The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome. Man Martin
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brought home the metaphorical bacon.
“How about this Saturday?” Mary asked.
On Saturday at sundown, therefore, Bone stood ready to press the doorbell of Mary’s townhouse apartment. Twilight gave each skinny tree—precisely one per lot—a poetic, wistful beauty. Someone was grilling a steak. Birds tittered in the eaves. But Bone was aware only of the starched shirt leaning on his shoulders like a cardboard sheet. Even he knew that arriving this early was a faux pas; wouldn’t it save embarrassment to wait in the car a few minutes before announcing himself? He turned, stepped toward his car, hesitated—on second thought. Turned. Raised his hand to the doorbell. Stopped. Lowered his hand. Considered. Raised it. Lowered it.
He never knew how long Mary’s roommate, Laurel, had been watching before he finally noticed her face in the window. Once he stopped, Laurel called, “Mare-ree! Your date’s here!” The door opened, and he slunk across the threshold.
As he waited, making strained replies to Laurel’s small talk, Bone’s surroundings—the Jacques Brel poster over the unused ten-speed; the dusty potted ficus; the plastic crate-cum-bookshelf housing Salinger, Vonnegut, and The Fountainhead—stamped his memory, the way the priest’s face, guards’ clasping hands, and clanking leg irons imprint the consciousness of a prisoner en route to the electric chair. Bone had an unignorable foresense of failure.
Indeed, the date was not precisely a success.
He took her to dinner and a movie, which, he’d gleaned, is standard operating procedure on dates, but sitting across a table from the woman he’d fantasized about, rather than inspiring him to gallantry and charm, merely stunned him.
She gave him a roll from the bread basket and held it in his fingers as she buttered it for him, an unexpected intimacy that sent electricity crackling up his arm. “It must be exciting being an author,” Mary said. Bone said it was not that exciting. “When do you find time to write?” Mornings, Bone told her. “I always wished I could write.” Bone said she should try it.
After a few more failed gambits on her part, the silence went unspoiled by human speech until the theater, when Bone’s two-quart paper cup of crushed ice and syrupy grape soda, which a sign at the concession counter ludicrously identified as “medium,” managed to upend into Mary’s lap.
After this episode they left without seeing the rest of the movie.
Back at the apartment, Mary gave Bone her cheek when he went in for the kiss, and his attempt to land on her mouth only resulted in an evasive maneuver resembling an experiment in magnetic repulsion. “So,” Bone said. He felt shortchanged and short-tempered. He was no skinflint, but this rendezvous had run him—between tickets, popcorn, and soda, not to mention the lavish dinner he had barely tasted—a great amount of money, money he could ill afford on a college teacher’s salary. In contrast to this, a kiss—the memory of which might have warmed the cold baloney sandwiches on which he would subsist next month to economize—would have cost her nothing, and yet she withheld it. He hated himself for having these thoughts, but in no way did that stop him from having them.
“So,” he said, “can I ask you out again?”
“Sure,” she said, her reply as insincere as his request. “Give me a call.”
He did call—why, who can say, unless to confirm his bitter hypothesis—four times: the first time she answered; the next two times it was Laurel; each time Bone was informed Mary had a prior engagement. The fourth time no one answered at all.
Bone heard, through a vine of particularly sour grapes, that Mary, “you know, that pretty secretary who works in the dean’s office,” was “involved with” Dr. Gordon, the dean, a serial womanizer whose wife would no doubt “just die” if she found out.
In its long existence the word “love” has acquired its share of false etymologies, to wit: in French l’oeuf, “egg,” is metonymy for zero, the egg’s shape suggesting 0, as “goose egg” does in English. The British anglicized l’oeuf to “love,” and in the way that meaningless coincidences sometimes become meaningful, to this day, in tennis, as in life, love means nothing. Bone warmed himself reflecting on this chilly irony.
The gossip about Mary he added to a preliminary but quickly growing store of data regarding the bad character and otherwise undesirable qualities of Mary and women like her, indeed all women generally, coolly committing himself to the solitary life. As for Gordon, if Bone had not especially liked him before, he loathed him now.
Therefore, when Bone answered his telephone one day and heard Mary’s voice on the other end, you could have knocked him over with a hummingbird feather.
“What’s up?” she asked. The question flummoxed; what was up? The white clouds, he supposed, the yellow sun that warmed the earth, his soaring heart; these things were up, and yet he could make no reply. “You haven’t called in a while,” Mary chided, as if above all things else the anticipation of his call were the chief delight of her existence. “I thought you and I were going out again.”
He gurgled, “I’m glad you’re using the correct case.”
“What?”
“You said ‘you and I’ instead of ‘you and me.’ I was congratulating you for using the correct pronoun case.”
“Oh.” A longish pause while Mary waited for Bone to speak. “So, you wanted to go out?”
Mary, it transpired, had already picked a place and date, sparing Bone the chore of planning suitable entertainment. At her townhouse, he spent the obligatory awkward minutes with Laurel until Mary emerged in a scrumptious short black skirt and red blouse which offered the additional advantage, which Bone naively believed she did not suspect, of revealing her breast in profile.
It rained; getting lost only once—a shared mishap that seemed to seal the bond between them—they threaded their way through black, rain-bright streets between streetlamps punctuating the night like an ellipsis to the Vietnamese restaurant Mary had chosen. Bone’s hot blood roared in his ears, the fine hairs on his neck tickling his collar as if he were sitting on an electrified fence instead of next to this beauty in mute wonder; what glad change of heart accounted for this good fortune? Had he made a better first impression than he’d thought, and was it only bad timing and bad luck that had kept them apart?
The waiter asked if they wanted iced coffee—an odd suggestion coming before they’d even seen a menu. Meeting their puzzled looks with a puzzled one of his own, the waiter explained that Çhao Gio was renowned for iced coffee, implying it was unusual, if not unheard-of, for customers to be unaware of this. Bone and Mary exchanged looks, and Bone said yes, they would have the iced coffee.
Their wait was relieved by an awkward coincidence when Dr. Gordon and his wife arrived. It was a small restaurant, and the couples sat at adjoining tables. Time dripped in strained camaraderie before the waiter reappeared.
“We ordered the iced coffee,” Bone announced.
“Yes,” Gordon said. “It’s the specialty.” Gordon was his insufferable self, reclining with his arm extended over the back of his wife’s chair. Mrs. Gordon, who even smiling wore frown lines of a long campaign to stay slim and attractive, asked if Mary enjoyed her position and if it got very hard being under her husband, a strange, fierce fire in her eyes. Gordon asked Bone something about teaching, not concealing his lack of interest in Bone’s reply; Gordon was after all a dean, and Bone a mere lecturer.
A surreal and uncomfortable situation, but Mary reached across the tablecloth to hold Bone’s hand, and beneath the table, her knee pressed his own. In his joy, he lost his discomfort; a thousand Dr. Gordons could have marched in with a thousand wives, and he would have snapped his fingers at all of them, aware only of that sweet touch against his hand and knee. Bone said something clever and offhand, a remark that later he could never remember, a modest put-down, at which Gordon’s nostrils dilated in mild displeasure and Mrs. Gordon laughed.
Mary squeezed his hand, and the waiter returned with a tray to prepare their coffee.