The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

Eric?” he says.
    “Not much,” I say. I always get the easy ones wrong.
    “Cool, man, cool,” he says. “There’s some wine and stuff over there.”
    And so I set out toward the buffet table, a journey that takes me directly into Maya’s line of vision. The floor is shiny cement, very hard, not comfortable to walk or stand on for long. Overriding my inclinations I look straight at Maya and smile in the hope of projecting the exact opposite of what I’m feeling. People say
It’s all about self-confidence
, but they don’t say why, and so for a long time I rejected this truism. Why should self-confidence, of all qualities, be the keyto attractiveness? The answer is that sexual selection is distorted by information asymmetry. The first time she sees you, she doesn’t know if you’re a potent, generous alpha male or a guy who spends all day getting into edit wars on Wikipedia. But you know, and the self-valuation you display is her best clue. But knowing that confidence is valuable doesn’t help you acquire it—it just pushes your confidence toward the closest extreme. Confident people know they have an advantage and become more confident; insecure people know they have a handicap and become less confident. It’s a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on which side of the zero intercept you start from. I’ve arrived at her conversation, and she turns to look at me with that amazing unsurprisable expression, and again I’m sure she knows everything there is to know about me.
    “What’s up?” she says. “Eric, right?” The fact that she remembers my name must be a good sign, unless she remembers it from talking to Lauren on the phone the day after I met her.
I love you, Mom
. Jesus.
    “Yeah, Eric,” I say. “And you’re Maya.” It comes out as a statement of fact.
    “How’s it going?” she says. “This is the lovely Rebecca Grady.” The lovely Rebecca Grady smiles sardonically at Maya and makes a curtseying gesture. She is in fact not unlovely; she looks a lot like the actress Helen Hunt, who is of only average loveliness for a TV actress but certainly 98th-percentile by civilian standards. It’s a shame for Rebecca Grady that Helen Hunt became recognizable, because now instead of her beauty what you see is her resemblance to Helen Hunt. We stand there for a minute in this awkward triad. I don’t have any Maya-specific conversational hooks, so I ask how her weekend is going.
    “I’ve been chained to my desk,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve left the office since Wednesday.”
    OK, we’re going to start with a work conversation. “What doyou do?” I say, shifting my feet slightly so I’m facing Maya foursquare instead of splitting my focus between the two of them. It’s a little rude to Rebecca Grady, but it has the advantage of diminishing the chances that I’ll end up going home with her and making ill-advised confessions.
    “I’m a reporter,” Maya says. She names one of the local alternative weekly newspapers: left-wing politics in the front, phone sex ads in the back, record reviews in the middle. A month ago, feeling rich and lonely, I called one of the phone sex numbers and made it as far as entering my credit card number, although as soon as the person answered I got embarrassed and hung up.
    “So what’s the story that’s kept you chained to your desk?” I ask.
    “Big dull investigation,” she says. “Frisco Tow, the company that tows your car when you park in a bus stop. Graft, corruption, the usual.”
    “You’re a muckraker. You rake the muck.”
    “I do. I’ve been raking muck for three weeks straight. It gets kind of messy. How about you? You do some kind of Internet thing, right?”
    Christ, how does she know? “Yeah, I make software,” I say, because I’ve tried all the synonyms and that one is the least bad. “So how did you get started with the raking of the muck? Were you a freelancer?” The fact that she has made no move to include Rebecca