“You could just say ‘Hi,’ Mike. Did you ever think of that?”
“Hi?”
“Yes. Open with ‘Hi.’ It’s quite accepted, actually.”
“And then what?”
“And then whatever. ‘What are you drinking?’ ‘I like your shoes.’ If she’s interested, she’ll say something and then you’ll say something, and if you have chemistry it will go on from there. If not, it won’t.”
Mike has had this discussion before. It always ends the same way: He agrees that he could be more assertive with women, and nothing comes of it.
“No offense to this wonderful establishment, Eva, but I guess maybe I’m not going to meet a girl in a bar.”
“Then why do you come here every weekend?”
“Because everyone I know comes here to hang out.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“I guess.”
“You don’t hope that maybe one of these days you might hit it off with some girl—maybe she’s not Mrs. Right, but maybe she’s sexy and fun to talk to—you don’t hope that a girl like that might let you—”
Before she can finish, a young woman with a fake tan approaches the bar and orders three beers. Eva is busy just long enough for Mike to wonder the obvious—if perhaps she’s really coming on to him this time. But a more likely possibility is that she’s just being a friend, like always, and it would be a disaster if he made a pass at her and she rejected him. He could never come back in here.
“What are you thinking about now?” Eva asks him.
“What you were just talking about.”
“No, I bet you were wondering if I’m coming on to you right now. If you’re reading the signals right and what to do if I say ‘no,’ and all that shit, right?”
Mike laughs out loud.
“I like you a lot, Mike, but I don’t want to lose you as a friend. We’d have fun, sure, but eventually everything would get messed up. Because we’d never make it as a couple.”
“For the sake of argument, why not?”
“Because I’m not the one you’re looking for.”
“Well, since you want me to be more assertive, I’ll go ahead and admit that you certainly appear to be what I’m looking for.”
“Thank you,” she says. “But I’m not. I just run this bar. I smell like smoke all the time and I flirt with a hundred men a night so I can afford my new house.”
“So?”
“So, the woman you’re looking for is not that. The woman you’re looking for is pretty, but she’s also really, really smart like you are. And she’s above the stereotypical girl shit. Sort of how you aren’t all macho, how you don’t think the world revolves around beer and college football.”
Mike wonders how long Eva has been working on this elaborate hypothesis, but before he can ask her, his mind trundles out a memory to consider, a face he hasn’t been able to get out of his mind the past week.
“Do you know someone like that?” Eva asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, give me a break. You
do
know someone like that. Someone you’d like to date.”
Mike looks away from Eva, wondering for a moment where Samantha went, or what Larry might be up to.
“How do you know her?”
“I met her on my flight back to Dallas last week.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a television news anchor.”
“Not in Wichita, I guess. Not from what I’ve seen lately.”
“No, in Dallas. Her name is Kelly Smith.”
“Really? Kelly Smith?”
Mike nods.
“Doe she have dark blonde hair, a little long?”
“That’s her,” Mike says. “So you’ve seen her on the news, too? I guess I’m the only one who hasn’t. Larry thought I was an idiot for not knowing who she was.”
“I don’t know her from Dallas. She used to be on Channel three in Phoenix, if it’s the same Kelly Smith. Every guy in town was in love with her.”
“I can see why.”
“So you talked to her?”
Mike spends a few moments relating the story to Eva, from the moment he saw her until their abrupt parting in the airline terminal. He feels stupid as he talks, as if he’s assigning too much importance to a fleeting, chance encounter he had on an airplane.
“Well, you have to talk to her again, Mike.”
“I just told you she said no to that.”
“So what? There isn’t anything wrong with trying once, just to let her know you’re more than casually interested. The very fact that you initiated an actual conversation with her tells me she must have really done it for you.”
“So I just call her up at the station and say, ‘Hi, I’m that guy from the airplane. You wanna go out?’ ”
“Mike, how do you possibly run the super collider when you’re this obstinate?”
“But you make everything sound so easy! Just call her up, no big deal. Who cares if she thinks I’m a stalker?”
“One call is not stalking. Besides, she already knows you.”
“Right. She already knows me.”
“You sound like Larry,” she says. “Parroting me like that.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Did you like her?”
Mike looks away. “Did I like her? Boy, did I ever.”
3
Later, he’s at home, sitting in the dark, his face bright with the phosphorous light of his computer monitor, eyes droopy with alcohol. From the Channel 8 website Kelly Smith is staring at him, and she’s just as beautiful rendered digitally as she was in person.
Her bio doesn’t provide much information. Attended the University of Virginia and began her career doing traffic for a small station in Richmond. Then beat reporter in Nashville, morning anchor in Kansas City, and finally her first principal anchor job in Phoenix. She loves Dallas, is a huge Cowboy fan, and so on. Below the bio, two blue, underlined words beckon him.
E-mail Kelly.
Of course he can’t call her. There is no way he could muster the nerve for that. But e-mail? Perhaps, with enough time, he can fashion a reasonably enticing message.
He clicks the link and Microsoft Outlook opens a new mail window.
In the “Subject” line he types
Hey there
The two words sit there looking lonely. He depresses the “shift” key and then the number 1. Now it says
Hey there!
Mike spends five minutes trying to decide if the exclamation point looks too upbeat, too desperate. In the end he decides to leave it.
Finally, after hammering away for twenty minutes, Mike reads the message all at once. The product of his work, he notices, has reached epic levels of nonsense.
Hi Kelly,
My name is Mike McNair. I met you on the plane ride from Atlanta last week, remember?
I wanted to tell you again how much I enjoyed talking to you. It’s not that often you meet someone and just hit it off right away, you know? I suppose if you aren’t available, that probably means you have a boyfriend. But if you were just worried that I was a stranger, that you didn’t know me well enough, then what I’ll do here is tell you a little more about myself, and then we won’t be strangers anymore!
I was born in New Orleans, but mainly grew up in Williston, North Dakota. My dad was in the oilfield, and his company moved us there when I was three. He thought it would be a short assignment, but I ended up graduating from high school in Williston. I studied at Berkeley and also did a little work with Anton Zeilinger at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Finally I got a job at Fermilab, the particle accelerator in Illinois, which is much smaller than the NTSSC. I dated a girl while I worked there, but eventually I blah blah blah this is such bullshit this e-mail is going nowhere and who in the hell would want to read such boring drivel, it’s three-fifteen in the goddamn morning and I’m tired and my job is probably in jeopardy and I ought to just go to bed and
And then the phone rings. A
DAMS
L
ARRY,
the caller ID says.
“Hello?”
“I think we have something.”
“It’s late, Larry.” He glances again at the e-mail and deletes everything but the first line. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Higgs, you jackass.”
“And?”
“And I was talking to Samantha—that woman is a bitch, by the way, she—”
“Larry.”
“Right. Anyway, she was going on about luminosity, like she does, and she had this necklace, this stone, it was a diamond but it made me think of silica for some reason, layers, and then I got an idea about the detector, about why our triggers might need to be adjusted.”
“Are you sure, Larry?”
“When you see my new models, you’ll understand why I called you at three o’clock in the morning. We might have been generating Higgs all this time and. . . .”
Larry trails off, the prospect of success silencing him.
“You think the triggers need to be adjusted?” Mike asks.
“Based on the new models, I’d say we’ll need to loosen them. But Landon won’t go for it. Don’t you remember the last time we upgraded the Grid? He said—”
“I don’t give a shit what he said,” Mike snaps. “I’m asking for more processors. When we started this project, he told us never to worry about money. If he can hire new people at the drop of a hat, he can buy us some more processing power. I’m telling him Monday morning. And then you—”
“Get my team to work on the new program. I’m there, boss.”
And when Larry is gone, when Mike is off the phone and suddenly stone-cold sober, his heart leaps at the sight of Kelly Smith smiling on his monitor. His fingers fly across the keyboard, clicking and clacking, until he fires off the e-mail during a surge of confidence. In this moment, he cannot imagine a negative response from the object of his affection. He cannot imagine Donovan denying his request to upgrade the Grid. Eva was right: Sometimes it’s not enough to reason your way through a problem. Sometimes you just have to tell people what you want.
Mike grabs a few bottles of water from the kitchen and returns to his desk. He logs onto the NTSSC network, giddy with the possibility of new and better GEM data, and forgets all about heading to bed.
4
Kelly’s normal assignment is to anchor the news desk every weeknight at six and ten, but once a month the second-team anchors do a late Friday newscast to give Ted and her an early start to the weekend. And so Kelly finds herself stuck on Highway 75, enduring rush-hour traffic on the way home, a whole Friday evening in front of her. A whole Friday evening alone.
She remembers a similar Friday months ago, when she and James had been clinging desperately to the years they had built together, years that would be wasted if they broke up. He’d been searching for a pair of shoes, shoes and a tie for an interview with Nortel. He wanted to shine for the recruiter, he told her, because it was time to get a job again. He didn’t want to take her money anymore. He made nine orbits around the perimeter of the shoe department and couldn’t stop staring at a pair of Johnston and Murphy lace-ups.
“I like them,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“But James,” and she lowered her voice for this, knowing her words would embarrass him. “They’re a hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
“So?”
“So, do you think it’s smart to drop that kind of money for shoes considering your finances right now?”
“I want to look good for the interview,” he said. “That’s why I asked you to help me shop for these shoes. And the tie. We haven’t even looked at the ties yet and already you think I’m spending too much money.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. This was exactly the thing he couldn’t see, refused to see, that no matter how much she loved him, she couldn’t kick in money every time he wanted to spend a little extra. She felt like a bank, not a romantic partner.
“What are you thinking about?” James asked her.
“Nothing. Did you decide on those?”
“I guess.”
“Come on, James. If you’re going to spend the money on them you might as well enjoy it.”
“How can I enjoy it with you trying to make me feel guilty?”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I like the shoes. If you think they’ll help you get the job, then it makes sense.”
Finding the tie was easier. A cute red-haired sales clerk named Autumn came around the counter to help him look through the racks. She asked what the occasion was, and James told her about his interview to be a tech writer for Nortel. Autumn seemed impressed by this—“Writing is not my thing,” she admitted—so James pushed forward, revealing that he was also a budding screenwriter.
“Interesting to watch you flirt with a girl while I’m standing right there,” Kelly said later, on their way out of the mall.
“I wasn’t flirting with her.”
“Look, James. I know we haven’t been intimate all that much lately. You’ve been going out with your friends, I’ve had work—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to tell you that I understand. I understand how, when that sales girl showed a little interest, how you might have taken the bait. It’s nice to feel wanted.”
“Kelly,” James said.
“Please, Baby. Please hear me out. This—”
“Come on, Kelly. Not here. Not now.”
They marched through the mall, and all around them kids were talking and laughing and threatening to buy costume jewelry. To Kelly it seemed as if the two of them were fifteen years older than anyone else around. Older but just as single, and perhaps back to the end of that desperate line where thirty-year-old people stood hoping to meet a spouse.
“All right,” James said, after they reached the parking lot. “I see what you’re trying to say. But we have to talk about this. We have to think.”
“I
have
thought. A lot. This isn’t a relationship we’re in.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“It’s two people going in different directions—and one of them is devoting all his energy to achieving his dream.”
“I love you, Kelly.”
“I know. But it’s not enough anymore.”
“You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?” he asked. “Kelly Smith Says What She Means. That’s what the commercials say, right? You say what you mean, and you’re breaking up with me, and I have no say in it at all. But I guess I never did, since you’re the one who makes six hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“That is not fair!”
“Yeah?” he said. “Neither is this.” He looked at her car and then back at her face. “How in the hell am I supposed to get home? Wait a minute. I don’t have a home! You just broke up with me. Where am I supposed to go?”