“Remind me why I had to meet you in this dingy motel after I drove two hours to get here from Manhattan at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning?” the handsome young man asked Charlotte, a sly smile on his lips.
“I didn’t want Max to see you.”
“And what would he say if he knew we were meeting like this?” Langston Kade, who had the plastic perfection of a Ken doll dreamed into life, raised an eyebrow and placed his thin fingers on her shoulders to sit her on the edge of the bed while he studied her face, his navy blue eyes wide and alert. The room smelled like unwashed laundry and sex. There were fingernail clippings left in the sink. These were the kinds of places Charlotte’s family had stayed in during their summer road trips to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown or Atlantic City, where her dad tried to sneak them into a heavyweight fight.
Charlotte looked at Kade and rubbed her hands along the light-brown comforter that was about as soft as a grocery store paper bag.
“Max would laugh at me. He’d tell me not to do this.”
She’d been seeing Langston behind her husband’s back since just before her fortieth birthday, usually on business trips to New York.
“You want the usual?”
“Maybe a little more.” Charlotte cringed. “Make sure the swelling isn’t too bad.”
“I need it.”
Langston opened his alligator-skin briefcase and extracted two bottles from a cooler, one containing Botox, the other Juvéderm filler.
Vanity, Charlotte believed, was something to be ashamed of, a holdover from her Protestant upbringing. And yet she cared more about looking old than she’d ever admit. It had only gotten worse after Annie was born and her chin seemed to melt into her neck. It was worse still that she knew she’d be photographed on a daily basis from unforgiving angles with iPhone cameras containing HD lenses. She had figured she could wait until next month to meet with the doctor when she would be in New York for the Humanity board meeting, but Josh’s scrutiny made her second-guess herself and she’d paid Kade triple what he usually charged to drive here on short notice.
“How’d you get here?” Kade filled his needle with the clear liquid and eyed her jogging clothes. “You’re sweaty,” he said with a look of obvious distaste.
“I jogged. Told Max I was going for a run.”
“You can’t run back. You’ll sweat everything out.”
“I’ll walk. It’s fine,” she replied evenly.
“You look tired.”
“I know. That’s why I need you.”
“Everything okay?”
These were the most words they’d ever spoken to each other. Charlotte caught her reflection in the cracked dresser mirror. Her face was pale, her eyes rimmed red. Leila had come home with them from the restaurant and they had stayed up most of the night before sitting at her kitchen table writing and rewriting her speech. Charlotte forced a smile for Kade. “Run-of-the-mill mom exhaustion, wife exhaustion, running-for-political-office exhaustion.”
“Mmmm-hmm.” Kade was already bored by her.
Ten little pricks in strategic places on her forehead, at the corners of her eyes, and around her lips and it was over.
Kade handed her an ice pack. “Keep this on for about five minutes. You’ll look as fresh as a baby’s ass by tonight.”
*
The parking lot of the motel was empty except for Kade’s cherry-red convertible BMW, an eighteen-wheeler, and a family of scrawny stray cats. Charlotte stood there for a breath and allowed the crisp morning air to soothe her raw skin.
Five minutes into her walk home, she stood in front of what was once Regent’s drugstore. The pharmacy had closed five years ago when a Walgreens opened a mile away, but the building still stood, the façade cracking, the G in the sign missing, probably stolen by a teenager named Gavin or Gabe for his dorm-room wall. She ran her hand along the peeling paint of the doorframe, and when she closed her eyes she could picture Max, eighteen years younger than he was today, leaning inside this doorway, cocky and oblivious to anyone who might want to pass by him. It was the first time she’d seen him since high school.
It was 1999. She was twenty-nine and working in public service as an aide to Maryland governor Rosalind Waters. She’d been a systems wonk at Wharton and had drunk the Roz Waters Kool-Aid when she heard her speak about how to run a state government like a business. Charlotte was home for a rare weekend in Elk Hollow that coincided with the annual Fourth of July parade. She was also tipsy. Not drunk, though. Charlotte didn’t like getting drunk and usually set her limit at two drinks, enough that she could get a buzz without being sloppy. The fact that she was drinking at all—during the day, no less—was her brother’s fault. She and Paul had quickly fallen into their long-ago-assigned roles of screwup older brother and eager-to-please little sister. It was almost fun, until it wasn’t. Until beer and warm gin weren’t enough for Paul and he got pissed at her because she wouldn’t lend him a thousand bucks to bet on Holyfield in Atlantic City the following weekend. She tried to explain to him that she made less than thirty grand as a governor’s aide and had more than $100,000 in student loans.
“Then you shouldn’t have gone to those stupid fancy schools,” he spat at her and stalked away. Charlotte didn’t bother to chase him. She needed Advil and maybe a packet of Little Debbie donuts to soak up the booze. But Max blocked her way into the drugstore as he fiddled with a PalmPilot and lazily nipped at a cloud of gauzy cotton candy. She hadn’t seen him in more than ten years. He stood straighter now and had fixed his gray tooth. His face had grown into his nose and he radiated confidence like a Hollywood movie star.
“You got cute.” Charlotte was both surprised and delighted by her uncharacteristic boldness. Though coming from her lips the words still had the tone of a fact rather than a flirtation.
An amused expression touched his eyes before he laughed. He had a good laugh. “Hey, Charlie.”
“Hey, Max.”
He produced a water bottle from his back pocket and handed it to her. She chugged it quickly and gratefully, drops spilling onto her chin. He reached over to wipe them as the two of them settled onto the curb to watch the last remnants of the parade pass: a Buick carrying the mayor, his wife, and their sad-eyed poodle; a squad of high school girls in glittery shorts tossing batons into the air.
Charlotte quickly filled Max in on her job with the governor of Maryland, emphasizing that she’d grown to become Roz’s right-hand woman. She hoped she was impressing him.
He let her finish before he began his own boasts about his big job out in Silicon Valley at the start-up he insisted would change the world—Humanity.
“But what do you do?” she pressed, commandeering the rest of his cotton candy and letting the sugar dissolve on her tongue. What did any of those tech companies really do?
He grinned and closed his eyes like he was about to tell her something special. “Everything. We make companies more productive. Our software, operating systems, and applications streamline everything from human resources to payroll to benefits, customer management, and internal and external communications. We use artificial intelligence to predict what a consumer wants before they know what they want.”
Humanity, whose mission was based on its founders’ impudently naïve adoration of John Maynard Keynes, had begun nobly, in the abstract way most Silicon Valley start-ups do, with the goal of maximizing the efficiency of productivity software to usher in an age of automation such that workers could eventually have a three-day work week. Less time working would give Americans more time to spend with their families and enjoying their interests and hobbies outside of work. The founders, Kevin Rogers and Kumail Chatterjee, dreamed of a world where everyone learned Italian atop a surfboard on Thursdays.
Max nattered on to Charlotte in slick tech jargon—first-mover advantage, scalable best practices, core competencies, the vast expansion of human potential. The irony to Charlotte was that a company called Humanity was doing its best to make humans obsolete. She wasn’t wrong. Once Humanity grew legs in the next decade, mostly due to Charlotte’s organizational skills, once it streamlined the productivity software necessary to fulfill its destiny, it never delivered a three-day work week: It merely ushered in a Cambrian explosion of automation that eliminated millions of jobs around the globe. At the end of the day, altruism was trumped by the Silicon Valley dictum to move fast and break things. What they broke was the American worker.
But Max and the founders wouldn’t have known that yet. Back then, they were still just going to save the world by expanding the weekend and it was cute.
“You’re really full of yourself,” she said.
“Is it turning you on?” He looked amused.
“Not yet.” The truth was, she hadn’t been so attracted to anyone since Jack in high school. Pickings were slim in Annapolis, and working eighty-hour weeks for Roz didn’t leave much time for socializing with the city’s few single men, most of whom popped their collars and wore boat shoes despite never getting on a boat—not that any of them had asked her out. Even knowing what he had been like in high school, this new version of Max Tanner felt completely out of her league.
His hubris and metamorphosis since leaving Elk Hollow intimidated her and made her wonder if she was really all that different from the girl she’d been when she left this town. Had she changed enough to intrigue him?
After the parade wound down, they decided to stroll through town, the edge of a hand occasionally brushing the other’s thigh or a hip, but never explicitly touching. The conversation returned to the superficial—was Y2K as big a deal as everyone said it would be, whatever happened to people they’d both hated in high school. But before they parted ways he turned to look directly into her eyes, daring her to look anywhere but at him.
“We could use people like you at Humanity,” he said to her. In that moment, she knew she’d succeeded in impressing him and she liked the way it made her feel. And then he said ten words that would turn out to make all the difference. “Politics is dull. Come to California. It’ll change your life.” He grinned and Charlotte was a goner.
After witnessing her parents’ unhappy marriage, Charlotte was in no hurry to chase a man, even one as captivating as Max had turned out to be, but she was looking for a new challenge. Roz was going to run for Congress once her term as governor was up and Charlotte had grown wary of the inertia of lethargy that dominated DC. Silicon Valley felt like a place where shit was getting done, where she could make a real difference. The possibility of something happening with Max intrigued her more than she wanted to admit.
Nine months later, she left the East Coast with a single suitcase of Ann Taylor suits she’d never wear again, a few books, and her clunky old answering machine that no longer worked but held something precious: her best friend Anne’s last voice mail she’d left for her, the day before the car accident.
“I fucking miss you. You’d better be out raising hell and making the world a better place if you’re too busy to answer my call. Love you, Moo.”
Before she’d taken off for California, Max had vouched for her, promising Kevin and Kumail in grandiose verbiage that Charlotte Walsh would be the best thing that had happened to the tech world since Google began indexing the World Wide Web. Silicon Valley welcomed newcomers without a pedigree. When Charlotte joined the operations and project management staff at Humanity, her East Coast–establishment work ethic helped her to thrive. She reveled in overseeing the arrogant children as they disrupted industries around the world. She told herself over and over that she hadn’t made the move for Max. In those days she found it easier to lie to herself than to lie to other people.
Moving to California gave her a front-row seat to watch Max court a never-ending parade of ever prettier women while he treated her like an adorable younger sister. “I’m making up for lost time,” he would joke. “I didn’t lose my virginity until after college.” When she thought back on those years, Charlotte felt like she was watching a buddy comedy, the kind that made you cringe for the female protagonist with the unfortunate haircut and thrift store skirts. When Max would get too drunk in the city to go back to his tiny apartment in Palo Alto he’d sleep on Charlotte’s futon at her small apartment in the Mission or sometimes snore alongside her in her bed, never laying a finger on her. They’d commute to the Valley together, eating breakfast burritos and mocking their founders’ interest in things like Transcendental Meditation and forest yoga. He’d shave his Etch A Sketch stubble while she drove.
Max understood her ambition from the beginning and he nurtured it, encouraged her to speak up in meetings, challenged her to think in new ways. It felt like some of his charisma, the charms that endeared him to everyone he met, wore off on her.
The question loomed for her, of course: Can best friends become lovers?
It was easier to stay infatuated with him than to balance a real relationship with her job. She had a brief crush on the woman who ran the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park that went nowhere because Charlotte was too self-conscious to properly flirt with a woman. There was one guy. He was older, a San Francisco hippie, the kind who made money in an ambiguous way and always had enough of it, even though he preached it was the root of all evil. She’d sleep with him on his houseboat in Sausalito, an experiment in forgetting about Max. It was nice to fall asleep on the bay, a reminder that the world beneath you would continue to shift, sometimes violently, sometimes with soft and gentle waves, even if you did nothing at all. She had only a small handful of friends from college in the Bay Area, and they met up once a month or so for overpriced beers or quick manicures. But they all moved to Marin once they had babies, which might as well have been New Jersey if you lived in the city and worked in the Valley. Then came that trip to Yosemite, the poison oak, the thoughtful sex at night, the hard and quick sex in the morning, followed by more waiting, more patience.
Max got weird. Busy.
“I’m thinking about moving to DC. Roz called last week and she wants me back on her team and I’m considering it,” she told him one night at the bar after work, six months after they’d first slept together.
“But I love you,” he replied.
“Okay,” she responded as calmly as she could with her heart thrumming against her rib cage, her breath quickening.
“Marry me?” Even though she’d never been a romantic, it wasn’t how she imagined a marriage proposal.
Charlotte forced the next words out of her mouth. “Too late.”
She flew to DC for a week under the guise of attending job interviews, but spent most of her time wandering the city. The orderly anonymity of the grid was her favorite thing about the nation’s capital. She ducked in and out of museums and had coffee with Roz. When she returned to San Francisco she agreed to meet Max for a beer at one of those tourist traps in Fisherman’s Wharf she knew he despised.
“We should probably date first,” she proposed to him after they’d each ordered a bowl of clam chowder in a sourdough-bread bowl. She liked regaining the upper hand.
“Fine.”
They spent four months making out like teenagers all over the city and in dark closets in the office before he proposed again for real during a trip to the Grand Canyon.
Once Max chose her she finally felt validated, chosen, and comfortable in her own skin. It felt like she’d won something, and the fact she’d never expected victory made it all the sweeter.