This Modern Love

by Ray Hecht

  Candace stood up. “Come here,” she said, and opened her arms. “Look. I owed you more than a text breakup. Don’t take it so bad.”

  He carefully stepped around the plug and he went to her. They hugged. He felt her warm body against his and squeezed tight. She patted him. He couldn’t help feeling her breasts flattened against his torso. How he wished he would be getting laid tonight.

  Afterwards, Ben gathered his things into his bag and waved goodbye. He took the long walk home and didn’t look back. He observed other coffee shops, restaurants, and boutiques. He saw young couples pushing carriages, old couples walking dogs, and found himself slightly envious of those people. A sense of loneliness stabbed at him, and it cut deep.

  Passing through a residential neighborhood as the shops disappeared, he became the lone pedestrian for several blocks over. The palm trees hid him from the sun and parked cars stared menacingly.

  He fiddled with his pockets. Tapped at the laptop in the bag. Opened and closed his wallet. Glanced at the unused condom inside. He turned his phone off and on, and started to draft messages to Candace but then deleted after the word Hello.

  When he played around with his various apps to see if there were any updates, he couldn’t resist logging on to Arrowchat.

  He sent a simple Hiya to a girl he’d been chatting with over the weekend, and felt guilty in doing so. All the while he’d been telling himself that he would never meet her so long as he was with Candace, but the simple truth was that he indeed had kept such correspondences as backups.

  The girl he’d been chatting with was a fan of Space Squad and Ice Realm, but she lived on the far inland end of the state. He didn’t want to stop talking to her, but he didn’t know any better. In the here and now, Candace was supposed to be his best bet at a stable relationship. But then again they’d only been together a few weeks. They didn’t have much in common, but she was a living, breathing, attractive woman. They’d had sex four times. Did that or didn’t that imply a certain commitment?

  He didn’t know the protocol. Was she right to be so hard on him? So much pressure.

  His mind raced all over the place with these thoughts, like a car spinning out of control on wet snow.

  It didn’t snow here in the southern, beach-adjacent end of the state. Sometimes, he wished it would.

  * * *

  Back in the early 1800s, an offshoot of the Weiss family happened to be enjoying a comfortable life in the suburbs of Prague. After some disenfranchised Cossacks—left wanting after harsh economic times—instigated a violent anti-Jewish pogrom, the family was left with their home half burnt and their possessions ransacked. The matriarch of the family, a great-grandmother with a dozen living descendants, insisted that the youngest of them be brought to the United States. She did not make it, but after selling her jewelry she demanded her middle son emigrate along with his wife and three children. They traveled by way of ship, from a German port in Hamburg, and arrived in New York City the following summer.

  The eldest of those children was Ben’s grandfather, and with the help of distant relatives and the broader Jewish community he started his own fabric shop in a Brooklyn neighborhood. He retired happily in Florida, while the next generation moved westwards step by step in a series of business ventures. Ben’s father, another eldest son, did not wish to follow in the family footsteps, and studied literature instead of fabrics. He even married a Goy, for a spell. However, his dreams fell through and he returned to retail despite himself, and tried, and failed, at opening a bookstore in Ohio. Then another in Minnesota. When he inherited a camera shop from an estranged uncle in New Mexico, he decided to settle down. There he met his second wife, a local teacher’s assistant who sometimes volunteered at the synagogue, though in practice the couple was not particularly religious. The shop did well, and the inventory expanded to include various emerging technological products. He was able to sell to a chain retailer and set up shop in what would be his final move upon the western edge of the American coast.

  Finally, Benjamin Weiss was born. The middle child between an older brother and younger sister (not including half-brothers from his father’s previous marriage, something often left unsaid in the family) young Ben was surrounded by technology and had a knack for mathematics. His father fostered the child’s intelligence, giving him special treatment, and encouraged him to tinker with cameras as well as other products. Ben graduated high school with honors, and studied information technology at a prestigious coastal university. However, as he saw many of his fellow classmates drop out of school in order to form their own technology startups, some of which were actually successful, he too dropped out in his third year. This caused a major disruption in the family, and afterwards his father refused to offer any financial support. In the end, his own startup failed, although he had learned much, and went back to school to quickly receive an easy Bachelor’s Degree in the generalized field of Communications Technology. Since then, he entertained no further plans for higher education.

  Over the past year Ben has edged out a living by way of freelance coding for various technology companies, while his former college roommate and closest friend graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Programming.

  After a year of talk, he and his friend have finally registered their new company within the state and now they just need a solid product.

  Ben Weiss, though somewhat naïve, remained ever hopeful.

  * * *

  Several hours had passed since his disappointing lunch date, and Ben was resting easy in his ergonomic swivel chair. His ass was comfortable, but his heart was not.

  He spent much of his time in the chair, with his face planted in front of the oversized, ultra-sharp monitor. He would hunt for jobs on Dougspost, he would spend hours coding for different clients, and he would also watch streaming videos—pornographic and otherwise—and play massive online role-playing games.

  His bedroom was too small, barely enough room for the floor mattress surrounded by old textbooks and genre novels piled in each corner. A spacious living room was the preferred living space. His roommate was often out, so no one minded.

  He meant to get some work done, but he didn’t have much in him. Attempting to enjoy the day, he started up a Forever Fantasy Tactics Online campaign. Distracted, he ate two bags of potato chips and decided he didn’t like being alone. He quit the game and decided to open up the peer-to-peer video program.

  Luckily, his good friend and business partner Matthew Lee was blinking green on Kiter.

  He clicked dial.

  Matthew’s face popped up, wearing headphones. He was saying something, but the audio was muted.

  “What?” asked Ben. “Matt, are you free now?”

  There was no answer. “Hey, can you hear me?”

  “What?”

  “I can’t hear you but can you hear me?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

  “Can you hear me or not?”

  They went back and forth like this for an unnerving amount of time, until they were finally connected and ready to start a real conversation.

  “I hate Kiter,” said Mathew. “Why didn’t you text me?”

  “I want to have a reatime brainstorming session,” said Ben. “I’m in the mood.”

  “I mean, okay. We can have a session. But you know Kiter sucks so much! You spend more time asking ‘can you hear me?’ than actually talking about anything else. So much surface and no substance.”

  “I totally agree,” said Ben, fully distracted, in glorious work mode. “Therefore, let’s do something about it.”

  “Do something? I thought we agreed we shouldn’t enter the cam market. It’s already very oversaturated. The big names are too big. It’s over!”

  “But our own compression algorithms could smooth things over so easily. We could totally speed up the audio rates, and by significant margins. No more waiting to catch up. Remember that project we did sophomore year?”

  “Yeah but come on dude, let’s not reiter
ate the past. Enough already. I thought you had the idea for the dating app, not old college cam projects. What is it?”

  “I’m just spitballing.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Okay, carry on” he said, sad to start thinking about dating again. “Missed connections.”

  “Missed connections it is.”

  Matthew was the coding guy, who had done much of the bulk mathematical homework.

  Ben was the idea guy, as well as the other coding guy. Actually, Matthew was the idea guy too half the time.

  The missed connections theme was Ben’s initial spark. It happened upon him one afternoon, after he saw a familiar cute coed exiting the communal laundromat, and the two of them locked eyes for a moment, quickly trying to recall how they knew each other. Then she walked away without a word and Ben was left standing there, defeated. He never crossed paths with her at such an opportune moment ever again, and often wondered what she was thinking that time. He was too embarrassed to even go back to the laundromat. He spent a lot of time in those days thinking about what he should’ve said, but moreover he wished he had the chance to converse with her online (a medium he was decidedly more comfortable with than real life), and he wished there was a way.

  So he decided to invent a way.

  “Missed connections,” repeated his partner. “Locked on to your personal device’s GPS. All synched to the major social networking sites, conveniently fitting in your pocket for your smartphone. Hmmm. It beats those classified ads sites and newspapers, obviously. It is a decent idea. I approve.”

  Unfortunately, for an idea guy, Ben was in the wrong place. The wrong town altogether. The real action was due north. He still took up freelance coding jobs by remote, but was uninterested in a fulltime position at a big firm up there. He told Matt he had better things to do, and it was too competitive up there anyhow. In truth, he didn’t want to leave his family. The prospect of moving was frightening.

  “You’ve done some fine work in my absence,” said Matt, skimming his partner’s text and pic files. “I could smooth over some bugs, sure. But I can see it’s going pretty well.”

  “Hey, I mostly know what I’m doing.”

  “We’re still just focusing on Grapephone OS, is that right?”

  “I may have to admit I only know what I’m doing,” Ben said with reluctance, “when it comes to Grapeware.”

  “It’s cool. That’s the hip OS, right? Fits our style.”

  “Well then, when the funding starts flowing in we can get some other specialists to work on cross-platform compatibility.”

  “Sure, thing. Plenty of Robot experts out there,” Matt said, referring to the competition’s operating system, and picked up some papers to flash over his laptop’s camera. White paper filled the opposing computer monitor, blurry, the text taking a moment to focus. It was no technical X spreadsheet, merely words and badly-drawn pictures. “Let’s talk about marketing. I can’t deal with the names here.”

  “What’s wrong with Connectidiche?”

  “Come on.”

  Ben reached around the desk to pick up some notebooks from the floor. He flipped through them and ran his finger over various sketches and scratchy handwriting. “Okay, I have some more ideas. Connect Pi. Missus Miss. MissingU. MissedU. That’s with a capital ‘U.’ Look at the designs I drew, with the hearts and the word balloons.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Matthew lamented.

  “Just brainstorming here.”

  “Word balloon? Seriously? Like that’s never been done.”

  “I said I’m just brainstorming.”

  “We so totally have to hire some professional marketing people.”

  “That’s a bridge I don’t want to cross for a long while.” Ben was getting overwhelmed, beginning to regret initiating this conversation.

  ”Not your forte?” Mathew replied.

  “Not in the budget.”

  “We’ll get some of that sweet, sweet V.C. funding eventually.”

  “Speaking of funding…” They then resumed the session with more vigor, delving into the technical aspects of cross-platform compatibility specifically in regard to online banking, and Ben felt content.

  This sort of thing went on for a good while, and eventually Mathew suggested they disconnect and call it a day. “It’s been very productive,” he said. “But I’m supposed to be working right now, and my client—”

  “Wait,” said Ben. “There’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  “How about beta testing?”

  “No way! You’re too impulsive, Ben. We’re months and months away from that. We need to hire some interns, and so forth.”

  “I don’t agree. I’m ready. Look, I have a lot of free time. You said today was productive. Let’s get a product out there as soon as possible, and start meeting the women.” He immediately regretting saying it out loud.

  “Damn, do you actually want to use the app to meet girls?”

  “Um. Duh?” No choice now but to lay it out there. “That’s kind of the point. That and making money out of helping others do the same.”

  “At this juncture, I just don’t know.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “Don’t you have a girlfriend or something?”

  “Well. Anyhow. About that… No comment.”

  “Oh, man,” said Mathew, condescendingly. “I get it.”

  “No you don’t. Look, the way I see it, our problem is that we have these grand ideas, and the technical know-how, but we don’t get women. I mean, who the fuck do we think we are to make a romance app?”

  “Get women?” asked Mathew, perplexed.

  “We don’t understand women. How to get them, how to play the game. The technology, awesome as it may be, isn’t enough. We need more.”

  “Ha ha,” he laughed. “We’re smart alright, but we’ll never be that kind of genius.”

  “Speak for yourself,” retorted Ben. “Seriously though, the sooner we can figure out the social bugs the better.”

  “Social bugs?”

  “Yeah. Like, uh, life-hacks. Real world glitches, the social rules. Women have all their own rules. Don’t you know? You can’t be logical about it. I mean, consider how in the early years Arrowmatch was free for everyone. Then they charged for women but not men, because they started getting all those fake accounts. Now they have authenticated systems as well, tie it into your phone number and social account and all. Even bars with ladies’ nights work that way. We need to figure out a proper pricing range, the curve with regards to gender, make it unfair, that sort of thing.”

  “We’ll figure out the pricing thing when we go live. It’s not hard to change, you just adapt with the market. That’s economics, dude.”

  “I don’t mean only prices. Moreover, like, what does and doesn’t creep women out? How can we know that our app is any good? We want to get the nice girls and the serious guys, right? Differentiate ourselves from Minnderrr and the hookup scene. That’s what I’m talking about here, Matt. But it’s so tricky with women, it really is. We need to figure out the particulars before they surprise us later and it’ll be too late.”

  Mathew had to think about that. “I’m not sure I follow. Maybe it’s just not my expertise. So, you’re saying women get offended easily or whatever?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Oh, I know. We’ll hire an expert consultant!”

  “An expert?”

  “Hire a female intern. That’s the solution, right?”

  “That kind of expert?” Ben paused and munched on chips as he thought about it. His mind often worked best while crunching. “Eventually, I guess. That’s not the crux of the matter.”

  “Why not? Ben, if we supposed to figure out this social glitch thing as you call it, why not just ask a girl? You’re losing me.”

  “Look, I have thought about it. Of course, we’ll be equal-opportunity employers when we make it big, and all that. But for now…”

  “Wha
t?

  “See here.” He paused, swallowed, and realized how to put it. “My roommate Jack always told me that you should never ask a girl what she wants because she’s the last one to know. You can only figure out what girls respond to intuitively, and by way of trial and error.”

  “No way. Your roommate!? You mean that player dude you always talk about?”

  “Yeah. I mean, kind of. I wouldn’t say Jack is a player exactly, but he always has women over, um, every week or so.”

  “Wow…” The conversation was about to take a turn. “Different girls?” Mathew asked, eyes closed and mouth twitching.

  “He has some regulars, then some new girls every so often.”

  “At the same time?!”

  “Um, no. Like overlapping times. Come on.”

  “Are they hot?”

  Ben shrugged. “Pretty hot. I guess.”

  “Does he meet them at clubs and that kind of scene?”

  “Um, I think he meets most of them online. That’s why I say he’s kind of the expert you’d be looking for.”

  “Online. Damn, I can’t even get girls to email me back.” Matthew leaned back, and looked up. “I tell you what: I agree. I do think it’d be fruitful to pick this guy’s brain.”

  “It’s not like that,” said Ben. “He uses those apps that we’d be competing with. I don’t want to be judgmental or anything, but it’s all kind of sleazy to be honest. Our missed connections thing will be different, more romantic. I mentioned my roommate as a general example, that’s all.”

  “Ben, why are you talking in circles? You want me to convince you that the guy is the perfect expert on social glitches and the like? Come on, just do it. Pick his brain. I’m approving. Have an impromptu session with the dude, and get back to me. It’s totally a proper work thing.”

  “I’m not going to have him edit your profile for you,” Ben said, smiling. “That would be cheating.”

  “You suck,” and they laughed.

  “I really have to get to work,” said Mathew.

  “This has been another awesome brainstorming session,” said Ben. “Even without the brain.”