Ethan

When Ethan first set eyes on Annie Miller, he thought he’d made a mistake. She was far more attractive than the other women he had been paired with. Her short spiked hair drew attention to her blue eyes, skin browned from the sun. And though her face exhibited eight piercings—three on each ear, a silver ring on her upper right lip, and a tiny stud through the left nostril—they did nothing to reduce her appeal. If anything, the perforations only illustrated just how durable her beauty was. She could change her hair color, pierce her nose and lip, tattoo her forehead if she wanted—and Ethan still would have been seduced by her.

He was at work when he first encountered Annie. She was one of the three million members in the eCouplet.com database, and he was the programmer tasked with improving the member search engine. Every search engine ran on algorithms—lines upon lines of a language that was indecipherable to most humans but was poetry to a computer. Ethan’s algorithms parsed each profile—the favorite movies and foods and colors, the income levels and hometowns—all toward that goal of pairing one person with another.

Ethan sometimes used his own profile for testing. He had developed an entire stable of artificial member profiles that he would insert into the pairing engine, but these were not real people. His, on the other hand, was an authentically average profile, representative of so many millions of people who joined these Web sites—people who did not stand apart in looks or career.

Ethan was taller than most men, with a runner’s build, but he was not an athlete in the organized sports sense of the word. And though his height gave him every right to an extrovert personality, he was shy around women. His photo worked against him. Though his face compared favorably with those of his fellow programmers, he was competing in the gene pool of San Diego, competing against surfers and skateboarders who wore their free spirits in their tanned faces and sun-bleached hair. Ethan was pale, his body artless. He had a full head of dark hair, but the cut was conservative. He intended, one of these days, to visit a salon instead of a barbershop. He intended to take his well-meaning co-worker’s advice: Get his teeth whitened; work on his posture; begin, finally, to look women in the eyes. He’d intended to make numerous self-improvements over the years, but he never followed through. He blamed the job, the long hours, the crunch-time leading up to a new software release. But the truth was, good intentions were no match for his periodic but extreme bouts of insecurity.

Fortunately, insecurity did not come across in a search query—which was how Ethan and Annie met.

When he saw her photo, his initial reaction was to close the search window and start over. When her face came up a second time, he clicked on her profile. She was twenty-four to his twenty-nine. She was an environmental activist. She had been in jail half a dozen times for various protests. She was a college dropout. She bagged groceries at the health food co-op in Hillcrest. She didn’t eat meat.

Ethan suspected a bug in his code. An if/else statement gone awry. A poorly defined algorithm. A memory leak.

Memory was like oxygen to a computer—and every piece of software required memory to function. Elegant software recycled memory after it was used. Poorly written software progressively consumed more and more memory until there was no oxygen left, and the system crashed. One sign of a memory leak was software that acted unusually or, in this case, a search engine that returned odd results.

Ethan returned to the code and meticulously scanned every line for a missing semicolon, a recursive loop, anything that would have paired a geek with a beauty, a meat eater with a vegetarian, a jailbird with someone who’d never gotten as much as a speeding ticket.

He re-compiled the code, ran the search again, and again her smiling face greeted him. He knew better than to believe the numbers could lie—and yet he wanted to believe that the code had functioned correctly, that he and Annie could be a match. That perhaps, for once in his life, destiny and data were in sync.

* * *

This was not a date, Ethan told himself. This was work. Field work.

He would meet Annie for an innocent meal. He would get to know her better. In doing so, he would diagnose why that search engine of his had placed them together. An hour in a restaurant would be far more effective in solving this mystery than another week spent debugging. This was what he told himself, and no one else.

He wasn’t allowed to date Annie. Company policy forbade it. Last year, a competitor came under fire for pimping out its employees on dates to improve member retention rates. But these were details Ethan found easy to overlook; he had not been on a date in more than a year.

He arrived early at the Italian restaurant in Hillcrest and ordered a beer. Annie had suggested the place when she responded to his email; he’d been careful not to use his work account. Her email voice was bright and succinct. He appreciated the absence of smiley faces and exclamation points. As he sat at the table sipping his beer, he began to wonder why she’d agreed to meet him so readily. Surely she’d read his profile; what was the appeal? Unless, perhaps, the search engine was working as intended, had detected something between the two of them that Ethan had not, something that would lead to romance. Ethan’s over-clocked brain began to imagine an evening turning into morning turning into happily ever after.

But this was not a date, he reminded himself.

If this were a date, he would have been visibly nervous. His forehead would have glistened. Words would have collided with one another on the way out of his mouth. The menu would have flapped like a bird’s wing in his hands. But because this was not a date, he was calm. Work was the one area of his life in which he felt completely confident.

He watched her enter the restaurant and pause as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. At first glance, she was wildly contradictory. She wore a blue fifties-style poodle skirt cut a few inches too short for that decade. She wore a white-and-yellow plaid sweater that barely covered the tattoos on her arms. The tattoos on her legs emerged from her bobby socks, winding up her thin legs.

Ethan stood and waved her over. “Annie?”

“Hi, Ethan.” She shook his hand and they both sat down.

His confidence began to vanish, and Ethan looked around for their waiter, feeling the pressure of silence building. When he turned back to Annie, she was extending a clipboard towards him. “Since we’ve got a moment, I was hoping you could sign something,” she said. “It’s a petition to ban foie gras.”

He looked at the clipboard and then at Annie. “I’ll bet you say that to all your dates.”

“You can sign right there.” She handed him a pen and pointed at the bottom of the page, oblivious to his attempt at humor.

Ethan took the petition and squinted at it. The candle at their table didn’t provide enough light to make sense of the fine print. Again he looked for their waiter. He knew he should just sign it and get on with the date—except that it wasn’t a date, and he didn’t like to sign petitions, even for causes he agreed with.

“Do you think we could eat dinner first?” he asked. “I promise not to order…faux…”

“Foie gras.”

“Right. To be honest, I don’t even know what foie gras is.”

Annie gave him a sympathetic smile. The waiter finally arrived, and she ordered a beer. She told him, in surgical detail, about foie gras: the restraining cages, the metal tubes used for ritual force-feeding, the way the ducks would cry to one another at night.

“I have videos,” she said.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“My goal is a thousand signatures. We need more than a quarter million to have a shot at getting this on the ballot. Which is why I’m doing everything short of blocking intersections to get them.”

“Is this date one of your signature-gathering strategies?” Ethan asked.

“Of course not. I’m just here for a free meal.” She smiled.

Ethan assumed she was joking with him, but he could not be sure. While he could always tell what was going on inside of a computer, people were more of a challenge. He was a terrible judge of emotions and other human subtleties, and he knew it but couldn’t seem to solve it. He spent a lot of time over the years asking “what?” as those around him laughed at some inside joke or sexual euphemism that he apparently missed altogether. He was on the outside of most conversations, looking in, trying to see what everyone else saw so easily. He tried not to let it bother him. He was smarter than other people in so many ways, and he contented himself with that knowledge. But he could not help but struggle in moments like this, not knowing if a girl was smiling because she was happy or because she was inwardly laughing at him. At times like this, Ethan often assumed the worst and responded defensively.

“Annie.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t sign your petition,” he said. “It’s not because I don’t agree with your cause, but because as a matter of principle I don’t sign petitions.”

“You don’t sign petitions?” She stared at him.

“Petition drives have gotten out of hand in California. And the only way to fight back is to refuse to sign them altogether. It’s been years since I last signed one.”

“You trying to win a medal or something?”

“Do you realize there were seventeen propositions on the ballot last year?”

“Yes. One was a proposition that I helped get on the ballot.”

“Oh?”

“Proposition 3. To expand the size of battery cages for chickens.”

“I thought you didn’t eat meat.”

“I don’t eat meat, or any animal product. But even those on death row deserve humanity.” Annie stood and reached for her backpack. “Look, Ethan, if you’re not going to sign it, that’s fine. It’s your choice. Give me my clipboard.”

As Ethan handed it back, the waiter approached with Annie’s beer, and she held the clipboard out to him. “Would you like to sign a petition banning foie gras?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “We don’t serve it here.”

“And you don’t have any principles against signing petitions?”

“Why would I?” he asked. Annie looked down at Ethan, and he wanted to jump to his feet, grab the clipboard back, and start again. But it was already too late—he had gone from first impression to last impression in record time.

“Nice to have met you, Ethan,” she said.

He nodded, avoiding eye contact, then stared at her back as she left the restaurant. He paid for the beers, and as he walked home he tried to convince himself that he’d done the right thing. She was trying to use him, and he had held his ground. Back in high school, the only pretty girls he’d gotten close to were those who needed help with their homework. He was branded a computer nerd, and even the emergence of fabulously rich computer nerds did not seem to brighten his prospects. He had come to assume the worst of beautiful women: They wanted something from him. How could they not? What good was he but for a late-night computer question, a re-installed operating system, a signature?

He had been accused by previous girlfriends—all three of them—for not talking enough. The last one—the one with whom he could see a real future, even marriage—told him he was emotionally distant. She was probably right, but he did not know how to rectify the situation. He was fluent in any number of programming languages, but these were foreign tongues to the women he most wanted to be with, and plain conversational English often seemed foreign to him. Over the years, he’d made significant upgrades to his repertoire of small talk. He could banter about the weather in San Diego (or lack thereof) and the best beaches to surf (though he didn’t surf). But small talk only delayed the inevitable. Eventually a woman wanted more. Eventually, in quiet moments together in cars or in elevators or at home waiting for the toaster to pop, he would have nothing more to say. She would ask what she had done wrong. He would tell her that everything was fine. And eventually she would see him as mute, paralyzed, useless. And she would leave.

When Ethan returned home, he logged into eCouplet, telling himself he needed to check his work email, though he only wanted to see her face again. And then he realized his hypocrisy. He had accused Annie of using him for his signature. But he had been using her, too, manipulating a search engine, asking her out under cowardly pretenses. And neither had gotten what they wanted.

When Ethan went to look up her picture, he was denied access. She had blocked him from viewing it.

If he’d only signed that silly sheet of paper, just signed it. She would have put the clipboard away. They would have had a fantastic meal. They might have made the perfect match. Instead, she had dumped him, after only one date.

And it wasn’t even a date.