The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  Mitch, we’ll call him Mitch, raised his chin in greeting to a plaid-wearing codger coming for a refill. “That Tebow, what do you think about—”

  “Mary asked me to get her some pasta salad,” Bone explained. “I don’t really like pasta salad this much. The other plate’s for a friend of hers. She’s not a neighbor.” Mitch and the codger were in rapt conversation, and Bone addressed only their shoulders. “It is good pasta salad, though,” he said, excusing himself. Goddamn, where was she?

  He moved among the partiers in their bright summer clothes drinking beer from red plastic cups, talking about nothing and laughing at nothing, and doing both at ever-increasing volume. He stretched his neck to peer over their heads, clamping a smile over his simmering, bowel-clenching anxiety. He did not find her.

  Someone told a joke. Laughter. Jokes were stupid: forcing everyone to listen up not to miss the punch line, and if you didn’t laugh, if you didn’t “get it,” you flunked some kind of minor social test.

  “Hey, have you seen Mary?” Bone asked Laurel, holding the plates up.

  “Hey, no, I haven’t,” Laurel said. Was she mocking him, repeating his “hey”? He couldn’t search her face for an answer because she turned to talk to someone. Avoiding eye contact?

  “I got your pasta,” he told her, shouldering his way slightly between her and the man she was talking to.

  She looked at it. “I really couldn’t eat it now. Do you mind throwing it away for me? Thanks.” And she turned back to her conversation without awaiting reply.

  Through the plastic plates he felt warm pasta in greasy puddles of Italian dressing. A black fly landed but, before he could shoo it, lifted off. He dropped the plates in a trash can by the privacy fence. Bone went inside and, after using the bathroom, furtively opened doors to the other rooms. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Mary wasn’t in the living room, either. Charlotte sat on the couch. He sat beside her.

  “Have you seen Mary?” he asked. Charlotte looked mildly disoriented. “My wife?”

  “Your wife,” Charlotte said with a peculiar slight emphasis on the your. “I thought I saw you walking up with her to look at Betty’s arbor.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Bone said.

  “How’s that book of yours coming?”

  He said it was fine and left. Outside, shadows lengthened, and party guests swarmed and dispersed, some holding plates of purple Jell-O with cream-cheese icing. Laurel pointedly looked very innocent, oblivious to Bone’s miserable rage. (The phrase “impotent rage” is commonly employed in such situations.) Oh, Bone got the point, all right, Bone got the point. But the knowing taunts, the sly insults always stayed just this side of flagrant, nothing he could openly object to. Were they all in on it?

  Bone’s face heated, and Charlotte’s oily pasta salad came up, burning his throat. “Great party,” Bone told Betty. He queasily considered leaving. “Have you seen Mary?”

  Betty looked at him sharp-eyed, and Bone sensed her making up her mind about something. A dark hope rose in his heart that he had finally found an ally. “I think she walked up to the arbor. Let’s check.” They went up the stone steps and an uneven flagstone path into Betty’s backyard just as Mary and Cash came down.

  “We probably need to get home,” Bone said, iciness spreading in his gut: not a precursor to another outbreak of his condition, just an ordinary iciness. He made only the briefest eye contact with Betty and could not bear to look at Cash at all.

  They left: Mary with the casserole dish, streaked with the purple ruins of Jell-O, Bone with his dread. After maintaining frigid silence as long as he could bear, Bone asked where she’d been. He’d looked all over the party for her. To her reply, that she’d looked for him, too, and had decided not to worry about it, he snorted in disgust.

  Where had she looked?

  Well, in the kitchen for starters.

  That was not possible, because he’d been in the kitchen.

  Maybe they’d just missed each other; he couldn’t have been there the whole time.

  Betty’s party wasn’t that big. It wasn’t possible they’d missed each other.

  The discussion continued at home:

  What was she doing up there alone with Cash?

  She wasn’t doing anything.

  Why had she gone up there?

  To see the arbor, Jesus.

  He was trying to believe her; he was trying, but it was so hard. If she could just be honest, whatever it was he could forgive her, but she had to trust him enough to be honest first.

  Did he want her to tell him she was having an affair; is that what he wanted?

  Was she having an affair?

  She stared. “Is that what you want? You want me to tell you I kissed him?”

  “If that’s the truth.”

  “Okay, yes, I kissed Cash.”

  “Oh, God.” If fear had chilled Bone before, it now closed him in an iceberg.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted to hear.”

  “It doesn’t mean I liked hearing it. Why did you do it?”

  They were in the kitchen. She squirted yellow soap into the casserole dish and ran hot water. “I don’t know why, okay? I just did it. These things happen.”

  “They don’t happen unless you want them to happen.” Mary did not respond to this logic. “Are you at least sorry you did it?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, okay? If I hurt you, I’m sorry.” She washed out the Jell-O remnants, peeling pieces out of the glass container like purple skin.

  “‘If I hurt you’ isn’t a real apology. You can’t be sorry because I might be hurt. You have to be sorry for what you did.” Bone had heard this point made on a TV drama, and it had turned out to be a useful thing to know.

  Her face was set in a stubborn frown. “Okay. I’m sorry for what I did. I fucked up.”

  “I would have given anything on earth if you had not used that particular idiom.” Bone began to cry, and Mary put her arms around him. At this point, he realized he was trembling. “Are you going to do it again?”

  “No, of course not,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. He could feel the warm dishwater still on her hands as she held them against his back.

  “Do you promise?”

  “Of course, I promise. It was a stupid mistake, is all.”

  “In that case, I forgive you, darling, I forgive you,” he said wholeheartedly. It was so simple, forgiving. At once he shed twenty dark pounds of dread. The clouds broke, and it was over. They’d settled it. He’d heard the worst and forgiven her. Now they could move on. Confession and forgiveness operated as if he and Mary had renewed their wedding vows.

  They did a lot of talking and soul-baring that night. Mary admitted it flattered her that Cash might still find her attractive. She’d tried one kiss, one, and suffered instant remorse and embarrassment. Cash felt the same, she knew. Bone listened without anger or jealousy, proud of his maturity and empathy. Afterward, he and Mary made slippery love in the bathtub—not entirely successful but memorable for its novelty. Later, Mary gave him a smile as she got into bed beside him, his Post-It-noted Fowler propped up on his knees, and kissed his forehead with a new tenderness before turning out her light.

  Confession was a good thing, no doubt about it. How wonderful that she’d confessed. Ironic, but kissing Cash and then confessing it might just be the best thing that had ever happened to their marriage.

  Then something occurred to Bone that sent his thoughts corkscrewing like squirrels around a tree trunk. Periodic mental shouts, Shut up, shut up, stop thinking! availed not; the more he tried to make his brain think less, the more it thought more.

  What if Mary were lying?

  Preposterous, of course, but what if? What if he’d pressured her into a confession that wasn’t true? She’d kept repeating—hadn’t she?—“Is that what you want me to tell you; is that what you want to hear?” Had she only said she’d kissed Cash because Bone had demanded it, because the only way to stop his hectoring was saying what he o
bviously wanted to hear? If that were Mary’s calculation, she’d calculated correctly; he’d been more reassured than he had been in many a day.

  What an odd idiom that was, when you came to think of it. Many a day. “A day” cannot be more than one, let alone “many.” Yet the expression was “many a day.” Probably a French idiom translated into English. It sounded French. The French were responsible for a lot of nonsense creeping into English. Or pseudo-French. Ever since William the Conqueror, Anglo-Saxons have had a linguistic inferiority complex about the French.

  A Joke Illustrating This:

  An American couple in Paris ask their host, “Can we go to the Eiffel Tower?”

  “Mais oui.”

  “Okay! Okay! May we go to the Eiffel Tower?”

  Bilingual puns, a little-exploited source of humor in monolingual America.

  Another:

  A Frenchman and a Spaniard are on a park bench when a pretty girl walks by, and the wind blows her skirt up.

  The Frenchman says, “C’est la vie.” (That’s life.)

  The Spaniard replies, “Se la vi tambien, pero no diga nada.” (I saw it, too, but I didn’t say anything.)

  Park benches, suggesting conversation and passive spectating, seem made for puns about pretty girls walking by.

  Another:

  Did you hear about the miracle? Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone are on a park bench, and a pretty girl walks by. Wood turns to Stone, Stone turns to Wood, and the girl turns into a beauty parlor.

  (Shut up! Stop thinking!)

  One Last One:

  A man and his pretty wife sit on a park bench.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?” the husband says. “Tell me the truth, you’re lying!”

  “Okay, here’s the truth: I’m lying.”

  Yes, there is many a joke about women and park benches. Of course, the last one wasn’t so much a joke as a paradox, but then Bone had just come up with it himself.

  If your wife confesses to kissing the neighbor, does it make her more or less trustworthy if she didn’t really do it?

  Finally, he nerved himself to ask the darkness, “When you said you kissed Cash, did you really do it, or were you just saying it?”

  The brief halt in her breathing told him clearly enough she’d heard his question, but she didn’t answer. Her rib cage resumed its regular contraction and expansion, and he permitted them both to believe she’d been sleeping.

  When my love says she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.

  But what if when my love says she lies, I don’t believe her?

  Bone thought he would never go to sleep that night, but he did, nor did his doubts infect his dreams.

  I, i

  From the Semitic yodh (i), “hand.” The Greeks pared it to a single stroke, (I) iota, which, being their smallest letter, became a metonym for anything tiny or insignificant, “not one iota.” The King James Bible translated iota as “jot”: “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). To this day, jot remains a noun, “a small or insignificant thing,” as well as a verb, “to write quickly or briefly.” Parenthetically, tittle refers to a small mark over a letter, such as the dot floating over the lowercase I, introduced during the Middle Ages to prevent confusion with similar-looking letters.

  ignus and lignus: Medieval scholars proposed an ingenious etymology for the Latin words ignus, “ignite,” and lignus, “wood.” Wood, they supposed, burned easily because it already had fire inside it. Modern scholars chuckle up their sleeves at this, as they do at the folk wisdom that woman means “woe to man.” These naive guesses lack empirical support but are meaningful to anyone who believes them. Who can deny there is evil in the devil?

  Sunday morning, when Bone started to get out of bed, Mary said, “No, you lie here,” and kissed him. Bone lay, telling himself that staying in bed because your wife says to is a very different case than not getting out of bed because you can’t, contentedly listening to the soft clap and clatter of dishes and cookware, savoring the delicious fragrances beginning to emanate from the kitchen, covers snugged up under his chin, toes wriggling in happy anticipation under the taut sheets. Mary brought a tray and laid it on his lap: waffles, bacon, orange juice, and coffee. Before letting him touch a bite, however, Mary gave him a long kiss that caused him to spill some of his orange juice.

  Was she buying him off? Did he care? Did it even matter whether she’d really kissed Cash or not when life was so sweet?

  She stripped off her summer nightgown, causing Bone to spill his juice again, and carefully slipped into bed beside him. Eating breakfast from a tray in his lap with a beautiful naked woman pressed to his side and licking and nibbling his ear posed difficulties, but it was a problem worth having.

  “Let’s go to church this morning,” she said.

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “But first. Finish your breakfast. Then we’re making love.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  He ate breakfast, and they made love—somewhat stickily, thanks to maple syrup—and then soaped together in the shower before dressing for church.

  What a wonderful privilege after the morning’s delights stepping into the chapel, cool and dark as a cave’s mouth with parables bejeweling the windows—the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son—Bone’s starched shirt buttoned to his Adam’s apple, the unaccustomed pressure of a necktie at his throat, Mary in a demure dress that nonetheless showed her lovely tanned arms, holding hands as they nodded their heads to the altar before taking their pew, two children of paradise innocent and loving and loved.

  Bone, voice stretched like a rubber sheet, attempted that exquisitely awful hymn as acolytes and crucifixes and candles and choristers followed by Father Pepys himself filed down the aisle and ascended to the altar. Then came the readings, Old Testament, Psalm—they had to sing that, too, and dear Lord, it was abominable, but how joyous and wholesome and silly!—then something from Letters, then two acolytes bore the gilt-bound gospel into the aisle and Pepys read from Luke, an incident when Jesus, asked an impertinent, wholly irrelevant question by some Pharisee, stops him in his tracks with a pertinent and holy relevant comeback.

  Next came Father Pepys’s homily, and how Bone loved a good long sermon. What a wonderful opportunity it gave one to think!

  Then they confessed their sins, and by golly, Bone meant every word of it! He had sinned against God in thought, word, and deed! He hadn’t loved God with his whole heart! He hadn’t loved his neighbor as himself! He was sorry and wanted to do better! And God forgave him, Pepys said so, with the holy hocus-pocus of a cross made in the air! And everyone passed the peace, “The Lord be with you, and with your spirit.” They reached hands across the pews and even across the aisle and greeted each other like beloved siblings reunited after long separation. I love you. I love everybody.

  Last they took communion. Ah, to kneel at the rail, shoulder and thigh against Mary’s shoulder and thigh, taking the wafer from his cupped hands into his mouth, where it clung to the alveolar ridge like a shred of skin. His lips pressed the same cup as hers, a secret kiss passed along with the sacramental wine like a coded message. After one more godawful hymn and the recessional, Pepys called out from the back of the church, “Let us go forth in gladness and singleness of heart to love and serve the Lord!” Yes, yes! And Bone said, with the whole congregation, “Thanks be to God! Hallelujah, hallelujah!” And everyone began to exit their pews.

  Normally, as soon as church ended, Bone preferred to scoot out with all deliberate speed, but today, topped to the eyebrows with the Holy Ghost and Christian love, he just had to speak to Father Pepys. “Something I bet you didn’t know about the word ‘cretin,’” he said, taking the priest’s hand. “You’d probably think it’s a derisive term for a native of Crete, but it’s not. Actually, it’s from the Swiss French, ‘crestin,’ which just means ‘Christian.’ See, they thought of even idiots as souls.” Pepys’s s
mile congealed, and his eyes unfocused. “Isn’t that nicer than some clinical term,” Bone persisted, “like ‘Down Syndrome,’ or some complicated euphemism like ‘intellectually challenged’? Just identify a moron as a Christian and let it go?” Mary pulled Bone’s elbow.

  “Yes, yes,” Pepys murmured vacantly, still smiling but looking displeased, and finally getting his hand loose as Mary led Bone to the door.

  Damn it, they hadn’t let him finish. Pepys thought Bone was insulting him, but that wasn’t it at all, not this time; he’d been trying to get at the idea that from the vantage of the omniscient, no human has a greater claim to intelligence than another, and someone we mark as a fool was as apt a spokesman for God as anyone, but Bone hadn’t gotten to say any of it, and now Pepys was offended.

  And then, just as they were about to exit, Bone’s condition struck, and he couldn’t leave. So now he had to—goddamn it—do-si-do back through the line, bowing to partners and sides, swinging his invisible partner, before he could promenade out the door and escape their thunderstruck faces—Steve Duffy audibly snorting in horror, old Rose Blocker gaping like he’d just dropped his drawers—with Mary blushing so red Bone could fairly feel heat radiating from her face.

  After church, Mary didn’t mention the incident, but the atmosphere between them had chilled. A cold front had moved in. They spent the rest of the day in relative silence. Mary read her mystery and watched the news. Bone worked on Words. Finally, when they were in bed together—and even here, with the roundness of her butt pressed into his back, Bone felt as if a wall had descended between them—Mary said what Bone had been dreading and waiting for her to say all day. “Whatever possessed you to do that square-dance thing in the church?”