The tour ends in Alex’s office, the cubicle in the farthest corner. Start-up workstations are typically disaster areas: electronic devices piled atop jumbles of printouts and fast-food containers, all covered in a light dusting of Post-its. Alex’s counter is clear, save for a desktop computer, a laptop zipped into a padded case, and several brands of cell phones on which to test his app. There’s no obvious way for him to keep an eye on his employees unless he makes a deliberate point of standing and walking several yards toward the main area.
“I like the quiet,” Alex explains. “People think raising your voice conveys power. It’s the opposite.”
That may be the most un-Russian thing anyone has ever said. Zoe wonders if Alex meant for it to sound as hot as she finds it.
“That’s something else my app is going to do.”
Evaluate phrases for hotness? Zoe most definitely doesn’t say.
“Send a warning when you’re pissing someone off. The Japanese smile when they’re angry, get more polite, but Westerners might not realize it, so they keep doing what they’re doing. My app is going to pick up on changes of mood and let the user know before he does any more damage. It’s a way to let you in on what other people are thinking without their needing to come right out and tell you. They keep their pride—and their secrets, but you get what you need, too. Win-win.”
The possibility is music to Zoe’s ears. Forget world peace and business meetings, think of what it could do for her own family! As Baba would say, that means it’s too good to be true. Zoe hears Baba’s voice coming out of her mouth as she says, “There are so many cultural norms, though, even within the same culture. It’s going to be a massive task to compile that data, much less tweak your code to recognize such a fine level of nuance and convey it instantaneously.”
“Go big or go home, right? You know the Billy Joel song ‘Movin’ Out’?” Alex hums the catchy chorus. “I used to think that when he’s singing ‘Is that all you get for your money?’ he meant, is that all you’re going to settle for, when there’s so much more available? Here’s this song about a guy jumping out of the rat race, and I thought it meant, if you just work harder, you can have so much more than a house out in Hackensack or the fender of a Cadillac to polish! Middle-class banality isn’t truly moving up, that’s why he’s moving out.”
“I used to think ‘you won’t fool the children of the Revolution’ meant the survivors who had their lives destroyed know revolution is a horrible thing, and you won’t fool them into supporting another one.” It’s one of Zoe’s most embarrassing memories. She’s never shared it with anyone. “My best friend from high school, Lacy, I said it to her mom when we were talking about music. I was trying to sound hip about the old stuff. It was mortifying. Luckily, she already thought I was a poor, unfortunate immigrant. Lacy’s mom calls herself the last of the red diaper babies. When she found out my family was from the USSR, she was dying to meet them, hear about their authentic experience. She wanted to trade stories about how her grandparents from the Lower East Side were also warriors for socialism. Can you imagine if I’d let that happen?”
“Americans are adorable, aren’t they? They’re the ones who truly believe in international brotherhood. Remember how they sang about Russians loving their children, too?”
“Knowing Lacy’s mom got me prepared for NYU. Whenever I’d say something negative about Communism, I’d get smacked down with how somebody as privileged as me could never understand the experiences of the oppressed, and my passing judgment was culturally insensitive. The professor said I had to apologize for making my classmates uncomfortable before her lecture could continue. At least I had enough sense not to tell my grandmother when it happened. She’d have given me a different smackdown about my privilege and made me apologize again!”
Alex looks sympathetic, shocking Zoe with the realization of how desperately she’d been waiting for someone—anyone—to understand how odd it was to be American, feel American, look American on the outside—and yet somehow still be so foreign on the inside.
“That’s the nice thing about going to a glorified trade school like Caltech. No engineer would talk up a theoretical idea that hadn’t been field-tested. Or one that failed every time it’s been tried. We’re not like those hippie pure-math guys.”
“Ooh, nerd burn!”
“Hey, I’m speaking as a reformed sinner.” Alex mea culpas his chest with a fist. “I thought I was going to be a math major myself. Till I got to Caltech and found out that, compared to those guys, I couldn’t do math at all. Thank God for Gideon showing me the light—and his notes—and guiding me into something practical.”
At the mention of his friend’s name, Alex briefly pivots in the direction of Gideon’s work space. Zoe can see the top of Gideon’s head, like black sheep’s wool. She feels an urge to run her palm against it. Now that, she understands, actually is culturally insensitive. A microaggression.
Back to his sales pitch, Alex says, “Gideon calls me Icarus, flying too close to the sun. He’s ridiculously well read. Private school all the way. Classic literature is a huge help in translating. Latin, too. All that metaphor, instead of saying what you mean. It’s a master class in beating around the bush, not to mention covering your ass by leaving everything open to interpretation and plausible deniability. How totally Communist is that?”
“I wish I were better at it,” Zoe confesses, shocked, once again, by the unexpected catharsis of saying what she’d only thought—and even then, hesitantly—before.
Alex doesn’t appear to notice the soul baring going on. Why should he? These are colossal moments for Zoe. For Alex, it’s just another pitch meeting.
“I’ll take the Icarus comparison with pride,” he says. “Why would the sun be there, if we’re not supposed to reach for it?”
“I’d like to get hot with you,” Zoe blurts out, still on a candor high. Then she hears herself.
Alex doesn’t look taken aback. Maybe it’s still just another pitch meeting. Maybe he hears things like that all the time. Self-confidence is scary-sexy in a guy. And Alex reeks of it, like he’s been attacked by an army of department-store salesgirls pushing Eau de I’m Great.
Zoe stumbles to recover. “What I meant was, I’d like to hear details regarding how you expect to blast your company off into the stars, as it were. And how my company might help you achieve your objectives.” That is not what she’d meant.
“I have a proposal for you.”
Zoe nods, ready to agree with anything he’s about to say.
“Go out with me.”
Except that.
This calls for reinforcements. Zoe asks Lacy to meet her after work at a bar that serves alcohol alongside Rice Krispies treats and ironic, retro board games like Battleship, Operation, and Connect 4. Lacy instantly agrees. Because she is Lacy.
Lacy is Zoe’s most American friend. Out of all of Zoe’s friends, she’s the only one who believes everything will always turn out fine. Her last name is Freeman. Her grandfather took out the d to make a point. She’s Jewish, like Zoe, except Lacy doesn’t believe in the evil eye. She doesn’t believe in not telling people your good news because they will be jealous and curse you. She doesn’t believe in never relaxing enough to enjoy the present because even the best of situations will go wrong.
“Of course not,” Zoe’s grandmother snorted when she heard this about Lacy. “It’s easy to believe the world is good when nothing bad has ever happened to you.”
It’s not that bad things have never happened to Lacy. It’s that she refuses to see them that way. Lacy’s parents are divorced, like Zoe’s. Lacy insists it’s great. “My mom and dad were miserable together. Now they can be happy apart! It’s best for them, and it’s best for me, too.”
Of course, unlike Zoe, Lacy spends time with her dad. He’s a dancer turned stuntman turned performance artist. Lacy has taken Zoe to a bunch of his shows, held in sketchy clubs in even sketchier neighborhoods that Zoe most definitely didn’t tell her family she was going to. Zoe was freaked out every minute they were there, but Lacy acted like the old drunk guy chatting her up was just being friendly, and the five frat bros who surrounded them and pushed the girls to do shots were something Zoe and Lacy could disentangle themselves from as soon as they felt like it. And, because she was Lacy, she was right.
Which is why Zoe loves Lacy.
Which is why Zoe needs to speak with Lacy, ASAP.
Zoe needs someone to tell her that everything will be fine.
“Everything will be fine,” Lacy says the moment she slides into the booth next to Zoe. Lacy doesn’t even know what the emergency is, but she knows it’s what Zoe needs to hear.
Zoe tells her about Alex. The work part, and the part where he asked Zoe out.
“This is great,” Lacy squeals. “He sounds perfect for you.”
Let the record show that Lacy says this about everyone.
It just so happens that, this time, Zoe might agree with her.
“I don’t date guys from Brighton,” Zoe reminds her, as if Lacy hasn’t heard her singing this song for exactly a decade now.
“But this one’s different—you said so yourself.”
“I said he seems different.”
“He’s ambitious.”
“He is.”
“He’s cute.”
It’s entirely possible that Zoe may have shown Lacy Alex’s photo off his website.
“Your family will love him!”
“Is that really a good thing?”
Lacy laughs. Let the record also show that Lacy’s family loves everything she does. After dropping a quarter of a million dollars on her college education, Lacy’s family thinks it’s thrilling that she’s working a combination of TaskRabbit and waitressing jobs, since connecting with a wide variety of people is vital for an artist!
Zoe would love Lacy’s family, too. Except they confuse Zoe so.
Lacy’s mother, who was dying to talk politics with Baba—she had Lacy in her forties, so she and Baba are practically the same age—lives in a classic-six apartment on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. She inherited it from her parents. It’s decorated with framed posters from famous protest marches, including one that proclaims all property is theft. It would be so easy to make fun of her. Except Lacy’s mom is so darn nice. To everybody. The only time Zoe let Baba and Lacy’s mom exchange words was at Lacy and Zoe’s high-school graduation, when Lacy’s mom gushed about the Rozengurt family’s inspirational courage in fleeing the USSR and Baba magnanimously let her. Baba thinks Lacy and her mom’s perennially upbeat air is, at best, naive, and, at worst, an act so they can lord it over everyone else. She doesn’t understand that they honestly think people are good at heart. They have that Anne Frank quote up in their classic six, too.
This time, it was Balissa who took umbrage. “The Frank girl wrote this before Auschwitz, yes? Did anyone ask her after? No. Because she was dead.”
When Lacy predicts Zoe’s family will love Alex, she isn’t being naive or condescending. She’s just being Lacy. Which is why Zoe called her in the first place.
Because this whole Alex thing is making Zoe very, very nervous. Her day wasn’t supposed to go like this. Her day was supposed to go like every other day. Work, meeting, work, meeting, work, text from Mama, work, text from Mama asking why Zoe hadn’t replied to her earlier text, work, meeting, call Mama back, argue about minutiae for Baba and Deda’s anniversary party, run errand to fetch last-minute item for said anniversary party, home, microwave meal, sleep, rinse, repeat. At no point did her schedule include: meet the most potentially perfect guy ever, get asked out by him, freak out.
If Zoe wrote down her requirements for the ideal man and her family did the same, there would be a tiny Venn diagram overlap. Alex Zagarodny was it. He had all the qualities Zoe was looking for, as well as enough of what Mama had been listing just the other day. He seemed too good to be true (thanks, Baba). And if he was as ideal as he seemed, what would someone like Alex want with someone like Zoe? Better temper her expectations. Baba always encourages Zoe to imagine and prepare for the very worst outcome, then she’s less likely to be disappointed. And Baba can say, “I told you so.”
So Zoe hedges, “There’s still the conflict of interest with my job . . .”
Maybe if she hedges enough, the evil eye will become bored and look elsewhere, thus not screwing up what had the potential to be a really great thing—pu, pu, pu, knock wood, we should only live so long.
Then again, who needed the evil eye? Zoe could screw up any potentially great thing all by herself. Just look at her now, conjuring up excuses to avoid so much as giving Alex a shot.
“Oh, that’ll work out, don’t worry.” Lacy gets the look she first assumed when she decided, back in high school, she was going to make Zoe her fixer-upper project, Wicked-style. “Cut it out.” Even when Lacy gets exasperated, she remains buoyant. “Quit making excuses for why this won’t work before you’ve given it a chance.” Does Zoe get any credit for at least thinking that? “Why not take a leap of faith and assume Alex is the perfect guy for you, you’re happy, your family is happy, Alex gets his investment, the company is a huge success, I get to wear a hot bridesmaid dress, and absolutely nothing goes wrong ever?”
Lacy bites into her Rice Krispies treat and washes it down with a shot of tequila.
Zoe wants to be Lacy when she grows up. She wishes she’d grown up as Lacy.
However, at this point in time, she is still, unfortunately, Zoe. Who grew up with Mama and Baba and all the self-doubting self-sabotage therein.
Lacy knows this. Which is why she makes Zoe take out her phone and text Alex.
Now.