Euphemism

The court reporter asked her to state her name for the record, and she did, and then Daniel Prewitt spent the next four minutes trying to describe her company without using any of the words her company was built on.

The room was on the fourteenth floor of a building on California Street, glass down one long side, and through it the bay lay flat and gray and the bridges stood in the haze like things drawn faintly and then half erased. The light came in even and cold and made everyone at the table look slightly embalmed. There was a pitcher of water no one had touched and a bowl of mints sealed in cellophane and the small steady sound of the reporter’s machine, which caught every word anyone said and turned it into a thing that would exist, in a file, forever.

Vera had thought about that machine a great deal in the weeks before. It was the reason she was calm. Whatever was said in this room would be written down, and she had built her whole case on the difference between what people would say and what they would allow to be written.

“Ms. Loewe.”

“Doctor,” she said.

He looked up from his legal pad. He had a good face for this, she thought, smooth and apologetic, the face of a man who would be gentle with you right up until the moment he wasn’t. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s Doctor Loewe. Not Ms.” She kept her hands flat on the table, one on either side of a single closed folder she had not opened and did not intend to. “The degree is relevant. We’ll get to why.”

They were here because her company had tried to buy advertising and been refused, and because she had declined to accept the refusal quietly, which was, she had gathered, the part that surprised everyone. Companies in her position were expected to be grateful for the market they were permitted and silent about the one they were not. She had sued instead. Prewitt worked for the platform. His job that morning was to establish, gently and for the record, that the refusal had been reasonable. Her job was to make the record show what reasonable had cost.

“Doctor Loewe.” He wrote something. “You’re the founder of a company that manufactures, and I want to make sure I characterize this accurately, personal wellness devices.”

“No.”

“No?”

“We manufacture instruments.” She said it without heat. It was not a correction so much as a reading, the way she would read a number off a gauge. “Meridian is an instruments company. The word wellness isn’t ours. You brought it.”

Prewitt smiled the smile. Across the table his second chair, a younger woman, did not look up from her screen. Somewhere to Vera’s left her own counsel shifted, a small warning movement, and she ignored it.

“Let me try again,” Prewitt said. “Your company sought to place advertising with my client. That advertising was declined under a policy governing, and again I’m reading here, adult and sexually oriented material. You’ve brought an action alleging that decision was discriminatory. Do I have the shape of it right?”

“You have the shape of it.”

“And your position is that the policy was applied to you unfairly.”

“My position,” Vera said, “is that four months before your client declined our submission, it ran a campaign, in the same format, in the same placements, for a device that maps a man’s preferences using a machine-learning model trained on several thousand recorded human movements. That device was crowdfunded into the millions. It appeared on a television program about this industry, played for laughs, and nobody at your client’s company convened a policy review about it. The founder gave interviews. He was called, in one of them, an innovator.” She paused. “I can send you the clip.”

The younger woman’s typing stopped for a moment and then resumed.

“That’s a different product,” Prewitt said.

“It’s the same product.” She turned her hand over on the table, palm up, an engineer showing an empty hand. “It solves the same problem with the same methods for a different body. His measures movement. Mine measures response and adjusts to it in real time, which is harder, and which works, which I can prove, and which we’ll also get to. The only variable that changed between the campaign your client approved and the campaign your client declined is which body the instrument was built for.” She let that sit. “You can see why the degree is relevant. I’d like the record to reflect that I’m an engineer. People keep forgetting.”

Prewitt tried a different road. He asked whether it might be fair to call the product an adult novelty. She said no, that novelty was a customs classification and not a description, and that she had spent a year of her life making certain the thing was not a novelty in any sense a customs officer or anyone else could mean by it. He asked whether personal massager was acceptable. She said it was the name of a category invented so that a certain kind of object could be sold in a certain kind of store without a word being said aloud, and that she had founded her company specifically to stop saying it. He wrote none of this down. The reporter’s machine caught all of it.

His own client had a word too, she reminded him, and the word was sensitive. The policy did not ban her category by name. It flagged her submissions as sensitive content and routed them to a review with no published standard and no appeal, and sensitive was doing there exactly what wellness and novelty and massager did everywhere else, standing in the doorway so the real word never had to come inside. Prewitt said the policy spoke for itself. She said that was precisely her complaint. It spoke for itself so that no one would ever have to.

Prewitt set down his pen. For a moment he was just a tired man in an expensive suit in a cold room, and Vera almost felt for him, because she knew what he was about to do, and she knew he knew it was absurd, and she knew he would do it anyway because the alternative was to say the word in front of the reporter, and the reporter would type it, and then it would be real, on a transcript, in a building on California Street, in the light.

“Doctor Loewe,” he said carefully. “Can you describe, for the record, what the product does.”

And there it was. The whole of it, in one question. He had asked her to say the thing so that he would not have to, and she understood, watching him not say it, that this was the entire architecture of her life now, the reason for the rejection and the reason for the lawsuit and the reason a woman with a doctorate in mechanical engineering was sitting in a deposition explaining that she built instruments.

Everyone in her world would say everything except the truth. They would say wellness and personal and adult and sensitive and novelty. They would say device when they were being generous and they would say toy when they were not. They had a word for every part of the country around the thing, and no word, none they would speak aloud in daylight, for the thing itself.

She had built her company on refusing that. It had cost her more than she had ever told anyone.

“Yes,” she said. “I can describe what it does.”

She described what it does.