Man Martin

      Unbridled Books

      In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are

      unknown, and in between, there are doors.

      William Blake

      A, a

      From the Semitic aleph (a), “ox.” The Greeks renamed it alpha, twisting the neck to point the horns downward. In the lowercase, the ox head can still be seen in profile, a single horn curving like a cricket’s antenna: a.

      alpha and omega: The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet (A and Ω). Metaphorically, God, i.e., the “first and last,” from Revelation 1:8, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord.”

      alphabet: The characters of a written language arranged in an established order. From alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

      atone: To reconcile or make restitution. A compound of at and one, that is, to be “at one with,” or in harmony.

      The night before being struck by the Lemon Jell-O Syndrome, his private nickname for his terrible, incapacitating illness, Bone King taught Wednesday-night Composition 1101 at Fulsome College with an unease with which it has rarely been taught. When reminding his students that the object of a preposition could never be a subject, he spoke as if it came as a personal tragedy. Suspecting your wife of infidelity, and only suspecting—if my wife is cheating—is a subordinate clause that wrings the heart like a mop until there is a declarative sentence to complete it.

      The clock by the door told him motion by motion when Mary would be coming home from Grace Church and changing to go out to Jelly Jam: now letting herself in the kitchen door—now making the orbit from kitchen to bedroom to bathroom, changing from work clothes, getting ready to leave—putting perfume behind her ears?

      Born in the Tennessee back hills, Bone was an unlikely candidate to become a scholar. He could quote Seneca in Latin, but he was haunted by the dread that he’d never really overcome his pronunciation of “pin” for “pen” nor lose that weighty one-word imperative, “gih-yawn-owwa-hyeah!,” he’d once used against hound dogs in the kitchen or chickens on the front porch. Through monkish solitude and dedicated study, he’d climbed the greasy trunk of academe and published his master’s thesis, Misplaced Modifiers, which had won first place for Books on Grammar and Usage in the Southeast. His further ascent seemed a foregone conclusion, but the struggle had cost him. Wherever he went, a silent inner voice went also, a running commentary on usage and etymology. Mary had once loved his dreaminess but now complained he didn’t pay enough attention. The truth was he paid too much, only never to the right things. Sometimes he wondered if this weren’t a sign of mild lunacy, but then he’d spot in “luna-cy” the ghostly lexical thumbprint of the moon, and with that he’d be off in another world.

      By the time he got home, the sun had set, and it was dark. She was at the club.

      “Chicken and rice on the counter,” Mary’s note said. He turned on the TV and listened from the kitchen as his dinner rotated, humming in the lighted window of the microwave. He sat in the recliner, plate in his lap, bathed in the vapor from his chicken and rice and the blue-white glow of Wednesday-night reruns: a medical comedy with a hardworking, no-nonsense doctor, a wisecracking nurse, and a quirky patient with a strange diagnosis. After his solitary meal, Bone went to bed.

      Mary.

      Had another man touched that smooth white skin? Her naked back, where it tapered to her waist. A masculine hand, black hairs bristling around a heavy old-fashioned wristwatch, resting itself along the curve, two fingers lightly curled along the cleft ...

      Bone noted, observed, and tagged the minutes passing on the glowing alarm clock as he lay alternating between sweats and shivers. At last the front door opened. Boards creaked down the hall and into the bathroom. Flush. The shower ran. A toothbrush scrubbed. A drawer opened and closed. Mary—soap smell and scrubbed skin—eased into the covers beside him. Bone pretended to have just awoken.

      “So, how was tonight?” No response. “How was Jelly Jam?”

      “It was great.” She readjusted herself on her pillow.

      “So who else was there?”

      “Hmm?” Like a drowser surfacing reluctantly from a dream.

      “Who else was there? At Jelly Bean?” He hoped the whimsical substitution of “bean” for “jam” would evoke a smile. “So who was there?”

      “Oh, you know—Laurel, Cindy Davis, Ruth—the usual.”

      “That’s nice.” He lay rigidly in bed. “Did you run into anyone else?”

      “What?” She turned toward him. “Why are you asking all this? You’re cross-examining me.”

      Something hot settled in the back of Bone’s throat. “No, I’m not,” he said, forcing a smile to the darkness. “I’m just talking is all.” Bringing up the next question was like pushing a stalled car over the crest of a hill. “Was Cash there?”

      “Oh, Christ, Bone.”

      Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why had he asked that? Bone’s throat was dry and scorching hot. He was trembling. He ought to roll toward her, tuck his head into her neck and lay his thigh over hers, his hand on her ribs, smell her hair, whisper, Work has become a run-on sentence for me, with neither period nor semicolon. I am past tense, restless and incomplete in this world, a dependent clause, and you are the comma at which I rest. Conjugate with me and teach me the sweet syntax of your body.

      “Was he there? If he wasn’t there, just tell me.”

      “No, he wasn’t there.” She sighed; in the crooked trapezoid of yellow moonlight falling over their bodies, he could feel as well as hear her lungs expand and expel.

      When my love swears that she is made of truth,

      I do believe her, though I know she lies.

      How wise Shakespeare was; he knew it all.

      Bone pretended to sleep and pretended not to know she was pretending also.

      The next morning was Friday, and in theory Bone had all day to work on his manuscript, Words. We who take grammar so lightly may well give a thought to men like Bone working in dark library basements safeguarding the subjunctive mood while the rest of us are out living our lives.

      After vacillating whether to mention his nemesis, E. Knolton, in the introduction, Bone settled on a haughty and dismissive “some”: “Some might say the concept of correct grammar is outmoded.” In the Grammar Wars, waged with the tenacity only professional academics can muster, Bone defended Standard American English against the E. Knolton faction, anarchists claiming no such thing as “correct usage” existed, only “different dialects,” each with its own “worthy grammar.”

      How Knolton would have jeered to know the pains it’d cost Bone to pluck “might could” out of his speech, the sweat spilled mastering “it is I.” And—highest price of all—the rejection by his own kind, pursued along the quarry tracks by jeering boys and pelted with gravel for talking like a Yankee.

      Finally, Bone rose from his desk and went to the window. One of Cash’s Mexicans cut grass in slow zigzags; another applied clippers to a boxwood. Mary and Cash talked in the side yard. The fragrance of the gardenias was at its height, and Bone imagined the heady smell sweetening the air around them.

      A