His Voice Broke My Plan

I want to start with the plan, because the plan is the only reason I ended up at The Croon Room on a Thursday night, and everything after that happened because the plan was bad. My name is Joyce, I'm 34, I do corporate law, and I have never been married, which my mother mentions about four times per phone call. My last serious thing was in law school, when I was 22, and it ended the way most law school relationships end, which is with both people realizing they were too tired to argue.

The plan was simple. Khalid, my match from the app, had photos on his profile that I was almost sure were five years old. Men do this. They pick the one photo where the lighting was kind and their hairline was where it used to be, and then they show up to the date looking like a slightly different person, and you spend two hours being polite about it. I decided I would not be polite about it. I picked karaoke because karaoke is a trap. You cannot hide behind a menu at karaoke. You have to stand up, hold a microphone, and be a whole person under fluorescent lights, and I figured if he had anything to hide, a microphone would shake it loose.

I called it a reconnaissance mission to my friend Rosie, and she said, "Joyce, it's a date, just admit it's a date," and I said it was reconnaissance, and she laughed at me, and that concluded that part of the conversation.

I got there first on purpose. The Croon Room is the kind of place with neon in the windows and floors that stick to your shoes a little, and the host had already given me a table near the stage. I ordered a beer I didn't want just so the table didn't look empty. I had the whole confrontation drafted in my head. Something breezy. Something like, so, these photos, when were they taken, because I do due diligence for a living. I was going to watch him sweat, finish my beer, and leave. That comprised the entire structure of my evening.

Then he walked in at 7:50, ten minutes early, and the plan started falling apart.

He looked exactly like his photos. That was the problem. I had spent two weeks building a case in my head, out of nothing really, just a suspicion and a bad mood, and he walked in wearing a gray button-up with the sleeves rolled and looked like every picture, down to the haircut. Thirty-five, he'd said, and he looked 35. Software engineer, he'd said, and he had the laptop bag to prove it. He spotted me, waved, and came over with the easy walk of a man who has never once worried about a karaoke bar.

"Joyce?" he said, even though it was obviously me, sitting alone at the table I'd described. "I'm Khalid. You look like your pictures too, for what it's worth."

"That's a relief," I said. "I was worried."

"About your pictures?"

"About yours."

He laughed and sat down. "I'll be honest, I almost wore the shirt from the third photo. The blue one. It photographs well but in person it's kind of a disaster."

"See, that's the kind of information a person should volunteer up front."

"Next time I will." He flagged down the waitress and ordered a whiskey, and I noticed my beer was already half gone, which was not part of the plan either.

The thing you have to understand is that I came armed. I had a whole evening budgeted, ninety minutes, one song, one confrontation, one exit. And instead we talked for an hour about nothing, about his job and the terrible project management software he maintains and the fact that I once billed a client for eleven hours in a single day and cried in a parking garage. He was easy to talk to, which annoyed me, because easy was not what I had prepared for. I had prepared for a liar.

Around 9:00 the host called the open mic and Khalid turned to me with a look I already didn't trust.

"Duets are two for one tonight," he said. "I read it on the way in."

"I read the same sign. That's not a reason."

"It's a little bit of a reason." He was already standing. "Come on. Worst case, we're bad at it and never come back."

So we did it, and I won't say which song because I have some dignity left, and about halfway through, he held out his hand between us, palm up, a question, while we both leaned into the microphone. It was the kind of offer you could pretend you didn't see. I took it. I want that understood, that I noticed it, catalogued it, and put my hand in his anyway, and my recon mission just kept getting worse from there.

He could actually sing. That was the real trap. I had assumed karaoke would be the leveler, the thing where everyone is mediocre and it's funny. Instead he held a note and the room went quiet for a second, and when we finished there was actual applause, from strangers, and he did a little bow like an idiot and I was smiling in a way I could feel from the inside.

We sat back down and he wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

"Okay," he said. "You're staring at me like you're grading me."

"I'm a lawyer. I grade things."

"Did I pass?"

"I haven't finished the review."

He leaned back and looked at the stage, then at the hallway by the restrooms where the private booths were. The Croon Room has maybe six of them, little rooms with a screen and a couch and a door, and I had noticed them when I came in and filed them away as irrelevant.

"They have private booths," he said. "Better acoustics."

"That is objectively false. The booth speakers are smaller."

"I know. It's a bad excuse. Do you want to see it anyway?"

Here is where I should tell you I said no, or that I said yes for recon reasons, which would at least be consistent. What I actually said was, "Yeah, okay," and we both knew what that meant, and I picked up my beer and followed him past the stage and down the hallway, and I did not once think about the exit I had planned.

The booth had a couch against one wall and a