Chapter 4
Nellie
Convergence: Work ethic, politics, moral compass
Divergence: Travel plans, disposition, willingness to compromise
Danny almost cancels at the last minute but appreciates that he already knows the date will last only forty-five minutes. Nellie sent him a calendar invite.
They do the perfunctory hug at the door of Our Lady of Perpetual Breakfast. It’s a diner in Chelsea where Danny has spent more money than he has spent at possibly all other New York establishments combined.
It’s in an old Catholic school—the building was converted thirty years prior—and there are still stained glass windows and retro drinking fountains.
The old chalkboards are scattered around the diner, some displaying daily specials, others displaying customer graffiti.
One near the back says GIGI AND JULIAN AND DANNY LOVE OLOPB!
!! Gigi wrote it last night. Danny really can’t express just how often he finds himself here.
Nellie props her sunglasses on top of her head and looks around. “Huh,” she says. “How’d you find this place?”
“My friend Gigi used to work here. When she first moved to the city. She lives a block away now.”
“Cool, cool,” Nellie says. “Been meaning to try it. Anyway, so I’m going to have to keep my phone on.”
“Yeah, no worries. You work in finance, right?”
She quickly types an email, which he takes as his answer. He rocks onto his heels and waits. When she looks up again, he begins his shuffle toward the nearby empty booth, and she follows. Danny waves at Ed, who has worked at the diner for its entire existence, and Ed lifts a coffeepot.
“What’s your name?” Nellie asks.
“What?” Surely she knows his name—it was on the calendar invite. “Danny?”
“Like, full name.”
“No, it’s actually just Danny. It’s not short for Daniel, or long for Dan, or anything.”
Nellie makes a scooping gesture of the air. “I mean last name.”
“Oh. Aagaard.” He spells it for her. All those a’s.
“You were first for everything,” Nellie says. “Students with alphabetically earlier names get better grades. What are you, Norwegian?”
“Sort of,” Danny says.
“Sort of?” Nellie looks like she’s interested in parsing this but ultimately gets distracted by her phone. When she speaks again, she says, “So, Pathos?”
“Yeah.”
“I asked to join the beta because we’re thinking of investing.”
“Oh, shit, really?”
“But dating apps are a broken business model,” she says. “The incentives are wrong. The second you get someone into a good relationship, you’ve lost a customer. It’s a fundamental bug in the system.”
“Right, but the thinking is, then their friends hear about how they got such a good match from us, then their friends hear . . .”
Nellie’s phone buzzes. She taps out another email, hits Send, and blinks up at him like she forgot he was there.
“It’s like trying to be a subscription fridge service,” she says. “You don’t need a new fridge every month. You just need a good one that won’t break. All dating apps run into this problem.”
“We’re hoping to compete on the quality of the matches.”
“And have they been?” she asks. “High-quality matches?”
“It’s so hard to quantify a connection that way,” Danny says.
“Yeah. But that’s your job.”