How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

Kelly sighed. Clara’s sweet tone was much harder to say no to than her mother’s quasi-mania. She had a feeling she was about to meet a cocker spaniel.

two

Kelly wondered, as she prepared for her blind date the following Saturday, why other girls seemed to love the getting-ready process. In movies this was always a snappy montage that involved trying on various colorful outfits and throwing them off over your head like a jovial idiot who doesn’t understand how hangers work. Instead, there she was, in her drab apartment, staring sadly into her closet. It was like Eeyore shopping for a quinceañera dress.

Well, drab may be a little harsh—Kelly had a perfectly nice (for Silicon Valley rental prices) one-bedroom with square, modern lines, granite countertops mottled with black and sienna brown, and broad windows offering views of the small, flat park across the street, where dogs ran through the cropped grass and kids played soccer. Her IKEA décor was neutral and tasteful, if rather plain. She tended to choose items in neat, geometric shapes, pieces that had no possibility of clashing with each other or cutting the space in the room into any of those awkward, too-small-to-have-a-function wedges of unfillable air. It was easiest to go basic, she figured—safest. Pick out something inoffensive and you didn’t have to devote any time and energy to thinking about it, or worrying what other people would think. There was no way you would look back at that rectangular beige couch and think you’d made a horrendous mistake. She couldn’t imagine a world where home décor served any higher purpose than to do no harm.

The same philosophy extended to the wardrobe she was now peering into as if she expected it to offer her some magical, glamorous outfit she had never actually bought. She might as well have been looking for the portal to Narnia. Kelly owned very little in the way of going-out clothes or even casual clothes, 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, or that her butt didn’t feel anything like a butt, and both prospects were so worrying that she was clueless as to how to react.

“Um, thank you,” she mumbled, and slipped butt-first from his grasp. But somehow when she started walking, instead of going toward the restroom in the back, she started toward the door. Some primal fight-or-flight instinct was taking over, and evidently Kelly’s ancestresses had been the ones who bowed meekly before the mastodon and bid it a pleasant day. She was fleeing.

Clearly, she reasoned with accelerating speed, the whole evening was down the toilet anyway (nearly literally). If she turned around and headed back to the table now, Martin would be obligated to ask why she had thought the restroom was somehow invisibly concealed by the front door, like some sort of Platform 9¾ situation. She would be obligated to provide an explanation, which would mean she would be obligated to come up with an explanation, which would mean she would need to think a heck of a lot faster than she was thinking right now. Then the rest of the evening would pass in tense small talk about wine and weather while Martin was obviously fixating on her mysterious lap around the restaurant, and she was obviously fixating on whether or not her mom had paid Martin to give her some human contact, the lack of which in her “already twenty-nine-year-old” daughter’s life Diane was always lamenting, and really, did Kelly want to subject herself and Martin to that? Of course she didn’t. Besides, if she left now, Martin’s pal Tony certainly wouldn’t charge him for her tuna, and he wouldn’t stay for dessert or order another drink without a date, ergo, Kelly was granting him a significant savings by walking away from the night now. Maybe fifty dollars? If he invested that right, it could be five thousand dollars by the time he reached retirement. Clearly, Kelly was taking the only logical course. This was a successful and reasonable termination of the night.

As she pushed open the door, its chime jingling, she looked back just enough to glimpse Tony and Martin gathered by the table, both gaping at her in bewilderment.

Kelly clattered down the sidewalk as fast as she could in her sensible heels, cursing the frigid winter air and the fact that the only parking spot had been on the other end of the strip mall. The faster she moved, the sooner she could get to her car and vent her emotions by blasting NPR. She needed to drown out her thoughts: Thoughts about the million and one more graceful ways in which she could have handled that situation. About how she couldn’t find a plus one on her own and couldn’t even hold on to the one that was handed to her. About how dating, the soul-sapping square dance of trying to find the right guy, sucked. About the fact that she really did still want to find the right guy, in spite of all the bruises that come with cracking your heart from its exoskeleton. About the growing suspicion that she couldn’t find the right guy because she wasn’t the right person.

As she finally reached her black Accord, her still-empty stomach creaked in protest.

As soon as Kelly got home, she stepped out of her dress and unpeeled her swimsuit. It was like skinning a grape. She felt better. Until her phone buzzed. She knew even before fishing it from her purse what the screen would say, and sure enough, it was her mom. Of course Diane would be waiting anxiously for a report of the night’s events, probably envisioning a fairy-tale evening that had ended with Kelly stretching onto her tiptoes for a magical kiss, kicking back one foot like the heroine in a rom-com. Instead, here Kelly stood in her half-lit apartment with a very confused date somewhere alone in another part of the city and a Target Juniors bathing suit around her feet. She couldn’t talk to her mother. Not now.

She walked into the kitchen, pulling up Priya’s contact on her phone instead. Priya she could talk to. Priya she needed to talk to.

Priya shared Kelly’s intellectual curiosity and analytical mind, but not her over-analytical mind. She was relentlessly open, sometimes to the point of TMI, but her endless ability to laugh at herself and others had often sapped the power from Kelly’s neuroses. It was lucky, really, that they were forced to work together for long hours back when they had been paired on the Zed project as AHI’s newest hires. Otherwise Kelly would probably never have attempted to get to know Priya, or been able to let Priya get to know her. But something about finally getting a robot to execute a perfect spin in place, at three a.m., after imbibing enough Red Bulls to make your toes twitch, really cements a friendship. Now, tinkering beside Priya in the lab was one of Kelly’s favorite parts of her job.

Kelly told Priya her tale of woe while she fixed herself a favorite late-night meal: Campbell’s tomato soup with popcorn, and soon Priya’s laughter was coming so loudly through the phone it nearly drowned out the popping from the microwave.

“You just walked out of the restaurant? You literally did that?” Priya gasped.

“I mean, it wasn’t that bad, really. Not as bad as it sounds,” Kelly protested grumpily.

“After you told him you needed to poo?”

“Well, I didn’t tell him—”

“I love you. This is amazing. This is the greatest moment of my life.”

Kelly finally had to laugh. She felt a little better. “But what am I going to do? You know my mom; I can’t just go to the wedding alone, like a normal person.”

“Uh, normal people don’t go to weddings alone, but whatever. Just find a date.”

“Oh, sure, why didn’t I think of that? I’ll just go out and find a date.”

“It honestly doesn’t have to be that hard, Kel. I promise.”

Maybe for Priya. Priya had a mixed history with men, but getting a date was never the hard part. Men found her attractive: her features were unremarkable, but with her good teeth, abundant dark hair, and long legs, she gave a general impression of youth and prettiness. More than that, she was fearless with guys. She never hesitated to ask them out, and it was rare that they didn’t say yes. She loved meeting new people and would give almost anyone a chance.

But once the date began, things tended to go downhill. The same openness and lack of guile that drew men to her like magnets tended to repel them with the same force. She would reveal off-putting truths about herself on a first date. She was ruthlessly honest about her initial impressions of men’s naked bodies. But as often as Priya failed to get the third or fourth date, she forged ahead. She would laugh it off to Kelly, asking breezily why she should get hung up over one guy, anyway, when there were so many others out there to sample? Kelly noticed that she never seemed to learn anything from her failures, but then again, who was Kelly to give dating advice?

“Getting a date is that hard,” Kelly persisted. “Otherwise I would have done it already.”

“Uh, hello, have you heard of Tinder? We literally have an Amazon for lonely penises.”

“I don’t want a lonely penis,” Kelly said.

“For this, you do. Just sign up for a dating website. You’ll find someone in no time. We live in Man Jose. The odds are good.”

“But the goods are odd,” Kelly mourned. “Maybe there’s just not anyone out there for me. Maybe I’ll be a cat lady, except instead of cats, it’ll be those robotic comfort seals from Japan.” She ate a spoonful of soup. “Actually, that sounds kind of nice.”

“No excuses. There is someone out there for literally everyone. Just keep an open mind. Or …” Kelly dipped a piece of popcorn while Priya paused dramatically. “Come out with me! I’ll help you find a man. I’ll get you a whole freaking Boy Scout troop. But, you know, of grown-ups. There’s this awesome new bar in Menlo Park—”

“I don’t do bars.”

“Come on! The night is still young! Get your heinie over here and I won’t let anyone touch it unless you sign a consent form first.”

“It’s just not my scene, Priya, you know that. Besides, I’m tired. I’m actually falling into bed right now.” Kelly popped another piece of popcorn in her mouth. She could almost feel Priya squinting on the other end to make out the noise.

“You’re not in bed. You’re eating popcorn and tomato soup, aren’t you?”

“Good night, Priya.”

“Imagine how much better that soup would taste if your robust young lover were spooning it between your eager lips.”

“Good night.” Kelly tried not to snort with laughter into her soup as she hung up.

The next day, Kelly was actually glad to be spending her Sunday morning at Gary’s small, stucco house in Santa Clara, babysitting her nieces. She needed a task that kept her mind from drifting to other things. Not that she didn’t have fun spending time with her nieces, but she got it when her brother called these few hours spent running to Costco and to the dermatologist to get his plantar wart frozen off his “me time.” Playing Baby Einstein games with the girls while their father was on hand to swoop in at the first signal of a potty training disaster was a whole different experience than being alone with them for four hours, the only thing standing between them and the kitchen knives. Now Gary was due home any minute and Kelly was exhausted.

“So what piece looks like it could fit with this piece?” she asked Bertie, the oldest by a few minutes, holding up a gray plastic wheel from the top-of-the-line Lego set she had splurged on as her Christmas gift. Bertie rummaged through the pieces spread on the floor and came up with a gray spoke. “Yes!” Kelly beamed, helping her lock the two together. “And what fits with this one?” She offered a red block. Bertie carefully scrutinized the piece, then responded by taking it and placing it calmly in her own mouth.

“No!” Kelly wrested the piece back just as she saw the quickest of the girls hurtling into the next room, naked from the waist down. “Emma? Where are you going?”

She gave chase and emerged into the entryway to see Gary coming through the front door. A Costco box in one arm, he easily scooped Emma up in the other, just in time to keep her from making her grand escape into the street. “Hi, Emma. Nice fashion statement,” he said.

“I swear she was just clothed,” Kelly panted.

“Where are Bertie and Hazel?”

“In the living room. Or at least they were twenty seconds ago, so by now they might be on Jupiter. Do you have any more boxes in the car?”

She accepted the keys Gary tossed at her with some relief as he walked calmly into the living room, bouncing Emma gently on his arm.

As Kelly and Gary put the groceries away, the girls happily comparing the animal crackers from the boxes they had pulled from the Costco boxes with glee, she regaled him with the story of last night’s date with Martin. It was a little easier to laugh at after a decent night’s sleep.

“Mom’s going to kill me,” she sighed, rearranging the produce in the fridge to fit a bulging bag of grapes.

“Eh, just maim, probably,” Gary replied.

“If I show up at that wedding without a date, she’ll lose her mind. She’ll sell me to some other family on the black market.”

“Not sure there are too many couples out there looking to buy twenty-nine-year-old children, but it could happen.”

“Don’t you have any single guy friends you could set me up with?” Kelly pleaded, turning to look at her brother.

“Single guy friends? Kelly, my entire life is spent between preschool, Mommy and Me, and these four walls.” He gestured around the house. “I murmur Nickelodeon theme songs in my sleep. I know the origin story of flipping Caillou. What about any of that makes you think I have single guy friends?” He put a bag of oats in a cabinet then turned back around. “Although there is this one guy,” he said slowly.

“Who? As long as he’s free on March seventh, I’ll take him.”

“No,” Gary shook his head, thinking. “It wouldn’t work.”

“Why not? Is he married? Is he a felon? We don’t need to let that come between us.”

“He’s too similar to your exes. Robbie and—what was that guy’s name from college? The one who didn’t want you to meet his parents until after you’d gotten your teeth whitened?”

“Nick. So? It sounds like your friend’s my type,” Kelly responded.

“That’s the problem. Your type isn’t working.”

It was true that Kelly’s relationship history read like a warning label for women everywhere. Both Robbie and Nick, the college class president with the gargantuan list of extracurriculars, had looked good to Kelly on paper, but made her feel bad about herself in real life. Spotted in between were a few short-lived flings, if “flings” can describe a series of dignified lunch appointments with coders who ended each date with a hug as tentative as if she were an electric fence.

“You ended up miserable both times,” Gary went on. “I want you to have something better, not the same thing all over again. It’s not a good match.” He broke down the boxes and stacked them by the recycling bin. “Thanks for helping out today. I’m a new man without that wart.”

“Yeah, sure,” Kelly said, with the slightly deflated feeling that she was being dismissed.

On the ride home, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just sealed her own doom again. She was sure that Gary was genuine about wanting the best for her, but she questioned too if hearing about her behavior on the date with Martin made him reluctant to burden any of his friends with her company. She already knew she was a mess. But was she that much of a mess that her own brother couldn’t recommend her? As she pulled into the parking garage beneath her building and shut off the engine, she wondered grimly if Caillou was single.

three

Back at work that week, Kelly sat in a room that was open, square, and full of lights: fluorescent ceiling beams, glowing computer monitors, and a bank of control panels with switches, knobs, and blinking indicators. Beside her was Dr. Masden, a psychologist whose black eyes angled up in a very attractive way that she would have seen if she weren’t nervously avoiding those eyes. Opposite them, an oversize monitor displayed a digital waist-up image of a being named Confibot. The image looked essentially like a man, sporting short, combed blond hair and a small-check plaid shirt. But where a human face should have been was a set of dotted lines over a blank white space: two oblong rounds for eyes, a triangle for a nose, a straight line where a mouth would go, really just the suggestion of features.