“Back to Texas,” he said, his voice kind of cracking. “You want Melinda, she’s all yours.”
“I don’t want her!” Sam said. “I want her to stop pestering me, for cryin’ out loud.”
Larry put down the cardboard carton he was carrying on the tailgate of the Volvo and drew himself up to his full height.
“She’s not interested in you anymore, Mr. Gunn. She’s gone batty over this guy.” He jutted his lower lip at me.
For a ridiculous instant I felt like a gunslinger in a Western, about to be challenged by a callow youth.
“Listen, son,” I said as reasonably as I could, “I was just trying to get her mind off Sam.”
He kind of sagged, as if he’d been holding himself together for so long that his strength had given out. I thought he might drop to the ground and start crying.
But he didn’t. “Sam, you—what’s the difference? She doesn’t like me anymore. I guess she never really liked me in the first place.”
I looked at Sam and he looked at me. Then he got a sort of strange, benign smile on his face, an almost saintly kind of expression I had never seen on Sam before.
He went over to Larry and slid an arm around the kid’s skinny shoulders, as much to prop him up as anything else. “Larry,” he asked in a quiet, kindly sort of voice, “have you ever heard of a fella named Cyrano de Bergerac?”
“Who?”
“Cyrano?” Jade looked sharply into Johansen’s sparkling blue eyes.
“You know the play?” he asked.
“I played Roxane in our high school drama class,” she said.
“Oh.” Johansen looked slightly uncomfortable. “I think I saw it on video once. Had a lot of sword fighting in it.”
She sighed and nodded. “Yes, a lot of sword fighting. And Cyrano coached Christian so that he could win Roxane’s heart—even though he loved her himself.”
Johansen nodded back at her. “Yep. That’s just what Sam did. Or at least, that’s what he got me to do.”
It was sheer desperation—Johansen continued. Without Larry we’d never be able to build our hardware on the schedule we had promised in our proposal. Or maybe not at all.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Sam told the kid, right there in the driveway. “Mutt and I know everything there is to know about women. With us helping you, she’ll fall into your arms in no time flat.”
The kid’s face reddened. “I get kind of tongue-tied when I t-try to t-talk sw-sw-sweet to her.”
Sam stared at the kid. A stuttering lover? It didn’t look good.
Then I got the idea of the century. “Why don’t you talk to her through your computers?”
Larry got really excited about that. Computers were something he understood and trusted. As long as he didn’t have to actually speak to her face-to-face he could say anything we gave him.
“Okay,” Sam said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Mutt, you take our lovesick friend here to the library and borrow as many poetry books as they’ll let you take out. I gotta get to the airport and meet Bonnie Jo.”
Melinda looked surprised when we came back into the office; those big brown eyes of hers flashed wide. But then she stuck her nose into her computer screen and began pecking at the keyboard as fast as her chubby little fingers would go.
It was getting near to noon. I went to my desk and ran off the phone’s answering machine. There was only one call, from Sam. Bonnie Jo’s plane from Salt Lake City was running late. Delays and congestion in Dallas.
So what else is new? I sat Larry down at his desk and helped him unfold his computer and set it up again. Melinda glanced at us from time to time, but whenever she saw me looking she quickly snapped her eyes back to her own screen.
Larry hadn’t said a word to her. While he checked out his machine I thumbed madly through one of the poetry books. God almighty, I hadn’t even looked at that stuff since they made me read it in high school English classes. I ran across one that I vaguely remembered.
Without speaking, I showed the page to Larry, then left the book on his desk and went over to my own, next to the window. As nonchalantly as I could I booted up my own machine, waiting to see if the kid actually worked up the nerve to send the poem to Melinda, sitting four and a half feet away from him.
Sure enough, the words began to scroll across the screen: “Come live with me and be my Love …”
I don’t know what Melinda was working on, but I guess when she saw the message light blink on her machine she automatically set the screen to receive it.
Her eyes went really wide. Her mouth dropped open as she read the lines of poetry scrolling onto her screen. To make sure she didn’t think they were coming from me, I picked up the telephone and tapped the first button on my automatic dialer. Some guy’s bored voice told me that the day’s high would be eighty-two, with a seventy-five percent chance of showers in the afternoon.
Melinda looked at me kind of puzzled. I ignored her and looked out my window, where I could watch her reflection without her knowing it. I saw a suspicion on her face slowly dawn into certainty. She turned and looked at Larry, who promptly turned flame-red.
A good beginning, I thought.
Then Sam burst into the office, towing Bonnie Jo Murtchison.
When it came to women Sam was truly democratic. Tall or short, plump or anorexic, Sam made no distinctions based on race, creed, color, or previous condition of servitude. But he did seem to hit on blondes preferentially.
Bonnie Jo Murtchison was blonde, the kind of golden blonde with almost reddish highlights that is one of the triumphs of modern cosmetic chemistry. Her hair was frizzed, shoulder length, but pushed back off her face enough to show two enormous bangle earrings. She had a slight figure, almost boyish. Good legs, long and strong and nicely tanned. A good tennis player, I thought. That was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw her.
She was wearing a neat little miniskirted sleeveless frock of butter yellow, the kind that costs a week’s pay. More jewelry on her wrists and fingers, necklaces dangling down her slim bosom. She clattered and jangled as she came into the office, towering over Sam by a good five-six inches.
The perfect spoiled princess, I thought at once. Rich father, beautiful mother, and no brothers or sisters. What a pain in the butt she’s going to be.
I was right, but for all the wrong reasons.
The first thing that really jolted me about Bonnie Jo was her voice. I expected the kind of shrill yapping that you hear from the cuties around the condo swimming pool; you know, the ones who won’t go into the water because it’d mess up the hairdo they just spent all morning on.
Bonnie Jo’s voice was low and ladylike. Not quite husky, and certainly not soft. Controlled. Strong. She didn’t hurt your ears when she talked.
Sam introduced her to Larry, who mumbled and avoided her eyes, and to Melinda, who looked her over like a professional prizefighter assessing a new opponent. Then he brought her across the room to my desk.
“This is our president, Spence Johansen,” Sam said. “I call him Mutt.”
She reached across the desk to take my hand in a firm grip. Her eyes were gray-green, a color that haunted me so much I looked it up in a book on precious stones at the local library. The color of Brazilian tourmaline: deep, mysterious, powerful grayish green.
“And what would you like me to call you, Mr. Johansen?” she asked in that marvelous voice.
She just sort of naturally drew a smile out of me. “Spence will be fine,” I said.
“Good. I’m Bonnie Jo.”
I think I fell in love with her right then and there.