Julia was giving me that what-is-a-beautiful-woman-like-me-doing-out-with-a-computer-geek look, and there was nothing I could do about it till my meal got there. I wanted to tell her that I desperately loved her, but I knew that would only get a long, strong laughing-at laugh.
Finally my entree arrived, and I had to stay calm and go slow to keep it from looking rehearsed. I ate some of the shrimp first. Then when I turned my attention to the steak, sure enough it was tough and rubbery just as I’d surreptitiously ordered it to be.
“I am so sorry, sir,” the waiter said when I told him the problem. “We have never had anything like this occur before. I will personally see to it that—”
“Please,” I interrupted. “It’s no big deal. The chef probably just misunderstood. He must have thought I ordered the surf and Nerf.”
I held my breath and shifted slightly in my seat, the better to get a running start toward the door if this one did a Hiroshima.
But I needn’t have worried. It worked.
Julia laughed so hard she almost choked on her bordeaux and she lost that look she’d had in her eyes earlier. I could breathe again.
Even though the Mr. E line had turned to vaporware, my comeback was good enough that I probably still could have gotten a kiss out of her that night. But my lips were chapped and dry, and now that we were actually at her door, the line I had rehearsed for this moment somehow lost its luster, so I didn’t push my luck.
I was walking on air for a few days after that, but when I called and asked Julia out again she turned me down flat. She said it was because she had to go to her uncle’s funeral. She said she’d take a raincheck and she looked forward to seeing me soon.
But I could tell what she really meant was “I never want to see you again. You lied to me. You’re not a clever bon mot utterer. All you are is a computer nerd. A computer nerd who is never going to get a kiss from me.”
And she was right. I had been crazy for trying to win her over by pretending to be a guy who’s great with words. That was a plan that was doomed to fail sooner or later. But what else could I do? Be myself? That was Marty’s famous useless advice. But every time I was myself, the only reaction I got from women was laughter, and it was definitely at-laughter and not with-laughter.
I guessed the truth was I had been crazy trying to win a goddess over at all. Girls like Julia and guys like me did not belong together. The head cheerleader did not go steady with the president of the audiovisual club.
I threw myself back into my work, which I had been neglecting completely what with running around to restaurants and plays and stuff and all of them twice.
What I was working on was programming a software application. Marty and I had always made a little extra money by offering Internet access. It was just a sideline, not that many people interested in it — until now. All of a sudden everybody was interested in it. Everybody wanted to ride on the information superhighway.
The problem was you gotta know the UNIX computer language to navigate, and not that many people do. What I was trying to work on was a graphical user interface program that would make surfing the Internet as easy for the newbies and novices as Microsoft Windows and most of the other software had gotten lately. We called it Atlas, the Easy Way to Find Your Way on the Information Superhighway. And Marty said it was going to make us both very rich someday.
I just wished I wanted to be rich. But I didn’t care — about anything. The fire in my belly I always got when programming and creating software just wasn’t there any more. I couldn’t stop thinking about Julia. Why couldn’t I be clever and spontaneous? Or why couldn’t she be attracted to a man who knew his way around the inside of a computer and spoke COBOL fluently?
I just had to get her back. But how? The bon mots could be thrown off too easily to be counted on exclusively. I needed another weapon or two to fall back on. But my arsenal was empty.
Or was it?
Before I fell into the bon mot thing I used to try to get women’s attention by making them feel sorry for me. It never really worked, but I always felt like it had a lot of potential.
Now if only something terrible — I mean something other than losing Julia — would happen to me. Something involving bullets or broken bones. Maybe I could even work up a bon mot to get off while I was bleeding all over the place like Clark Gable in Red Dust. That would win her back.
When I woke up in the hospital early the next morning with my head all wrapped up and bandaged, the very first thing I did — even before I opened my eyes — was to call out brokenly, “Julia... Julia.”
But she was already there. Right by my side, where I never thought she’d ever be again. For a minute I figured I must have overdone it and sent myself past the hospital all the way to heaven, that’s how great it felt to see her.
“Oh my gosh! Chip, you’re awake!” she said. “How are you feeling? I have been so worried about you.”
“Unhhh.”
Yeah, I realized that as a mot this wasn’t particularly bon, but my brain hurt so bad I was lucky just to get that out. I wasn’t sure whether the fever I was feeling was because of the injuries I had sustained or because Julia was holding my hand.
My eyes started to adjust to the bright fluorescent lighting, and the pounding in my skull was almost bearable if I kept my head perfectly still and way back in the pillows.
I cut my eyes over for a better look at Julia and saw that Marty was there, too, sitting in a folding chair in the corner of the room. He didn’t look any too happy to see his only brother reviving, but maybe he was just giving me this time alone with Julia because he knew how much I loved her.
“Honey, the police have been by here to check on you a couple of times,” Julia said. “And they’ll be coming back a little later. They want to know if you can describe the person who did this to you and give them some more details about the crime.”
“Huh?” was all I could say. I knew she had given me some kind of information, but I didn’t hear anything after I heard her call me “honey.”
“What happened, Chip?” she simplified it for me.
Well, what actually happened was that I took all the money out of the cash register, hid the Atlas software prototype, and knocked myself unconscious with an electric screwdriver. But I wasn’t about to tell her or Marty or the police about that.
And it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I didn’t really steal anything. I took the cash and bought a money order with it. In a few days I would mail it back to the shop with the software and a note from my penitent pretend robber. No harm done, except, of course, to my cranium.
Marty wasn’t even looking at me. I don’t want to say my brother is insensitive, but I think he was feeling the loss of the money pretty heavily. There was more than usual in the cash register that day — about five hundred and fifty dollars — because a guy had paid cash for a new CD-ROM kit and some software. I felt bad about making my brother worry, but he’d be all right once the money was returned.
“Well, I was closing up the shop. Marty had a meeting, and he’d already left ears,” I told Julia. (I had thought of a couple of semi-bon mots to toss in while telling this tale, one of which involved calling this crime the Information Superhighway Robbery, but the pain in my head was so huge I couldn’t remember the context. I decided to stick with the pity aspect. It seemed to be working pretty well so far.) “This guy comes up, bangs on the window. I wave at him, like we’re closed, but he keeps knocking. Through the glass he tells me that he’s from out of town, he’s got a major report to do in the morning, and the battery in his laptop finally gave up the ghost. Would I please, please sell him a new one. Real quick, wouldn’t take a minute.