“Ooh, he’s cute. How tall?”
“Six feet.”
“OK even if he’s five-foot-ten with tall shoes I say go for it. He looks like he takes care of himself.”
Lina agrees and swipes right.
• • •
The inane podcast blaring from Joey’s earbuds ducks in volume, making space for a blinging notification. He rinses his fingertips in the sink, wipes his hand on his shorts, and checks his phone.
You matched with Lina!
He sniffs an inhale and taps the notification to remind himself who Lina is out of the thousands of women on whom he auto-swiped.
Oh yeah.
He appraises her pictures. She looks good. She isn’t fat and she doesn’t look like she’s going to steal money. That’s enough.
• • •
“heyy”
“I knew you were going to match me,” texts Joey. He has learned to burn through the fuel of his confidence as fast as he can early in the conversation.
“oh ya?”
“yeah”
“how?”
“I just knew” Joey deletes the vague response and replaces it with, “because you saw the picture with my dog, he was irresistable”
“lol maybe ur right”
Come on, give me something, thinks Joey. At the same time, he crosses his fingers that he won’t have to explain the “was” in the story about the dog, not actually his, dying recently, tragically; as well as the lie works, it weighs on him every time he repeats it. He waits another second, hoping Lina will say anything that proves she is a living human being, but gets impatient and fires off another message.
“where’d you get that cocktail in your second picture? looks good” Joey cringes as he sends the message. Was it too obvious, too transparent a setup? “looks good—” so stupid, but maybe Lina is stupid. He fights off a fisherman’s worry.
Lina chases down her cat and forces him to swallow a pill. She plops in her armchair, ready to focus. She feels guilty that she was so unfocused for the opening messages but knows now that her distraction is through, she can appraise this guy for real.
“oh ya… goldstar lounge, its a cute place, the drinks are SO good and not that expensive, it’s like ten mins from me” Lina feels stupid. Even “focused” she is coming across as boring to herself. Why is she talking about how cheap the drinks are? It makes her herself seem cheap, she thinks.
“where do u live” Lina feels that she is asking a dumb question but cannot pinpoint what is dumb about it.
“oh lol I live really close to Goldstar, I just mapped it, but never even heard of it”
Joey splits his brain in half. One side keeps track of the conversation with Lina, if it has even risen to the level of “conversation;” the other half clicks through the online menu of the Goldstar Lounge, making sure her comment about the price was not some kind of reverse psychology to weed out all but the richest suitors. It looks fine: single-digit-dollars for beers and the fanciest cocktail comes out to seventeen. He tabs back to Lina. Three dots indicate she’s typing. They disappear. Joey grimaces.
Lina is sick of the cycle. She’s sick of herself. The coy, overly-metagamed back-and-forths that have made every man like every other man and every woman like every other woman sicken her. She understands that she has been a complicit player. She looks at mens’ heights before she looks at their pictures now. She looks at the pictures before she reads the text. She doesn’t believe a single word of what’s in her own bio and she doesn’t feel like she looks like any of her own pictures. How many times is she going to do this? What is “this?” None of her girlhood stories felt anything like this. It’s not like I’m looking for Prince Charming or anything, but come on! This is how people meet nowadays? Dry, calculated texts, one in a thousand is good at all, one in a million is worth dating? “Dating” — the same program, over and over: coffee on a Saturday afternoon, then something involving booze a week later, maybe dinner, maybe not; a hug that lingers, a kiss if he’s ballsy; she blushes if he’s tall enough and his forearm veins bulge enough; “when can I see you again?”; more booze next weekend, leading to sex, finally, as if it weren’t all so predictable, as if it weren’t always worse than it seems like it should be; two dinners the week after; “come over to my place, let’s watch a movie” — yeah, right, a movie; his place smells weird; she lets him anyway; now they have to talk about stuff; she feels dumb because she doesn’t know anything; he seems dumb too, and possibly conservative, possibly racist; she doesn’t like him anymore; the same breakup text every time: “im not sure what im looking for right now, i just dont think its the right time for me”; redownload the app — she didn’t even delete it in the first place.
No more.
Lina sees herself from above, a labrat in a circular maze, and makes up her mind.
Enough.
She wells up with free will and types, “meet me there in 30 mins.” Lina’s phone is closed before Joey can type a response. She’s going either way, she decides.
Lina flamingo-steps out of her unflattering shorts and pulls her tanktop off. She switches her bra out for one with thinner, more discreet straps then scans through a mental image of her closet as she heads to the bathroom. Her favorite lipstick slides easily, the weight balanced just so in her grip. Eye-liner wings come out perfect, emphasizing not-too-much, not-too-little shadow. The green dress — obviously. It smells fresh enough and fits great as always. The gold flats are sitting right there, beckoning to her, the only elegant shoes she owns in which she can survive more than a quarter-mile of walking. The dangly earrings, the cute bracelet, the elastic hair tie — Lina meets her own gaze in the mirror, a rockstar ready to rock in record time. She grabs her phone on her way out the door.
“I’ll be there.”
Yeah you will.
Lina strides into the Goldstar Lounge, hips lilting with the invigorated energy of a woman who is living a real life. She is going to pierce the veil and meet Joey on the other side. He will awaken with her from the hazy stupor that has leaked into every corner of life. He will look into her eyes and reassure her, let her know that he’s real, he’s for real, he’s alive and so is she. He’ll grip her shoulder in an uncreepy way, a warm way, and transport them as a pair beyond this realm of sludge, to the realm of truth and light where the body’s senses are dialed all the way up and money doesn’t exist anymore, where blood pumps and wine flows and hearts beat and eyes flutter, no more websites, no more calendars, time itself a singular point — now, nothing but now. Lina actualizes with every step. There he is — the only other person in the universe.
“Hey!”
He twists out of his stool, standing to behold her. She enters his personal space. He goes for the hug and she matches his boldness, wrapping her arms around his neck. Time itself gasps. They lock eyes and smile into each other’s smiles.
“You look beautiful,” he says without releasing his hands from her low back.
“Shut up,” she giggles. Her eyes twinkle. Their arms intertwined around each other’s bodies form a circuit through which energy flows. Their faces are the resistors that light up and project beams of the possibility of nascent love. His reflects hers and hers reflects his.
He swallows, half-afraid to end the moment, but then asks, “what do you want to drink?”
“Vodka cran.”
He turns to the bartender and slides out the neighboring stool. “Two vodka cranberries.”
Seriously? What are you, a teenage girl? What self-respecting man— Lina attempts to truncate her unfair thought, and although she manages to cork the flow of internal words, her radiant, affirmed disposition wilts in an instant, like an orchid uncared for. She looks at Joey. She doesn’t recognize him. How could she? She doesn’t know him. She never knew him. His sideburn comes down a little too low. His chin sort of slides into his neck, unsquare. She doesn’t think he’s actually six feet.
“Cheers,” he offers, extending his little glass.
“Cheers,” she mumbles, suddenly darkened.
“You looked great in your photos but even better in person.” He’s trying to recapture the eye contact he lost.
“Shut up,” she says once again, but without bright mirth as before.
His smile hangs as he tries to process if what he just heard was an actual request to shut up.
“Uh—”
Lina cuts him off before he can form a word, not even by speaking but by pulling out her phone. It illuminates in blue her pouting face which to him now looks like a lumpy fruit on its way to rotting. He pulls out his phone too.