“Sounds good,” I said, though he wasn’t really asking.
“As the kids say,” Fon said, glancing at her watch, “ ‘Now we’ve come to the part where I make my exit.’ ”
Turning toward his wife, Jonboat let go my shoulders to put up his fists and bob and weave. “So it’s the kids who say that, huh?” he said.
“I think so,” Fon said, slapping at his wrists, blushing neck-to-forehead, averting her eyes.
“Is it really what they say?” he said. He pantomimed an uppercut. “Come on. Is it really?”
She stamped her foot, flashed a mock scowl. “They say it on TV,” she said. “They say it on sitcoms.”
“On sitcoms?” said Jonboat. Jab. Jab-jab.
“Dramedies, too,” she said.
“Oh [right hook], dramedies [left],” he said. “I thought what they said was, ‘I guess that’s my cue.’ ”
“I guess that’s my cue! That’s two eras back,” she said. “They gave that up for their name and out. Like ‘Fondajane: out.’ ”
“Never heard of it,” said Jonboat, blocking phantom wallops. “Jonboat: incredulous.”
“Anyway, the latest’s ‘Now we’ve come to the part where I make my exit,’ and the next one, if the pattern holds—”
“What pattern?” said Jonboat, stilling himself.
“The pattern. You know. The pattern of reversal. Long becomes short or short becomes long, formal informal or informal formal, the one constant being you make a knowing nod to stage direction, to playing a role that demands your departure. The next one, I’m betting, will be ‘Exit Speaker.’ ”
“Why ‘speaker’?”
“Not the word speaker. The speaker’s name. As in, ‘Exit Fondajane.’ They’re probably saying that already. TV can’t keep up with the kids.”
“But the kids are so dumb,” he said.
“The kids aren’t dumb.”
“The kids are dumb as ever.”
“Trip isn’t dumb.”
“But Trip doesn’t count. He’s never really been a kid. Besides, he says, ‘Goodbye.’ Or ‘Seeya later.’ ‘Seeya soon.’ I don’t know.”
“He told me, ‘Crunch-a-tize me, Cap’n,’ and saluted me,” I said, but only Burroughs responded: he patted my arm. I didn’t know what the pat meant. Let them flirt on their own? Let them argue on their own? Whatever we decide to call what they’re doing is—if not in content, then in form, in rhythm—a kind of long-practiced repertoire, so don’t interfere? You, like me, are irrelevant here? I, like you, and the rest of the world, am half in love with her as well, but he’s her only husband, and you’ll just have to live with that? I sat in the guest chair in front of the desk.
Fon lifted Jonboat’s hand and kissed it.
“You really have to go?” he said.
“I have a call to make to Brussels. It’s late over there.”
“You coming to Riyadh?”
“When?”
“Wheels up at eight.”
“Maybe,” Fon said. “Could we stop in Abu Dhabi on the way?”
“It’s not on the way.”
“You know what I meant.”
“I have to meet Robbie bin Laden for dinner, so.”
“How about after? On the out-of-the-way back.”
“Maybe,” said Jonboat. “Depends what Robbie says. I might have bad news to convey to Uncle Haj, and that would have to be in person, and we’d have to stay the night, or else Haj’ll feel all—you know how he gets. And I have to be Stateside, rested, by noon on Wednesday.”
“I’m pretty tired of Dubai,” Fon said.
“I know. Me too. But I might have good news for Haj from Robbie, in which case we could go to Abu Dhabi, which rhymes so nicely I can’t imagine how you could possibly refuse.”
“I’ll let you know by seven,” she said. She lifted his hand and let it drop, then pivoted, and, before I thought to stand, she bent at the waist, took hold of my jaw, said, “What’s up with the look? You’re weirding me out, dude,” and kissed my forehead, and bit her bottom lip, and squinted and side-eyed and pout-smiled and left.
* * *
—
On to business.
Jonboat read one of the copies of the contract, pen in hand, while Burroughs stood beside him, duly diligent, reading the other, and I, across the desk—still the only one sitting—occupied myself with silent admiration for the blond-silver cure, which had yet to stop running in place atop the globe. I admired the fineness of its herringbone pattern (the lines as thin as fingerprint ridges, as tidy as stripes on a football pitch), and I admired, as well, its fixity of pace (how it hurtled the bracket that encompassed the equator every three gallops—twice per revolution—without need of adjusting the length of its stride), but more than anything else, I admired its irises. They were centrally and completely heterochromatic—the right a grayly banded green; the left a greenly banded gray—a phenomenon (or pair of co-occurring phenomena) I hadn’t previously known to be possible, much less ever witnessed before.
Predictably, the longer I stared at the cure, the greater my desire to hold it became. Less predictable than that—at least to me—was how rapidly my desire to hold it became a yearning to squeeze it, gently, which then became an impulse, or a series of impulses, increasingly impelling and increasingly graphic, to slap it off its feet, off the top of the globe, see it slide down the wall, and then pick it up and then gently squeeze it, then coo to it a little, then not-so-gently squeeze it until the middle of my palm sensed the give of its ribs, and my middle phalanges the bowing of its spine, and I’d loosen the squeeze to encircle its neck within an okay-ing thumb-and-forefinger ring, and bend my arm to bring its head to my lips and insert it partway into my mouth—to the middle of its face—and turn it on its side so the muscles of its jaws came flush with my top- and bottom-right eye-teeth, and then, at last—slowly—I’d close my own jaw, gradually impaling its squeaking skull from above and below while savoring the feeling of its dying painsong quivering my uvula.
“Looks like someone,” Jonboat said, “caught himself an eyeful of Handsome Arthur Twelve,” and Burroughs stepped sideways, obstructing my view of—and path to—the Curio, breaking the trance. I wasn’t entirely ungrateful to him. I didn’t think I’d been in danger of going into overload: despite their specificity and clarity, the urges I’ve described above weren’t quite as strong as the ones I’d felt—and subsequently overcome—toward the cure on the slide a couple nights earlier. But, then again, although I hadn’t gotten up (I’d have had to walk a step or two to close the gap between my chair and the globe), I had begun to lean at pronounced enough an angle for Jonboat to have noticed, and who knew of what adrenalized, superhuman lunging I may have been capable had the cure, for some reason (a fall to the floor, a bracket-stubbed toe, or even just general overexertion), begun to painsing?