About Face by James Calder

to hear how it had turned out. I gave him a quick rundown as I finished my coffee. He wanted the juicy details, but I was not in a chatty mood. Instead, I mentioned the role I had in mind for him. I wanted him to set up a date with Erika and another Silicon Glamour associate.
    His first reaction was not to say it was a ridiculous idea, nor to say he didn’t need to hire his dates. Instead, he asked if the associates were good-looking.
    â€œThey couldn’t charge what they do if they weren’t,” I said.
    His sneaky smile told me he was into it. This was a side of Wes that amused me. I’d known him since college, when he was a skinny physics major with a hangdog look and a shyness about dating. We made a couple of goofy Super 8 films about existentially perplexed sci-fi insects. He’d also been the first person to show me the Internet, when it was used only by government agencies and science departments at something like 2400 kilobytes per second.
    Wes was as loyal as a friend could be, but like all of us he had his fixations. I figured he felt compelled to make up for all the lost time he’d spent in the physics lab. Everyone has their own way of feeling off-beam. Wes was good-looking now, with sharp features and dark hair sweeping across his forehead. He was also CTO of a net company that had beat the startup odds. But in his own mind, he was still the nerdy boy endlessly trying to prove he could get a date.
    The fact that he was a tech exec—a mind-boggling fact, to me—made him the best candidate I knew to apply to Silicon Glamour. I told him to play up his geek side and to be sure to askfor a date with Erika, the name that had been scrawled on Alissa’s message board.
    Wes rubbed his hands together. “No problem. We’ll show them a good time.”
    â€œI believe that’s
their
job. What we need to do is earn their trust so that they’ll tell us about Silicon Glamour.”
    â€œTrust. Right. You did say Rod was footing the bill?”
    â€œIt’ll go on my expense report.”
    Wes then insisted on coming with me to Rita’s. I warned him it was not a social hour. We had work to do. He said he just wanted to see how Rod looked on screen.
    Rita’s place was in the Mission, a backyard bungalow almost a hundred years old. An editing suite was set up in her basement: an Avid system loaded on a G4, two nineteen-inch monitors on a shelf, a vector scope, and speakers spread in a semicircle in front of her chair. The hard drives were under the worktable. A Beta deck and an eight-track mixing board occupied the ends of the semicircle. Out in the garage, under a plastic cover, she kept a Steenbeck flatbed for old-style analog film editing. We didn’t get to use it nearly enough for my taste.
    Wes dragged a folding chair into the tiny carpeted room. Rita sat in a rolling desk chair in front of the screen. A poster of
The Third Man
hung on the wall.
    I brought her up to speed on the Rod story. “Silicon Glamour,” she said. “Isn’t that when you don’t wear your pocket protector, Wes?”
    â€œNobody uses pens anymore,” he shot back.
    Rita had to needle me, of course, about sticking her alone with the editing. It was already a big job for two of us. But she understood. The film business was all about last-minute changes. Besides, she was still raising money for her next documentary, and film work in San Francisco had gone quiet since the Internetbubble burst. All those filmmakers who’d been sucked into Web producing suddenly needed jobs. The good stuff—documentaries and features—only came around so often, and TV commercials had moved to Vancouver. I was lucky the Rod gig had come along when it did.
    Rita said, “So what’s your take on this Rod and Alissa business, Wes? You’re the one who introduced us to him.”
    â€œRod is the real thing when it comes to engineering genius,” Wes said.