“So Patty and I are on the outs,” Cecil informs me over breakfast. Mine the usual yogurt, fruit, grains, nuts and pulses. I think there are some pulse qualifiers in the mix in my bowl. Cecil’s ventured for some French toast today. Comfort food, he tells our waitress, Roxanne. “To cure the broken hearted,” he mocks. Himself, not Roxanne, that is.

He and Patty have been conducting what you might call a fractious, on-again-off-again relationship. Many of Cecil’s relationships over at the ‘Complex’, his retirement digs for a few years now, have been similarly conducted, Cecil having transformed himself since his move there into something of a senior serial dater, by all accounts, a label that would never have applied in his earlier adult life, a seeming lifetime ago.

“I’m a bit of a catch in these my winter years,” Cecil sheepishly and modestly confessed to me one time. “I’ve got my faculties, more or less, on most days,” he explained, “and I’m not in diapers yet.” The problem is, according to him, everybody’s too set in their ways. “Inflexible to interpersonal negotiation,” he sees it as. Rigid and tight as the old hamstrings. “Eventually,” he says wistfully, “they find someone who can still drive at night and then that’s curtains for ol’ Cecil here.” Never an enthusiastic motorist, Cecil had long since given up his license and only now, it seemed, lived long enough to regret it.

“What happened now?” I dutifully ask him.

“She didn’t think that I took Elon Musk seriously enough,” he replies in between bites and chews of French toast, in an open-mouthed manner that makes me wonder if being unlicensed is the only reason Cecil finds himself regularly thrown back on the singles circuit.

“You two parted way because of your aversion to Elon Musk?”

“Yep. She says it means that I don’t take the future seriously enough. Can you believe that, Barnaby?”

A curious turn of events, I thought, as Cecil had claimed to have sworn off all talk of politics within the walls of the Complex and with all residents who called it home.

“People will surprise you, Barnaby,” he said at the time. “All doddery goodwill and avuncularity on the outside, a swirling tempest of Thermidorian hate on the inside. Real reactionaries, most of these old coots, I’ll tell you that much.”

“And how did the subject of Elon Musk come up with Patty?” I ask.

“She told me I needed to get cracking and make sure my wealth manager—wealth manager, Barnaby, that’s what she calls my accountant—that my wealth manager was on top of this XSpace IPO thingie,” Cecil replies. “The deal of a lifetime, she said,” he adds.

“Just out of the blue like that?” I nudged. “With no prompting from you?”

“What do you mean?” he asked with enough sincerity to make his question feel genuine.

Ever since Cecil first found out about Musk, all the way back in 2023, I think it was (a late adopter my friend Cecil), he fell down hard on the side of antipathy toward the man. And that was before the Nazi salute. Before DOGE. Before the trillionaire talk.

“How is that even possible, Barnaby?” he demanded to know when he first read about the prospect. “I don’t even think that was a word when we were growing up.”

So, you’ll have to pardon me if I’m a little skeptical about the topic of Elon Musk just popping up out of nowhere where Cecil’s concerned.

“Everybody was talking about it, the very real prospect of the man becoming a trillionaire, a trillionaire, Barnaby,” he pleads. “The topic was impossible to avoid.”

“Which I’m sure you’re tried to do,” I say, the sarcasm dripping.

Cecil appears to be ignoring my statement, working his way through a rasher of bacon and a couple mouthfuls of coffee.

“Cecil?”

“I didn’t call it all hokum, Barnaby,” he responds eventually, “if that’s what you’re suggesting.” He finishes off the bacon. “Not at first, at any rate. But I mean, really!”

There it was.

“And then Patty says that I just don’t recognize genius,” Cecil continues, spewing bacon bits at me. After polishing off his coffee, “Genius!” he says, throwing up his hands in a reenactment of the spat, I’m imagining, “What genius are we talking about here, Patty? What has the man ever invented? What has the man created except massive wealth for himself?”

Cecil’s outburst briefly silences the eatery. From behind the counter, Roxanne raises a finger to her besmirked lips in a playful gesture calling for us to pipe down. She’s not unused to our commotion and knows that it dissipates quickly, tiring easily as we do, given our advanced age. After a slight pause, the hum of consumption picks up again.

“Trust me on this, Patty, I tell her,” Cecil tells me, leaning in, whispering, “this bubble’ll burst as sure as the first tech one did, and it’s going to take a lot of people’s net worth with it. Just you wait and see. Oh,” he says, decibels rising slightly, “she says back to me, you know more about this then the actual professionals on Wall Street, do you?”

I have to agree somewhat with Patty in this re-telling but keep it to myself. Cecil has only recently jumped on this anti-Elon bandwagon. It’s quite possible that his newly formed views and opinions may not be as rigorous as they are passionate.

“You know what I said to her then, Barnaby?” he continues.

“What did you say to her then, Cecil?”

“I said, I got two words for you, Patty.” He pauses, obviously waiting for me to play Patty’s part here.

“And those two words were?” I ask.

“Tu-lips. Ha!” he cackles, loud as a firecracker, hushing the establishment once more. Cecil immediately raises his hand in apology, letting everyone around us know that he’s finished, point made. As you were, as it was.

I sit back in my chair, coffee cup in hand and take in my friend, Cecil, more content, it struck me, with winning an argument than losing the girl. At least for the time being. As I’ve said, their relationship is very cyclical in nature.

“She accused me of just being jealous,” Cecil goes on, forking into his French toast, “jealous I never made a trillion dollars. Who needs a trillion dollars, Patty? I ask,” he says, mouth full. “Seriously, Barnaby. Who needs a trillion dollars?”

“Those keeping score on a spreadsheet, I guess, Cecil,” I reply.

I didn’t know.

“Well, at least Warren drives a Tesla, Patty said me,” Cecil says. “You don’t even own a car. And dinner was over. Just like that.”

Over just like that. Cecil and Patty.

Again.

For the time being.

We sit for a bit in silence, digesting our meal and Cecil’s tale. Breakfasting continues around us.

“On the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton matrimonial scale, Cecil,” I finally venture, “does this break up with Patty measure at a first divorce level or second?”

Cecil waves me off and with the same hand gestures to Roxanne a request for a coffee refill.

“I’ve only ever been a pawn in the match between Patty and Warren, Barnaby. I was always going to lose out to the guy with the Tesla.”