The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

“Don’t be immature?”

  “It was already over between us,” she repeated. “I never mattered to you as much as that damn book.”

  “I’ve lost the book,” Bone said, his voice rasping. “The deal fell through.”

  “And what hurts more? Me or the book?”

  Bone would never forgive himself for the fatal pause before he framed a reply; he should have cried out instantly, “You, of course!” but instead his chin dropped as he considered his answer.

  “I have to get ready for work,” Mary said, pushing past him into the bedroom, and before he could stop her, she locked the door behind her, so he was denied even the glory of watching her pull the towel from her shimmering skin and put on her clothes. Her hair dryer came on.

  “God, God, God,” Bone cried. He could pick the lock if he had a safety pin. There were paper clips in the office. The first paper clip he tried to straighten, his trembling fingers dropped in the crack between the desk and the wall. On his knees, he pulled out the desk but couldn’t reach his arm behind it. To hell with this. He shaped a second lock-pick and ran to the bedroom door, clumsily working it around in the hole. Before he succeeded, the knob turned, and Mary came out. “I’m going to work now. We’ll talk about this later.”

  Bone spent that day in a lather of anxiety, and when the afternoon rolled around to evening without Mary’s return, he walked to the house one street over. With heart-leaping horror, he saw her Honda already parked in Cash’s drive. Cash’s truck, however, was gone. He knocked and rang the doorbell. He reconnoitered the house’s perimeter, peering in windows under visored hands. He saw nothing. He walked foolishly to one end of the street and then the other in the forlorn hope that he might catch sight of them. Finally, around eight o’clock, Cash’s truck pulled up. Bone was sitting on Cash’s front stoop. Cash slowed to a stop at the curb, but then the truck started up again, heading for Bone’s street. Bone followed, and when he was almost home, Cash’s truck passed him again, this time heading the other direction, no Mary in the front seat.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for hours!” His voice was ragged.

  “We went out to dinner,” Mary said in a not-that-it’s-any-of-your-business voice. She bore a faint aroma of kung pao. Bone’s throat constricted.

  “So that’s how it’s going to be?” Bone demanded. “Every night with him and just come back in the morning to change your damn clothes?”

  “No,” Mary said. “I’m getting a change of clothes so I can get dressed over there tomorrow. I’m tired of dealing with your drama.”

  O, o

  From the Semitic aiyn (O), “eye,” but it is an Orphan Annie eye, without iris or pupil; in the modern alphabet, it resembles an open mouth pronouncing the letter. Its simple shape has not changed in thousands of years. The Greeks called it mikron, “small.”

  onomatopoeia: A word that, strangely enough, does not sound the least bit like what it means.

  orgasm: The kinship to organ is more distant than we are first tempted to believe. Organ derives from the Greek root organo- and ultimately from erg, “to work,” and orgasm from orge, “urge,” and ultimately the Proto Indo-European root—uerg, “to swell.” Partridge notes that the -asm ending, while associated with abstract nouns, seems to connote more vigorous activity than -ism: to wit, orgasm, enthusiasm, spasm.

  Osiris: The green-skinned Egyptian god of eternal life, killed by his evil brother, Set, but resurrected by his faithful wife, Isis.

  oxymoron: A self-contradictory phrase such as “pretty ugly.” The word itself is an oxymoron, from the Greek oxus, “sharp-witted,” and moros, “stupid.”

  Saturday morning, Mary came over to announce another decision: “I’m moving in with Cash.” Bone faced her, unspeaking. “Did you hear what I said? I’m moving in with Cash.”

  Bone just shook his head at her. “Christ, Mary. Have you even thought what the neighbors will say?”

  “I guess they’ll say I moved in with Cash.” She didn’t seem to appreciate that it was the way they’d say it. She took the cut fruit from the refrigerator and fixed a bowl. “Want some?” she asked. Bone didn’t answer. She sat at the living room table and ate, expressionless as a marble goddess. “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Bone. I never meant to hurt you. I think—” There was a rehearsed-feeling pause as she looked out the picture window. She was gearing up to launch into a difficult, personal, and deeply honest self-analysis, like a character in a television drama. Bone felt like gagging. “I never knew my father, and my mother was irrational and alcoholic, so I grew up always missing a stable father figure. My friends all had daddies, and subconsciously, I think I believed my life would have been happy if I had a daddy, too. When I began dating, I was looking for someone to be sort of a surrogate father. Looking back on all my early relationships, I always chose men that represented that to me.”

  “Is that what Gordon represented?” Bone asked, his jaw tight. “Your daddy?”

  Mary looked disapproving. When you’re in the middle of difficult, personal, and deeply honest self-analysis, you don’t appreciate people chiming in with snide remarks. “I think that’s what you represented to me. A father figure.”

  “Christ, Mary. I’m the same age you are.”

  “I mean spiritually, emotionally. You’re a college professor and an author. You’re very intimidating. You’re distant. You’re always filled with your own thoughts. Lately you seemed like you were trying to change, but—the world isn’t quite real to you. I don’t mean in a bad way. But in my insecurity, I thought you could fill a gap in me. The missing piece of my childhood. I’m ready to move forward now.”

  “So. Fill a gap in you. So now Cash is filling your gap?”

  “I’m sorry you’re taking it this way,” she said. She ate the last bite of melon, rose from the table, and left the room with the empty bowl. He followed her to the kitchen, where she put the bowl into the dishwasher, and then to the bedroom, where she opened a big suitcase on the bed and began taking her stockings and panties from the top dresser drawer and laying them in it.

  “How you can do this? After everything? You said you loved me.”

  “I’m sorry, Bone. I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just something that happened. It’s nobody’s fault.” Her gaze turned to the window as if she’d spotted her own ghost walking in the backyard and was watching not with alarm, or even surprise, but with understandable interest. “One of the most wonderful memories I’ll ever have is standing beside you in the front of the church, waiting to take my vows to love forever this wonderful, intelligent, handsome man.” She spared him a smile, like flattery would make him feel so much better. “To realize I just don’t love you anymore—that I can’t love you anymore. It’s awful. Tragic.”

  “My God. You want me to feel sorry for you. What book did you read this in?”

  “I’m just trying to make sense of it all. These tumultuous, confusing emotions.”

  “Did you just say ‘tumultuous’? Who the hell says ‘tumultuous’?”

  “I don’t think I ever really loved you. Not really.”

  “How can you say that?” Bone asked, but she was too preoccupied packing and dealing with her tumultuous, confusing emotions to answer. “You’ll be sorry.” Goddamn it, he couldn’t stop from issuing these clichés She was playing a breakup scene from a TV drama, and he was trading line for line like they were reading from the same script. “You won’t ever find anyone as good as I.” He couldn’t help saying this stuff. At least that last one was so moth-eaten, it sounded almost original.

  “I’ll bring the suitcase back when I’m done with it,” she promised.

  Bone took her elbow. “Everybody’s going to know what you did. Don’t you care what other people—” It seemed bourgeois to finish “what other people think,” but at the moment, this seemed the most monumental objection imaginable.

  “No one in the neighborhood likes you, Bone,” she said, suddenly cold, her eyes the color of a gun barrel. She pulle
d her arm from his grip. “No one likes you. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. They all think you’re a kook and a creep, and they wonder why I even stay with you.”

  “Goddamn you, you goddamn whore,” Bone said, shaking in every part of his body. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a furious glass of water from the sink. He drank a third of it, spilled half on the floor, and poured out the rest. No, he thought, a whore takes money for sex; she’s a common slut. He stomped back to the bedroom to add a few more “goddamns,” “whores,” “sluts,” and home truths, such as that he’d find another woman better than she in a week—his mind shot to Miranda Richter—but he was blocked at the hall door by an untimely bout with his condition and had to endure the infuriating necessity of square dancing to get through. Mary came by with her suitcase just before he reached “prah-menade” and said, “I’ll be back for the rest of my clothes; this is going to take more than one trip.”

  When Mary came back, Cash came with her. Bone glowed with fury; his skin felt like it was stretched over a heat lamp. He deliberately stood in his path and said, “You’re a bastard.”

  Cash put his hand on Bone’s shoulder and nodded solemnly. “I understand why you’d say that.”

  Later that evening, there was a knock, and when Bone opened, it was Cash. “I need to get Mary’s furniture,” Cash explained. “She says there’s a dresser of hers and a loveseat. Can you help me?”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “I completely understand why you feel that way,” Cash said. Bone detected Mary’s coaching in these bland, nonconfrontational responses.

  “Goddamn it, quit acting reasonable about this, you bastard.”

  Cash did not respond but said, “Can I get her stuff?”

  “What the hell. Sure, why not?”

  In the bedroom, Cash, fists on hips, made a quick appraisal. “If we push the bed against the wall, it’ll be easier moving the dresser.” Cash pushed the bed, its feet groaning against the hardwood, as far to the side of the room as it would go. Then he took all the loose items off the dresser—Bone’s hairbrush, the snapshot of Bone and Mary on honeymoon in Jacksonville, the box where they kept the nail clippers and spare change, the card with the little boy and fistful of flowers, “I like you”—and placed them on the bed. When he was done, he said, “Can you help me with this?”

  “You’re a bastard,” Bone said. Cash nodded without making eye contact, touching the dresser top as a silent reminder that it wasn’t going to move itself. “You’re a complete bastard. You should fucking go to fucking hell and fucking get fucked.” Bone, inexperienced with cursing, sensed he wasn’t doing it correctly, but hearing himself talk this way, liberation fizzed in his veins, and he began trembling uncontrollably again. “You fucking fucker, fuck you, fucking fuck.”

  “I completely understand. Really,” Cash kept saying, lifting one end of the dresser. “Can you help me with this?”

  Bone took the other end, still maintaining a steady stream of “fucks,” “bastards,” and wishes for Cash’s and Mary’s prompt deaths and everlasting torment, following as Cash backed through the bedroom door. Bone paused his monologue when they reached the hallway, however, partly because his voice was tired, partly because the explosive rush of angry hormones had drained from him, and partly because maneuvering the dresser into the hallway entailed solving a riddle of applied geometry that required both his and Cash’s full concentration.

  They took the dresser through Bone’s front door and loaded it in the back of Cash’s truck. “I’ll need your help over there, too,” Cash said. “Climb in; we’ll drive over.” So Bone had to play the role not only of deceived husband but also of assistant furniture mover. The drama of his life had a small cast, and everyone had to take two parts.

  * ONE TIME ONLY *

  SPECIAL EVENT NOT TO BE MISSED:

  CUCKOLD HELPS WIFE’S LOVER MOVE DRESSER???

  They brought the dresser through Cash’s front door and to the room corresponding to Bone’s bedroom. Through the door corresponding to Bone’s office door in this mirror house, Bone watched Mary watch them walk by with the dresser. She was folding her things and putting them away, just as she would have at Bone’s house, and Bone imagined they were inside of one of those toys where you roll a BB through a plastic maze of hallways and little niches, and how making the BB and its target destination coincide seemed to take hours of Satori-like patience to do something not worth doing, and which the slightest jostle would undo, sending the BB caroming back to the start.

  Cash’s house and Bone’s were palindromes, those words that spelled the same thing backward and forward.

  Live on no evil.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t get through the door,” Bone muttered, his eyes cast down to avoid looking at his rival. With a dresser blocking the hall, there was no room for a proper square dance. Bone tried improvising a sidestep to get around it, but it was no use. Square dancing requires more than one foot of space. “You have to pull the dresser back.” Cash stood perplexed, unmoving. “Pull the damn dresser back so I can square dance,” Bone repeated. Cash pulled it back, and Bone completed a truncated sort of square dance, only barely getting through the door.

  The room, Bone’s mirror room, still had Cash’s things, though these were in the process of being rearranged to make space for Mary. An electric keyboard. What was Cash doing with an electric keyboard? They pushed the dresser into position, and Cash studied the effect.

  “Well, let’s go back and get that loveseat.”

  Moving Mary’s furniture, and the other items Mary had left behind, took all evening and what remained of Bone’s righteous rage. He got home that night, no longer even angry, just weary: weary with moving furniture, weary with love and jealousy, weary with himself.

  His bed was still pushed to the side of the room, and his hairbrush, change box, and other things were still on the covers where Cash had put them. The little boy on the card still offered his fistful of flowers.

  Bone had been through so much, and so quickly. How could things possibly be worse?

  This is not a question a wise man asks.

  P, p

  From the Semitic pe (p), “mouth,” a letter that must have been frequently mistaken for the third letter, gimel (c). The Greeks avoided confusion by propping up one side to make the stool-shaped pi (Π). The Romans transformed it to an upside-down b by twisting up the right leg, so now P stands poised on one foot, like a pensive heron at the water’s edge.

  paradox: A seeming self-contradiction. “If you don’t get this message, call me.” From the Greek para-, “apart from,” and doxa, “belief.”

  phatic communication: Social language stripped of content, coined by Malinowski in The Meaning of Meaning. For example, in the exchange “How’s it going?” “Great, how’re you?” no information is sought or given, question and response being ritualized. So prevalent is phatic communication that many people, talking nearly nonstop all their lives—pausing only to chew, swallow, use the bathroom, sleep, go into comas, and die—are buried, having said almost nothing.

  psychiatrist: From the French psychiatrie, first used in 1890 to replace the uneuphonious “mad doctor.” Literally, “healer of the soul,” from Greek iatreia, “heal,” and psykhe, “soul” or “butterfly.” We can see the butterfly’s wings in the Greek letter psi (Ψ).

  Sunday, after Mary moved out, promising himself he wouldn’t let his life sink into disorder, Bone made a pot of chili.

  This was the last actual meal he prepared.

  Bone spent not a second longer at Fulsome than necessary, skulking on and off campus like a trespasser. Tuesday, when he got hungry, he ate tablespoons of cold chili straight from the pot, leaving in the spoon. He left the pot, scraped clean except for a few brown smears, in the sink.

  He did not sleep but on Wednesday slept late. A paradox. He fortified himself against the ordeal of Wednesday-night class�
�thank God, this was the final—with Kelley’s Korn Flakes, a knock-off of the national brand—the box bore a cartoon rooster with the predatory beak and furrowed brow of a bald eagle—pouring cereal being the maximum effort justified by eating. A bowl joined the chili-crusted pot in the sink, both filled with water: one a translucent, milky pond and one brown.

  On the way to class, Bone got a strange look from Loundsberry passing in the hallway, and Bone ducked into an empty room to avoid talking.

  Coming home with the dead weight of ungraded finals in his leather case—God, but his voice had squeaked in class; what was happening to his voice?—he eliminated the step of pouring cereal into a bowl, instead stuffing fistfuls of dry flakes into his mouth, washed down with milk chugged straight from the jug; this approach, however, with all the time-saving it had to recommend it, lasted only one feeding before the cereal ran out.

  The option of calling Limongello’s office, Bone rejected on three counts: (1) Limongello was in Leipzig, (2) neurology offered no help in his present crisis, and (3) Bone didn’t want to be that patient. Bone wondered, why, if life were so miserable, he didn’t simply take a good stiff rope, knot one end to the chimney, the other to his neck, and jump off the roof—a thought that recurred later with a stab of regret nearly as agonizing as a broken ankle: that he hadn’t exited when it would have been convenient and relatively painless—but Bone hung in there, nagged by the hope that dogs the human race: that someday, things might get better.

  He drove to Skyland Kroger Thursday night for supplies. Cereal and milk seemed a logical and nutritious choice, as well as ground beef for more chili, and maybe some frozen dinners, bread, jelly, and peanut butter. He pictured himself striding through the checkout, shopping cart abrim with satisfying and easy-to-prepare items, feeling competent and in charge in a way that he had not since Mary left. This was the turning point for him; he sensed it.

  He detached a cart from the centipede next to his parking place and, counteracting the requisite wobbly wheel always striving to veer off course, rolled up to the grocery store’s bright glass maw, but when the unseeing electric eye sensed him and opened the sliding glass doors, Bone could not go in. This was not an episode of his condition; he simply couldn’t bear facing the aisles ranged in columns before him, filled with blue-white fluorescence, boxes, cans, and Muzak. He pushed the cart’s nose into the anus of another at the door, hoping if a cashier witnessed it, she’d assume he was returning a cart, not cravenly losing the nerve to enter. Other carts stood silhouetted in the glaring dark of the parking lot and spotlighted in fuzzy halos falling from the parking-lot lights, scattered forlornly where shoppers had abandoned them, carts that an underpaid bag boy would have to go and collect.