess Package.”

“What is that?”

“What does it sound like?”

“It sounds like a gift basket I get for ovulating.”

“Ooh.” She reached into her pocket for her phone. When she started typing, I peered at her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m writing it down.” She kept typing with her thumbs. “It’s an interesting idea, an ovulation subscription service. We could work with a cycle-tracking app. Heating pad, tea, journal—”

“Postcard from the department of health asking whether you’re pregnant.” She stopped typing. “I don’t know what people would write in an ovulation journal anyway, besides, like, ‘light mittelschmerz.’ It’s not much of an experience.”

She tucked the phone back into her pants. “I’ll think on it. Anyway. Platinum Goddess! What that means is that you and I will work directly together for twelve weeks, give or take. Your situation is unique, obviously.” She looked down at her phone, seemingly referring to some kind of schedule. “We do a couple weeks of prep, and then you go on twenty dates.”

“Yes, Toby said that. It sounds like a lot to me in a short time, I have to admit.”

“It’s not that many,” she said. “But I think it gives us an excellent chance that somebody will pan out. You’ll go on more dates with the people you like, some spark will definitely catch, and we’ll even have time to go through the first stages of seeing a new person. Then I’ll set you free and you’ll fly away into your future. That’s it. Platinum Goddess.”

“What happens if I meet somebody the first week?”

“Well, that won’t happen, because you won’t meet anybody for a little while except your dummy.”

“My…dummy?”

“Not a dummy dummy,” she said. “A dummy date. Don’t worry, he’ll still be somebody great. But in this case, we’ll record that, and I’ll listen back to it, and I’ll talk to him after, and to you. It’s like a placement test.”

“But what are we testing?”

“Your approach. How you make conversation, how you talk about yourself, how you present.” She probably saw my face changing color. I envisioned it as a greenish gray. “It’s not going to be bad,” she said, reaching out and putting one hand on my arm. “It’s going to be fun. People don’t learn how to date, because they don’t go on dates with themselves. This is like a date with yourself.”

I had never been on a date with myself, it was true. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that experience was like. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Then what? After the dummy date, what’s between that and the big man-binge?”

She laughed. “Well, we work on you,” she said. She saw me flinch. “Not on changing you, just on getting you ready to be successful. You get ready to get out there, we get your photos, we talk about your past experiences, we clear the decks, we make sure you’re in the best headspace. Because that’s the way we make sure that when you do the twenty dates and you meet somebody, you are in the best position to succeed. Hashtag…year of Cecily,” she concluded. “You’re going to love it.”

“What if I meet somebody on my own? What then?”

She raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows. “I mean, is that really going to happen?”

I’d had dentists show me my X-rays with less unvarnished candor. “It’s not impossible.”

She smiled, and then un-smiled, and then smiled again. “How do I explain this? Okay, do you take the Metro? Like, to work?”

“Bus, actually.”

“Of course. And there’s part of you, probably, that thinks that you’re going to be walking to the bus one morning and a hot superhero is going to come by and ask you for your number. It’s a nice idea, and a lot of people are carrying it around, but that’s not a thing that happens in real life. And furthermore? Even if it did happen? That will end in tears.”

“Tears,” I repeated.

“Well, look,” she said. “From everything I already know about you, you wouldn’t pick a job because somebody came up to you on the street and offered it to you. And you shouldn’t pick a relationship that way either. Not without a plan for what you’re looking for.”

“A plan,” I repeated.

She leaned closer. “A plan. You’ve been picking for yourself for what, like, twenty years? How’s that turned out?” I didn’t answer. “My point exactly,” she said. “Take three months off. Relax. Exhale. Stop looking. Let me help, and see how you feel about it.”

“What happens if it doesn’t work?”

She shrugged. “Make a podcast about how relationship advice is a fraud.” She must have seen my eyebrow go up. “I’m serious, Cecily, cross my heart. If you try this, if you do what I say and you really think it’s nothing, then go ahead. Make your show, do your exposé, prove that I have no idea what I’m doing. Prove I’m not qualified.”

“I mean, are you qualified?” I asked.

“I majored in marketing,” she said immediately. “And while I was in school, one of my two jobs was at a clothing store where I got treated like absolute trash by rich women every single day until I cried in the bathroom. And my other job was taking customer service calls for the pharmacy section of a health insurance company, where I learned that all people want is for somebody to listen to them. A few years later, I went to Riviera Maya with some of my girlfriends, and I noticed that one of them was obsessed with this woman who reviewed swimsuits on Instagram. And I thought… That seems like more fun than sitting in meetings with boring men who want me to tell them how to get nineteen-year-old girls to buy bottled low-alcohol, low-carb, low-sugar cocktails. ”

I knew she had probably told this story to a hundred podcasts already. But I, too, had clothing-store experience. I’d once worked for a fast-fashion behemoth, folding and refolding hundreds of black tees. If I had, at that time, seen my friends going gaga over somebody talking about clothes on Instagram—instead of what actually happened, which was that I became obsessed with that one podcast that everyone always pretends was the first podcast ever, you know the one—I might have done the same thing.

“By the way,” she said, “I went back to Riviera Maya this year, everything was comped, I treated all my friends, and we were living la isla bonita. ”

I tipped my head. It was possible she was a Madonna completist, but I suspected she knew it from Glee . “I think you might be thinking of la vida loca. ”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, right, la vida loca. By the way, one thing to work on? You don’t have to be so smart all the time. I know you didn’t think I would know what ‘mittelschmerz’ is. And you’re surprised that I do.”

She was right.