His next move was to bring me a drink. He said it was a maple-pear mojito, “sweet, delicious, refreshing,” he said, “like you.” I tasted it, I said it was delicious, but I wasn’t used to drinking much. Also, he’s the kind of guy who puts things in drinks. When he looked away I dumped most of it in a glass someone else had left on a table.

Then he suggested we go for a walk. We would go down by the river.

I mean, for God’s sake, that’s like a junior high school move. You’d think a man of his age and experience would have something…I don’t know…more so-phis-ti-cated. I said, “It’s kind of cold and rainy.”

If I remember correctly, the next suggestion was that we go to his AV room. It’s upstairs in what used to be the servants quarters. He said they had to knock out walls to make it right because he has a 98-inch flat-screen Sony, which is like seven feet wide and four feet high, and they’d brought in special luxury furniture to watch it from, plus there’s the sound system. Sony has four speakers on the front of the screen so the sounds feel like they’re coming right out of the scenes, and then he had their own guy, a specialist, come in and add more sound stuff.

Then he informed me that it had all been soundproofed.

If alarms hadn’t gone off before, they would have then.

I wasn’t going to get into a room alone with him where he could close the door, let alone one that was soundproofed. Cornered, I would have to swoon, and give in, or he’d force me, or total rejection with me running from the room, which we would have to call a premature conclusion, given that my job was to keep teasing him and drag things out. Right? That’s what you wanted.

His next ploy. He starts talking about his car. He said it cost more than $300,000.

Have you read Thorstein Veblen? For about ten minutes I thought I was going to be an economics major. They’re not very good at what they do, but some of them make a lot of money at it, so I might reconsider. Conspicuous consumption, that’s Veblen. These people, Mr. and Mrs. McMunchun, if you took that away from them, their conspicuous consumption, would they implode?

The car was a McLaren 720S Spider. But you know that by now. It had a turbo-charged V-8 engine and a whole lot of other things and was so super-cool that they didn’t measure its power in horsepower but in some other way that I’ve never heard before.

He said the design was based on the great white shark. I did like that.

He said, “Would you like to see it?”