The Palm

On my first few dates with someone, I usually feel like a fraud. I wear my best clothing, get more sleep than usual the night before, generally show the other person a version of myself I wish existed beyond the few hours I get coffee or dinner with someone in the beginning of a relationship.This version is, nevertheless, incredibly curated for the sake of making a good impression. Sometimes I even lie - a little of course. I say I speak Hebrew when I can only hold a casual conversation for three minutes. I feign confidence in my college major selection even though I could easily graduate in three years with a completely different focus than what I have told potential love interests over the years.

On my first date with Jacob, I straightened my hair even though it’s naturally somewhat curly. I said I liked Las Vegas - the city he lived in when he was not in Los Angeles visiting family frequently or doing business - even though I have considered sending a map of the United States to North Korea with a big red X over the “Sin City.” I took too long to do my makeup and laughed harder than I normally would at jokes he made. I also said I was 20 and went to UCLA even though I was 17 and still in high school.

I met Jacob at a wedding my close friend Honor and I crashed, sort of. On a Saturday night in February, we got in an UberPool which already had another passenger in it, a young guy in a fancy suit. I was in a bit of a mood since I had just spent an hour bouncing and joking around Target with my close friend. 

“Why are you wearing a suit? Are you going somewhere important?” I asked.

“Yeah -- actually a wedding,” he replied from the front passenger seat. 

“Whose wedding, yours?”

“Yeah, I’m taking an Uber pool to my own wedding,” he said.

Honor and I laughed.

“So whose wedding? Is it a celebrity?”

This time he laughed. I kept going.

“Can me and my friend come? If Beyoncé and Jay-Z are renewing their vows we want to be there.” 

“Actually, I think the couple wanted more young people at their wedding. You guys can come if you want, it’s pretty easy to get in, just go to the Beverly Wilshire.”

Honor and I looked at each other in disbelief. The gears in our head started turning.

“See you there!” I said.

After a few more minutes of small talk and questions about the wedding, our driver made a right at Robertson Blvd. and Honor and I got into her house. After some deliberation, we made the decision to go. We improvised a lot for my outfit - I had come prepared for a Saturday night of watching Mean Girls and eating the junk food we had just purchased at Target. 

Instead, I was squeezing into a pair of Honor’s mom’s heels, zipping up a dress her sister lent me, and using black eyeshadow on my lashes instead of Honor’s mascara so I wouldn’t get pinkeye. We took another Uber to the Beverly Wilshire, a luxury hotel near the famous Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. 

When we arrived, the party was in full swing. The ceremony had taken place about ten minutes before, and now people were swaying on the dance floor, chatting over catered plates of champagne greens and foie gras at their designated tables, and having photos taken by professional photographers. Honor and I made a beeline for the snack table. After some Tuna Nicoise and brie, we decided to wait in line at the bar. I thought I could order confidently enough to distract the bartender from the fact that I was not yet 18.

A man in a sleek black suit started talking to us in line. I forget how it began, but we found ourselves deep in conversation by the time I was supposed to order.

“I’ll have a rum and Coke.”

“ID please.” 

“Oh no, I left it at my table, is that alright?”

“I’m sorry, I need you to go back and get it.”

I looked at Jacob. “It’s so annoying I’m almost 21, just not 21,” I said quietly enough so the bartender couldn’t hear me, even though she was already too busy taking someone’s order for a vodka tonic. 

“That’s the worst,” he replied. He ordered right after. 

“A rum and Coke please.”

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

Maybe it was a bit of a red flag that this 31-year-old man was so casually ordering alcohol for someone he just met and about whom literally the only thing he knew was that I was below the minimum drinking age -- and, I suppose, that I favored eyeshadow over mascara. But who was I to question the blessing of an older, wealthy-looking guy who could order alcohol for me? 

We kept talking from there. He founded and ran a company that sounded sketchy, but judging by his clothes and hair I figured it was doing well. I was a History and Economics double major at UCLA. Honor was a freshman studying Literature. Her act was less believable than mine, but then again she was only lying about a year and a half, not three. Jacob mostly ignored her anyway; I was clearly more interested in him than she was. 

We exchanged phone numbers at the end of the night and agreed to meet up sometime in the next few weeks.

And that’s how I found myself, one week later, at a five-star restaurant in downtown L.A. with Jacob, talking more about my major and career aspirations over several $22 appetizers in preparation for a hockey game where Jacob and I would sit front row. 

Ever since a rude five-year-old named Andy pushed me on the playground in preschool into a sharp pile of wood chips, I have believed that women and girls are fundamentally more mature than men by about five to ten years. My hypothesis was confirmed again and again through middle school and high school. This led to a disdain, especially sexually and romantically, for men my own age. The behavior, intellectual depth, empathetic skills, and dress of similarly-aged men was continuously disheartening, and made me look to men about ten years my senior for partnership.

Until now, though, that had largely been hypothetical; it’s not exactly easy for a minor to meet an eligible man in his late 20s in a way that’s natural. But in the middle of February I did, and a week later we scheduled our first date. I didn’t order at The Palm, a pricey steak and seafood restaurant around the corner from Staples Center, because Jacob knew exactly what and how to order.  

I really believed that this was it. Meaning, I had met someone I could seriously date long term. Of course it was ridiculous for me to believe in something that could not and did not exist.  I believed in my and Jacob’s bond based on a conversation at a party, some texts, and a few superficial characteristics I believed to be paramount to my romantic endeavor. How could “this” be “it” when “this” was founded on multiple lies? (All of them mine, I might add.) An atheist might compare my stubborn, irrational faith in the prospects for our relationship with the  faith in God so many religious people have. I would just call it what it was: a teenage delusion taken too far by my own sense of superiority, skillful deception, and the lure of extravagance. 

Unfortunately, my belief was quickly challenged, as things sort of took a turn for the worse as we began to talk. Not wanting to talk too much about myself, or the fictional version of myself I was presenting to Jacob, I mainly asked questions about his business. As an alleged Economics major, I was allegedly interested in business management and entrepreneurship myself. 

I had already read a lot about his business online. He was a “searchable” person, meaning a Google search of his name produced a Wikipedia page, several news stories about him, and so on. But I wanted to hear about it from him. The company was essentially a membership-based community that begins when one is in college. From there, the company hosts exclusive events at a discounted price and offers other discounts on credit cards, healthcare services, and the like. 

If you’ve seen Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary, just think Magnises minus the credit card. 

“There’s just a lot of really lonely people, y’know?” Jacob explained to me. “Especially in the Midwest. There are all these people that graduate and don’t know what to do with themselves besides work. So in places that are really spread out we’re really popular.” 

At first I wanted to ask critical questions. Did he feel he was exploiting the loneliness of individuals in American suburbs? I thought I could have the kind of mature, interesting conversation with him I was never able to have with 17-year-old guys. But for some reason I held back on the criticism. I wasn’t sure how self-aware he was about what seemed to me the  unprincipled nature of his company. 

I asked how well it was doing. He said that membership costs $100 per year, and in the last year or so they had signed up a few thousand new members. I quickly calculated in my head that if he acquired five thousand paying members, that would be half a million dollars in annual revenue. 

“And that takes up all your time?” I asked. I was skeptical, I couldn’t believe this company alone was bringing in the kind of income it seemed like he had. I was right -- he was also a money lender, specifically for college loans. I made a joke about how that was kind of icky.

“Look, everyone needs to take out these loans, they have to get them from somewhere.”

There were a few other shady practices he casually divulged to a supposed 20-year-old he just met last week. He lived in Las Vegas part time because Nevada is much better on taxes for small and medium businesses than California, the state he actually resided and had family and friends in. I never understood the whole “rich people evading taxes” thing until that moment. 

Not wanting to begin disliking this person I had invested so much hope and energy in by talking only about money, I shifted the conversation to books. Surely, this would be a better and more fair test of character than his questionable business dealings -- after all, everyone does need to make a living. 

I also felt a little hypocritical judging his fraudulence when, of the two of us, I was the only one guilty of being dishonest in the context of our budding romance. I wondered what’s worse,  cheating the government out of a few million dollars over the course of a lifetime, or cheating a man out of money and time he would not have otherwise spent had he known the truth? Of course the cost of the date was probably inconsequential to Jacob relative to his income, and it certainly was dwarfed by the emotional cost Jacob could suffer if he knew that he was being led on by an underage girl. Even though Jacob’s business activities seemed pretty gross, he was at the very least honest in describing them to me. My gross behavior, on the other hand, was all about lying to him. 

And who was I to judge someone for how they obtained their wealth? I wouldn’t be paying for this meal, and I was initially charmed by Jacob because he possessed so many trappings of wealth -- the convertible sports car he drove us here in, the high-rise apartment unit he owned on the Vegas strip, the high-end wedding he had actually been invited to, even the elaborate first date he planned. At the risk of sounding shallow, I’ll add that my romantic interest in Jacob was mostly due to what I thought was substance he would have that high school-aged boys did not have. At the wedding and over text, Jacob spoke about his business, his plans for the future, interesting countries he had been to, and so on. He had something to talk about besides vaping and sneakers.

The food only impressed me more. Until that night, my favorite appetizer was an order of fries from In n’ Out. I can now say it’s sliced sesame-crusted ahi tuna with soy ginger lime sauce and wasabi. There were ultra-spicy brussel sprouts, baked brie with cranberry pecan crumble, and some other dishes that looked like they belonged in the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art rather than The Palm.

While dipping some carpaccio in an olive oil-based sauce, I asked Jacob if he liked to read. He said he did, and asked if I was reading anything at the moment.

“I just finished Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, have you read it?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s the one that’s about masturbating?”

My face probably visibly dropped. Maybe it’s because I was sort of going through a Philip Roth phase at the time, but I could not believe this high-powered, business-savvy adult man had just reduced a novel of enormous literary and social significance -- one that received harsh criticism from the very people it sought to represent, while still revolutionizing its genre by taking seemingly lowbrow comedic concepts and transforming them into powerful cultural metaphors -- to being the “one that’s about masturbating.” It sounded like the kind of idiotic, simplistic, juvenile comment one of the boys in my junior English class would have made. 

Before I could respond, he excused himself to go to the bathroom.

When he came back, he told me he was going to purchase the hockey game tickets now. I was confused, since I thought good seats had to be purchased well in advance.

“Usually,” Jacob said. “But if you know the right places online you can buy the best seats at the last minute, they’re being traded right now.”

He showed me an app with quickly moving seat bubbles and prices, it looked like the New York Stock Exchange for sports stadiums. He was able to get two “glass seats” for a little over $400.  There was something gross but intoxicating about a man with a $4,000 watch who wouldn’t shell out more than $400 for front-row seats.

But by then I think I knew I’d had enough -- of the date and of this man who’d arranged it. 

Perhaps more than that, I’d had my fill of the escalated fraud I’d so thoughtlessly orchestrated. There were multiple layers of fraudulence in the mix on my date with Jacob. There was the literal fraud Jacob was committing by stealing from the government. But that only existed for me in the form of conversation -- I might as well have been reading about it in a book. Fiction? Non-fiction? Who knows? More directly, there was me misleading him. Fraud is usually defined as misleading people, like shareholders, for personal or financial gain. In a way, this was what I was doing. Jacob was investing his time and money, not in a company this time but in me, and I was misleading him so that he would invest -- and, if I kept it up successfully, invest and invest and invest. This was all for my personal gain. Even financial gain, after a fashion: food isn’t free, and if he wasn’t paying for it, I would’ve had to, albeit at more abstemious rates. I don’t want to objectify the dating process and its actors, but the prevalence of fraud makes the comparison too obvious to not make. Then, too, there was the more innocent type of deceit I had grown accustomed to, like lying about my bilingual capabilities or hair texture. It seemed like for both of us, the more small lies we told, the easier it became to tell big ones, to the point where we eventually believed in them -- or wilfully acted as if we did.

Jacob had convinced himself that his business practices and companies were okay, even doing something good, and I believed that a connection based on falsehoods could be real. These looming problems were overshadowed by the luxurious food and atmosphere, a tactic we both used to distract one another from the scams at hand. And here I was, priding myself on my maturity, really only by osmosis from a supposedly mature older man. As it turned out, only immaturity was underscored both Saturday nights.