Chapter Twelve The Twenty Dates
Chapter Twelve
The Twenty Dates
A week or so later, Eliza and I met again at Sophie’s for coffee and some updates. When we sat down and the capsule mic was shining its little orange light, she told me that she had the dates almost all lined up. “I charmed them with your new pictures, which are fab,” she said. “They are selling you just great. You look ten years younger.”
“I’m supposed to look younger?” I said.
“Twenty-six,” she said. I honestly hadn’t expected her to spit out a number like a graphing calculator. “From now until you’re forty, the aim is twenty-six. From forty to fifty, you’ll be going for thirty-five. Fifty to sixty, go for forty. After that, all you want is for people to say you look great for your age.”
“What in the hell,” I muttered, letting my eyes fall on the orange light on the mic. It was a ridiculous thing to say, and it was very good tape.
“Look, I didn’t make the rules,” she said.
“You did, you just gave them to me.”
“I didn’t make them, I explained them. I am telling you how it is for women.”
“And I’m sure it’s different for men.”
“Of course! Nobody knows how old men are. You can show an eighteen-year-old a picture of Tom Cruise now and they’ll think he’s thirty. People say a guy looks forty from when he’s twenty to when he’s, like, seventy. The public understanding of how old men are is deranged. Until they’re ninety, they can convince people they’re middle-aged if they have the right wife.”
“This is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, you can be depressed by it, or you can make it work for you by having the best possible pictures and taking excellent care of your skin. By the way, I was just at a meeting, and they gave me a bunch of samples of this stuff that’s supposed to be great for wrinkles. You want it?”
“I don’t have wrinkles,” I said.
She squinted at me, then reached into her bag, extracted a small pump bottle, and handed it to me. “Better safe than sorry.”
—
Over the next four weeks, Eliza was, as promised, sending me on twenty dates. All over the city. Dinners, lunches, brunches, a visit to the Smithsonian, and a show at the Kennedy Center. I would rotate four approved outfits, which I would clean or have cleaned obsessively. The team would keep working on production because our episodes were about to start coming out. But for me, there would be practically no time for anything else in those four weeks but dating and talking about dating. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to sound like boot camp, but it did. “At the end,” Eliza said, “we’ll find out who you want a second date with, and who wants a second date with you, and we’ll go from there.”
But first, I had to go on twenty dates.
Josh
Josh had an IT job out in the spy/military part of Virginia that he couldn’t tell me anything about except that he worked in a room where you couldn’t take your cellphone, and he showed me his Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a little shy, and he owned an iguana ironically named Dynamo, because it almost never moved. I thought that was funny.
Paulo
A straight-up beautiful man with soft pink lips who worked at the Portuguese embassy. We went to a French place for dinner, and he wore a suit so gorgeous that I stared, transfixed, at the edge of the cuff while he was talking about his job. I think he did something legal. At any rate, I went on this date when I had just read a story in The New Yorker about the Paris sewers, and I talked about it for much too long. I would have kissed him, just so I could caress the suit, but he shook my hand firmly and said, “Delighted, Cecily, really,” and he was gone.
Michael the Poker Player (aka Michael #1)
He was a professional poker player. We had upscale burgers for lunch, and even though I didn’t have a long history of being attracted to bald men with big rings, I kind of liked him. I had only played poker a handful of times, and I made him walk me through a few hands on an app on my phone. He kissed me before we said goodbye, and it was pretty good. It was a week later that Eliza told me he was unavailable because he had relocated to Costa Rica for tax reasons.
Eric
We had Lao food. He owned three car washes and had a couple of very funny stories about customers who didn’t understand how to correctly take their cars through for service. We didn’t have a lot to talk about, but on the plus side, those were some of the best noodles I have ever eaten in my life. After I got home, he texted me a link to a podcast he liked about personal finance.
Ron
Eliza wanted me to try—just try—going out with someone older than I was. Ron had about twenty years on me, and he was a lobbyist for the anesthesiologists. A nice man. No chemistry. Good Thai food. I learned a lot about insurance billing and made a note that he might be a good source for a story someday. I mean, insurance billing is crazy.
Shane
Brunch at one of the ritzy hotels downtown. Very good-looking, square jaw, cleft chin, and a tattoo of a hammer on the inside of his forearm, which he told me was a tribute to his father’s construction business. He was getting into house-flipping. I’d just torn into a tremendous Belgian waffle when he dragged the conversation around to knives. At first, I worried that this meant he was a murderer, but after about five minutes, I realized he was deep into an MLM and wanted to sell me a knife block and a sharpening kit. I declined. He kissed me. He smelled great; I wished he were interesting.
Damian
Given Eliza’s admiration of people whom she considered driven, I found it hard to believe she set me up with a guy in a small-time ska band. A ska band! But it turned out he only did music on weekends, and during the week he sold cars in Silver Spring. In the middle of dinner, there was a small fire in the kitchen of the restaurant, and we had to evacuate. We stood on the sidewalk and talked about ska for about ten minutes (which is to say he did), and then he looked at his watch and said he should probably just get home.
Michael the Doctor (aka Michael #2)
A family doctor who worked in Chevy Chase, Michael looked gentle and wholesome, like a guy who would be targeted by a scammer in a Netflix documentary. We had lunch at a vegan place Julie suggested, where I had braised jackfruit. He’d been single for a long time because he worked so much, but he said he was trying to slow down, and he’d left a hectic practice to gain some control over his schedule. He complimented the alligator pin close to my collar—I never wore necklaces, because they could interfere with the mic. When we were leaving, we kissed, and while I cannot say I felt it in my toes, I did feel myself sigh into it a bit.
Maxim
Oh, Maxim! Maxim was an adjunct professor teaching world history to college first-years. He had dark wavy hair and olive skin, and when he fastened his eyes on me, I wanted to eat him up like a cookie. We were flirting madly over Indian food at Rasika, and I was pondering the possibilities of licking his neck like a Popsicle, when he started to explain some of his more firmly held political views, which amounted to nostalgia for the social hierarchies of the 1950s. Shortly thereafter, I thanked him for dinner and bolted. I texted Eliza, knowing she’d have gotten the skinny from Julie. Are you serious? She wrote back, I didn’t know!
Anton
Anton was Russian. He had come to the United States for college years and years ago and ended up working in cable news as a researcher. Over very good plates of pasta, he told me he thought audio was a fad and I should get into virtual reality. I wished him well, but I rushed over to Julie almost as soon as I was finished chewing.
After I gave her my mic back, I just said, “So?” Our first real episode had dropped that day—one of twelve, the one where Eliza went into detail about her background and we mapped out the world of relationship advice. We’d gotten the episode out right on schedule, and Julie had had a late-afternoon meeting with everybody involved, a debriefing that I hadn’t been able to grill her about yet. She gave me a thumbs-up. “Everybody is really happy. Everything is good. We’re on our way.”
Dylan
If Ron was my chance to date someone older, Dylan was my chance to date someone younger. He was twenty-six, and he never stopped talking—he was working on three different fledgling businesses, because he couldn’t decide if he wanted to do real estate, open a vape shop, or restore vintage cars. It should have been annoying, but it was intoxicating, because I didn’t have to do anything but eat. He had listened to almost all the podcasts I had ever worked on, and he had opinions about every one. By the end of a Tex-Mex lunch, I was exhausted. I liked him a lot, but not to date. In ten years, though, after a couple of character-building setbacks, he was probably going to be a great guy.
Zach
Zach looked a lot like Justin. A lot. I tried hard to get over it. If we’d had more in common (he was an extreme-sports guy who hated being inside for any longer than he had to), I might have been more successful.
John
John was a trial lawyer, and divorced. Well, no—John was separated, but he’d been separated for four years, so he considered himself divorced, even though the legal scrapping continued (no kids, just money, cars, and two basset hounds named Frolic and Detour). In the end, it wasn’t the status of his marriage that prevented us from connecting over Caribbean food. It was the fact that by the end of dinner, I knew everything about his wife. Which is to say I knew everything he thought about her, which is to say I knew how much he resented her.
Rafael
Rafael was a print journalist who covered Congress. He had a beautiful smile and an air of intensity that seemed well suited to his work. We met up at a cool brunch spot where everyone appeared to be actively in pursuit of getting really drunk (the problem with cool brunch spots), and we talked about interviewing styles for half an hour. He had a cat, played tennis, and was planning a solo vacation to Paris in a couple of weeks. He was handsome and charming, and we had a lot in common. When we were getting ready to go, he said, “Well, I don’t think this is a match, but maybe we can get together as friends?”
Brandon
He was a partner at a small advertising agency in Arlington, and he had shoulder-length blond hair and smooth skin that I suspected was costly to maintain. We had fancy barbecue and dark beer at a place Toby had recommended, and he told me about a campaign he’d recently worked on for a nonprofit working to provide clean water around the world. It seemed like very worthwhile work. He also told me he was training for a triathlon, and he flinched when I said, “Oh my God, why would you do that?” I recovered, and we had a nice unassuming smooch as I was getting into the car. On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I should probably be working out regularly.
Alexandre
French. Hot. Kissed him after Greek food and a gin and tonic. Couldn’t remember anything except his lips by the time I got home. No regrets.
Michael the Architect (aka Michael #3)
We went to a symphony performance at the Kennedy Center, because he had a subscription, and he fell asleep. This didn’t offend me at all—for some people, that’s part of the process—but later, when I gently teased him about it (at least I thought it was gentle), he insisted he hadn’t been asleep at all, just “taking it in” with his eyes closed. I chose not to tell him he was “taking it in” while snoring.
Drew
Drew was a professional soccer player. When Eliza arranged the date, he was working on a plan to open a beer garden in town. When the date finally occurred, he had signed with a new team and was about to move to Cincinnati. We had Italian food and a lot of wine, and because we lived near each other, we made out in the back of the cab all the way back to my apartment. Ah, what could have been.
Tyler
Tyler was a research ecologist at the National Zoo, which was one of the coolest job titles I had ever heard. We met at the American History Museum and walked around for a few hours while I grilled him about the zoo. I didn’t have any idea how many questions I had about the zoo until I met Tyler. He was funny and friendly, and it felt like spending the afternoon with a favorite cousin. Late in the afternoon, he told me sheepishly that he was only about a month removed from breaking up with his long-term girlfriend, and he had mixed feelings about dating. I gave him a hug, and we said we’d keep in touch, and maybe he’d show me around the zoo sometime.
Rob
Rob was a six-foot-six personal trainer, and let me be clear: I am as shallow as anyone, and as we enjoyed Brazilian food, I stared appreciatively at his arms, his shoulders, his neck, and everything else he stuffed into his black T-shirt. He had a great laugh, and he was clearly crazy about his family, which he was about to head to Oakland to visit. When we were finished eating and getting ready to go, we stood on the sidewalk together, and I looked up at him, feeling a genuine strain in my neck, but in kind of a good way. He looked down at me hungrily and said, “I could get you in shape in three months.”
—
“So, what did you think?” Eliza asked, as we sat across from each other in one of the Palmetto studios. She’d listened to the dates, but we’d mostly avoided having me give specific feedback on these guys. “How many of the twenty are we eliminating? How many do you want to go out with again? I want to hear everything.”
“Well,” I said, “I liked the doctor. The family doctor. Michael.”
“He’s the cutest!” she said. “I haven’t met him, but we talked on the phone, and he seemed like such a great person. That’s an amazing start. Who else?”
I hesitated. “Else?”
“Yes. Who else? Who else do you want to see again?”
“Can’t we start with that one? If he wants to?” My eyes widened. “Does he not want to?”
“He does want to,” she said with a smile and a waggle of her eyebrows. “I’m just hoping you didn’t eliminate nineteen out of twenty people on your first shot, and that you have other good news to tell me.”
“I mean, some of them eliminated me,” I said. “You did send me out with a guy who’s already married.”
“A technicality.”
“Another one thinks it’s not natural for women to have jobs.”
“Well, that’s not exactly what he said.”
“One guy fled the country.”
“Okay, he didn’t flee the country.”
“A man with a hammer tattoo tried to sell me knives.”
“He’s an entrepreneur! There were a lot of good prospects. I happen to know you made out with one of them.”
“He just moved to Ohio.”
“To Cincinnati! He’s not going to stay there.”
“What does that mean?”
She sighed dramatically. “So,” she said, folding her hands in front of her on the table, “out of all those guys, you only want to see Michael again. All those great guys—”
“All those guys ,” I corrected.
“All those guys, you have one second date you’re interested in.” She nodded. “Fine. We can work with that. I’ll set it up.”
“I need a little time,” I said. “I’ve spent so much time going on dates in the last four weeks that I have barely done any other work, so I’m way behind, not to mention completely small-talked out. This coming week is Thanksgiving, and after that, you have to give me a real week to just process. They’re sitting on a mountain of tape from these dates that will turn into six episodes, so there’s no hurry.”
“Okay. But this is going to be so good!” she said, clapping her hands. “I mean, people think they like us now, but when they actually hear you on these good dates—not the dummy date but the good dates—I am telling you, everybody is going to love them. Marcela is losing it, she’s so excited. She says I’ll end up with another book deal and she thinks I can do dating classes through one of those platforms where people study cooking and Photoshop and stuff, and she wants to talk about condoms.”
“About…”
“Condoms, branded condoms. One of the big companies is talking to her about a partnership. That way, if you’re not having sex, I can help you. If you’re having sex, I can still help you. She’s a genius.” Eliza got up from her chair and came over and hugged me without my even getting up, and then she was heading out the door. “Happy Thanksgiving! We’re on our way!”