“And that convinced him,” I said.
“Well, halfway,” she said. “It started to convince him. It convinced him that you weren’t trying to hurt him with the book, but it didn’t convince him that he wasn’t Bam Naka, or rather—ha!—I should say: it didn’t convince him that you hadn’t intended Bam Naka to represent him. He said that you’d sent him some letters back when he first went to Annapolis. Three letters, he said. He said that the third letter seemed to indicate that you were obsessed with him. Fixated on him. Of course I asked to see the letters—three pieces of one of my favorite writers’ juvenilia and all—but, to my great disappointment, he no longer had them. He said the content of the letters was beside the point anyway. The point was you’d sent three, and that you’d sent the third only two months after having sent the first, only one month after having sent the second. He said that had you written only twice, it would have been different. You might have reasonably imagined that he, rather than declining to respond to the first letter, had never received it—you might have imagined that it, or his response to it, had been lost in the mail—but that it would have been unreasonable of you to imagine that both the first and the second letters and/or their responses had been lost in the mail, and so, in sending the third only one month after having sent the second, you were either being unreasonable, or pushy. In either case, you were showing an unwillingness to let things go their natural way.”
“Things?” I said. “Their natural way?”
“Hold on, hold on. That’s what he said. I’m just telling you what he said. To which I said, ‘Look. Enough is enough. Regardless of what you may or then again very well may not know about the sense of epistolary etiquette young authors should be expected to possess, not only is No Please Don’t not about you, you self-obsessed sweetheart, but it’s almost as if the author has gone out of his way to disassociate himself from you, to make sure he doesn’t take advantage of ever having known you. Not once in the entire full-page author biography at the front of the book is there even a sidelong mention of you. Not once. He didn’t even tell his own editor he knew you. It’s not about you.’ Coup de grâce, Belt. Made the man blush. An inhale, an exhale, and a prolonged apology.”
“An apology?”
“Well that is too personal to detail, really. Between husband and wife. But believe me, it was a sweet—a very sweet—and sincere apology.”
“What was he apologizing for, though?” I said.
And here I was treated, for the second time that morning, to Fondajane’s signature feel-great horse-laugh. Up close like that, I was instantly infected. Without any clue as to the object of her mirth, I not only found myself laughing uncontrollably, but doing so for as long as she—for what had to have been at least a minute. My throat, when the convulsions abated, stung. My armpits dripped. My lungs were aching.
“We got so sidetracked, I skipped—” Fondajane said, catching her breath, “I skipped the part about Triple-J.” She dabbed at her welling eyes with her wrists, then reached her right hand across the counter for mine, which I slid a couple of inches toward her, ensuring that she would get there this time, and, as soon as she’d covered my right hand with hers, I covered her right hand with my left, sandwiching it for as long as she’d let me, which turned out to be a little bit longer than it took her to tell me “the part about Triple-J.”
As to whether her having skipped that part had made Fondajane so winningly horse-laugh only because it had been the one thing she’d been trying to tell me for the past twenty minutes, or also because—concurrent with the realization that she’d skipped the one thing she’d been trying to tell me for the past twenty minutes—she had suddenly appreciated previously un- or underappreciated congruencies between what she had told me and what she would momentarily tell me (e.g. that the instrument she’d used to win the argument with her husband was the same one she’d used to entice her stepson to read No Please Don’t, which reading had itself been the cause of the argument), I have no idea—she didn’t ever specify. Nor, boldly sandwiching her up-heating hand, could I muster the syntax to ask her to specify; I couldn’t even apply to the ensuing conversation the kind of attention that might have later (i.e. as I write this) enabled me to quote very much of it directly.
THE PART ABOUT TRIPLE-J
LIKE MOST OTHER CHILDREN of his generation, Triple-J had been enthralled by Curios since well before learning to speak complete sentences. Like very few children of any generation, he wasn’t short of money. At the Pellmore-Jasons’ Manhattan residence, he had a whole “lab” devoted to cures: a playroom stocked with marbles and PillowNests, sleeves and EmergeRigs, limited-edition mini push-pedal vehicles, novelty mini sporting equipment, custom-designed mini gadgets and weapons, and, above all, formulae, liquid and solid, Play- and GameChanger, non- and terminal, dis- and continued—every variety ever marketed to mainstream North American consumers, as well as countless imported and “garage” varieties, and quite a few yet in early development (many of which would never make it to beta) that he’d received as presents from his beloved godsister, Tessa Swords, who had herself received them from her doting father (Triple-J’s godfather), Baron Swords, COO of Graham&Swords, who’d always come home from his monthly visits to the company’s west coast R&D facilities bearing a duffel a-brim with swag.
It was around the age of ten that Trip began to seek out and acquire—simply for the joy that he took in viewing them—the kinds of video clips he’d eventually collage to make A Fistful of Fists. Some of these clips he had to pay for in cash, but most he got for free from lab techs, ad execs, and TV producers (nearly two-thirds of his collection was composed of unaired Funniest Home Videos submissions) for whom an encounter with a Pellmore-Jason—often just a letter from a Pellmore-Jason—was payment in itself. By the time he was eleven, his collection of footage exceeded his lab’s available shelf space, and the ever-mounting spillover (dozens of new tapes and discs arrived each month) had to be absorbed by Fon’s home-library. Well, not really had to be: the spillover could have gone into basement or offsite storage, but Fon had always adored Triple-J, and any opportunity to spend more time with him, even just the fleeting moments it would take him to shelve or unshelve this or that video, was more valuable to her than a bookcase or two or, as it would eventually turn out, five.
Owing largely, however, to the tutelage of Burroughs (“as much an Aristotle to Trip’s Alexander as he’d once been an Alfred to Jonboat’s Bruce Wayne”), Triple-J, despite having so much stuff, was neither a spoiled nor a lazy child. Quite the opposite. The after-school regimen of martial arts–, ethics-, and backgammon training through which the driver put him kept him well rounded and well behaved. He was a straight-A student, an all-seasons athlete, and an inadvertent inspirer of powerful grammar- and middle-school crushes which, when unreciprocated (i.e. in nearly all cases), produced much heartbreak, but—because of his gentleness—hardly any bitterness.