The Plus One Read online

  “A dancing lesson? It’s a wedding, not a cabaret.”

  “Carl, this is your only daughter’s wedding—”

  Kelly looked around the table to see if anyone else noticed. They didn’t.

  “And you’re going to learn to dance,” Diane said in her I-mean-business voice. Carl’s face stiffened, even his glasses stiffened, but Clara cut in with a gentler tone, her eyes glimmering with sincerity.

  “It’s just one lesson, Dad, and it’ll make things so much easier. This way you won’t get up there at the wedding and feel like you don’t know what to do. You’ll have learned everything beforehand; you won’t even have to think about it.”

  “Oh, fine, that’s all right then,” Carl grumbled. Kelly gulped on her chicken. How did Clara do that? How did she always say the right thing?

  But she was quickly distracted by the inevitable question. “So, Kelly,” her mom asked brightly, “have you met anyone recently?”

  “Well, a boatswain from the Philippines just asked me to connect on LinkedIn, so . . .”

  “You know what I mean, a man!”

  “No, Mom, since you asked me last week, I have not found a husband.”

  “No need to be snippy. I just want what’s best for you. After all, you are already twenty-nine; I would think you would gladly take my help in the situation. And luckily for you, I met someone!”

  “Congratulations, dear. Will I be invited to the wedding?” Carl asked, not looking up from his salad.

  “I mean for Kelly, obviously.”

  “Mom, I don’t—”

  “Oh, is this the one you were telling me about?” Clara interrupted Kelly excitedly. “I think you’ll actually like him, Kel.”

  “Please don’t—” But Kelly failed again.

  “Give it a try. Worst that happens is this stranger murders you on the first date, and then at least you’re not dying alone,” Gary said, slicing food for two of the girls across his own untouched plate. His expression was so straight that few people but Kelly would have been able to tell he was joking. And even she wasn’t convinced.

  “I really don’t want—”

  But now Diane cut across Kelly. “Will everyone please just let me finish?” Oh, how rude of me, Kelly thought. “His name is Martin and he’s Donna’s sister’s neighbor’s son. He’s a realtor and a tennis player and just adorable and best of all, he’s the same height as Gary, so everything will be symmetrical in the pictures!”

  “What pictures?” Gary asked.

  “At the wedding, obviously.”

  Kelly couldn’t let this go on. “Mom, I don’t care how good this guy looks next to Gary, I’m not marrying him.”

  “Not your wedding, silly. Though who knows! I mean for Clara’s wedding. Oh, and I almost forgot. He has a cocker spaniel.” Diane sat back, satisfied. The man had a cocker spaniel.

  “It’s perfect, right, Kel?” Clara beamed.

  “Wait, so you guys just went and found a plus one for me?”

  “I know how you dread these things,” Diane said. “Now you don’t even have to worry about it.”

  “What makes you think I don’t already have one?”

  “Well, you don’t—do you?”

  Kelly spluttered. “That’s not the point! I don’t want to go to my sister’s wedding with some tennis-playing jerkoff I don’t even know.”

  “But you will know him. I set up dinner for the two of you. You’ve got almost two months to get to know each other.”

  Kelly looked to her father. “Dad, you’ll pose next to me in the pictures, right, so everything looks good? I don’t need a plus one?”

  “I would, but I probably wouldn’t live up to your mother’s standards. She’s never called me adorable.”

  “Gary? Is anyone going to stand up for me or is my whole family happy to just pimp me out to a strange man off the streets?”

  “Honestly, I’d be thrilled to have another guy at the family table,” Gary admitted. “My doctor said if I don’t start exposing myself to people other than Gina and the girls, I will lactate.”

  “Kelly, this is ridiculous. You have to bring someone,” Diane insisted.

  “Why? Who cares?”

  “Who cares?” Diane set down her fork. Kelly sensed that she had asked the wrong question. “A wedding is a house of cards, Kelly. If you mess up my seating arrangements, all hell will break loose. And all of my friends, my family, my industry colleagues will be there. The eyes of the Bay Area are on me. I am a bridal professional and this is my daughter’s wedding! This is my Triple Crown!”

  “Wait, so are you the horse in this scenario?” Kelly couldn’t resist asking.

  “I think she’s the jockey.” Gary caught her eye before looking away, masking a grin.

  “Please, just give him a chance, Kel,” Clara said. “It’s one dinner. I think you’ll have more fun at the wedding if you have someone to talk to, and I won’t have to worry about whether you’re having a good time. Please? For me?”

  Kelly sighed. Clara’s sweet tone was much harder to say no to than her mother’s quasi-mania. She had a feeling she was about to meet a cocker spaniel.

  two

  • • • • • •

  Kelly wondered, as she prepared for her blind date the following Saturday, why other girls seemed to love the getting-ready process. In movies this was always a snappy montage that involved trying on various colorful outfits and throwing them off over your head like a jovial idiot who doesn’t understand how hangers work. Instead, there she was, in her drab apartment, staring sadly into her closet. It was like Eeyore shopping for a quinceañera dress.

  Well, drab may be a little harsh—Kelly had a perfectly nice (for Silicon Valley rental prices) one-bedroom with square, modern lines, granite countertops mottled with black and sienna brown, and broad windows offering views of the small, flat park across the street, where dogs ran through the cropped grass and kids played soccer. Her IKEA décor was neutral and tasteful, if rather plain. She tended to choose items in neat, geometric shapes, pieces that had no possibility of clashing with each other or cutting the space in the room into any of those awkward, too-small-to-have-a-function wedges of unfillable air. It was easiest to go basic, she figured—safest. Pick out something inoffensive and you didn’t have to devote any time and energy to thinking about it, or worrying what other people would think. There was no way you would look back at that rectangular beige couch and think you’d made a horrendous mistake. She couldn’t imagine a world where home décor served any higher purpose than to do no harm.

  The same philosophy extended to the wardrobe she was now peering into as if she expected it to offer her some magical, glamorous outfit she had never actually bought. She might as well have been looking for the portal to Narnia. Kelly owned very little in the way of going-out clothes or even casual clothes, because she did very little going out or casual-ing. Most of her items were work oriented: blouses in cream or taupe, skirts and trousers with simple lines. In actuality, her office was rather forgiving of the “artist/techie/genius with beard lice” types who worked in the Engineering department, many of whom dressed like college students who had rolled out of bed just in time for class. But Kelly wasn’t the type to indulge in such informality.

  She swung out one of her three dresses and looked it over. A high neck, but at least it was sleeveless. Nothing says date night like a pair of arms. It was a basic, lightly fitted shape in a sturdy material of forest green. She worried that the green might be too matchy-matchy with her eyes. Then she worried that another color might not match enough. Before sliding it on, she snapped herself into a too-small, one-piece bathing suit she had brilliantly repurposed as a form of budget shapewear, repeating “It looks good, it looks good” in her head like a mantra while it rearranged her internal organs.

  Kelly met her own eyes in the mirror as she blow-dri
ed her light hair. Her routine here was more about correcting her features than playing them up. She twirled a round brush through her hair as she blew it out to eliminate its natural waves and create a simple, straight shape. She smoothed foundation over her freckles to cover them up. Her face and nose were a little longer than she would have liked, but she had learned through precise application how to rectify them with contouring. She actually liked her green eyes; just a little mascara and oyster-colored shadow was all that was needed there. She left her lips bare—this was a first date, after all, and the last thing Kelly wanted was to go overboard.

  She stepped back and surveyed herself in the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine what she would think if she were meeting herself for the first time, pondering the question that has troubled mankind since the ancients: Hot or Not? Would she want to date herself? Not that she wanted to date Martin. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t want him to want to date her.

  That would sure show her mom, and Clara. They had assumed she couldn’t get a wedding plus one on her own. As much as Kelly loathed to even formulate the thought, preferring to stow it safely in the back of her mental closet, with the dust and the fifth-grade gymnastics costumes, she knew that she was a failure in her mother’s eyes—and Kelly was not someone who accepted failure. She breathed out a contented little sigh just imagining her family’s shocked faces if Martin came back for a second date—if he actually liked her.

  Kelly had always relied on data, and the models of her parents’ marriage and her own disappointing relationship history gave her little logical basis for predicting the arrival of true love in her own life at any point in the future. Her two previous boyfriends had been guys who looked great on paper, but made her even less happy than she had been alone. Still, a little illogical hope kept flickering, telling her that love might still be out there after all. Her stomach clenched in a way that was only partially the fault of the bathing suit.

  She swiped on a little lipstick, just in case.

  * * *

  • • •

  Martin knew the waiter at the restaurant, a French and Vietnamese place in Alum Rock with glowing saffron-colored walls, and Kelly naturally took this to be a bad sign. She harbored an instinctive suspicion of these people who seemed to know everyone. With a pang, she visualized the modest Friend count on her Facebook page—that couldn’t have made a good impression when Martin had likely online-stalked her prior to meeting.

  Martin wasn’t bad looking: sandy hair, features a little blunt and Germanic but good-natured, and wide shoulders. He looked like someone who got outside often, but always for recreation, not for a living.

  He started the conversation by asking about Kelly’s work. “So I heard that you do some kind of Hall of Presidents thing for work? Isn’t that that show at Disney with all the animatronic presidents? That seriously creeped me out as a kid. But I mean, totally cool if that’s what you do.”

  “No, it’s not really anything like that,” Kelly said with a small laugh. Already she felt embarrassed. Diane told everyone that her daughter basically worked at the Hall of Presidents.

  Martin went on. “Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m a realtor, I do residential spaces in East San Jose. I kind of fell into it through family, but I feel lucky because I actually love it. I love working with people.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Kelly smiled while taking a sip of water, hoping that her face didn’t betray that she could relate to that comment about as much as if he had told her he liked taking long walks on the planet Xanadu.

  In the ensuing silence, Martin glanced around, then, spotting their waiter, Tony, quickly stopped him. “Could I get another Amstel when you have a second? Thanks, man.”

  Kelly thought back anxiously to how quickly she had responded when Tony took their food orders earlier. Of course she had Googled the restaurant menu beforehand and figured out what she could order so there would be no surprises. Prawn noodles? Too messy. Papaya salad? Too fussy. Ahi tuna? Just right. Though the beef shank did sound good. But it might be an uncomfortable bedfellow with the bathing suit. Naturally, it was exactly what Martin had ordered.

  She glanced up to see him looking around the restaurant with a polite aimlessness, drumming quietly on the lip of the table with his fingers, broad and flat like tongue depressors. And she pulled out of her own anxieties enough to realize that she clearly was not being a very good date. If she wanted to achieve her ambitions for a successful night, it was time to ratchet up her conversational acumen. Besides, a twinge of guilt lit within her. Martin really was trying.

  “I’m not sure how closely you follow all the news out of Silicon Valley,” she said, leaning forward, “but there’s this amazing new development called ‘visual foresight’ we’ve been working with. We can program robots to teach themselves how to predict the outcome of different behavioral sequences. They’re basically learning to see the future.”

  “Awesome,” Martin replied, with an easy smile. “That is definitely cooler than the Hall of Presidents.”

  “I like to think so. That’s what I love about this field—you take anything you can imagine, and you can find a way to make it a reality.” She smiled back at him, lighting up. She was crushing this first date thing after all.

  “So robots can predict the future. It’s like Minority Report. I love that movie.”

  “Well, not exactly. The machines use dynamic neural advection, calculating what will happen in the next frame of a video. The really exciting part is that they’re teaching themselves, learning autonomously.”

  “So wait, maybe it’s more like Rain Man. Like, if you took a robot to Vegas, could it predict what the dealer’s going to do? Are you taking orders yet?” He laughed.

  Kelly stopped, her hopes sinking. She could think of literally zero good responses to this. He was staring at her, waiting for her to continue the conversation, to say something, anything—

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she blurted, standing abruptly and knocking the table so that the ice in their glasses rattled. She recognized too late that the worst response of all had been to imply that she had to drop a super emergent deuce.

  “Oh, sure,” Martin said politely. He stood and moved to her side of the table to help pull out her chair. As he did so, he extended a hand around her lower back, as if to usher her out—and that hand went straight to her butt. He didn’t squeeze it, didn’t precisely cup it, but he definitively, 100 percent touched it. Kelly’s eyes flew to his face, which was entirely nonreactive. She couldn’t tell if he even recognized what was happening. A swift analysis determined that either he was copping a feel before dinner had been served, or that her butt didn’t feel anything like a butt, and both prospects were so worrying that she was clueless as to how to react.

  “Um, thank you,” she mumbled, and slipped butt-first from his grasp. But somehow when she started walking, instead of going toward the restroom in the back, she started toward the door. Some primal fight-or-flight instinct was taking over, and evidently Kelly’s ancestresses had been the ones who bowed meekly before the mastodon and bid it a pleasant day. She was fleeing.

  Clearly, she reasoned with accelerating speed, the whole evening was down the toilet anyway (nearly literally). If she turned around and headed back to the table now, Martin would be obligated to ask why she had thought the restroom was somehow invisibly concealed by the front door, like some sort of Platform 9¾ situation. She would be obligated to provide an explanation, which would mean she would be obligated to come up with an explanation, which would mean she would need to think a heck of a lot faster than she was thinking right now. Then the rest of the evening would pass in tense small talk about wine and weather while Martin was obviously fixating on her mysterious lap around the restaurant, and she was obviously fixating on whether or not her mom had paid Martin to give her some human contact, the lack of which in her “already twenty-nine-year-old” daughter’s life Diane was alw
ays lamenting, and really, did Kelly want to subject herself and Martin to that? Of course she didn’t. Besides, if she left now, Martin’s pal Tony certainly wouldn’t charge him for her tuna, and he wouldn’t stay for dessert or order another drink without a date, ergo, Kelly was granting him a significant savings by walking away from the night now. Maybe fifty dollars? If he invested that right, it could be five thousand dollars by the time he reached retirement. Clearly, Kelly was taking the only logical course. This was a successful and reasonable termination of the night.

  As she pushed open the door, its chime jingling, she looked back just enough to glimpse Tony and Martin gathered by the table, both gaping at her in bewilderment.

  Kelly clattered down the sidewalk as fast as she could in her sensible heels, cursing the frigid winter air and the fact that the only parking spot had been on the other end of the strip mall. The faster she moved, the sooner she could get to her car and vent her emotions by blasting NPR. She needed to drown out her thoughts: Thoughts about the million and one more graceful ways in which she could have handled that situation. About how she couldn’t find a plus one on her own and couldn’t even hold on to the one that was handed to her. About how dating, the soul-sapping square dance of trying to find the right guy, sucked. About the fact that she really did still want to find the right guy, in spite of all the bruises that come with cracking your heart from its exoskeleton. About the growing suspicion that she couldn’t find the right guy because she wasn’t the right person.

  As she finally reached her black Accord, her still-empty stomach creaked in protest.