Long made short, I went back inside the house, gathered the portfolio and ampule from the kitchen, took a No Please Don’t from the stack on the mantel beside the bust of Hagler, and read through the scene. I read it at my desk with Blank on my shoulder, and then again in bed with Blank on my chest, both times with much pleasure.
It appears in Chapter 9, at the end of Part 1, by which point the novel’s nine-year-old protagonist, Gil MacCabby, has spent a full month in search of Bam Naka, his lost and beloved action figure. Gil is visibly thinner than he was only weeks ago, his head aches so badly he’s constantly squinting, and the previous night, around 3 a.m., he somnambulated into the backyard pool, where his father found him screaming and splashing around. Mr. MacCabby, having already taken a number of measures to get Gil to abandon his fruitless, increasingly self-destructive search—he’s yelled at Gil, gone out with him for ice cream, yelled at him some more, brought him to the batting cages, brought him to the zoo, sent him to a shrink, and of course bought for him a new Bam Naka—decides that, before he checks his son into the Children’s Memorial Hospital psych ward (which Gil’s shrink has, twice, recommended he do, but which seems to Gil’s father—however less and less so—a parenting cop-out), he should try one last mental-health home remedy. Toward that end he gives Gil a golden signet ring embossed with Gil’s initials, GBM (the B is for Benjamin), and explains to Gil that he and Gil’s mom had commissioned the ring a few months earlier, that they’d planned to give it to Gil on Gil’s upcoming birthday, which is only a couple of weeks away, but he’s decided that Gil should receive the ring early because the ring is a young man’s ring—it’s made of 14k gold—and he believes it’s important for Gil to comprehend that Gil already is a young man, that Gil has been a young man for a while.
Gil understands his father’s message: young men know when it’s time to give up. But Gil also understands that he’s been worrying his father, and that his father might not really believe in Gil’s young-manhood. His father might think that Gil is still yet enough of a boy that he (i.e. Gil) would be so flattered at being thought a young man that he’d do anything he could to keep his father thinking it, which in this case would mean giving up on his search. But if he is a young man, and young men do know when it’s time to give up, then, Gil reasons, he shouldn’t give up, as he knows he must find his lost Bam Naka. Yet if, on the other hand, he’s not a young man, or if he is a young man but young men don’t necessarily know when it’s time to give up, then maybe it is, after all, time to quit the search, and he just doesn’t know it.
In any case, Gil entirely believes that his father believes (and furthermore, Gil believes this himself) that rings made of real gold are expressly not for boys, big or little, and he reasons that his father wouldn’t give him a ring that was made of real gold if he (i.e. Gil’s father) didn’t believe (whether correctly or incorrectly) that Gil was a young man. And because Gil suspects his father of not believing that Gil’s a young man, he suspects that the ring might not really be gold.
In the scene that’s both my and Triple-J’s favorite, Gil, who, til now (roughly midway through the novel), has shown himself to be almost painfully methodical and slow-to-react, does something impulsive. He takes the ring off and bites it on the signet, performing a test of authenticity he’s seen performed any number of times on televised Westerns he’s watched with with his father, Westerns in which golden nuggets are offered as payment (for horses, guns, livestock, etc.) to men who, prior to accepting them, bite them in order to determine whether they’re real gold or something called “fool’s gold.”
Gil bites his ring as hard as he can, feels the metal give way under force of his eye-teeth, relaxes his jaw, takes the ring from his mouth, and sees he’s marred the signet. Caved it in. His surname’s initial—the M—is bent, is sunken in the middle, is disembossed. He’s ruined the ring. He’s ruined the gift his father gave him, the gift his father and mother had so thoughtfully—months in advance of its giving!—commissioned for him. What’s more, he doesn’t know what he’s proven. He doesn’t know if he’s proven anything. Of all the nugget-biters in the Westerns Gil’s seen—who always end up judging the nuggets authentic—not one of them ever even once explains just what the nugget did or didn’t do between his teeth to assuage his suspicions of its being fool’s gold or confirm his hopes of its being real gold. Is bitten gold supposed to give or resist? If give, then how much? Under how much pressure? If resist, then to what extent? Are one’s teeth supposed to chip?
On top of not knowing what he has or hasn’t proven by deforming the ring, Gil has, moreover, completely lost track of what, if anything, he’d hoped to prove. Were the ring real gold, he’d be a shitty son who should have trusted his father and failed to do so. Were the ring fake gold, he could not trust his father, and yet being unable to trust his father didn’t necessarily mean, as Gil now saw it, that he shouldn’t have anyway. Had he trusted his father, the ring—whatever it was made of—would not be ruined.
Bitterly disappointed in himself, cloudy from sleep-dep, and duly haunted by last night’s watery and (seemingly) inadvertent near-suicide, Gil, in the final part of the chapter, is struck (for reasons that become quite clear) by a vivid recollection of a long-forgotten moment from his early childhood:
He was three, maybe four. His mother’s hair was still red. They were sitting in the kitchen. The kitchen was sunny. The venetian blinds threw rails of shadow across the bright white floor and counter. Everything was fine. Everything was solid. His mom gave him water. A tall glass of water. A real glass of water. Only recently had his parents started serving him drinks in anything other than lidded, plastic cups. He hadn’t thought twice about it. Now he thought twice about it. Thought about glass. How, on shows, glass would break, but at home it never broke. On shows, glass would break, and people’d get cut. Sometimes it was windows. Other times dishes. They were always getting cut, though, on shows, by broken glass. It was a different kind of glass than the glass in the house. A dangerous kind. The glass in the house was the safe kind of glass. It wouldn’t be in the house if it wasn’t the safe kind. It would be too unsafe if it wasn’t the safe kind. It had to have a special name you could say, though. So you’d know it was different when somebody said it. But Gil didn’t know it. He wanted to know it. He wanted to say it.
“What kind of glass is our glasses?” Gil asked.
“Clear?” his mother said.
“No,” Gil said. “That’s all kinds of glass. But what about our kind?”
“Are you telling me a riddle?”
“No!” Gil said.
“I don’t understand, Gil.”
“What’s it called?” Gil said. “What’s this kind of glass called?”