Triptych
The woman didn’t go out on a date until a few years after her husband’s car crash. The man had reached out over LinkedIn of all places. He introduced himself as a Tawkify matchmaker, hired by someone named Charlie. She hadn’t heard of Tawkify before, so she checked out their website.
Dating apps are just not designed to work for you.
Tawkify’s professional matchmaker has cracked the code on what it will take to get you to a second date.
She thought to herself that an attractive man - the kind to turn heads from both sides of the dinner table when he spoke - shouldn’t need to hire a Tawkify matchmaker. But still, who knew? Out of curiosity, she decided to take the call.
“Charlie’s finally looking to settle down after spending all his life building up the family restaurant,” the matchmaker explained to her over the phone. “Didn’t grow up rich but is doing well now. Very well. Also, he’s got no kids. That’s hard to find after a certain point. But yes, he’s doing well. He’s looking to settle down.” The matchmaker spoke with the cadence of an auctioneer.
The woman wondered what her hypothetical matchmaker would say to potential matches. Grew up middle class, but is now lower middle class. At best. Also, she’s a single mom that works at a library. But yes, she’s doing fine. Well, just ok actually. Going once… going twice.
Given the circumstances around her husband’s car crash, none of the woman’s friends and family had offered to set her up on a date. If it had been a divorce, her sister would have set up a Hinge profile without her permission, and shortly thereafter, her college friends would be swiping through profiles for her over dinner. But in this situation, there wasn’t exactly a socially acceptable way to tell someone to hurry on up with it already - even after all these years.
Still, there was progress. The woman no longer sat on the floor of her husband’s closet, enveloping herself in his clothes and scents. And she had long gotten out of the habit of scrolling through texts from early on in their relationship, back when she would lock herself in the handicapped restroom to send him racy selfies during her lunch breaks. At the time, it felt like their love could have burned down whole cities. She could still feel the heat radiating after all these years.
To the woman’s surprise, despite her transparency, the Tawkify matchmaker still provided her with Charlie’s contact information. Curious, she did more research on Tawkify and found that consulting packages started from $5,000 and went all the way up to $70,000. The packages ranged in the number of coaching sessions and the number of dates organized.
Essentially, she realized, the date was likely happening because of Tawkify’s business model. They probably needed to guarantee a certain number of dates for Charlie given all the money he had dropped on the service. And maybe, Charlie didn’t go for the ultra-premium tier that would have filtered out dates with single moms.
She and Charlie decided to meet at a bowling alley on a Tuesday night. It was her suggestion. The consensus in the dating over forty subreddit was that bowling was the ideal first date - casual, low commitment, and with an activity to bond over.
Charlie was already at the bowling alley when she arrived. He looked mostly like his photos, except there was somehow less of him - as though he were a boxer cutting weight or a runner slimming down for a marathon. Even his hair seemed wispier.
Charlie asked what she’d like to drink. She told him to get her a Shirley Temple. He ordered a beer for himself.
While they waited for their drinks, she asked Charlie about how he got into the restaurant business. Charlie spoke about how he practically grew up at his parents’ bodega in Brooklyn. “As a kid, I did most of my homework in between ringing up customers at the register,” he explained. She noticed Charlie’s Brooklyn accent then - he spoke as though he were chewing on the edges of his words.
“At least your parents could help you with homework since they were also at the bodega right?”
Charlie laughed. “If anything, I’d be the one helping them with making coffee or cleaning the grill. My parents never went to college, so homework wasn’t exactly their strong suit.”
“They did their best though,” he said as he drank from his beer. “What about you? What’s your deal?”
She told Charlie about working in the local library for almost two decades now. It was the best job in the world in her mind.
“I’m thinking the best part about it is being able to read on the job,” Charlie guessed.
She shook her head. She talked about watching the community grow. Teenagers who would come in during summers when she first joined were now bringing their own children into the library.
“But also,” she continued. “Some of the old people that would come in regularly just stop coming in after a while. So there’s that too.”
She and Charlie ended up not bowling. Instead, they remained at the bar for another round of drinks. This time, she ordered a Merlot. I’ll have whichever one isn’t from France, she told the bartender.
The woman spoke to Charlie about the challenges of being a single mom and the strange circumstances around the car crash. I was always neutral on the kids question, she said. But he always wanted kids and I knew just how happy he’d be as a father.
But the more she spoke about her past, the more she felt herself pulling back. She knew that it wasn’t helpful to compare, but in this case, it couldn’t be helped.
Charlie’s height (about the same), his weight (much less), and his net worth (?) were all relative to her husband. And what she was noticing now was how quickly Charlie spoke (faster).
What she loved most about her husband was how slowly he took things - when in bed, when in conversation with her overly chatty mom, when working his way through a pick-and-roll on his high school basketball team, when in bed… Back in high school, Cool Hand Luke was what his basketball coach and teammates had called him. She had never seen the movie, but the nickname had always made sense to her.
That said, her husband wasn’t an angel. Although she tried not to think about it much, she always did wonder about the graduate student riding shotgun with her husband at the time of the car crash. Naturally, she was the pretty one that she’d met at the holiday party the year before - the lithe one with curves.
She stopped herself. She was beginning to breathe heavily and Charlie had put a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you alright?”
She nodded and took a deep breath.
For a long while, Charlie and the woman remained silent. The lack of conversation was filled by the sounds of children laughing and bowling balls crashing into pins.
“Last call for drinks! Last call!” The bartender shouted from the other side of the bar.
“Well, I’d imagine you’re not able to get out all that much with your schedule. Must be getting late for you,” Charlie said as he looked at his watch.
Charlie was right. The last time she had gone to the climbing gym was over a month ago and dinner with friends maybe a few weeks before then.
She drained the rest of the Merlot in her glass and looked more closely at Charlie, noticing hints of veins running along his forearms. He wasn’t overly skinny, she thought to herself. He was just lean. A former athlete maybe? Cross country? Rock climbing? She wondered what nickname he would have had in high school. She doubted it was better than Cool Hand Luke.
But then again, she thought as she felt the Merlot rise up to her cheeks, there really was only one way to find out.
When the bartender looked over, she raised her hand and pointed to her empty glass.
“A month-long honeymoon? Really?” The teenager said when his mom called from work to tell him the news. It would be the teenager’s first summer alone and his last before leaving for college.
“There’s multiple connecting flights along with two boat rides to get to the island. And Charlie and I really want to make sure we get the most of our honeymoon.” His mother paused, as though to think of some olive branch. “Thanksgiving, we’ll be sure to do something. We’ll go anywhere you want for Thanksgiving - really, anywhere. But in the meantime, we’re going to need to think about what you want to do this coming summer. I can ask Jake’s parents if you can stay in their basement. You spend so much time there anyways so I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big change… Or, I could ask Aunt Emmy to fly in for a while to keep you company? She likes it in Los Angeles in the summer time since it’s dry and not too humid.”
“Hello?” his mother asked after a while. “Are you still there?”
The teenager had not hung up. He was busy, pondering if the we in we’ll go anywhere you want for Thanksgiving meant just him and his mother, given that they were the ones speaking on the phone. Or, did we now also include his stepfather?
The teenager thought that there was an ambiguity to the word we. Over time, the word’s meaning would change. When two people get married, they became a we, a we that grew with each additional child that was added to the family. But over time, the group would slowly shrink as the original family unit died off, one by one.
The teenager was of the opinion that Charlie and other stepfathers definitely did not get included into a family’s concept of we. At least not by default.
“It’s fine Mom,” he eventually said. “I think I know how I want to spend my summer.”
“Ok that’s great. Really that’s great,” The words tumbled out of her, relieved. “You know, we’ve never been to Texas before and I know how much you like barbecue. Maybe we can make it out to Austin for Thanksgiving since I’ve heard it’s all hip over there now. Charlie’s even got a timeshare that we can stay in… But really, we can go wherever. I don’t mean to make plans for us again. We’ll do whatever you want to do.”
The teenager’s mother went on to talk about other potential Thanksgiving trips, but she didn’t ask what the teenager had planned for the summer. He happened to be ok with this.
He had gotten his driver’s license just a few months ago, so he would be able to entertain himself. He could drive some of his friends down to the Peninsula for some hiking. Or, they could even pool together some money to get a cabin in Tahoe for a couple nights. By the summertime, all the snow would be melted off the roads, which would make for an easy drive up to Tahoe.
And when he wasn’t out with friends on road trips, he didn’t mind staying at home by himself over the summer. It would be the NBA playoffs then, which meant that he could spend time in the hospital, watching the Lakers with his father.
Moments of lucidity were few and far between for the patient, like rocks amidst the ocean.
Occasionally, he found himself slowly piecing together parts of his life, coaxed by voices echoing from a far off place. Lately, there was a familiar voice echoing most frequently in his consciousness. He couldn’t understand what exactly the voice was saying, but it lit a spark for the patient.
He has a son. He has a wife. He has a job as a professor at the University of San Francisco.
And the last thing he remembers is this: the sound of his body crunching as a pickup smashed into his car.
On the way back home, he had been driving one of his graduate students Kim back to her apartment after office hours. She had asked him out to drinks earlier that week, a request he politely turned down. Still, he offered her a ride home after the office hours that they were co-hosting during finals week. In his mind, it got too dark around the winter time for public transit.
That office hours session, however, was particularly challenging. The students had trouble grasping the concept of multivariate linear regression, which meant that he and Kim were basically out of breath by the end of office hours from answering questions. A drink right now doesn’t sound all that bad actually, he told Kim, once she got into his car.
Kim looked at him then and smiled. I have a wine bar in mind, she said.
The patient remembers staying for more than one drink at the wine bar. He remembers the form-fitting white crop top Kim was wearing. He remembers Kim’s fingers grazing against his as they stumbled out of the bar. What he doesn’t remember, though, is what exactly he intended to do after driving Kim to her apartment. He thinks that maybe he’ll never know.
One thing he does know is that his wife’s favorite drink is a Merlot. On their honeymoon to Bordeaux, they took their rented car to the various vineyards on the outskirts of the city, frantically hooking up in the backseat in between every tasting. They were late to just about every appointment.
Years later, they found out that they had done the tastings all wrong. The best Merlots were on the right side of the river, and they had only visited the vineyards on the left bank. Since then, his wife refused to drink Merlot from France. Well, she explained. I’m obviously saving the right bank Merlots for when we go back.
For when we go back… Those words sound familiar to the patient. He begins to recognize that this isn’t the first time he’s pieced together the puzzle of his life, the implication being that he would most likely forget all this soon enough, a realization that causes him to panic.
How long had he been asleep anyways? And if he woke up, would he be able to speak in full sentences? Would he be able to walk?
The patient wishes he studied medicine instead of economics. If he had studied medicine, maybe he would have read the latest research from respected medical journals, ideally something titled, “Optimal strategies for waking up when in a deep coma.”
Instead, he went the business management route, but ended up getting bored with all the business jargon, which was how he made his way to economics. He thought of how strange it was to have a business management track for college kids. What kind of company would hire a 21-year old as a manager? At that age, he didn’t even know his drink order at a bar.
It occurred to the patient that even now, he wasn’t sure what his drink order would be at a bar. Whiskey on the rocks? A tequila soda maybe? It would be something light, not heavy. He knew he hated feeling bloated.
The patient imagined himself at the Elephant Room, a bar that he and his college friends used to go to once they became seniors. He imagined himself sitting at the corner of the bar against a booth where he could see all four of the queen-bed sized television screens. As usual, there was a substantial line at the order window where everyone’s holding a beer and a ticket - the Elephant Room was popular for giving a free hot dog voucher with every drink order.
He wondered what he was doing at the Elephant Room anyways. He was alone and he wasn’t quite sure who he was waiting for. He tried to retrace his thoughts. There was something about economics and his detour into business management… There was a thread to be pulled there, the patient thought, but he couldn’t seem to find the other end.
It’ll come back, he said to himself as he took a sip of his beer. He turned to watch the Lakers game on the television screen closest to him. The Lakers were down two with just a few minutes to go. Shaq had the ball in the left block and was methodically backing down his defender.
It’s going to be a spin move back to his right hand, the patient thought to himself before hearing a voice reverberating from the walls of the Elephant Room.
He looked around, but no one else at the bar seemed to hear the voice, which was just barely incomprehensible. It was as though he were hearing the voice from several feet underwater. He closed his eyes to listen more closely.
Shaq turnaround hook shot is… good! And one. He’ll probably miss the free throw though.
He opened his eyes and turned to the television. Shaq was fouled while making a turnaround hookshot.
He actually made the free throw. Wow. Banked it in though.
A few seconds later, the television screen showed Shaq banking in the free throw.
Spurs call a timeout. Wow, what a game.
Then, the Spurs called a timeout. The patient frowned. He looked around the bar to see where the seemingly prophetic voice might be coming from.
It was coming from outside the Elephant Room, he thought. He wanted to follow the voice, but the game was almost over and he had hardly even touched his beer. Maybe after the game he would go outside. After the game, he would try to see where exactly the voice was coming from.
Come to think of it, when was the last time he had gone outside the bar? The patient could not remember. He looked down at his beer and realized that he wasn’t even sure when he had ordered it.
The patient looked to the exit and noticed sunlight seeping in from the edges of the doorway. It was the kind of sunlight that promised a breeze with summer scents.