On Wednesday night, sitting at home by myself, or rather pacing around by myself, I got nervous about the play I had chosen. Was it going to be any good? Was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz too juvenile for Julia? I knew she’d seen the movie; was it going to bother her a lot that she knew how it ended? And so on and on till I finally went to the theater by myself, two days before I was supposed to go with Julia.
And the play was good; in fact it was very good. The part where the Wicked Witch of the West gets her just deserts was particularly well done. If I hadn’t known a little about theatrical science, I would almost have believed the old gal was actually melting.
All the way home I thought about the witch and the way Dorothy had liquidated her. And I thought about Julia and how I might already be in love with her even though all I knew about her was that she was beautiful and aromatic and liked verbal cleverness.
Then something that hardly ever happens unless I’m in front of a monitor happened. I had an idea. A great idea. A surefire, foolproof, can’t-miss way to win Julia over.
I hoped.
I couldn’t wait until Friday.
Which is not to say that when Friday got there I wasn’t nervous. I was practically nothing but nerves. My vocal cords might as well have been paralyzed. I said, “Hello, you look n-n-n-nice,” when I picked her up, then nothing — not one word — in the car, and nothing during intermission.
I certainly don’t believe in telepathy, but it wasn’t hard to read what Julia was thinking.
My only hope was the second act, and the impending annihilation of Oz’s hydrophobic sorceress.
And there it came. The witch was setting her broom on fire and holding it out toward poor Scarecrow’s flammable self.
This was it. My one and only chance. This was for all the marbles. If I bombed out now with Julia, my nerves would never allow me to go out on another date even if I could convince somebody to go with me.
Dorothy sees her friend in flames, grabs the water bucket, pitches it.
Come on, Chip, you’ve rehearsed this a thousand times in the past forty-eight hours. Remember to watch your timing. Marty says that’s ninety percent of the game. And... go!
“Don’t worry,” I whispered to Julia as we watched the screaming, writhing witch melt into the floor. “It’s just a stage she’s going through.”
For one endless terrible second Julia just stared at me like I was a miraculously cured deaf-mute. Unfortunately, a deaf-mute whose first words were incredibly stupid.
And then she collapsed into high-pitched gales of laughter. I mean she drowned out the actors on stage. People were turning around, staring and ssshhhing her.
Julia went on for — I’m not exaggerating — a good four or five minutes — Dorothy and her friends on stage had to wait to ask the Winkie guards for the witch’s broom until my date’s last rafter-reaching guffaw had subsided. Then she put her hand on my leg, wiped tears out of her eyes, and said, “God, you are so funny.”
For the first time in my life, I was definitely completely in love. I would have done anything to make this woman mine and keep her laughing and looking at me like that.
I didn’t have anything else rehearsed, so I didn’t get off any more bon mots at our post-theater dinner, but it was all right; I didn’t need to. I could coast along on the “stage” one. And making Julia laugh had loosened me up enough to where I could at least talk to her, even if it was only about everyday stuff like the weather and the World Series and the new ninety megahertz Pentium computers.
Didn’t matter, she was convinced that I was funny, so she saw me that way.
I’m pretty sure if I could have summoned up enough nerve to try to kiss her goodnight she probably would have let me. I would have risked it, too, if I had worked out anything clever or witty to say at her door. But I hadn’t, so I decided not to chance it that night but made a note to rehearse the winding-down part better before our next date.
Next Friday I took her to Mr. B’s, a seafood place on the west side of town. I managed to get off a couple of pretty good lines about jumbo shrimp and about schools of sturgeon that were almost as well received in actuality as they were in my living room rehearsals. Julia laughed her lovely lilting laugh, and my heart melted like that witch.
I was afraid to say it even to myself for fear I might jinx it out of existence, but it sure looked as though Julia was falling for me. I could see it in her eyes and hear it in her laugh. This incredible goddess was falling for me, Microsoft would soon release Windows 4.0, and all was right with the world.
It was also kind of a sham because she was falling for this guy who was always clever and charming and getting off these puns and stuff she liked so much. But it wasn’t me. I mean it was me — I made up the jokes and everything, they weren’t from a book — but it wasn’t the spontaneous me.
That night went fairly well, but it was really just a setup for the following Friday when I took her to Eschycclio’s, the new Greek-Italian place everybody was talking about without actually saying the name, since nobody was sure how it should be pronounced.
I had of course done my preliminary reconnaissance, dining there on the previous Monday evening to learn the menu and the decor and anything else I might be able to get off a bon mot about. I stole a menu and ran its entire contents through a program I’d created that I’d hoped would create puns.
I was getting less and less nervous around Julia. I even managed to make small talk in the car on our way to the restaurant. The only thing I was at all concerned about was the fact that Julia was going to have to help me with a straight line to set up my bon mot.
But I felt sure she would. It was a question everybody all over town was asking. When we got to Eschycclio’s all she had to do was ask me, “How do you pronounce the name of this place anyway?” and I would say “I don’t know. It’s a Mister E to me” (you see now, of course, why we had to go to Mr. B’s the week before), and she would laugh that delicious laugh again and I would definitely get a kiss tonight.
But it didn’t happen. The waiter — a different guy from the one who served me Monday — messed me up. Before we had even sat down he said, “Good evening. Welcome to Esschycclio’s.” And he said it real slow like “Ess-chick-leo’s” so there was no way Julia was going to ask me how to pronounce it after that.
Well, I had backups of course. But nothing as good as my first-string stuff. When the waiter said, “Falafel, sir?”, I said “No, a slight headache, but overall I feel pretty good,” and I got off another one about how we weren’t antipasto; we were in fact all for it. But all they got from Julia was a polite giggle.
I was losing her. Not only was I not going to get a kiss tonight. I was never going to get another date with her, either.
I started stammering again, and I had to excuse myself, go to the men’s room, and pace around trying to think of some way to make her start laughing and liking me again.
Finally, after a few dirty looks from the patrons in there, just ’cause I was talking to myself one minute and then pretending to be Julia the next, I hit on an idea.
I stepped around into the kitchen and told the chef I would give him twenty dollars to send me a tough, rubbery steak. He was very foreign and we had a tough time understanding each other. At first he didn’t want to do it and he didn’t want me in his kitchen, but when I upped my offer to fifty dollars, he said okay.
I went out, sat back down, ordered the surf and turf, and silently waited for my meal to arrive.