A Party With Too Many Good Reasons

By the end of 2016 we were selling useful launches, not stacks of speculative registrations. Customers could bring their own names, and many did. Our original templates, booking features and support earned more repeat money than a clever address alone. Rex laughed when he heard the first annual sales figure, then stopped laughing when Mila explained that customers renewed because they liked us. I had kept my ordinary paid job until the venture could support a sensible departure. On my last day he offered me a grander title without a share. I thanked him, collected my bag and left before he could explain why the opportunity required me to be grateful.

We celebrated with a small party where several women had very different reasons to be glad I had left. Mere was twenty-nine, a composer who had supplied original music for an optional paid template. She played something of her own, then pulled me toward the little cleared space beside the chairs. Joy, a twenty-seven-year-old dance teacher, said I was following Mere like a man waiting for an instruction manual. She took my other hand and taught me the missing step. Mere laughed, leaned against me at the end of the song and said I improved when I stopped apologizing. Joy said the improvement could be tested at dinner. I managed to accept two invitations without dropping the glass I was holding.

Tia photographed the evening. She was twenty-four, sharp-eyed and entirely unwilling to let me hide behind Mila whenever the camera appeared. After the other guests moved outside, Tia straightened my collar, paused with her fingers still there and asked whether I always needed a professional reason to let someone come close. I admitted I had been using work as one. Tia said that was an unusually uninteresting habit for a man who could make her laugh. She kissed my cheek and told me to call when I had an evening that belonged to me. I did. The next photographs we took were simply ours.

Pua was twenty-six and supplied flowers for private events. She and Ana argued amiably about which part of the party people would remember first. When I said the evening would be difficult to forget, Pua asked if I was brave enough to say which woman I was looking at. Ana rescued me by saying I had been looking at both. The two women laughed at the accuracy of my sudden silence. Later Pua slipped a small flower into my jacket and invited me for a walk; Ana asked for a second supper without a launch to supervise. I began to understand why being honest would require more courage than being charming.

I told the women I went out with that I was not exclusive. It was a beginning, not permission to leave everyone in a permanent waiting room. Mila enjoyed our closeness and also wanted to know whether I could separate a company meeting from an evening she had chosen for herself. Lina preferred slower dates and very plain answers. I liked the way she rested her hand over mine when I began telling a story too quickly. She once asked if I was trying to get to the good part before she had time to decide whether she liked the beginning. I slowed down. Her smile made that feel like the most profitable decision of the week.

Fia and Lei met me through the growing venture but refused to become decorative experts in my personal legend. Fia, thirty, was a lawyer who made one proposed contract considerably smaller and better. Lei, twenty-eight, kept the accounts and asked why a man who understood renewals sometimes forgot his own expenses. At a separate friend's dinner, both women saw me lose an argument to a stubborn sauce bottle. Fia opened it, handed it back and said competence could be shared. Lei touched my arm and said she had been hoping I was less polished outside the office. They each invited me out later, on different evenings, and I learned how pleasant it was to be liked without having to demonstrate a feature.

Nia was twenty-five and trained seriously as an athlete while working ordinary jobs to support it. She wanted a simple page for private coaching, without invented testimonials or a promise to manufacture a champion. After the paid work was finished, Nia invited me to watch a local meet. She found me afterward, flushed and delighted, and caught my hand before I could congratulate her with a speech. She said I could start with a kiss if I meant it. I did. Later, over food, she asked whether I had ambitions that could survive a day on which nobody praised them. I told her I was beginning to learn the difference.

Rita was thirty-one, a producer who wanted clear tools for a small original programme. May was twenty-nine, a teacher developing her own adult lessons. They became friends during a workshop, discovered I was much less impressive at improvising a demonstration than at preparing one, and made me repeat it until I could explain the purchase without a paragraph of fashionable words. At dinner weeks later Rita sat close and asked a personal question I could not answer with a slide. On another evening May took my hand during a walk and said she liked the man who could admit he did not know. Both evenings ended with a kiss and a clearer understanding that these women had lives beyond the use I could find for them.

The future helped me choose a direction, but it did not fill the chairs at a workshop. Mere wanted her music heard on its own terms. Joy built classes instead of waiting for me to invent an audience. Tia and Pua had growing businesses, Fia and Lei had professional boundaries, and Nia, Rita and May were not available whenever a date happened to fit my schedule. Mila watched me discover this and said I had become very successful at making my own calendar difficult. I asked if she was offering sympathy. She leaned over, kissed me and said she was offering one very enjoyable reason to stop being vague.