Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

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.

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?