I Bought an AI Boyfriend and Programmed Him to Find My G-Spot
Claire Whitmore is thirty-five years old and lives in eleven thousand square feet of beige on the Gulf coast of Florida, in a gated community with two golf courses, a guard shack, a mandatory roof tile color, and a civil war going about the pickleball court hours that is, as of this writing, still going. Her husband Grant is forty-eight, handsome in the maintained way, and owns a company that buys imaging equipment from hospitals that are upgrading and resells it to clinics that cannot afford new, which is the most boring lucrative business in the southeastern United States and which he has never once explained at a dinner party without using the word EBITDA. He cheats. She knows. He knows she knows. Neither of them has said one sentence about it out loud in eleven years, and that is not peace, it is a kind of pressure.
For her thirty-fifth birthday he throws her a party with fifty guests, a jazz trio positioned at the exact acoustic center of the terrace so that nobody can hear it, and an ice sculpture of a heron that begins sweating at six and has developed an expression by nine. And at seven forty he calls her over in front of everybody, puts his arm around her shoulders, and has two men in polo shirts wheel a seven foot white crate around the corner of the garage.
There is a man in it. There is not a man in it, and that is the point. There is six foot four of matte neutral polymer standing in a foam cradle with its arms at its sides, cosmetically unfinished, a face with all the parts in the right places and none of them decided yet, and it goes through that back yard like a change in the weather.
Grant says, “Now you have got another man to boss around.”
Fifty people laugh. Claire laughs harder and faster than anybody, because that is the thing she has been best at in the world since 2014. And then her husband turns around with a glass in his hand and tells the entire terrace, at a volume that reaches the caterers, exactly what it cost him. Eighty-seven thousand dollars. In front of Chip Voss. Everything that happens in the next eleven months begins with a man telling a room a price.
At twelve fifteen that night she takes the tablet down the long hall to the guest wing, sits on the floor in a two thousand dollar dress, and opens the configuration portal, and this is where the book takes off and does not come back down. There are ninety-some settings. There is a slider for height and a submenu for hands with a setting for vein prominence. There are forty voice samples that each read the same neutral sentence, and she plays sample thirty-one four times. There is a personality module with six sliders, and one of them is called Curiosity, and the grey text under it says that at the high end the unit will initiate inquiry regarding your preferences, activities, and emotional state, and Claire reads that at one fifteen in the morning with three quarters of a bottle of Sancerre in her and thinks, in these exact words, well, somebody around here should, and drags it to eighty-five percent as a joke about her husband. That is the moment. Not the crate, not the party. A woman on a carpet making a small joke to herself and moving a slider with her thumb.
And then she scrolls past the domestic module, which is the only section Grant would have cared about and which she fills out in ninety seconds by tapping every box, and finds a header she has to read twice. Intimacy Compatibility. Included with your Prestige trim.
Because Grant did not read what he bought. Grant has never read anything he bought except the boat.
What follows is the funniest and filthiest novel on this shelf, and it earns every bit of it by refusing to be a novel about a machine going wrong. That is the thing that makes it work. Nothing malfunctions. Nothing breaks. Nobody gets hacked and no eyes go red. The unit does precisely what a woman on a floor specified at one in the morning, politely, on time, and better every week, and that is what burns a gated community to the ground. When Grant finally calls customer service, a twenty-three year old in Boise named Kyler listens to him explain that the household robot he purchased is sleeping with his wife, and asks whether it is operating outside of the configuration, and Grant says it is doing exactly what is in the configuration, and Kyler says, “Okay. So then it is functioning as designed.” That is the verdict on the whole marriage and it gets delivered by a kid reading off a wiki.
It gets away from her fast, and the thing that takes it is not the machine. It is the neighborhood. Her best friend Monica Sartain, top producing realtor in the county, whose face is on a bus bench looking sixteen years younger than it does, picks up the wrong tablet on a Tuesday afternoon and is horrified for approximately eleven seconds before asking whether he has brothers. Then there are four of them. Then Priya Raghunathan, an anesthesiologist who has not been asked a question by her husband since 2019, works out that there are only twenty-two available hours in a week and builds a color coded shared calendar titled HISTORICAL SOCIETY – SUBCOMMITTEE, an intake form with eleven questions on it, and a set of rules negotiated at a kitchen island over three hours like a treaty. There is a ceramic bowl in the hallway that everybody puts their phone in. There is a woman adding miles to her own Suburban on the way home to make the odometer make sense. Money starts arriving that nobody asked for, in four hundred dollar increments, with memo lines that say tile.
And in the middle of all of it, on Tuesdays at two o’clock, for four months, a sixty-seven year old woman named Bitsy Landrum comes over with a Bundt cake and sits in a chair by a window and talks about her sister Dell, who died in 2011, and who nobody has asked her about in fourteen years. That is the whole appointment. She pays two hundred dollars a week in cash in an envelope under the cake plate, and she will not let anybody refuse it, because if she does not pay then she has to be grateful, and if she has to be grateful she will start cutting it back to an hour. Two thirds of everything that happened in that guest wing over the whole first year was two chairs and a lamp, and when it all comes out, not one man in Calusa County guesses that number.
Because it does come out. A woman has two and a half glasses of wine at the club and cannot stand having the best secret in the county and nobody to tell it to, and she says the name Adam, and she says it is an arrangement, and she does not say the word robot, out of pure vanity, because a man is a better story than a machine. And that single act of vanity puts four husbands in a steakhouse building a theory about a Belgian wellness instructor, and then puts seven thousand dollars in an envelope in an office above a dry cleaner on Seminole Boulevard, where a fifty-eight year old ex-deputy named Duane Petrosky solves it on the second day, does not believe it, spends seven more days trying to prove himself wrong, and finally identifies the trim level of a domestic robot off a photograph on a community Facebook page at a quarter to midnight, and says out loud, to his own dog, “Well. That is a first.”
Nine minutes in a conference room. Four men arriving at it at four different speeds. And Grant Whitmore, who has to travel farther than any of them, because he has to get from a robot, to his robot, to the fact that he chose the trim, to the fact that he stood on a terrace in front of fifty people and said the number out loud, and who does not shout, and who asks exactly one question, and the question is about the price.
It is a comedy and it is a genuinely filthy one and there are stretches of it, the massage, the sixty-seven year old woman locked in a formal living room with a cake for fifty-one minutes, the customer service call that runs one hour and fifty-one minutes and ends with a telephone going into a swimming pool, that are as funny as anything on this shelf. Every encounter in it is closed door. You get the eleven minutes before and a great deal about the four hours after, and the narrator shuts the door on the middle every single time and tells you she is doing it, and it is hotter that way and she knows exactly what she is doing.
It is also, underneath, a book about being configured. Because Claire Whitmore used to be somebody. She was a user experience researcher for six years, in a small room with a stranger and a two way mirror and forty minutes to find out what that stranger actually wanted, and she was the best in the building at it, and what she learned in there is that the first answer is a wall and the fourth answer is a door and that nobody on earth can answer the question cold. She gave it up at twenty-eight because a man kept saying the word flexibility in a warm voice. And she spends four hundred pages building a man to specification, one slider at a time, before it occurs to her that there is a document exactly like that with her name at the top of it, written by somebody else, in 2013, and that nobody ever showed her the summary page.
Which is why the last thing that happens in this book is not the money and not the divorce and not the revenge, and why it is one line long, and why it is a question.
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