Chapter Sixteen The Second Date
Chapter Sixteen
The Second Date
There was no reason for it to feel awkward that my second date with Michael #2 was scheduled only days after Will and I ate Mexican food in his living room. We were not dating. He was not staying. What’s more, I had told him exactly what was going on, and he had told me he would listen. To this very date! It just felt awkward.
Eliza was disappointed, I knew, that only one out of twenty of the guys she sent me out with had been a second-date-level match, and it had surprised me, too. I wasn’t even good at sending back an overcooked steak at a restaurant; this project had brought out something picky in my personality. I wished that she, who was constantly telling me not to settle, could understand that there was perhaps an upside in my rejecting nineteen out of twenty of her picks, but it didn’t seem to be going that way.
It didn’t help that our listeners were still plowing week by week through all those first dates, and halfway through, a lot of them didn’t agree with me, either—they were hoping I’d follow up with several of those guys, and they felt sure I would. In my defense, Michael #2 was definitely one of their favorites. In a poll someone posted, out of the guys they’d heard so far, they liked him, and they liked Josh (who owned Dynamo the iguana), and they liked Eric, the Lao food guy, and they liked a couple of the guys who had already rejected me (a development we’d dropped from their date episodes to preserve them as candidates for discussion until it was time to reveal their voluntary departures).
But “Hot Waiter” still showed strong in every survey they took. It was a joke by now, an in-crowd wink from listener to listener, or a general rebuke of Eliza’s method. Still, it was impressive how they’d clung to—how they’d created—this mythology around Hot Waiter that was, in fact, much less impressive than Hot Waiter himself. Imagine if they knew his mother was a stunt performer. They would die of squealing injuries.
I had promised myself I would tell the truth, and the truth was that Michael was the only one of the men Eliza brought me whom I had liked and who had liked me back. I had the sneaking feeling that the twenty guys represented elements of Eliza’s own taste in men as much as any careful observation she had made about mine. They were all different, but they all seemed to call back to something from her own life. Some of them had Cody’s shyness, some had a classic quarterback handsomeness, and some of them seemed like Eliza herself, with the hustle and the businesslike handshakes. Some of them…I’ll just say I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them land paid collabs to print their initials on the asses of their pants.
Michael #2 had a little less pepper in his paprikash, as Billy Crystal might say. He’d graduated from medical school younger than most of his classmates, and he’d started out in a high-pressure position, but he seemed at least theoretically interested in exploring some level of work-life balance. That sounded good to me, since work-life balance was something I thought would be lovely to get into someday, when I was less busy. He also had an aversion to discussing his credentials that I found charming. He hadn’t told me until about halfway through our first date that he’d gone to Harvard. Ron, the older lobbyist I had gone out with between Michaels #1 and #2, didn’t wait that long to tell me that his brother went to Harvard.
Eliza felt strongly that if the first date was a lunch, the second should be a nice dinner, because as she put it, “lunch doesn’t present possibilities.” She was further convinced that better restaurants led to better dates, and she wanted to see what a high-end experience would do to my impression of a guy. (I was not sure whether to be offended by this, since it seemed to suggest I could be bought with fancy appetizers, which I was something like ninety-two percent sure was not true.) So she managed to get us in for dinner at a Peruvian spot that was generally understood to be impossible to get into, where they did a prix fixe menu that Toby freed up some extra Fitness West money to bankroll, tip included. Some of the guys had been insistent on pitching in for previous meals, but there are things I would never let even a doctor pay for as a second date unless I was pretty sure it was on the way to marriage, and maybe not even then.
It was the nicest place I’d ever eaten. Ever. It had the best service, the most impressive hush of prestige, and wine pairings even I, as a person who sometimes drank tequila and Coke Zero at home, could appreciate. The food, including a piece of fish so divine it seemed to sigh itself apart into bites when you touched it with a fork, almost made me want to cry, because I knew it was the only time I would ever have it in my life.
We spent a lot of time just goggling at how good the food was. Michael #2 kept shaking his head and saying, “Wow,” and it made me laugh, because it was all I could think of, too. We wedged other conversation in around the edges of the calamari, the abalone, the abundant wine. He was trying to learn Spanish so he could serve patients better, and it turned out we had the same frustrations with the more popular apps for language learning. He told me one had tried to teach him how to say, “This chicken murdered my grandfather,” when he wasn’t too far into his studies, and he almost quit as a result.
It was nice.
When it was over, we went outside and stood in our coats in the cool evening, and he said it had been very good to see me again, and I agreed. My joints felt loosened by the wine, and this time, when he kissed me good night, I put my hands at his waist, and he pushed a bit of my hair behind my ear. He walked off to get the Metro—or, really, he walked off to do a little interview with Abby, and then to get the Metro—and I hung back to talk to Julie, who had been allowed to sit nearby, but who did not get dinner out of the deal. “That food looked really good,” she said as she started our debrief. I looked down at the microphone I was speaking into. I talked about the food. I talked about how amazing I felt, what a great night it was, and then again, I talked about the food. The fish. The little dish of potatoes. The gelato, and the bonbons they sent us out the door with, which were now in my purse. I talked about the wine, all the wine, how perfectly it went with everything and how delicious it was. And then Julie said, “So you like him,” and I said, “Who?”
In my defense, I was a little bit drunk, and because we had just been talking about the food, it was quite a swerve to move immediately to talking about the date, at least given my condition. But Julie looked at me like I had four heads coming out of my neck, and I said, “Oh! Yes! Michael! Of course I like him, yes. I like him a lot. He’s really a kind, fun, attractive man.”
“So it sounds like this is the best date you’ve had in this project.”
“It absolutely is. He’s good. She did well with this one.”
When Julie turned off the recorder, I said, “If you put that in the show, I will never live it down. Please erase every sign of it from the earth.”
“I’m not going to put it in the show,” she scoffed. “I’m going to make a copy for myself, though, and you can’t stop me. And every year on your birthday, I’m going to call and play it for you.”
I waved my hand at her when she offered to get me a car (Toby would pay after 10:00), and I took off toward home. I could walk half an hour in flats, and maybe I’d sneak a bonbon out of my bag now and then.
It wasn’t until I was about halfway home that it really sunk into my bones that because of Eliza, I had just had a successful second date at a very la-di-da restaurant with a lovely doctor who had a stable life, good manners, and a plan to get himself from where he was to retirement. The orderliness of it, right? He didn’t seem like he’d be threatened by my job. He didn’t seem like he’d take me on dates that were centered on weapons. He didn’t seem like he’d steal my work or suck the blood out of my career. He seemed to like me.
The thing she did—the thing she said she could do, the thing I was positive she could not do—it was hard to avoid the conclusion that she had done it. I put my shoulders back, adjusted my small bag against my hip (the Beast did not come on dates), and took a deep breath as a successful dater in a world of terrible conversations and hopeless miscues. I had never thought of myself as a person who specifically wanted to marry a doctor, but I started to wonder if it would mean I never had to pay to get a mole looked at again.