Yet, strange though its duration was to me, reader, the sandwich’s erotic falloff was stranger. At the start, I didn’t think of the sandwiching as sandwiching. I thought of it as touching, or touching Fondajane, and was more turned on than I’d previously been; I was more turned on than I’d ever been. It seemed to me that Fon, by allowing me to touch her, was granting me permission to be more turned on, and for as long as I thought of myself as touching her, any attention I wasn’t focusing on what she was telling me (i.e. “the part about Triple-J”) was split between 1) the pictures I was (semi-voluntarily) forming of what she would look like without her clothes, and 2) efforts to figure out whether and how to turn our touching into something more sexual—to turn it, more specifically, into a kiss that might lead to her actually shedding those clothes.
Slowly, however, I began, I supposed, to get used to touching Fondajane. This is when the word sandwiching occurred to me. I was sandwiching her hand. And once I’d begun to think of what I was and had been doing as sandwiching, I realized we (or perhaps just I) had entered a different—a less intense—phase. Whereas previously (i.e. at the start of the sandwiching), the sandwich seemed to have placed in contention Fon’s earlier claim that we would “never act on what [I was] thinking about,” now the sandwich seemed to be affirming that claim: it seemed less and less likely that there would be any kissing, until, soon enough, it seemed entirely assured that there would be no kissing (and forget about nudity). And while, sure, this did disappoint me, I also, to my surprise, felt relieved. To realize that I’d never have what I wanted was to realize the pointlessness of trying to have it. Thus, to cease in my efforts to come up with ways to upgrade our sandwich into a kiss was not only what I decided I would do, but what I decided—in the spirit of decency, respect, and energy conservation—I should do. In other words: I knew I wouldn’t later regret having ceased to try; I saw, as Fon had put it earlier, that I didn’t have to worry I’d blow my chance.
I had no chance.
And so I relaxed a little, then a little more, and a little more yet, and, in so doing, I became increasingly aware of my own inner noise, that free-associative background mind-wander which had previously been drowned out by my (now nullified) fear of blowing “my chance.”
This inner noise proceeded along the lines of what you’d probably expect. I wondered what was taking Triple-J so long to come to brunch, wondered what we’d eat, who would cook it, noticed I wasn’t actually that hungry, recalled the hugging of my father in our kitchen, remembered I had to give Lotta her $500 back, worried what Trip’s response might be when he learned I hadn’t finished watching his video, remembered I’d already decided not to worry, that maybe my failure would garner me a second invitation to the compound, wondered what business Jonboat had in Dubai, suspected he wasn’t on the phone with Dubai, thought that maybe he just didn’t want to see me, and remembered him saying I like Belt’s bike and He’s not into freestyle a quarter-century before, and I remembered the bike—its padded leather seat, and how its red-flippered gearshift was braced to the handlebar beside the right grip, rather than bolted to the handlebar’s post, and how those were the qualities that sold me on the bike: the luxurious seat, the newfangled tech—and I remembered the jingle the slapsticking boys who’d spit their gum on the pavement in front of the halfpipe had shout-sung at me—Muh-ray moves you fast-ah!
For a while, that jingle replayed in my head to the total exclusion of the other inner noise, and this soon became annoying, so I tried to do the trick that someone—Stevie Strumm? Jonboat himself?—once taught me to do to push an annoying song—“Wishing Well” by Terence Trent D’Arby? “Two of Hearts” by Stacy Q?—out of my head: the trick where you think of a different annoying song. I landed, first thing, on another television advertising jingle from my middle-school years: the jingle for the food product Hamburger Helper.
Hamburger Helper
Helped her hamburger
Help her
Make a great a meal!
Which struck me as peculiar. When was the last time I’d heard that one? Of all the catchy songs and jingles I knew, why would that be the first to come to mind?
The answer was right in front of me: the handwich.
Just as I had, before, gotten so used to touching Fondajane’s hand that I’d begun to think of it, far less erotically, as sandwiching, I had, thereafter, gotten so used to the sandwiching that I’d begun to think of it, even less erotically, as handwiching.
Now, Handwich was not the name of Hamburger Helper’s mascot: in all likelihood, Hamburger Helper’s mascot’s name was Hamburger Helper, or The Hamburger Helper. Neither was Hamburger Helper a sauce one added to hamburgers (i.e. hamburger sandwiches) to make them tastier: rather, it was a kind of seasoned noodle product to which one added ground beef (i.e. hamburger) to make a kind of casserole. But because Hamburger Helper’s mascot was a hand—a white-gloved, disembodied hand with a face on its palm—and because I (who was never fed Hamburger Helper, and who rarely paid the kind of attention to commercials that their sponsors intended) had believed for a while that Hamburger Helper was a sauce one added to hamburger sandwiches to make them tastier, I’d imagined the mascot’s name was Handwich.
So there, in the turret, having begun to think of what our hands were doing as handwiching, it followed that, in pursuit of a tune with which to replace the Street Machine jingle, I’d land on the Hamburger Helper one.
When, though, I wondered, as the handwiching proceeded—when had I learned that Hamburger Helper wasn’t a sauce one added to hamburgers to make them tastier? Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t remember exactly when, but I knew that it had happened years and years earlier. What did surprise me was my dawning realization that Handwich could not have been the name of the mascot for Hamburger Helper: that despite my having known for who-knows-how-many years that Hamburger Helper wasn’t a sauce one added to hamburgers, I had, up until that very moment in the turret, persisted in the belief that the mascot’s name was Handwich. Here had been a 2, and there, but a micron away, a second 2, yet never, til now, had I put the 2s together. I’d never once thought to. And I couldn’t help but wonder what else I had missed. What else was I missing?
A sense of expanding possibility imbued me, the same sense that had imbued me that morning, in the shower, when I’d thought about the years I’d spent failing to imagine that books could be inans. This time, however, instead of aiming my sense of expanding possibility at the future, I aimed it at our handwich, at the meaning of everything that went along—that was going along—with our handwich. It seemed to me our handwich was more than it seemed. Or other than it seemed. Or that it could be more or other. Might not Fondajane, for instance, through our handwich, be communicating? emphasis on the preposition? i.e. through our handwich as through a telephone. If not, then how else had I arrived at the certainty that nothing sexual would arise from the handwich? I mean: Wasn’t that certainty counterintuitive? Wasn’t it precisely the opposite of what such physical contact would typically mean? And yet there it had been, had remained, was: the certainty. There would be nothing sexual. Not now or ever. Was it so unreasonable to think that Fon had sent and/or was sending me that message through the handwich, via the handwich, and despite what the handwich would probably look like to the average nonparticipant? I didn’t think it was so unreasonable. I don’t, today, think it so unreasonable.