That evening, Fon appeared “in conversation with Nobel prize–winning novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek” at 92Y. Jonboat, who’d been in DC all day (“some think-tank thing”), was supposed to meet her at the pre-event dinner, but his chopper got held up in maintenance at Teterboro, and he’d barely made it to the greenroom in time to kiss her good luck before she hit the stage. Fon didn’t mind that he’d missed the dinner—she’d had fun, anyway; Jelinek was bawdy and sweet, a real giggler—but Jonboat, who possessed little patience for tardiness, was annoyed with his mechanic, his pilot, himself. So Fon decided she’d wait til the following morning to let him know about the phone call from Clepp. After the event, though, Jonboat seemed unencumbered, exuberant even—on his way from the greenroom to his seat in the audience, he’d called the pilot, made him can the mechanic—and she reconsidered.
In retrospect, she may have made the wrong choice. She’d always thought it better to ding a good mood than to spoil an even mood or compound a bad one, yet when it came to Jonboat—maybe because he was so rarely in a good mood (or, for that matter, in any mood; he was, emotionally speaking, the steadiest person she’d ever met)—when it came to Jonboat, maybe it was worse. In any case, when, on the ride home, she told him about the phone call from Clepp, he was so immediately beside himself with anger—it wasn’t only that Triple-J had cheated, but that he’d done so in the wake of their having made such abiding adjustments to his budding maturity (not to mention that Chemistry, like Math and Physics, was a subject that Pellmores and Jasons the both had always excelled at, which excellence had long been a point of family pride)—so beside himself was Jonboat that he, who, though a regular Curio user, refused, on principle, to overload out of anger or frustration (the talk he’d given at the think tank that very afternoon was titled (rather on-the-nosedly, if you asked Fon) “Cathartic Overload: The Big Little Death of American Ambition”), unsleeved his Curio and dacted it against the bulletproof (but apparently less-than-soundproof) partition with a force sufficient to alarm the driver.
Duggan pulled the limo over and waited, as per protocol, for Jonboat to speak his sequence of safewords into the dome light’s hidden microphone.
Anger expelled (transformed, really, into simple disappointment), Jonboat spoke the sequence softly, and Duggan got them home.
* * *
—
They found the boy in his lab, filming his favorite hobunk, Droogie, which held the wrists of a nascent Curio atop which it sat while repeatedly forcing it to smack itself on its temple and snout and reciting a variety of half-mastered phrases in the vein of “What wrong you,” “What happens,” “Why hit self.”
They had decided that they would talk to Trip together. Jonboat would offer to help him with his Chemistry, or, if Trip preferred, to have Burroughs help him. And Trip would lose his allowance for the next two weeks—a pretty light punishment, but they didn’t want the emphasis to be on punishment. Having been found out as a cheater, they figured, would shame Triple-J—Fon forecasted tears; Jonboat initial denial, then tears—and thus be its own punishment.
So neither parent had been prepared for the stone-faced apathy with which their supportive approach was met:
They’d heard he’d cheated on a quiz? So what. Who cared? Two weeks with no allowance? So what. Who cared? He had a choice between studying with Jonboat or Burroughs? His choice was neither. He just didn’t care.
Jonboat told him he’d changed his mind: Trip would lose his allowance for the next four weeks. Did he care about that?
Nope. Didn’t care.
Jonboat told him he was grounded til he showed A’s in Chemistry. How about that?
Didn’t matter. Didn’t care.
He told him he could no longer go to Chicago. Did he care about that?
Fuck you, you promised.
Fuck you, to Jonboat, didn’t sound like I care. Did it sound that way to Trip?
Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you.
Did he care about Droogie, though?
What? Fuck you.
And Jonboat, before Fondajane could stop him—she could hardly believe she was seeing what she saw—lifted Trip’s camera off its tripod and, with an overhanded blow that destroyed the camera, dacted both Droogie and the nascent at once.
Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you, man. Fucking fuck you. Just fuck you. Fuck you.
Jonboat told Trip that he supposed that he might have been wrong about the whole Fuck you thing, after all; it was suddenly sounding a lot like I care to him.
Fon dragged him out of there.
* * *
—
Father and son did not exchange a single civil word for a fortnight, and the few words that passed between Trip and Fon were exclusively civil. Toward the end of that fortnight, Jonboat, at the suggestion of Burroughs (who Trip—at least in front of his parents—had continued to treat with the same respect as always), decided to spend the coming weekend away, bow-hunting bear at the family cabin in the Adirondacks “in order,” he half-explained to Fon, “to break the whole shitty circuit.”
Fon thought this strange: her husband wasn’t saying he would take their son up to the mountains to bond, but that he’d go by himself. And she found it a little insulting, too, because, well: What about her? Why would he want to leave her behind? Was she a—what?—a shitty node on the shitty circuit? Is that what he was saying? Or maybe he was saying he believed himself to be the shitty node. Were both of them shitty? All three of them shitty? Was she even understanding the metaphor properly? Did a circuit, to be shitty, need even to have a shitty node or shitty nodes? Could it not just have a shitty connection or set of connections between its operable nodes? Perhaps it was the current that was shitty? The way it flowed through the connections between the nodes? Did it flow so shittily as to make it seem like the circuit itself—i.e. its nodes and/or connections—were responsible for the shittiness, when in fact they were not?
Prodding the metaphor didn’t get her anywhere, and if Jonboat had been willing to discuss things concretely then he wouldn’t have started out metaphorically, so she didn’t prod him to prod it for her. Nor did she protest the hunting trip. First of all, it obviously made sense to Burroughs, whose counsel was rarely less than sound. Plus, even before the episode with Droogie—really, ever since they’d given up seeking out environmental causes for Trip’s new MO—communication between husband and wife had been strained, had degraded: Jonboat had, more than once, accused Fon of throwing arch and disapproving looks his way, of being “distant” and “judging,” and Fon, in response, had grown insecure, had become, perhaps, a little distant and judging, and eventually even caught herself committing the very sorts of face crimes of which she had (initially) been wrongly accused. A brief separation might be refreshing.