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-dried 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,
