The Startup Wife(9)
“I don’t know, dozens.”
“And were any two the same?”
“I get a lot of requests for Harry Potter. But no, they’re all different.”
“Imagine if we could use AI to give people exactly the kind of experiences they were looking for, things they shared but were never able to integrate into a faith-based system.”
“How would we do that?”
“I don’t know. But I can figure it out.” I would need someone to help me design it, but I had a vague idea of how I might get started. It wouldn’t work if the rituals were ever the same—there would have to be an infinite number of possibilities, and we would have to decide where the system would get its data, and there were a million other things to sort out. But I knew it was just a matter of time before I worked it all out.
One of the Sams knocked on the door to announce breakfast, and at their kitchen table Cyrus and I held hands and struggled to cut our waffles. After breakfast we went back to bed and stayed there until it was time to leave. On the ride home we talked about other things, and then he dropped me off at my apartment, and when we said goodbye, I wanted to cry and tell him we should never spend another minute apart, but of course I didn’t, because even though there was little pretense between us, I had some sense of preserving my dignity. Twenty minutes later he called me, and instead of going to the lab, as I’d planned, I met him for tea and then we went back to Julian’s house. “Did you mean it when you said you just wanted to worship each other forever?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I want to get married.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I confessed.
“I don’t actually want to get married, I want to already be married.”
I knew what he meant. The in-between stuff seemed unnecessary. I had loathed every minute of my sister’s wedding. The thought of having to douse myself in gold jewelry and wear a sari safety-pinned to me so tightly I’d be doing Kegels without even trying made me want to throw up. But Cyrus was all about ceremony. “Are you sure?” I asked him. “You don’t want to stand in a field of cornflowers or walk around a circle of fire?”
“Let’s pretend we’ve done it already.”
“Speeches and champagne and biryani?”
“Tents and drunk dancing and I do.”
“Well then I do too.”
* * *
I called my sister. “Mira, I need you to come to Cambridge.”
“Now?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“I am marrying Cyrus Jones.”
“Fuck off. Cyrus? Cyrus from high school? The guy with the hair?”
I was so happy that she understood the importance of Cyrus’s past hotness. “Yes! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” And then I said, “You’re wondering why he suddenly loves me back.”
“Of course he loves you back. You morphed into a cross between Snow White and Iron Man.”
“What was I before?”
“One of the Seven Dwarfs. Bashful, if I’m being generous.”
“I can’t wear a sari and get pinched by aunties. You have to come.”
“I’m sorry. Ahmed and I are trying to get pregnant.”
“Oh. Can’t you just bring him and have sex in Cambridge?”
“It’s not sex, it’s IVF.”
It was the first I’d heard of it, and I felt like a jerk. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t know.”
“I have a bicornuate uterus. It’s shaped like a heart yet is totally inhospitable for babies. You should probably get yours scanned too, just in case.”
“You want me to come over?”
“Oh God, no. I don’t suppose you can wait?”
I knew I couldn’t. “I’m on a high. I can’t explain—I feel like it needs to happen right now, this very minute.”
“I get it. Go—take selfies and tell me everything later.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.”
* * *
Julian flew in from Hong Kong and came straight to city hall. When we arrived, he was already there, waiting under a small rectangle of shade in front of the bell tower. He and Cyrus greeted each other with excited cries like they’d been apart for years, even though it had been only the summer.
“Jules, this is Asha. Asha, Jules.”
Jules turned to me and threw open his arms. I was wearing a yellow sleeveless dress, and he squashed my elbows against my ribs as he hugged me.
“What’s this I hear about a wedding?” he boomed.
Cyrus said, “You’re it, friend. You’re the wedding party.”
They could’ve been brothers. Their haircuts were different (in that Julian believed in haircuts and Cyrus didn’t), but they were both tall and bore their bodies in similar ways, with a kind of casual swagger. That they had met on a mountaintop was fully apparent. But whereas I thought of Cyrus as big/small—a large person who often commanded an entire room just by walking into it, and yet could become almost invisible at will—Julian was just big in every way, as if he’d lost his volume control and settled on a kind of outside voice no matter where he found himself.