Well, he’d asked for it. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s take the opening. ‘It will be demonstrated that Gorczany Microsystems is in the process of becoming a bell weather for the industry.’” She quoted with savage relish.
He didn’t notice. Away from his widgets, he was kind of dim. “What’s wrong with any of that?” he said. “I see you’ve marked it up, but I don’t see why.”
“That’s why Mr. Gorczany hired me,” Vanessa said. “From the top, then. ‘It will be demonstrated…’ By whom? By what? God, maybe?”
“By the report,” he said indignantly.
“‘This report will show…’ On to the next. How is ‘in the process of becoming’ different from ‘becoming’?”
“Umm—” Ellis scratched the left, or shorter, wing of his mustache.
Since he didn’t answer, Vanessa went on, “Now this ‘bell weather’—”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s spelled okay. I did that part on the computer, and the spellchecker didn’t hiccup. You can see for yourself.”
Vanessa sighed, more in anger than in sorrow. “Just because the spellchecker passed it doesn’t make it right. ‘Bell’ and ‘weather’ are both words, sure. But the word is ‘bellwether’—w-e-t-h-e-r. It’s got nothing to do with the rain outside. Do you know what a w-e-t-h-e-r is, Dr. Ellis?” He got pissy if you didn’t use his title, so she loaded it with poisonous sweetness.
He blinked. “I never thought about it.”
Why am I not surprised? But she didn’t say that. She was being—relatively—good. “A wether is a castrated ram, the way an ox is a castrated bull. A bellwether was—still is, for all I know—a castrated ram with a bell around its neck. It leads the sheep where the shepherd wants them to go, and the bell tells him where they are if anything goes wrong. So that’s why the word means getting out in front.”
“Oh,” he muttered. That he could grow the lopsided mustache proved he had balls of his own, but he didn’t like hearing a woman talk about animals without theirs.
“Shall we go on?” Vanessa said. “I think you’ll see I had good reason for the changes I made.”
He considered. The next big flock of red marks perched two sentences farther down. There was another one in the next paragraph. “Never mind,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll put the goddamn things in when I rewrite.”
“Thank you, Dr. Ellis,” she said demurely. Fuck you, Dr. Ellis, she thought as he retreated. And he wasn’t the only one, and he wasn’t the worst (though he was in the running).
She tried to think of herself as a plastic surgeon, making flabby prose look better with strategic nips and tucks. More often, she felt like a middle-school English teacher—only too many of them didn’t know squat about grammar, either. She had to look at all the ugly stuff before it got improved, too, and came out not real gorgeous even after she’d done her best with it.
Once Walker Ellis decided he’d had enough, Vanessa went round and round with the company’s HTML wizard. “A bunch of the apostrophes in the new post are upside down,” she said. “You need to fix them.”
“That’s how Microsoft Word outputs them,” he said with a shrug: a geek’s version of No tengo la culpa. His name was Bruce McRaa, which he pronounced as if it were spelled McRae.
“That’s how Word outputs them if you let it be stupid,” she answered. If you’re stupid yourself were the words behind the words. She’d gone round this barn with other alleged computer whizzes. She told him how to make Word behave. With a carnivorous smile, she added, “You don’t even need a Mac to do it.”
“Messing with special characters is a pain, though,” he said. “Just typing is an awful lot easier and faster.”
“Getting things wrong is a pain,” Vanessa snapped. “Being lazy is a pain. Having people who look at the site think we don’t care about what we put there is a big pain.”
The HTML wizard—the evil enchanter, as far as she was concerned—threw his hands in the air. “Okay! Okay! When the power’s up, I’ll fix it.” Behind McRaa’s words lay a no-doubt heartfelt Now fuck off! Since she’d got her way, she left.
Standing in the rain waiting for the bus was a major pain. Watching Nick Gorczany head down to the Palos Verdes Peninsula in his BMW was a bigger one yet. No matter how obscenely expensive gas had got, he could still afford to drive whenever and wherever he pleased. The peons he deigned to employ? It was to laugh. Come the revolution… , she thought darkly.
Naturally, the bus showed up late. She stepped in a puddle walking to her apartment building and soaked her foot in spite of galoshes. The mail consisted of three bills and an ad. By the time she walked into her place, she was steaming.
Cooking odors greeted her. She got ready to scream and run, or to fight like hell. But Bronislav’s voice greeted her from the kitchen: “They turn me around early, so I get into town and come up here.”
“Oh. Uh, great!” Vanessa’s rage evaporated. She’d given him a key, which was a mark of how much she cared for him. She threw down the crap from the mailbox and hurried into the kitchen for a kiss. Then she said, “What are you making? It smells… interesting.”
“Even now, Americans think too much is not worth eating. In Serbia, we know better,” he answered. “This is chopped beef liver with hard-boiled eggs, with onions and peppers and spices.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said again, on a different note this time. Bryce’s mother had made her chopped liver—once. Once was twice too often. She’d tasted, then washed out her mouth with Manischewitz (which was also no thrill). Vile hepatic paste…
“You will like it,” Bronislav said. “I make it properly, not like horrible stuff they do in delis.”
She’d had to work to put up with Bryce’s mom even when she’d still liked him (that they’d loved each other for a while was something she tried hard to forget). She loved Bronislav now. That got her to keep her mouth shut about what she was thinking. It got her to taste some of the stuff he’d worked hard to make.
Nothing on God’s green earth, not even love, could make her like it or eat more than a forkful. “Sorry, dear,” she said. “More for you, that’s all.” Too many aggressive flavors in her mouth all at once weren’t her idea of a treat.
He looked wounded. With those sorrowful eyes, he did it better than anyone else she’d ever known. Then he brightened—a little. “If I serve it in restaurant, people who come there will know to expect food with strong Serbian soul.”
“Sure they will,” Vanessa greed. She started to tease him about Serbian chitlins and collard greens, but didn’t. There probably were such things, or their close equivalents. Poor people, peasants, all over the world ate whatever the folks with more money didn’t want to bother with. There was the root of Bronislav’s crack about American tastes.
He’d also done something with potatoes and sharp cheese that she could say happy things about without making herself a liar. And he was here when she hadn’t expected him to be. When you were in love, that even made up for things like chopped liver.
Once upon a time, going fifty or a hundred miles to see something was no big deal. Like anyone who’d grown up in Southern California, Bryce Miller had taken it for granted. He’d known plenty of people who’d commuted that far to college or to work every day. Oh, they’d bitched about how much driving they had to do and what a drag it was, but life wouldn’t be life without something to bitch about.