The partners sent him to Cologne to have him measured for an oven, sent him to Bern to have him measured for a range. His pots and pans were designed in consultation with experts in both Toulouse and Malmö, and his knives with masters in Kyoto and Sapporo, who filmed him chopping and slicing and carving, made molds of his grips, and cast the molds into hilts. For his prep tables, fridge, and garnishing tools, he was sent to other cities in Europe and Asia, though to name them would be disingenuous of me. Truth be told, I’m not even sure about a couple of the cities I’ve named already (Clem might have gone to Gothenburg rather than Malmö, Yokohama rather than Sapporo)—still, you get the idea.
The slob in the photo came off like a king because every last detail contained in its frame—rakish line cook excepted—had been custom-designed to accommodate all his particular habits of movement, to fit and thus flatter his slobbish proportions.
According to the article, the price of the kitchen—disinclusive of travel expenses—was $2.3 million. The oven alone had cost half a million.
And what did the half-mil oven look like? It looked like an oven in the kitchen of a restaurant, any oven in the kitchen of any restaurant. I imagine it would have looked the same to you, reader. And the butcher’s block and the overhead fan and the spoon Clem was stirring the pot on the range with…each of them equally, entirely unspectacular.
All of this to say that, apart from the scraped-up astronaut helmet, which, perched on the corner of his polished marble table desk, possessed (yes, even as I lacked the benefit of hindsight) all the doomy salience of that rifle on the wall in Peckinpah’s The Seagull, Jonboat’s office in Office House One—with its wide-screen computer, ergonomic swivel chair, wood-tone floor globe, and overhead bookshelves—could have been, as far as I could see, the suburban home office of just about any well-to-do professional, but given how formidable Jonboat appeared in it, I would not have been surprised to learn its decor had been as fine-tuned to suit his anatomy as Heather’s kitchen had been to suit Clem’s.
Then again, when hadn’t he appeared formidable? To me, just once: earlier that day, during the handwich, in the eye of my mind, when Fon was describing the argument they’d had upon his return from the Adirondacks, the argument they’d had about No Please Don’t. Only that once had Jonboat, to me, appeared less than formidable—and that word, appeared, is of course a stretch, the subformidable Jonboat (his hands aflap, fingers trembling; his mouth agape, its lips too wet; his six-seven frame demilitarized, as curved and accursed as the neck of a vulture) being someone I pictured while I listened to a story—and yet this appearance, imagined though it was, had, apparently, been vivid enough or recent enough or disappointing enough to leave a mark; to mislead me to expect, without my realizing, that the next time I saw him, he’d be a lesser Jonboat than the Jonboat I’d known.
But lesser he wasn’t. And he didn’t look lesser. He looked like Jonboat, appeared as he always had. You’ve seen him before, reader, hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times, and that’s exactly how he looked: better than he should have even given who he was, i.e. better than he should have even given he was someone one expects to look better than he should even given who he is. He looked like himself.
Enough abstraction. I’m tired of abstraction. Or tired of something. Or maybe just tired. But enough abstraction.
* * *
We found him towering over the floor globe, atop which a Curio with herringbone-patterned, blond-silver velvet treadmilled quadrupedally along the prime meridian. He wore leather boat shoes, flower-print board shorts, and an untucked, sand-colored, linen sport shirt, its cuffs rolled loosely above his elbows, its wrinkly placket spread open from the button two below his ample and golden suprasternal notch. His nose was sunburned, peeling a little.
Saying, “Hey, you,” he spread his arms wide, inviting a hug that I set the Crunch down beside the helmet to deliver before I came to realize he sought from his wife, who, embracing his ribs, rose on her tiptoes and slid up his torso, then kissed him on the neck while he, around and over her, gave me the shoulder-clap/handshake treatment. It didn’t at all feel as awkward as it sounds. The handshake was committed, the shoulder-clap squeezy, and the woman between us in zero danger of being ruffled, much less crushed—Jonboat’s was a power forward–grade wingspan.
Releasing his grip, he said, “I heard that you’re going into business with my son.”
“Well, indeed I am!” I yelped very lamely and way too loudly, no little bit thrown by what seemed to me an abrupt skipping-over of even the most perfunctory reunion sounds (perhaps a “Been too long” would have been too much to hope for, but a “Been so long?”—what would that have cost him?), and no less thrown by Jonboat’s phrasing: not so much the going into business part, which did come out sounding somewhat condescending, but more the I heard part. How had he heard? When had he heard? Who had told him? Had he, through some invisible receiver in his ear, been listening in on Burroughs’s invisible collar mike? On Trip’s or Fon’s invisible collar mike? Were they all miked? All of them receivered? Had he heard me talking to his wife in the turret? Was there a mike in my bangle? Had he heard me address my bangle while pissing? Had Burroughs? The others?
None of that seemed likely. I’m not saying it did. It seemed too sci-fi. (Probably all that happened was Triple-J had called him, cellphone-to-cellphone, or cellphone-to-landline, to tell him the news while the rest of us were on our way to his office—a conclusion I reached only milliseconds after having concocted my paranoid mike-and-receiver fantasies (which concocting had, itself, taken mere milliseconds).) I’m just trying to provide, here—struggling to provide, here—an honest account (to myself, good reader, as well as to you) of what it was that may have driven me to yelp, “Well, indeed I am!” in response to Jonboat’s “I heard that you’re going into business with my son,” or to yelp, for that matter, anything at all.
I’d like to think my yelping out of character, I guess.
Whyever I’d yelped, I did, at the time, feel that my yelping had been beneath me, was instantly ashamed for having yelped, and more ashamed yet to witness the effects my yelp had on the others, who suddenly saw me as a threat or a sad sack—it wasn’t clear which, and perhaps it was both—and, in any case, had plainly been made uneasy: Jonboat set his hand on my shoulder again, to comfort me or keep me from getting any closer; Burroughs stepped toward us, a hand in his jacket; and Fon, if not in response to having been startled, then in order to signal to everyone present that my yelp, rather than the tension-making gaffe it may have seemed to some of us, had been a deliberately inappropriate social gambit intended by me to be tension-breaking—a risky kind of joke or gag I’d pulled that she was proud, even thrilled, to be the first to appreciate—Fon let loose her signature horse-laugh.
The laugh wasn’t as infectious as it had been earlier. My accompanying chortles were a little bit forced, a beat or two delayed. Still, it worked its magic, or some of its magic—enough of its magic—and for that I was grateful. The careful mood lifted a number of inches: Jonboat set his other hand atop my other shoulder; Burroughs’s jacketed hand came out empty; Fon caught her breath, and said, “Oh, Belt, what a riot you are. Isn’t he, Jonboat?” and Jonboat, squinting, said, “Always was. Hasn’t changed a bit. How about we have us a look at that contract.”