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

A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and Sixty-four Megabytes of RAM Robert Loy

Julia is the exception, but ordinarily I would much rather interact with computers than people. I know they’re supposed to be complicated and complex, and I guess in a way they are. But they have this advantage over human beings: once you learn what makes a computer tick, you know forever what makes a computer tick. It won’t change on you next week and start thinking and acting in totally different and incomprehensible ways like people do.

Especially female people. I like female people and everything, but I’ve just about given up on ever figuring them out. Part of the problem is I’ve never really been involved with one long enough to study how they process data and react and so forth. And part of the problem is that they’re just not consistent like computers. Their basic input/output system is erratic.

My brother Marty now, he’s just the opposite of me. He can’t do much with a computer other than sing its praises, but he can talk to people all day long and never run out of cute and clever things to say. Maybe that’s why our little two-man computer business is still thriving while most of the other independent little guys have either been bought out or bulldozed.

Our strengths complement each other is what I’m trying to say. I build the systems in the back while Marty sells the heck out of them up front. We have our own little brand name I’m sure you’ve never heard of, but everybody who has heard of it will tell you they are sweet machines. Then down the road Marty will either sell them a new faster upgraded model or I’ll fix the one they’ve got. I’ll even make housecalls, which is something I can guarantee Compaq won’t do for you.

It was on a housecall that I met Julia. I’ve certainly never believed in love at first sight. Biologically and chemically speaking, it just doesn’t make sense. But if I didn’t love Julia at first sight — and I’d be willing to swear that I did, or at first scent (she smelled incredible) — then I definitely loved her the first time I heard her laugh.

Julia works at a law office downtown, Fregosi, Walters and Fregosi. A law office that buys all their hardware, software, and peripherals from us. Julia’s internal modem went on the blink and it was throwing off the whole network, so I hopped in my Hyundai and headed downtown.

Usually people don’t hang around when I’m working on their system. They go and drink coffee or smoke cigarettes or gossip with some co-worker whose computer is still working. Once in a while someone will stay and try to carry on a conversation with me, but like I said, sparkling repartee is not what I do best. I’m pretty clever, I think, I’m just not quick. In fact, I have a tendency to stutter when I’m nervous, and I am always nervous around women. At night after I go home to bed I can think of all kinds of witty and charming things I should have said. But in the spotlight like that, my brain freezes up like a computer trying to boot up with a non-system disk.

Julia wasn’t there when I started working on her machine. I was screwing the rear cover back on — I had opened her up just to check everything out, but it wasn’t actually a hardware problem, just a couple of characters missing in her initialization string — when the cubicle was filled with the sound of high heels and the smell of expensive perfume.

When I turned to see who it was who smelled like that, I saw the woman I’ve fantasized about on the rare occasions when I’ve allowed myself to fantasize about ever actually finding a woman to love and understand. She had dark hair that hugged her shoulders, deep brown eyes, and a long slender neck with a pretty little mole just under her jawline.

“Forget it,” she said, and for one horrifying moment I thought she’d caught me looking at her chest. But no, she was talking about the computer. “It’s finito. Kaput. If it was a horse, I probably wouldn’t shoot it, but I’d sure geld him so he couldn’t reproduce and make any more little high-tech pains in the ass.”

“Uh... well, it’s... I m-mean, there’s n-n-nothing... that is...” For some reason people who look like they were real popular and successful in high school are the hardest of all for me to try and talk to. Julia was obviously head cheerleader, homecoming queen, National Honor society member, president of the student government, the whole nine yards.

I was trying to tell her that it was only a minor problem and that as a matter of fact it was already fixed, but as usual the link between my brain and my tongue was faulty. I couldn’t get the words to come out just one at a time, much less arrange them into any order that might be considered entertaining, or even informative.

But I’ll tell you, I was already looking forward to that evening when I’d be at home alone, and then I’d think of something Cary Grant suave or Clark Gable cool that would charm this goddess.

Even if I could have thought of something right then and there, it wouldn’t have done me much good because she was off doing something else anyway and not listening to me. She had a good-sized trophy of a woman swinging a racket that she was setting down here and there on top of different file cabinets and cubicle walls, backing away from it, looking at it, shaking her head and then moving it again.

“Where do you think this looks best?” she asked me. “I want people to notice it, but I don’t want to, you know, stick it in their faces. I won this over the weekend at the country club singles tournament. Pretty, huh?”

She looked at me proudly, expectantly, and I knew I was supposed to say something, but I had no idea what it was. I felt my chest tighten and my knees soften and knew I was about to experience one wicked panic attack.

Just before I gave myself over to it, I remembered something Marty used to say about talking to people. “All you gotta do is just talk about whatever it is they’re interested in, nod and agree with them every once in a while, ask a couple of questions so they know you’re following them, and they’ll think you’re brilliant, I guarantee it.”

“Um, well, I g-g-guess it looks nice over th-there w-w-where you had it... But r-r-right there is nice, too,” I said. “Oh, and c-congratulations. How long have you been single?”

Oh my God! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Geez, Chip, you moron, it’s not a contest to see who’s been unmarried the longest. Any damn fool ought to be able to look at the trophy and see she was talking about tennis. I wanted to smack myself in the head or sink into the carpet. My face was hot and red and huge.

She laughed, of course. (The most delicious — if stinging — music I’ve ever heard.) I mean, who wouldn’t laugh at an idiotic remark like that?

But it was strange. After I stopped burning and shrinking, I noticed this was somehow different from my usual say-something-stupid-and-get-laughed-off-the-face-of-the-earth routine. It was sort of like she wasn’t laughing at me. Like she would have been laughing with me if only I had been laughing. I’ve seen people laugh like this at one of Marty’s lines, and although I could hardly believe that such an incredibly gorgeous and delightful-smelling woman could do such a thing, I could tell she was thinking I was quite clever. That I’d made a joke.

I’d waited a long time — twenty-seven years to be exact — for this moment, and for once I didn’t stammer. Which was surprising because one beer can get me so tongue-tied I can’t brush my teeth, and I was very intoxicated by that laugh.

“Will you go out with me?” I asked her. “On a date?”

She laughed again, and I couldn’t really tell if it was an at or a with laugh. I just hoped she wouldn’t get all mad or anything when she turned me down, like some women do. I’m used to staying home on the weekends, that doesn’t bother me. But I hate to lose a customer. Especially a customer who smells and laughs like that.

“Sure,” she said, and my heart stopped beating. “Where do you want to go?”

All I could do was shrug my shoulders and smile. I couldn’t take a chance on saying something stupid and blowing this thing now.

She’d said yes!

When I was in high school, before I gave up on the idea of ever having a real social life, I used to call up girls and ask them out — or start to ask them out. What I would do, since I knew I couldn’t come up with off-the-cuff bon mots like Marty does, was write down what I wanted to say. And a lot of it was pretty clever stuff if I do say so myself. I really can be sort of charming if you just give me enough time to prepare for it.

It didn’t work, though, because it depended on the girl’s sticking to the script and saying what I had planned for her to say. She never did, and I always had to hang up on her before I got to the reason for the call. I even wrote scripts for the few dates I did have (most of these arranged by Mom) with the same disastrous results.

This time I knew there was no point in even writing a script. But after getting a haircut and a new suit and ordering some flowers and some cologne, I did go to Marty and ask him for advice.

“I really, really like this girl,” I told him. “I can’t believe she said yes, but she did. And I do not want to blow it. What should I do? What should I say? Where should we go?”

Marty asked me her name, and I’m kind of ashamed to say I lied and said it was Ethel. But I just couldn’t take a chance on Marty’s stealing her from me. And he could, too. Without even trying.

“Well, if you’re nervous about talking to her, then take her someplace where you’re not expected to talk, like a movie. But on second thought, a movie first date is pretty trite. Why not take her to a play? And then dinner afterwards. That way you’ll have something to talk about dining dinner. You can talk about the play.”

That made sense. So I bought newspapers and downloaded reviews from the local bulletin boards, researching all the plays that were running in town. I marked off all the sexy ones right away ’cause I didn’t want Julia to get the wrong idea. Besides, that would just defeat my purpose. I still wouldn’t have anything to talk about during dinner because I am definitely not going to talk about sex with a goddess.

Next I ruled out all the really popular and long-running ones. I just knew Julia had to have a real active social life, and I felt sure she had already seen them.

All that was left was an amateur production of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But it had been getting some really great reviews. The newspapers said it was “a treat for all ages.” I wasn’t sure how old Julia was, so I figured this was probably my best bet.

I knew that she had only agreed to go out with me because she had somehow mistaken my social ineptitude for cleverness and wit, and I did not want her to find out the truth, not right away. I scanned Reader’s Digest (I have a friend who lent me the last thirty years of “Laughter, the Best Medicine” on floppy disks) and some joke books I checked out from the library. But I was far from feeling smug. I memorized some of the best stuff, but I was not at all confident that I could work any of it into the conversation.

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.

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.

“When he got in, he started asking me a bunch of questions about the Atlas software I was working on, and I small-talked with him while I was ringing up the battery. Then all of a sudden he said if I knew what was good for me I’d hand Atlas over to him.

“I thought at first it was some kind of dumb joke, and I told him to forget it, but when he pulled out a gun, I knew he wasn’t kidding. He had hardware, so I gave him the software.”

There, that was the other semi-bon mot I had been trying to remember. Nothing to write home about, but I didn’t think anybody could reasonably be expected to come up with any red-hot knee-slappers from a hospital bed. All I really wanted that remark to do was make me sound brave and pitiful.

“Then he cleaned out the cash register and told me to turn around and face the wall. I refused at first, but he shoved that gun in my stomach. Then when I did turn around, he must have knocked me in the head or something. The next thing I remember was waking up here.”

Julia smiled sadly and shook her head.

“What were you thinking, Chip?” she said. “You shouldn’t have argued with the man. You should have just given him what he wanted right away. He might have killed you. Thank God he didn’t.”

She stroked my hand softly, covering my fingers with that scent. And I knew we would go out again; I knew I would hear her laugh again. I knew there must be a God in heaven after all.

Then there was a loud knock on the door. It was the police coming back to talk to me. No problem; I was rested, rehearsed, and ready to make my statement.

Only these cops didn’t have notebooks and sketchpads. They had handcuffs.

“There are a couple of holes in your story, Chip,” Marty stood up and said. “Big, big holes. The screwdriver was dusted and thoroughly checked for fingerprints, and nobody’s were on it except yours. And both doors to the store were still locked from the inside. So tell me, just how did this robber escape?”

Damn.

Well, it was true, I didn’t let anybody handle my tools, ever. It was a superstition of mine. And of course I locked the doors. I didn’t want anybody barging in while I was hitting myself in the head with an electric screwdriver. That kind of thing is hard to explain to people.

I should have planned it better, taken my time, not been so anxious to make Julia pity me. But I don’t care how clever you are, it’s difficult to pull off the perfect crime while simultaneously winning the heart of the most beautiful woman in the world.

Or, judging from the way she was staring all wide-eyed at me now, alienating her completely and making her think I was some kind of particularly loathsome scuzbug.

The police read me my rights and told me they were going to post a man at my door. I’d be going to jail as soon as I felt better.

That was bad enough, but what was even worse was that Julia let go of my hand. Dropped it like a red-hot root vegetable. She even slid her chair back from my bed like she couldn’t stand to be near such a black-hearted brother-robber.

Marty cut me a nasty look, then he left with the cops. But Julia stayed in the room. I almost wished she’d taken off, too. I couldn’t stand the way she was looking at me, like she was modeling for a dictionary illustration of “stunned horror.”

There was obviously something she wanted to say to me, and I had a strong feeling it wasn’t “What a wonderful man you are. I bet you did this all for me. When you get out of prison, I’m going to laugh and laugh. Laugh and smell delicious and go on lots more dates with you, you smooth talking bon mot maker,” like she was supposed to in my “what-if-I-get-caught?” script.

Judging by her eyes and by her hands that were no longer holding mine but flexing and clenching like she wished this hospital had had the forethought to supply visitors with big heavy rocks to hurl at the patients, it was probably something more along the lines of “I have known some lowdown geezwads in my time, but you are the lowest of the low. Don’t ever call or even daydream about me again.”

“Julia, I don’t know how the guy managed to get through a locked door. I don’t know why his fingerprints weren’t on the screwdriver. Maybe he’s an alien from another planet. Or maybe he’s one of those mysterious Hindu swami guys from India that can dematerialize. All I know is I’m not lying. I was robbed. Brutally beaten. You believe me, don’t you?”

That’s what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was too tired, and I’d lied to her too many times already.

What I actually said was not clever or brave, but it was true.

“I am so sorry, J-Julia.” I shook my head, accidentally setting off a cerebellum-shattering explosion. “I know it was stupid. I know it was wrong. But all I wanted to do was make you keep on l-liking me. And it wasn’t as if I was going to keep the money or—”

“Shh, Chip,” she said, “don’t talk any more now.”

“But I have to, Julia. I have to make you understand why I did it. I have to show you—”

“What you have to do,” Julia said, “is rest.”

She walked back to my bedside. I instinctively drew back because I thought she might be going to slap me, but instead she adjusted my covers for me and fluffed up my pillows.

“Rest right now,” she told me. “I’ll be back later and we can—”

What?!

“You will? Really? You’ll be back? You mean you’re still speaking to me? You don’t hate me?”

She reached out and clasped my hand once more.

“Of course I don’t hate you, goofball. I’ll be back in a few hours with Mr. Walters — he owes me a favor after all that unpaid overtime I put in last month — and we can start preparing your case.”

My case. That was right. The thought of losing Julia forever was so horrible I’d forgotten it wasn’t my only problem.

“Boy, I have really messed things up this time,” I told her. “Yesterday I was working on the Information Superhighway; tomorrow I’ll probably be on the chain gang.”

Hey, wow! I knew it wasn’t Seinfield quality, but that one was completely spontaneous. I made it up right on the spur of the moment. Maybe I was getting better at this bon mot business. Maybe if Julia was serious about not hating me I really could keep her verbally captivated and not have to continue assaulting myself.

Ignoring the pain in my head, I turned and looked at the woman I loved.

She didn’t laugh at my baby bon mot, but she smiled so hard a couple of tears welled up in her eyes.

I really think that if I could have lifted my two ton head off those pillows I could have kissed her for real. But I didn’t want to rush things. I might have been reading the moment wrong, so I stayed where I was.

Besides, she was coming back. She said she would.

So I would have time to work up and rehearse some sweet nothings or some hospital-humor bon mots. Something to set the mood. Our first kiss was really going to be something special, and I wanted to do it right.

Julia the goddess was coming back.