The Startup Wife(16)
On Monday, determined to make up with Dr. Stein, I spent twenty-three straight hours at the lab. Finally, toward the end when I was standing in front of the water fountain for several minutes without appearing to drink anything, she tapped me on the shoulder and told me to go home immediately. Oh! I thought, she loves me again! And I stumbled home and fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke up, Jules was waiting for me in the dining room with a cup of coffee that had been made disgusting by the addition of grass-fed butter.
“We have a decision to make,” he said. “But it’s up to you, Asha. We’ll only do it if you say yes.”
I took a sip. The butter clung to my lips. “You and Cy want to have a baby, and you want me to be the surrogate? The answer is no. I’m not giving birth to a white-on-white mash-up.”
“We’ve been invited to audition for a spot in an incubator. There isn’t any money—but it’s a space to get ourselves set up.”
I paused for a moment and let his words sink in. “You mean the platform? I thought we were just messing around.”
“We were, but you saw the demo. We could give it more time, find out what it can really do.”
“Why is this on me?”
“Because the incubator is called Utopia and it’s in New York.”
He let that sink in for a minute. Utopia. The holy grail of incubators.
“You’ve got the most to lose, Asha.”
“How did they hear about us?”
“I don’t know. But they want us to go down there and show it to them.”
I wasn’t sure. “Don’t we have everything we need right here, thanks to a generous donation from the Cabot family?” I swept my arm across the gleaming oak dining table. “And anyway, no one really liked it.”
“The sample size was too small,” Jules said. “And the UX was shit.”
“Aw, Jules, you’re hurting my feelings, calling my code all brains and no beauty.”
“Do you want to maybe just meet them, check it out, see if we like it?”
It was all happening too quickly. “I don’t know.” Then something occurred to me. “Why are you having this conversation with me and not Cyrus too?”
Jules rubbed his hand up the side of his cheek as if grating a wedge of Parmesan. “Because he would totally not let us do it.”
He was right. Cyrus would laugh, and then he would talk us out of it. “Well, you know what they say—hubs before grubs.”
“No one in the history of sayings has ever said that.”
“It means I am not crossing your picket line.”
“Oh, come on, Asha, you know you want to. I’ll even splurge on Greyhound instead of the Chinatown bus. And maybe we’ll hate it and it won’t even matter.”
“Or maybe we’ll love it and you’ll put me in some kind of moral dilemma where I have to choose between the forces of Cyrus and Jules.”
“Call it whatever you want. I know you’re flattered. I know you’re curious.”
I was both of those things. We went back and forth a few more times. Finally, I agreed, and we made up a story for Cyrus about how I was visiting my sister and Jules was going to sign some paperwork at his dad’s law firm.
And that is how we ended up auditioning for Li Ann and her band of merry Doomsayers.
Three
I AM WHAT I AM
Cyrus has been sitting in the house with his legs crossed all day, taking deep breaths with a little chime app on his phone. When the chime goes off, he stands up, walks around the room seven times to stretch his legs, then gets back on his mat, faces the wall, and sits there until the bell rings again. I might find this extremely irritating if it weren’t for the fact that after one of these sessions, he is always twice as everything I love about him. He’s tender and thoughtful and even somehow smarter. I call it Zen Face. Zen Face is my favorite of Cyrus’s faces, even better than Gazing over a Candle at Dinner Face, or another—close to the top—Freshly Shaved and Smelling like Grass Face.
When we get home, Jules and I pad around the kitchen and make sandwiches out of whatever isn’t moldy. I think of Rory and his vegan startup. Already I’m a little fond of the people we met that morning, and I’m trying not to spend too much time imagining what it might be like, walking into that building every day and calling myself a Utopian. Being surrounded by all that shiny promise and making plans for the end of the world. But then there are all the things I thought I was going to do with my life. I try not to think about my student loans and the postdoc at Stanford, which, until yesterday, was my dream job. Can I do it? Can I drop everything to chase a dream?
Eventually, Jules and I stop waiting for Cyrus and start eating our sandwiches. Outside, the night is dense and quiet. I’m picturing all the people strolling home after a late-night movie or a pizza, all the youth and the cavalier confidence of just starting out in life. I could be those things too, I suppose, but I was born with a tendency to think and overthink, a habit of picking everything apart until it came out tasting like burnt toast.
My sister, Mira, is the opposite. She knows exactly what she wants, and she makes no apologies. She also has an ability to be serious and completely nonchalant at the same time. When she decided at the age of fifteen that she was going to start wearing a hijab, my parents freaked. “Go out in a bikini!” my mother begged. “That’s what America is for.”