I straightened my posture, said, “How old is that thing?”
“You’ll never believe it,” Jonboat said.
“Ten?” I said.
“No,” said Jonboat.
“Eleven? Twelve?”
“It’s one,” said Jonboat.
“Come on,” I said.
“Tell him,” said Jonboat.
“One,” said Burroughs. “Is it even one?”
“Turned one last week.”
I said, “What kind of formula you—”
“No. None. Well, it’s on some Spazola right now—that’s how it’s able to keep on running—but nothing that affects its appearance in the least. It’s just a really special cure, a total anomaly. Within a month of emerging, it had the pull of a two-year-old. All the Handsome Arthurs have. The first one I emerged—you met Valentine, right?”
“I did,” I said.
“Well, Valentine, when he met the first of my Handsome Arthurs—Valentine was what, Burroughs? Sixteen years old?”
“Fifteen, sixteen, something like that.”
“Right. So Valentine, not quite as big back then, but no small fry, you know—he has that Archon blood flowing through his veins—Valentine, who’s—and I mean this in the best possible way—but Valentine, who, I guess it should be said, has never been famous for…how should I put it?”
“Self-restraint?” said Burroughs. “Impulse control?”
“Harsh, Burroughs. Harsh. He’s a good kid, your Valentine. Let’s call it dispassion. He’s never been famous for dispassion, Valentine, and, a few years back, we’re all at this house in the south of France. Outside of Nice, right?”
“Little more like outside of Cannes,” Burroughs said. “The house was in a village called Sainte-Maxime.”
“Exactly there. We’re on a little family vacation in Sainte-Maxime, and young Valentine’s with us. Because of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Jonboat said.
“Ernest Hemingway,” said Burroughs.
“Better you tell it, Burroughs,” Jonboat said.
“Loves The Sun Also Rises,” Burroughs said. “Loves the stories, too, but mostly Sun Also Rises. Except he’s not so great at geography, my youngest. Not so great at reading a map. He thought he’d come along and I’d drive with him to San Sebastian, in Spain. I guess he thought that since San Sebastian, like Sainte-Maxime, was in Europe, on the sea, and named after a saint, the two places must be close. Something like that. Hard to say what he was thinking. But he had this idea that San Sebastian must be the greatest, most peaceful place on earth, because that’s where Hemingway sends Barnes to cool his jets after the whole sad ruckus in Pamplona. Mind you, he doesn’t tell me any of this until the last minute. Just asks to come along to Sainte-Maxime. And he’s a growing boy, and we’re going through that father-son head-butting period, and I think, ‘Great. I’ll bring him. He’s reaching out. We’ll bond.’ And then we get there, and he asks can we drive to San Sebastian, and I tell him, ‘Not a chance. We’re here six days. It’s an eight-hour drive. I’ve got a job to do, Valentine,’ and he’s…very disappointed, upset. I might have been a touch insensitive to him. Might’ve made him feel stupid. Lesser-than. You know. But he loses track of himself a little. More than a little.”
“Back then,” Jonboat said, “a little bit with Valentine went a long way.”
“We’re on chaise longues by the pool when I upset him, and Mr. Pellmore-Jason’s across the patio, in the game room, just the other side of this sliding glass door, doing something with Handsome Arthur and a beachball.”
“I was holding the beachball between my index fingers, spinning it, with the cure on top of it—getting it to run like that one’s doing right now. And Valentine, he storms away from Burroughs, toward the game room, and he sees us in there—sees me standing just inside the game room with Handsome Arthur, which couldn’t have been more than five weeks old—he sees me in there, sees that I’ve seen him have his little tantrum, and he stops right there, right outside the door. I still picture it in slo-mo.
“He stops outside the sliding glass door, a couple or three steps outside it, maybe four, and he waves hello at me, and pulls his face into this friendly smile that he’s aiming down at Handsome Arthur, acting like he wasn’t just in the middle of storming off from his well-meaning pop, like he hadn’t just learned that San Sebastian, far as driving there goes, might as well be Ljubljana. Acts like I haven’t just seen him having a tantrum, like the only reason he leapt off his chaise longue was to get a closer look at my Curio. It’s this whole big act he puts on, on the spot. And me, all I want is to help him save face. So I play along. I hold the beach ball out toward him a little, to give him a better look at Handsome Arthur, and, I swear, before I’ve even completed the motion—like I’m still in the middle of pushing the beach ball forward, toward the glass—he’s falling onto his back, on the patio, unconscious. Concussion. He was so instantly, crazily drawn to the cure, he forgot the glass was there between us. Walked full force into it.”
“Lucky, too,” Burroughs said. “Could’ve ended up with a subdural hematoma. Could’ve gone through the glass, cut his throat right open. That concussion was lucky.”
“It’s true. We’re laughing now, but.”
“What a story,” I said, with a little less conviction, perhaps, than I’d intended.
“That’s nothing,” said Jonboat. “You should hear the one about how I got Handsome Arthur.”
“That’s a good one,” said Burroughs.
“I got it from Chuck Yeager in what? 2005?”
“2004, I think,” Burroughs said. “After Ronald Reagan’s funeral.”
“Yeager went to Reagan’s funeral?”
“Maybe not,” Burroughs said. “And maybe it was 2005. It could have been after Gerald Ford’s funeral.”
“I went to Ford’s funeral?”
“You did.”
“And that was 2005.”
“It was,” Burroughs said.
“You’re certain,” said Jonboat.
“Completely,” Burroughs said.
“Completely!” said Jonboat. “You remember, with complete certainty, that the year in which Gerald Ford died was not 2004, not 2006, but 2005.”