Chapter 57: Library Computers
She looked at him.
"The fashion industry," she said, "produces more miserable people than almost any other industry on earth and has collectively decided to call that misery aesthetic. And everyone inside it knows it and nobody says it because the moment you say it out loud you’ve broken the spell and the spell is the entire product."
Ryan looked at her. "Do you still want to be in it."
"I want to make things," she said. "The industry is just the container. I’m trying to figure out if I can make the things without the container poisoning them."
"The line you mentioned. Your own."
"Still thinking about it."
"What’s stopping you."
She opened her mouth and then closed it.
"That’s a longer answer," she said.
"We have time."
She picked up her drink and looked at him for a moment with a considering expression he’d learned meant she was deciding how honest to be.
"Fear," she said. "The ordinary kind. Fear that if I build something with my name entirely on it and it fails then there’s no container to blame, no industry, no circumstance. Just me and the thing I made and the verdict." She paused. "That’s more frightening than anything anyone’s ever said about me in a magazine."
"That’s the only kind of fear worth having," Ryan said. "The other kinds are just static. But we all experience fear of failure."
Zara looked at him. "Says the man who sat down at a thirty thousand dollar poker table having never played a hand."
"I was terrified," Ryan said. "I just concluded the terror wasn’t relevant information."
She laughed.
The food arrived and they ate and the conversation moved how good conversation moved — looping, one thing leading sideways into another, following interest rather than agenda.
Ryan learned that Zara had wanted to be a marine biologist until she was fourteen, at which point she’d been approached by a scout at a mall in Portland and the trajectory had changed before she’d had the chance to think about whether she wanted it to.
Zara learned that Ryan had taught himself to code at thirteen using library computers because his family’s laptop had broken and his mother couldn’t afford to replace it for eight months.
"Eight months on library computers," she said.
"They closed at seven. I had two hours after school most days."
"What were you building."
"Nothing good. A game first, then a tool for tracking bus schedules because the MTA website was terrible and I was fifteen and furious about it." He cut into the duck. "The bus thing actually worked."
"Did you do anything with it."
"I showed my computer science teacher. She said it was impressive and that I should think about a career in technology." He paused. "Which was probably genuinely good advice or the maybe the most obvious thing anyone had ever said."
Zara laughed. "Both."
"Yeah...both," he agreed.
She told him about Portland — the quality of growing up in a place that prided itself on being unhurried, and the restlessness of a person who found unhurried maddening.
The way she’d arrived in New York at nineteen with the absolute certainty that the city would either take her or make her and either outcome was better than standing still.
"Were you scared," Ryan said.
"Every day for the first six months," she said. "And then one day I wasn’t, and I haven’t been since. About that specifically." She paused. "Other things scare me."
"Like building something with your name on it."
"Like that."
He looked at her across the table. The candlelight was doing things to her face, light that was honest rather than flattering — it showed what was actually there, and what was actually there was worth looking at.
"You should build it," he said. "The line."
"You don’t know what it would be."
"Doesn’t matter. You should build it."
She looked at him. "Why are you so certain."
"Because you’ve been thinking about it long enough that it’s not excitement anymore, it’s conviction. Excited people talk about their ideas. You describe yours like something that already exists and just hasn’t been made yet." He picked up his glass. "That’s an exception."
Zara sat with that for a moment.
"My dad said something like that once," she said. "About his restaurant."
"He had a restaurant."
"In Portland. Small place, twelve tables. He’d been thinking about it for years before he opened it." She smiled at something Ryan couldn’t see. "He said the day he stopped calling it a dream and started calling it a plan was the day he knew it was going to happen."
"Smart man," Ryan said.
"He was." She looked at the table. "He died four years ago. Heart attack. Completely without warning on a Tuesday morning." She said it evenly, and her tone told she’s said it many times before and had learned to carry the weight of her words. "I was in Milan for a shoot. I didn’t make it back in time."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"I’m sorry," Ryan said.
"Thank you." She looked up. "He would have found all of this—" she gestured vaguely at the restaurant, the evening, the general situation of her life, "—completely hilarious. He had no frame of reference for any of it. He thought Instagram was something you ordered at a coffee shop until about two years before he died."
Ryan smiled.
"He would have liked you," she said. "You have the same thing he had. That — certainty. The knowing that comes from having thought about something hard enough."
Ryan looked at her.
"Zara," he said.
"Yeah."
"I’m glad I called."
She held his gaze.
"Me too," she said. "Even if you took two weeks."
"The two weeks were necessary."
"For what."
"Probability calculations," he said.
She threw her napkin at him.
He caught it.
They both laughed at the same time as the restaurant moved around them indifferently, and the evening was nowhere near finished.