Well, then, she thought, and once again rued the fact that she couldn’t write about it for TechScene. It had all the elements of a good story: a hot startup crashes and burns, co-founders not speaking. There was always the possibility that she could pass along the information to someone else, but she quickly dismissed that thought; she was ambitious, not psychotic, and besides, Victor would definitely know that she had been the one to tip off her coworkers. And if she was being really honest with herself, she didn’t want to give a scoop to someone else at work—especially not now.
She and Victor had met in the line for a Vietnamese taco truck in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest, the tech industry’s five-day Super Bowl, prom, Oscars, and Coachella all wrapped into one, with breakfast tacos. By day, there were hundreds of panels inside the Austin Convention Center with titles like “Maximizing Mobile: The Next Frontier” and “Picturing the Future of Wearable Tech”; by night, the city’s bars and restaurants—really, any open space where alcohol could be served—were overrun by the conference-goers, mostly men, who spent a maximum of fifteen minutes at each party before heading off to the next. The most exclusive parties used an elaborate system of online RSVPs, wristbands, and secret locations, and yet the lines to get in still snaked their way around the block of wherever they were held, everyone desperately texting the person he knew inside, who inevitably didn’t have cell service.
Katya was doing a post on, among other things, the most popular food at South By (calling it by its full name was a sure sign you were a newbie) and was taking a picture of the menu with her phone so she could refer to it later when she overheard the conversation of the two guys behind her. “Tonight there’s the Google Hangouts hangout, the Foodbox happy hour, the Spotify secret show, the BitForce party…am I forgetting anything?”
The TechScene party, Katya thought to herself. But she didn’t even have to turn around to know that she didn’t want to tell these guys about her company’s party. They were clearly just your standard-issue startup bro dorks, the type who would obediently tweet from each party with the correct hashtag (#foodboxhappyhour, #bitforcesxsw, and so on) and get way too excited when they saw them show up on the real-time projection of everyone’s tweets on the wall. This was Katya’s first South By, but even before setting foot in Austin, she had already internalized a lot of the (exaggerated, she suspected) cynicism verging on outright disdain that so many people in the tech scene, particularly tech journalists, had for it. It was not cool to be a member of the media and be excited, in any way, by South By. The reasons were generally some combination of: it was the same damn story every year, no one besides the same two hundred and fifty people cared, there was no new way to cover things, there were too many journalists chasing too few stories about inherently boring startup people, and you got a distorted sense of what would excite real people in the real world because every single thing excited people in tech.
Maybe their conversation was something she could include in an “Overheard at SXSW” post? She casually opened the Notes app on her phone and started jotting down what they were saying just as one of them—she hadn’t really taken a good look at their faces, but there was one who seemed to be more concerned about where they would be spending the evening than the other—was concluding that part of the problem was that the Google Hangouts hangout was a couple miles away from the Foodbox happy hour, but they wanted to hit both because they wanted to meet people at Google and there was a greater chance that the Foodbox party would have food, and it was at that point that Katya decided that this conversation was in fact too inane to record for posterity and turned around and said, as fake-sweetly as she could, “I’m sorry that you have to rely on free party food to survive. I didn’t realize things were so bad out there.” One of the two—the Indian guy, who she now deduced had been doing most of the talking—looked stunned, but the other one burst out laughing. “Yo, this girl is the realest person in this whole city!” Then he had stage-whispered to her: “You should see us at a buffet.” Katya, who tended to be suspicious of most people’s motives but especially men’s, was unexpectedly charmed, and when he suggested that the three of them eat their banh tacos together, she agreed. By the end of the night, they had lost Nilay and were kissing in the back of a pedicab—which seemed to be the best way to get around Austin, at least until the driver turned to them with a flourish at the end of the ride and announced that their two-mile trip would be thirty dollars.
And now, seven months later, those tacos and that pedicab seemed like they had happened a million years ago.
After a few minutes, she went into the darkened bedroom and found Victor in the full-size bed lying on his side and facing the wall. She undressed to her underwear and got under the covers. She placed a hand on his naked back. “Victor?” she murmured, and it was then that she realized he was crying.
Katya was silent. She was not herself a crier, and she generally found people who cried to be weak-willed and sentimental, and she was particularly disoriented by men who cried. She had never seen her father cry—not even when her grandmother died, hit by a car crossing Ocean Parkway when she was going to buy groceries—and she had long been comforted by the feeling that Victor was not someone who would cry, ever. So now she sat up in bed, hugging her knees to her chest, until finally his tears dried up. He still hadn’t said anything but turned to her and tried to get her to lie down and snuggle. She was stiff.