The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome. Man Martin
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tight sheets as their arms and bodies sought each other out.
Mary, in the bathroom, was brushing her teeth with astonishing thoroughness, it seemed to Bone. After a while, feeling foolish and self-conscious, he pulled back the covers and got in. So much for his and Mary’s getting into bed at the same time. He lay on his side in a roguish pose, head in hand, elbow sunk in the pillow. Toilet flush. Mary came in the bedroom but immediately left.
“What is it?”
“Forgot to set up the coffee maker.”
Bone’s wrist was going numb. He rolled on his back, hands folded across his chest. Tonight, tonight, tonight. Then she was in the bedroom. She took off her skimpy flower-print robe and got in bed. Her summer nightgown was little more than a slip. Tonight, tonight, tonight. Bone reached for her but only knuckled an elbow. Now she was trimming her toenails. She propped against the pillow and opened her murder mystery. Bone kissed her bare shoulder.
“It’s Saturday night,” Bone reminded her hopefully. This was not turning out quite the magical evening he’d imagined.
“You just got back from the hospital.”
“So?” He waggled his eyebrows.
“I don’t work that way. I can’t just turn it off and on.” She stared at him. “Are you going to sulk about this?”
“Aren’t you glad to have me home?”
“All right,” she said. She bookmarked her place, set her mystery on the nightstand, and turned off the light. Her legs were wonderfully cool and smooth. She held his face in her hands and gave him a businesslike kiss.
They weren’t exactly setting the night on fire, but even bad sex is better than no sex at all. He kicked his briefs out from under the covers, then turned to kiss her again. But now the angle was wrong; their mouths didn’t seal, and a little drool dripped onto the pillow. Putting a hand on either side of her head, he lowered to her mouth in a push-up. The angle was better, but now there was something under his hand.
“Move,” Mary said.
“What?”
“Move. You’re on my arm.”
Bone got out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to pee,” Bone said. “Back in a second.” Down the hall in the bathroom, Bone peed and flushed. As he washed up, Bone looked in the mirror and reflected. When had their sex life turned into this dreary cycle of anticipation and letdown? There’d been a time, and not long ago, when adjectives such as “spontaneous” or “joyous” could fairly be applied to their lovemaking, or at the very least “mutual.” Mary enjoyed sex, Bone supposed, but she didn’t believe in it, its power to heal, to make whole, to justify the shabby round of existence. He wondered how he and Mary had allowed themselves to turn into these people. Could they ever turn back?
Bone cut off the water and walked down the hallway to the bedroom door.
But that was as far as he got.
Go on in. How do you go on in? Tell yourself to move. How do you tell yourself to move?
His immobility had struck again.
Mary said, “What are you doing?”
“I can’t move,” Bone said. “Oh, God, it’s happening again. I can’t move.”
Mary got out of bed. “I’ll get Cash.”
He cursed her, which shocked them both, and instantly felt ashamed and said more mildly, “Please, God, no, why do you have to bring him into it?” He saw her mind was made up, and said, “If you have to bring Cash into it, at least put something on me.”
Bone uttered a cry of horror when he saw what Mary had in mind, but she ignored him. A crisis is no time to be fussy about dignity. Getting Bone dressed in this condition, his entire body rigid as any mannequin, ruled out slacks and a polo shirt. He blocked the door almost entirely, leaving little room to operate, and it took several unsuccessful trials before she worked his arms, frozen midswing, into her flower-print robe, finally putting it on him backward like a hospital smock and cinching the belt around his waist.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” Mary promised as she squeezed past him into the hall.
“Don’t leave! It’s too small! You didn’t get the belt tight!” Bone shouted, but he already heard her naked feet pad down the hall and the kitchen door close. “The knot will never hold,” Bone said quietly, and as if it to prove that knots could hear, the belt loosened behind his back and undid itself like a vine forced into a shape it will not willingly hold. The robe fell open, and a breeze from the air-conditioning vent ran up his backside.
Bone wondered how long it would be until she returned. How long had it been already? Time hung suspended the way it does when nothing happens to mark its passing. Had she taken the car? He hadn’t heard the engine start, but surely she hadn’t run over to Cash’s house barefoot. Cash lived a street away. Bone imagined Cash answering a doorbell and finding Bone’s wife slightly out of breath, dressed in a slip nightie that barely reached her thigh.
Bone’s reverie was interrupted by a strangled gurgle emanating behind him that told him Cash Hudson had arrived on the scene. The neighbor, however, did not comment on Bone’s wardrobe but merely knelt and set to work getting Bone through the door, which was somehow worse and more humiliating than anything else he could have done.
Bone contemplated the consequences of his actions. If he’d absolutely had to use the bathroom, why hadn’t he put on his briefs so at least his gleaming backformation didn’t stick out behind like two white loaves? This, however, is the sort of thought that strikes one only after it is too late.
Cash gripped and lifted a calf, causing the robe to shift and slide silkily from Bone’s shoulders, down his arms, and onto the floor. Now Bone was completely naked.
I will not cry, Bone resolutely told himself. I refuse to cry.
So naturally, a fat tear rolled from his eye, burning his cheek, and frozen as he was, he could not even lift his arm to wipe it away.
D, d
From the Semitic daleth (d), “door.”
day: The interval between sunrise and -set. The d- rises straight up before sinking to a squinting -a-, after which –y descends beneath the word’s horizon, curving back again toward d-. The Proto Indo-European root for day, déi-no-, is unmistakably kin to the root for god, déyw-o-, that is, “shining.” From these two derive, therefore, not only date, dial, and diary but also deity, theology (owing to a consonant shift d > th), and divine.
door: The sideways lid of a room. The word opens with the ideogram for door itself (see D), a downstroke with a knob on one side. We pass the portals of two -o-s before reaching -r, a panel with a latch closing the word on the far side. The Proto Indo-European root, dhwer, leads back before doors themselves, to the late Paleolithic, evidently a meaning assigned existentially, its creators not knowing what lay behind it.
If there’d been any doubt about seeing the specialist before, there was none now, though Bone still told himself he was keeping the appointment only to humor Mary. As humiliating and frightening as the episodes were at the time, afterward they seemed merely ludicrous. He couldn’t get through doors—who ever heard of a thing like that? His disorder was as impossible to take seriously as death by penguin stampede.
That Sunday was tense and solemn. The obvious topic of discussion, neither of them cared to mention, so the day was spent in speaking little and avoiding eye contact generally; accordingly, Bone had ample time to speculate on his own about the cause of his condition. Perhaps his problem was not physical but—and this is preposterous, of course, but after all, who’s to say what is and isn’t possible?—verbal. And would this really be as far-fetched as it seemed? Many theorists claim consciousness isn’t a mere