The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome. Man Martin
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of High Church mass; the only things lacking were a crucifix and incense ball. Before Bone and Mary, the waiter set down two miniature coffee pots, frosty cocktail shakers, and tall glasses with a finger of beige semiliquid that Bone guessed was partially caramelized condensed milk; the waiter made Mary’s first, pouring the hot coffee into the cocktail shaker, giving two judicious rattles, then pouring it, chilled but undiluted, over the condensed milk; the result was a glassful of gray dawn: midnight black near the top, tapering to creamy taupe, and finally the antique white of the condensed milk at the bottom. Mary reached for her spoon, but Gordon said, “Don’t stir.”
Obediently Mary set the spoon back down and watched as the waiter completed the coffee-making operation for Bone.
Velvet.
Each flavor feathered to the next like the color in the glass. The closest thing Bone knew to compare with it was chocolate milk, except it was nothing at all like chocolate milk. Too soon his glass was empty, but he saw it would be gauche to order a second; besides, a single glass, he discovered, was the perfect amount. If only he hadn’t finished so quickly.
“Good, isn’t it?” Gordon said, as if iced coffee, the Vietnamese restaurant, and Vietnam itself were things brought into being for his private amusement, but which, for the sake of their edification, he graciously condescended to share.
After the restaurant, parked in front of her townhouse, a streetlight shining in the gleaming puddle at the curb, Mary was unexpectedly willing to learn all there was to know on the subject of Bone King; even if she were pretending, Bone, unwilling to end the evening, was unusually garrulous.
He talked about growing up in Tennessee, the sharp, sweet smell of sawmills, gullies choked with rusted car chassis and black plastic garbage bags. He told her about Red Man–chewing junior high boys who loved the music of fists on skin and terrified pleading. He told her how, when still a child, he’d discovered his love of the written word in the Cook County Library, and how his work on Words would be not only his dissertation but an expression of that love. He said that in spite of certain memories, he dreamed of going back someday, having a few acres and maybe a couple of chickens, and she said he was really something and kissed him.
She told him that night that he was real, that he didn’t play games, that she was sick of playing games. Bone sensed that she was comparing him to someone else, but he was too wise or lucky to ask whom.
Was that all there was to it? Did Mary, like Othello’s Desdemona, love Bone for the dangers he had passed, and did he love her that she did pity them? No, there was one other triumphant moment.
It was when they’d been seeing each other about three months, and Bone had taken Mary out for her birthday, his mood made more festive by the chill January night that made her huddle against him when they left the car. He’d recently read an article on backformation, removing what seems to be a suffix or prefix to form a new word, deriving buttle from butler, burgle from burglar, and, more recently, an African American neologism, conversate from conversation. Walking arm-in-arm to the restaurant, they played at making backformations of their own: “I might seem feckless, but I’ve got loads of feck.” “Give me a hammer, I need to ham some nails.” “I am so happy. Tonight I am full of hap.”
Seeing the homeless man sitting on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Bone automatically reached into his back pocket—he’d picked up new habits from Mary. The smallest bill in his wallet was a five, but what the heck; Bone gave it to him without further thought.
“Where are your shoes?” Mary asked.
“Someone stole them.”
Inside the restaurant, Bone happily studied the menu. Everything looked so good. Did Mary want to start with an appetizer? Mary stared at the menu as if it were indecipherable. Her chin trembled. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How could they steal that man’s shoes?” A tear went down her face.
A month of anticipation, ruined. It would be useless saying not to worry about the man outside, that there were shelters, that Bone had already given him five dollars. Disappointment, frustration, and annoyance flashed by like overhead lights marking the distance in a long, dark tunnel. Then he saw what he must do.
“Excuse me,” he said. He returned a few minutes later, his face about to split from his grin. “I think we should start with that artichoke-cheese thingy,” he said.
Tears still in Mary’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just can’t stop thinking about it. That poor man.”
“Look down,” he told her. He lifted the tablecloth. For a second she stared at his toes wiggling in his black socks without understanding. Then she cried again. Then they laughed. That was the night she said she loved him. That was the night he felt worthy of it.
C, c
From the Semitic gimel (c), “sling” or “throwing stick.” Hence, the three great achievements of the Early Bronze Age, as represented by the first three letters of the alphabet, were domestication of animals, man-made shelter, and warfare.
calque: A word formed by translation from another language. Typically, English adopts words wholesale, as in “déjà vu,” “amuck,” or “kindergarten,” but makes calques of particularly picturesque or apropos phrases, as in “losing face” from the Mandarin diu liãn, or “scapegoat,” possibly a mistranslation of azazel, a demon of Hebrew mythology, for 'ez ozel, “goat that escapes,” i.e., [e]scapegoat.
Christ: From the Greek khristos, “anointed,” akin to the Sanskrit gharsati, “to grind oil from seeds,” from the Proto Indo-European, ghri-, “to grind,” whence also grind, grist, and grits.
cliché: I will forgo the comical catalog of clichés a lesser lexicographer would mistakenly think witty and original. French printers called a ready-made phrase cast as a single piece of type cliché, onomatopoeia for the liquid slap and hiss of a hot letter mold dropping into cold water.
cuckold: A derisive term for a wronged man, from cuckoo, a bird famed for laying eggs in other birds’ nests, from the Middle English cukeweld or cukewold, from the Latin cuculous, and thence from the Greek koukos.
When Mary picked up Bone from the hospital, she quizzed the staff, getting nothing but good news, which is always strangely dissatisfying. The Etch-a-Sketch of Bone’s heart had risen and fallen all night with perfect regularity, his vital signs as vital as ever, his blood pressure neither too high nor too low, his urine all that good urine should be, if not more. Bone’s bill of health was a clean one.
“I think we ought to cancel the appointment with the neurologist,” Bone said as they drove home. “I know it was scary, but I think I just freaked out for a while there. I’ve been under a lot of stress, and I just freaked out.”
“What’s stressing you?”
Bone might have responded he was worried she had something going with Cash Hudson but said instead, “Just the usual. My editor’s losing patience waiting for me to finish Words. And of course, my dissertation committee’s breathing down my neck.”
Mary said nothing for a time. He put his hand on her knee, but she ignored it. “You still need to keep the appointment,” she said.
Bone couldn’t have said what he expected of his homecoming, but it wasn’t what he got. It wasn’t as if he thought there’d be a banner reading “Welcome Home.” That would have been ridiculous. Still, it felt odd that everything was exactly the same as it had been before. Instead of a ritual to smooth the transition, he and Mary did as always: Bone sat on the couch and read The Journal of Etymology, and Mary talked on the phone to her friends. They watched TV without speaking. It felt strange acting as if nothing were strange, but at least there was a bright spot about gliding back into the familiar routine: Saturday night in the King household was the customary night for sex.
At bedtime, Bone sat on top of the covers, stripped to his boxer shorts, a singsong going through his head: tonight, tonight, tonight, going to make