Chapter 5
When Danny gets back to Julian’s apartment, aka the de facto Pathos headquarters, he goes to Julian’s office and lies on the floor.
It has never made sense to Danny that Julian is able to afford a two-bedroom in Chelsea with real wood floors and an elevator from this century, and he suspects that Julian’s parents have something to do with it.
That, or Gigi makes more as an influencer than Danny realized.
Danny would love to have rich parents and a rich girlfriend with whom he could split rent.
Danny lives in a one-bed in FiDi, which he thought sounded corporate and impressive when he first moved in, but now he realizes it’s just windy and barren of grocery stores.
Before all that, years ago now, they were roommates on the Lower East Side.
Julian was working in finance. Danny was doing grunt-work coding for a series of failed fintech start-ups.
And then, three years ago, Julian had this idea for a dating app that gave users way more data—“Hinge but make it Spotify Wrapped,” Julian had said—so they spent a year working nights and weekends before they had enough seed money to go full-time.
While Danny’s fellow grunt-work coders have begun collecting a portfolio of stock options and annual bonuses, Danny still finds himself making the same amount of money he made right out of college.
It’s enough to buy an iced oat milk latte with caramel foam, but not so much that you won’t feel guilty when you do it.
“You good, man?” Julian says.
“Hnnnnngh,” Danny says.
“Didn’t you have a coffee date this morning?”
Danny presses his fingertips against his eyelids. When they named their start-up two years ago, they went with Pathos, as in inspiring emotion. They would draw feelings out of people! Danny can’t help but reflect now that pathos has the same root as pathetic, which feels, alas, incredibly apt.
“I think our app is broken,” Danny says.
“That is so not the attitude,” Julian says.
“Our metrics are wrong. There’s no way I was in the eighties, much less the nineties, with any of these women.”
“Have you considered that you’re not giving anyone enough of a chance? Maybe you’re being too picky.”
“How does one know if one is being too picky, though? Maybe we should all be picky.”
“ ‘One,’ ” Julian mimics. “You sound like my sister.”
Danny props himself up on an elbow. Julian has swiveled around in his chair so he’s facing away from the desk, and he has his ankle up on one knee. “How is Eve?” Danny asks.
“She’s moving back, actually. Did I tell you that?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, she and Fletcher got in a huge car crash. They broke up in the hospital.”
“Is she okay?”
“Physically, yes. But we talked on the phone yesterday and she was all evangelical about dispensing relationship wisdom. She said she would ‘no longer abide a relationship that was not spectacular.’ Hey, maybe I’ll get her on the beta when she comes back. It’d be funny if you two matched.”
Danny is stuck on that phrase: a relationship that was not spectacular. “Do you think most people would describe their relationships as spectacular?”
“I mean,” Julian says, “Gigi and I are spectacular.”
“But you’ve obviously had some doubts. At some point.”
Julian squints. “Not really.”
“Not even when you fight?”
“We like to think of it as us against the problem.”
“You never once worried she was going to break up with you?”
“Gigi and I trust each other completely.”
“Do you think that’s normal?”
“I think it’s special,” Julian says. “I think a lot of people have settled for a lot worse. I wish everyone could have what Gigi and I have.”
It would be annoying if he wasn’t so earnest.