The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome. Man Martin
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his predicament in light of the subject he taught: grammar.
So what did he know about his condition? Both episodes had to do with crossing a threshold of some sort—stepping out of a tub, crossing into a room. Moreover, each was associated with Mary—spying on her, though he would never admit that, and getting ready to make love.
To demonstrate how syntax could be at the root of his problems, Bone began by diagramming a very straightforward sentence, “Bone loves his wife.” The “sentence tree” style, that lopsided mobile of coat hangers and string, would not do; to really grasp a sentence at its core requires the old-fashioned and unfashionable Reed-Kellogg system.
How elegant. Two short vertical lines separate the subject, “Bone,” from “wife,” the object of the verb “loves,” with the tender possessive pronoun “his” touching the sentence stem like a tentative remora so there’s no mistaking whose wife it is Bone loves.
He took another simple example. “She loves him no longer.”
Almost the same sentence, except for that telltale adverbial phrase drooping like a dead branch beneath the verb “loves.” The adverb “longer” almost offers hope, except that even in its most positive sense, this necessarily implies a termination, and finally you come to the terrible “no” crouching at the sentence’s base.
Interestingly, in diagramming, an interrogative is put in the same subject-verb-complement order as a declarative statement. Thus, a question, such as, “Did you have sex with him?” supplies its own answer when diagrammed:
The “him” hanging by its preposition seems evasive, ashamed to be caught in the main sentence stem, an uninvited neighbor slinking across the street at a crabwise angle. None of English’s polite, Norman-French-derived vocabulary, however, can express the idea without a preposition: “have sex with,” “make love to,” “have intercourse with,” et cetera. To form a clear, straightforward sentence, Bone had to resort to sturdy if vulgar Anglo-Saxon.
There. Now “him” was properly the object of the verb-phrase “Did fuck,” as it should be, and not the wishy-washy object of the preposition.
Having attended to these arbitrary examples, Bone was ready to consider his predicament in a syntactic light: “Bone walks across the threshold.”
This, perhaps, revealed the source of his perplexity. The all-important verb “walks” has no object, no noun to receive its action. The only proper object of the verb might be the reflexive pronoun, “himself,” but if Bone walks himself, he is merely going in circles. “Walks” is intransitive, and yet transition is exactly what the meaning requires. To get where it’s going, the sentence has to detour from the stem and cross the narrow footbridge of a preposition only to arrive, where?
Threshold.
The determinate “the” that tells which threshold—the sentence is useless if it only claims that Bone crosses thresholds in general—is a driplet hanging from “threshold” itself. And “threshold”—what does it signify? A vacancy between two places—crossing a threshold necessarily means crossing into something, but that something is withheld, a ghostly implicature buried in the deep structure of the sentence.
Who could blame him for his inability to navigate such syntax?
Dr. Limongello’s office was in one of the medical buildings sprouting around Northside Hospital like mushrooms around a tree stump. When they arrived for Bone’s appointment—Mary had taken the day off—a receptionist gave them a clipboard, thick with forms to complete, instructing them to sit in the waiting area. If Wonderful Dr. Lemon Jell-O’s wonderfulness were measured by how many people he kept waiting, he was a wonderful doctor indeed.
They waited. Bone perused the periodicals laid out for their delight: sailing magazines (Bone didn’t sail) and golf magazines (Bone didn’t golf) as morning melted into a puddle of noon and their stomachs began to growl. Mary went to the desk to ask if the doctor would see them soon or if they should go ahead and get some lunch.
“There’s a cafeteria downstairs,” the receptionist offered.
“If we go down and eat, will we lose our place?” Mary wanted to know. The receptionist didn’t answer that one, and so they went back to waiting.
Finally, a nurse bade them follow in the wake of her swishing thighs, out of the waiting room to the final door of a door-lined corridor.
“Wait in here,” the nurse instructed.
“I can’t,” Bone muttered, heat rising in his face.
“What?” the nurse asked, and then repeated, “Wait in here.”
“I can’t,” Bone repeated more loudly than he’d intended. A curious patient down the hallway opened his door a crack but chose not to step out. The hell with it. “I can’t get through,” Bone said loudly enough for anyone who wanted to get a good earful. “That’s why I’m here. Sometimes I can’t go through doorways.”
So Mary and the nurse walked him through, manipulating his legs, into a room with an examination table, two black-cushioned chrome chairs, cabinets, and a sink.
“Will the doctor see us soon?” Bone asked, still feverish with shame, but this was another question destined to go unanswered. The nurse left, and Bone sat on the examination table, Mary in a chair. Dumbed-down scientific illustrations adorned the walls: colorful branching neurons, glands squeezing out hormones in fat teardrops, arrows indicating potential problems in the temporal lobe and frontal cortex. A poster told a modern-day pharmaceutical fairy tale: in the first panel a smiling man in a white lab coat talks to a damsel slumping sadly under a soot-black cumulus cloud. In the second panel, posture much improved, she ventures a timid smile—not exactly happy but willing to appear happy—and the cloud, while still overhead, has diminished, now a manageable dove-gray instead of black. Bone contemplated the implied moral … and she coped as well as could be expected ever after.
“Are y’all waiting for me?” A man in a white lab coat, smiling as if it were his first day on the job, stood in the door.
“Dr. Limongello?”
With one hand the doctor took Bone’s shoulder, and with the other he gave a vigorous Rotary Club handshake, coming awkwardly close, quizzical, snapping bright eyes scrutinizing Bone as if life’s secrets were printed on the inner wall of his skull. “This is the first time I’ve seen you, right? This is your first appointment?” he said, and when Bone said it was, the doctor said to Mary, “Well, aren’t you lovely?” making her blush, and for a moment, Bone thought the doctor was going to kiss her hand, but instead he just shook it and said, “Well, let’s take a look-see at the patient.”
Limongello bustled around the room as if assuring himself everything was where he’d left it: the sink handles, the glass jar of cotton balls on the counter, even the cartoon woman with her hovering thundercloud received his touch. Bone and Mary had been warned the double-doc was “eccentric,” but they hadn’t been prepared for this. What accounted for that smile that shone not only from his mouth but from every pore of his forehead? The awareness that patients were his bread and butter? The delight of diagnosis, being able to see through the translucent mystery that others find opaque? An effort to reassure? Happy anticipation of helping a stranger?
Limongello looked in a drawer beside the sink