Back After This

Chapter Nine The Dummy Date

Chapter Nine

The Dummy Date

Eliza had instructed me to show up at 7:36 for a 7:30 date (“You are not a flake,” she had said, “but you are not instantly available”), so I met Julie outside Madeline’s, the quiet bistro where this date was scheduled, right at 7:30 for our pregame chat.

Toby had agreed to pay for a car, and as I got out, I heard Julie whistle. “You look great,” she said appreciatively. She reached out with one finger and tapped my exposed collarbone. “Va-va-voom.” I crinkled up my face in response, and she laughed. “Oh, for God’s sake, learn to take a compliment, would you? Thank you for wearing something with pockets.” She clipped the lav mic to my neckline.

“I wish we weren’t doing lav mics,” I muttered. “I hate the sound.”

“It’s not ideal,” she acknowledged. “But this is what we’re doing, unless you want me to sit there with my headphones on directing a footlong shotgun mic at the middle of your date. Or were you planning to interview him with a handheld like a sideline reporter at the Super Bowl?” She ran the wire down my shirt. She connected it to the transmitter, which I slipped into my pocket. “We’re making it work. It’s going to be fine.” She stopped cold and touched the bag I was carrying.

“Is this real?”

I nodded. “Gift from Eliza. You should see the free stuff she gets. I saw a collection of lipsticks so big they sent it in a cardboard suitcase. She hasn’t even opened it.”

“Must be nice,” Julie said. “Okay, Andrew’s waiting, and he’s already wired.” She slipped on her headphones, and we checked levels. “Okay, so how are you feeling about this date? Are you optimistic?”

“I think I’m mostly curious. I have no idea who Eliza thinks is the right guy, but I guess that’s what we’re going to find out.”

“Are you worried that he’ll be the wrong guy?”

“Uh…yes.”

She asked me a few other basic questions, and I answered them as naturally as I could with a microphone attached to me, and then she said, “I think that’s all we need. You ready?”

“Yes. You’re rolling?” I said. She pointed to the bag over her shoulder. “You’re going to be listening?” She pointed to her headphones. “What if—”

She raised her eyebrows. “What if what?”

“What if he doesn’t like me?”

Julie put her hand on my elbow. “Well, then, he’ll be the star of an episode about what a goober he is. Just go have dinner.”

I walked into Madeline’s. We didn’t just have a reservation, we had a table Julie had prearranged so the recording would go smoothly. The quietest spot they had, by a wall and far from the windows, which could bounce the sound and make the recording sound hollow. Julie was set up a couple of tables away, doing her best to be inconspicuous.

A woman in a smart white shirt and a black skirt walked me to a table in the back, where a man in dark pants and a pale blue button-down was already working on a glass of red wine, with the bottle on the table. He had the facial symmetry and the perfectly shaped dark hair of a Lego prince. He stood as I approached.

“Cecily,” he said in the enthusiastic timbre I felt like the city was full of: the eagerness of the real estate agent or the representative of the American Association of Toe Surgeons. “It’s so good to meet you, I’m Andrew.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek, which made me very self-conscious about just how loud that tiny smooch was in the mic.

I breathed in and said to myself, Be open; I breathed out and said to myself, Don’t blow it. “It’s good to meet you, Andrew.” I sat down across from him. “What are you drinking?”

“Cabernet,” he said. “I tell myself the antioxidants make it healthy.” And he winked. One significant limitation of an audio presentation of a blind date was going to be the inability to expose a prodigious winker.

I briefly considered saying, out loud, That’s a nice wink you have there, but of course, I didn’t. Be open, don’t blow it. “Have you been here before?”

He shook his head. “Nah. It’s nice, though. Wine?” I nodded, so he poured me a little less than what was in his own glass, to which he then added a little more. This was a man pouring wine someone else was paying for.

“So obviously, you sort of know what I do,” I said. “What do you do?” I hated this question. Everybody hated this question. But everybody asked it.

“I work for GAZ-3; I’m in sales.”

I was glad that I had my glass in front of my face, because it offered me at least a little bit of cover. What I knew about GAZ-3 was that mostly it ran ads on podcasts I didn’t like. I understood it to be a manufacturer of supplements that did things like “sharpen your productivity” and “build muscle” and “provide energy so you can go all day.” They weren’t supplements like “your erection will grow by leaps and bounds” or supplements like “the heavy metal toxicity is how you know it works” or anything like that. They were just supplements. And he sold them to people.

“Oh, cool,” I said as I picked up the menu and looked for something not overly expensive that I could eat neatly. Eliza had a whole thing about eating neatly. Nobody wants to watch another person eat pasta on a first date, she had said. I can’t tell you how few people know how to eat spaghetti without looking revolting. We’d been out for lunch when she told me this, and I was eating spaghetti. And so, of course, she added, No offense.

I was just trying to picture myself knife-and-forking a club sandwich when a voice came from beside us. “Are you ready to order?” I looked up at him. He looked down at me. “Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said.

“You know each other?” Andrew said.

“We do,” Will picked up. “Cecily and I live in the same neighborhood.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Andrew, this is Will.” I paused. “He rescues dogs.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Andrew said. He turned to me. “You know, I’m allergic to dogs. Have been since I was a kid. We had a golden retriever, and I broke out in rashes constantly. Come to think of it, that’s how I got started on echinacea.”

I didn’t hear the rest. I was looking up at Will, who was smiling, not unkindly. It was and is my firm belief that most men look very good in a clean, pressed white shirt, and he was, it turned out, the rule, not the exception. The man with half a haircut I had first seen running after a dog with a plastic cape flapping over his shoulders was now close-shaven, with his curls in perfect order. His shoulders broke precisely at the seams of his shirt. I realized suddenly that I was gazing at him, and gazing at someone else while on a date was bad. Even I knew that. I would not like it if a guy did it on a date with me. Stop gazing, I told myself, while still doing it.

Andrew broke the spell himself. “I’m going to have the chicken breast, but just poached plain, please,” he said. “And with a side of the broccolini and a side of spinach. No salt.” It sounded like hospital food without the hospital, and I wondered if he had a medical thing, until he handed his menu to Will and turned to me. “Salt destroys compounds,” he said. Oh boy.

“I’m going to have the spaghetti Bolognese,” I said, handing over my menu as well. I might as well order what I wanted, given that it was already quite clear that while I had never in the past been the type of person to throw a pancake in the trash, there was a first time for everything.

It was only as Will was walking away that the full significance of this settled on me. He’d not only walked up on my date, but he’d walked up on my date while Andrew and I both had microphones strapped to us, which Julie had probably already explained to him as part of her prep.

The next part of the date was a blur. I tried to dig my smile out of the recesses of my personality. I tried to concentrate, for the sake of the tape I wanted to get. But mostly, I tried in vain to find anything Andrew wanted to talk about that I also wanted to talk about, and I failed over and over. I tried all the basics and some of the conventional icebreakers Eliza had endorsed—favorite book, favorite movie, last vacation you took—but nothing stuck.

Mostly, Andrew wanted to talk about deals he was closing, YouTube channels he liked for finance advice, and the gym. At one point, he whipped out his phone and showed me a picture of himself, shirtless, standing in front of a weight bench. In the time I had spent on various apps, I had seen probably a hundred photos exactly like it. “Ah,” I said when he showed it to me. “Sure.” What else was I supposed to say? He also showed me pictures of himself on a sailboat with some of his friends, all of whom looked like the guys you might see on TikTok downing energy drinks with dragons on the labels and complaining about feminists and seed oils.

Will walked up with our plates and I lunged for mine, eager to stuff food into my mouth and even more eager for Andrew to stuff food into his. “Do you need anything else?” he asked.

“No, this looks great,” Andrew said.

It made for a long dinner, learning quite that much about Andrew’s gym routine. It didn’t get better when he shifted gears to his opinions about crypto—he was a skeptic about it, which I later realized surprised me mostly because of his hair. Unfortunately, his skepticism was no more interesting than evangelism would have been. I fell asleep behind my eyeballs as soon as I heard the word, like I had been hypnotized to cluck like a chicken when someone said “long division.” I nodded, I smiled, I ate. I watched Will walk by and waited for him to walk by again.

Once dinner was over, I wanted to discuss the epic flop that was Andrew with Julie, but she had interviews to wrap up. I didn’t even get a chance to tell her that Will was the dog guy. She told me to go home and have a drink, and she’d do the wrap-up interview with Andrew and whatever else she thought would help. Tomorrow, Eliza and I would debrief at the studio. By then Eliza would have had a chance to hear the tape, and she would give me my…grade? Evaluation? Action plan? She would give me whatever she was going to give me. I handed Julie my mic, she tucked it into her kit, and I walked home in my uncomfortable shoes.

—

The next day, I met Eliza in the studio at Palmetto. She told me that I hadn’t done as badly as she thought I might, based on the tapes, and she acknowledged that Andrew and I didn’t have a lot in common. She insisted she hadn’t really vetted him, so the twenty other dates would be better, and she already had some of them lined up. She also promised that it was a coincidence and not some kind of undisclosed synergy that he worked for GAZ-3; she didn’t even know they did podcast sponsorships when she picked him.

When we were finished, I sat next to Julie at a desk in one of the editing rooms. She pulled up a document on the screen. “So this is my skeleton of a script for this early promo Toby wants,” she said. “You said you want to write the intro. Let’s say that’s ninety seconds. Then you have your open, ‘This is Cecily Foster, this is blah blah blah,’ we’ll fill in the name of the show when Toby figures out what it is. The first segment will be you and Eliza from when you were at her house. I want to use her talking about her job, you talking about some of your history.”

I nodded slowly. “Right. Okay.”

“That segment is, what, five minutes, probably. Then we’ll have a break. Then we have some more about Eliza, who she is, what she does. Abby’s been getting that tape from some people who know her, a couple of her clients. She talked to the husband.”

“Oh, how was that?”

“She said ‘shy but nice.’ Anyway, that’s probably another five. I’m going to assign Abby to help with your script, although obviously you can do as much of it yourself as you want. Then another break, and then the last ten minutes or so will be about the date with Andrew. We have the pregame we did with him and the one we did with you, then the date itself. Then we had Eliza record comments while she listened back to it, so we have that, and then obviously the conversation she had with you this morning. We’re aiming for twenty-five-ish minutes total.” A few years ago, Palmetto would have put one break in an episode that long; now we were more likely to have two if the ad guys could sell the space.

“It sounds like a plan,” I said.

“Good.” She leaned back in her chair. “I think it’s going to be great.”

“Of course it’s going to be great,” I said. “We’re going to make it great.”

“Now we just have to do the ‘make it’ part,” she said.

We only had about three weeks before the preview episode was supposed to go out. With everything else we were doing, it would take a few days to write a final script. A couple more to track it and lay it up so people could listen to it. A couple more to send it around to Toby and to whoever else’s ears Toby wanted to hear it. Then legal, and partnerships, and probably Marcela, too. There would be notes. Then we’d have final edits, and it would be what it would be. It wasn’t nearly as much time as I would have liked, but people made things work with less.

For the next ten days straight, weekends and weekdays alike, I was at my desk by 7:30 in the morning. I did my regular work until lunchtime—whatever Toby had emailed about or dropped on my desk or tapped me on the shoulder to ask for, because it wasn’t as if my taking on this enormous project meant he didn’t need me for anything else. I dropped in on editing sessions for other shows when Melissa or one of the other PAs had a problem, or I resolved conflicts on Slack between those same two guys from that same two-guy show, who still had weekly arguments that were officially not about the woman they had in common.

The afternoons were for the Eliza show, which Toby still hadn’t named, and for spending a lot of time with Julie, and with Abby and Charlie. I helped fact-check Eliza’s biography and everything she had ever said about herself—which had all turned out to be true. Charlie took the lead on the fact-checking of everything I had ever said about myself. He even talked to two of those guys I briefly dated whom I’d mentioned to Eliza, and they agreed that as long as we didn’t use their last names, they didn’t care if my truthful but elided versions of our breakups were included in the episodes. Yes, it was true that I had talked too much about podcasts. Yes, it was true that we had gone axe-throwing.

I wrote the intro.

I have been looking for the same person for a long time. As long as I can remember. I knew I needed to find him. I knew it was important. And it weighed on me that he might be looking for me, too.

Like a lot of people who want to solve mysteries, I have thought a couple of different times that I had cracked it. I thought I spotted him singing a Nickelback song with his friends in the talent show at Camp Sunfish when I was in seventh grade. That wasn’t him. I thought I saw him in my bio class in a Mets jersey and a backward baseball cap when I was sixteen. That really wasn’t him. And I was sure that I saw him walking next to me on the Brooklyn Bridge in April of 2017, and dancing with me at my sister’s wedding, and making me coffee in our apartment while I read a book on our couch. But it turned out that wasn’t him, either. So I’m still looking.

There are private detectives who specialize in helping you find someone who slipped away from you in a crowd or left your life decades ago. There are people whose job it is to try to locate the person you’ve been looking for, even if it’s someone whose name you don’t know. Someone you’ve never met, who you can’t track down on your own. You don’t have a picture of them or a letter from them. You only know they exist because so many other people have managed to find them. The people you envy because they’re not looking anymore. But I am still looking. And Eliza Cassidy thinks she can help me stop.

It came out to exactly ninety seconds.

—

When Toby heard the first draft of the preview episode, he wanted, he said, more of a kicker. Something fun to end on, something that would make people smile and get really excited about the show. He sent Julie on a quest for just the right thing—the kind of assignment you can only pray doesn’t turn into a Sisyphean “go find something; no, not that” battle that stretches for days. On a Thursday night at about 9:00, two weeks before the episode was supposed to go out, she asked me to come over to her desk. When I got there, she handed me her headphones.

“I think I finally, finally found the kicker,” she said. “Toby actually said yes to something, so I hope you like it, too. This was an extra little bit of tape we got at the restaurant right before we left, check it out.” She hit her space bar, and the playhead started to move.

Yeah, it seemed okay. It seemed like your basic date. They talked. He talked, mostly. But, uh, I’m not going to lie. I’m not sure there’s a future for a woman like that with a guy who doesn’t salt his food, you know?

I turned slowly to face her. “And that’s…”

“It’s your waiter,” she said. “He was really funny, and he’s so cute.”

I hadn’t told her that Will was the dog guy, because it didn’t seem to matter, or maybe because I wanted it not to matter. And now I couldn’t tell her, because if I complicated this choice after Toby had approved it, she’d have to go looking for an alternative.

So I just nodded. “Sure, that’s great.” A woman like that, he had said. What kind of woman, exactly?