The morning he left for the Adirondacks, she wanted nothing other than to spend the day lazing on the couch in her library, drinking coffee and smoking and reading something reliable—she wasn’t sure what yet. She made an alphabetical list of candidates, of five or six, went to her shelves to pull the candidates down, to weigh them in her hands, to ruffle and smell them and read their first lines to determine which to settle in for the day with, and discovered that one of them—No Please Don’t—was missing.
As she’d told me earlier, she walked around the city for hours, fruitlessly seeking out a copy, then ended up borrowing one from Burroughs. She fixed an espresso, lit up a cigarette, reclined on her couch, began to read, and was pleased, very pleased, more pleased than she’d been since the dinner with Jelinek.
And she was more pleased yet when Triple-J, later that evening, came into her library to get one of his videos and not only said hello to her and smiled, but asked for the title of the book she was reading. Not that she thought he was actually curious to know what she was reading, but the question conveyed more politeness than had become usual, more than was demanded. And that extra politeness seemed to Fon to indicate that Trip was reaching out, that he wanted to attempt to repair things between them. Perhaps, in the wake of Jonboat’s flight, he’d begun to feel responsible for the tension he’d been causing. Perhaps he was just growing tired of the tension.
She told him the title, and he asked her what the book was about. Because it was a novel and he’d always made it clear to her he didn’t like novels and didn’t want to read them, and because she’d never been good at summarizing novels, and because it occurred to her that Triple-J, despite not liking novels, might, owing to its certain je ne sais quoi, find No Please Don’t an exception if he gave it a chance, which chance-giving might not only be good for him (it was a shame for a boy to think he didn’t like novels, and she’d often wished she could convince him to read them) but might, also, be good for them, i.e. for Trip and Fon, since if he gave it a chance (even if he put it down before he finished it), they’d have something new and unfraught to talk about—for all those reasons, Fondajane, instead of providing Trip with a summary of the novel, told him that the author of the novel, which was one of her favorites, had been in the Friends Study, and she showed him the author’s bio to prove it, which enticed him, as she’d hoped, to give it a chance, and he asked if he could borrow it, and of course she let him borrow it.
And when Jonboat returned from the Adirondacks a couple days later, the first thing he saw as he came through the door was his son reading No Please Don’t on the settee. He asked him where he’d gotten it and, after Trip, who’d failed to greet him, warmly or otherwise—who, even as he answered his father’s question, failed to lift his gaze from the pages—after Trip told his father Fon had lent him the book, Jonboat asked Fon to come into his office and shut the door.
In his office, Jonboat told her that although he understood how she might have felt as though he’d left her in the lurch when he’d gone to hunt bear, he thought it was beneath her to seek vengeance against him through their son by giving to that son a book that went out of its way to mock him as “a mute plastic astronaut.”
And Fon told him that she had had no such intentions.
And Jonboat, who simply didn’t believe her, uttered a stream of rhetorical questions. Had she considered, before giving Trip the book, how much harder Trip’s inevitably resultant further loss of respect for Jonboat would make Trip’s adolescence? Had she considered how much harder that would, in turn, make Trip’s adolescence on Jonboat? On Fon? Did she not think things had gotten bad enough already? Did she want to make them worse? Did she hate him, after all? Had she given up on him? On them? Was she trying, after everything they’d been through together, to tear it all down? To wreck their family?
When Jonboat finished railing, Fon kissed him on the neck and fixed him a sidecar. He sat in his club chair drinking the cocktail, and she explained to him, gently, while administering a shoulder rub, how his take on No Please Don’t was all wrong, that no one who’d ever read the book, including herself, had ever for even a fleeting moment imagined Bam Naka to be related in any way to Jonny “Jonboat” Pellmore-Jason. He resisted for a while, made his arguments, referred to the letters I’d sent him at Annapolis, but ended up, as she’d mentioned earlier, convinced of her stance by the dearth of anything Jonboat in the bio, and then he apologized, embarrassed for having assumed the book had been about him, and, more than that, upset with himself for having lost control and yelled at his wife.
* * *
—
And it was at this point that Triple-J knocked on the door of Jonboat’s office, holding the twice-borrowed copy of my novel, and told his parents that he wanted to talk. He wanted to explain himself. He wanted to apologize.
Ever since he could remember, he said, he’d found all his greatest, most reliable thrills via Curios: via seeing the effects of various PerFormulae and combinations of PerFormulae on his hobunks and cures, and experiencing the effects those effects had on him. And ever since he could remember, he said, he’d always understood that, as the son of Fon and Jonboat, no one ever could or would stand in the way of any dream that he might dream. And the dream that he’d dreamed, for years by then, had been to be the best at the best thing there was for anyone to be best at, which meant that his dream, as they’d probably already guessed, had been to be the world’s best PerFormula designer.
He had wanted so badly to make his dream real that he’d kept it a secret from everyone, even Burroughs. Not because he was ashamed to have the same dream as half the other kids in Gifted at his school. Not because he feared his ideas would be stolen—there were too many to steal. And definitely not because he worried he could ever possibly fail. He kept the dream a secret because he wanted to make it come true on his own, without anyone’s help, so that he wouldn’t ever have to doubt he was the best—so that he wouldn’t have to wonder if he couldn’t have done it without the help of his family. He’d know he could have, because he would have…
Except how stupid and embarrassing his dream turned out to be, right? Because the first thing you had to be great at if you wanted to even be a PerFormula tech, let alone a PerFormula designer—and that’s to say nothing about if you wanted to become the best PerFormula designer ever—was Chemistry. And it wasn’t just that he wasn’t great at Chemistry—he was horrible at Chemistry. At junior high Chemistry. The day he started being a dick to everyone was the day he found that out. That morning, he was as happy as usual, maybe even happier than usual—he and Fon had had a great conversation about how she and Jonboat had helped make the world a safer, better-paid place for prostitutes—but then, second period, he got his first Chemistry test of the quarter back, and he’d gotten not a B, not even a B-, but a C. On a curve. And on top of that, he had thought that he’d aced the test when he’d taken it. He didn’t understand, even now, why his incorrect answers were incorrect. He had no talent for Chemistry at all.