Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [67]
I’d never seen her on TV, but I knew what she looked like from her various author photos. In the prominently positioned glamour shot on the home page of the iLoveULab website, she presented herself as a blown-out blonde with china-doll eyes and overindulged lips. From the neck up, in fact, Dr. Kate’s picture didn’t look that different from the Other Jessica Darling’s. There was such a disconnect between her academic background and her pornified photo that I assumed that the digital image had been highly enhanced for promotional purposes. Surely she’d be much plainer and less plastic in person. I mean, was it really necessary for a neuroscientist/C.E.O. to look like a porn star?
I saw for myself that Dr. Kate was even more flawlessly Photo-Shopped in real life. She was wearing something that resembled a traditional lab coat, only it was black and tight and had a slight sheen, and it was unbuttoned to reveal a black, white, and red python-print dress. She resembled a curvaceous, credulity-busting scientist in the Bond Girl tradition, the kind who saves the world from thermonuclear apocalypse and still makes it on time for her next Brazilian wax. This, apparently, is her signature look.
“You must be Jessica,” she said, without getting up, but extending her hand. Her nails weren’t long, but all squared off and expertly painted in the vampy, nearly black color I’d noticed on chic women around the city. My fingernails had been quickly and unevenly snipped with a pair of toenail clippers. Some nails were roundish, others were squarish, and one or two were cut so low that neither term applied. All had been unevenly painted in a clear ninety-nine-cent polish about one minute before I walked out the door. It’s fortunate for me that fingernails are not the windows to the soul.
“When I read about your work,” she said in a confident, TV-ready tone, “I thought you sounded perfect for iLoveULab.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, dipping my head in a gesture of false modesty, but also to avert my eyes from her artificially inflated lips. They looked like Novocain feels. “And I’m so glad to meet you and find out more about iLoveULab.”
“I’m so thrilled about this new venture,” she began, gesturing toward the suede cube chair on the opposite side of the slick black coffee table. “iLoveULab International is the first networking service to use state-of-the-art brain-imaging technology to pair up life partners who are matched from the inside out….”
Dr. Kate must know that her company’s name, though perfectly in keeping with others in the matchmaking game, has cheese-ass connotations, and could be a turnoff for the more serious-minded employees she courts. She was quick to put a smarty-pants spin on what many might perceive to be a shallow endeavor beneath her highly educated pedigree.
Maybe iLoveULab International has defied Silicon Alley odds and hasn’t hemorrhaged money like so many new media start-ups before it. It’s possible that in your second or third or tenth rereading of this notebook, iLoveULab has entered the pantheon of successful Fortune 500–type companies. Perhaps iLoveULab’s motto (“We’ve got love on the brain”) has become a multigenerational catchphrase with the timelessness of “Just do it!” Perhaps the iLoveULab logo (a cartoonish red heart inside a medical textbook illustration of the brain) has been canonized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and no longer brings to mind a drugstore clearance bin on February 15.
“What do you