It was nearly midnight.

"High time I came to bed," he announced.

I was already tucked in under the covers. "No kidding! What am I, chopped liver?"

"Yeah, that's for sure!" He said it in that enthusiastic but vague tone of voice he uses when his mind is on other things (usually, a coding problem) and he isn't paying any attention to what he's saying.

"Hmm."

"Oh wait," he said, alerted by my silence. I could see him re-running the last few sentences through his mind and hearing them for the first time. "Ah," he said, and looked up brightly. "I mean: No, You Are Not!"

"Okay. Suave-guy lesson number one: when someone asks you if she's chopped liver, the answer is not 'Yeah, that's for sure'."

"Right. Corollary number one," he added. "The answer is also not 'No, you are not.' Although I don't know what the answer is."

"That's okay."

He got a look of sudden inspiration on his face. "You're Beef Wellington!"

"Uh, thanks, honey."

"No! You're crème brûlée! Oh wait. There was already a scene about that. In Four Weddings and a Funeral. No, My Best Friend's Wedding. 'Crème brûlée can never be jello. You can never be jello.'"

"How come you can remember every word that's ever been said about crème brûlée, but you can't remember the lyrics to 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'?"

"Twinkle twinkle little star," he promptly sang, "How I wonder what you are." His mouth opened to sing the next line, and stayed open. No sound came out.

I watched him and waited. He squirmed a little. "Um.. diamond!... in the sky..."

"Thank you for illustrating my point."