“Seeing her,” Bone said—how could Bone ever speak the word “seeing” again without an inward shudder at its new and horrid connotation?—“up to the wedding. Who said?”
Miranda stared, weighing whether to speak. It occurred to Bone, not for the first time, how attractive Miranda was, even with her chipped nails and ridiculous pageboy haircut that looked as if it had dropped on her head from the ceiling. Once, he’d nearly asked her out. But the chance had passed. “It was Dr. Gordon. We were planning your wedding shower, and he said his present was not seeing her on the big day so she wouldn’t be late for her own wedding.”
Blood pounded in Bone’s ears. He sat still, concentrating on holding his teeth together so they wouldn’t chatter. Heavy silence hung in the air. It was Miranda who spoke. “I don’t think anyone took it seriously. He was just being an asshole, trying to be funny. That doesn’t mean I like Gordon.” Bone did not like him, either. “Watch out for Gordon,” Miranda said, raising her mug for a sip. “He was talking to Loundsberry in the copy room, and when I came in, they acted like I’d caught them at something. I don’t know what he’s planning, but I got the feeling it has to do with the English Department. The look he gave me. Gordon’s up to something, and if the excrement juxtaposes the oscillator, Loundsberry won’t stick up for us. Illegitimi non carborundum.” The last was a joke between them, an ersatz Latin aphorism, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“Yes,” Bone said, gulping the last of his tea and rising. “I have to get to class.”
“Toodle-oo,” she said, her customary farewell. A silly phrase, but Miranda Richter was the sort of person who would have disappointed you if she said anything but “toodle-oo.”
Teaching Survey Literature that evening did nothing to lift Bone’s spirits. As a child, imagining being a college professor, Bone had envisioned a somber lecture hall with a blackboard bearing indelible ghosts of bygone notes, tall, wavy-glassed windows, the threshold troughed by generations of students. Instead, he taught in a cinder-block dungeon of buzzing fluorescence and white tile floors. An advertisement-covered bulletin board cajoled the viewer to apply for credit cards and cell-phone plans. A smeary dry-erase board stood vigil over all.
During class Bone heard himself make here an insight, there an observation, his voice flattened and false-sounding, as if broadcast from inside an aquarium. Afterward he wanted nothing more than the familiar ache of home, but before he could flee, Belinda bushwhacked him: eager-to-please, willing-to-learn Belinda, bovine-bosomed Belinda. What madness had once led him to date this loathsome spaniel?
Not really dated. He’d happened to see her at a bar. Later, she’d told him about a band she was “into,” and he’d gone along. On another occasion, at a poetry reading, he’d taken her hand at an especially fraught passage. All perfectly innocent.
Well, not entirely innocent. Have we mentioned that Bone was a married man? And that he hadn’t happened to run into her; he’d chosen the time and location because he’d heard Belinda talk about it? And that when he’d held her hand, he’d been secretly hoping for much more? Much, much more?
Was that why Bone was jealous of Mary, because in his heart he’d given Mary cause to be jealous of him? What was it that really galled him: that Mary might be committing adultery or that, unlike Bone, she might be committing it competently?
“I finished Madame Bovary?” Belinda said. “And it was great? But maybe it was too perfect? Like maybe the great novels are great because of their mistakes, not in spite of them?” An opinion easily gleaned from any book on Flaubert, which, no doubt, is exactly where Belinda had gleaned it, the better to impress Bone with her startling originality. “Are you teaching Advanced Grammar next semester?” So unused was Bone to an actual question from this quarter that she had to repeat it before he said he was. “Because I was talking to Dr. Gordon? And I was telling him how much I liked your class? And that I wanted to take you next semester?” She stared, expressionless as a dry-erase board. “And he said something that kind of made me think you weren’t going to be here.”
Dr. Gordon again. The fact that Belinda’s last statement hadn’t come out as a question oddly alarmed Bone and made his heart beat a little faster. “When did you talk to Dr. Gordon?” Bone wiped the dry-erase board. He could talk to her only when he didn’t have to look at her.
“I work in his office.”
Mary’s old job.
“What did he say exactly?”
“I don’t remember exactly.” She could recite verbatim opinions cribbed from experts, but this she could not remember.
“Well, I’m definitely teaching fall semester,” Bone assured her.
“Well, that’s good? Because you’re, like, my favorite teacher?”
He shaped his mouth into a checkmark-smile and gave it to her. “I appreciate it.” Belinda was back to talking in questions, meaning crisis averted, back to normal. Only things weren’t back to normal. Miranda had said Gordon was “up to something”; did this something have to do with what Belinda had heard? Then there was the matter of Gordon’s seeing Mary up until the wedding. What a new and dreadful weight had been forever lashed to that innocent gerund. Once, during their engagement, after keeping Bone waiting an hour and a half at Macy’s to register for china, Mary had arrived breathless and uncharacteristically full of apologies: she’d been leaving her townhouse, she explained, when an old friend had bumped into her.
Had she just come from seeing Dr. Gordon?
Perhaps it was these thoughts that triggered it, but whatever it was, Bone had another bout of his condition at the door of the English building. Bone thought about moving but could not. So much for the immobility episodes not recurring. Now what? Okay, Wonderful Double-Doc Lemon Jell-O has a plan; let’s put ’er into action.
A square-dance caller in Bone’s head said, “Take your partner by the hand.” Bone reached, and sure enough, he could move as long as it was a dance step. “Bow to your partner, bow to your side.” Bone did. “Take your partner and swing her around.” With that combination of stomping and skipping, which square-dance enthusiasts will say is the very essence of the form, Bone swung around to find himself face to face with an astonished Dr. Loundsberry. Though he had not yet crossed the threshold, Bone’s arms, embracing his invisible partner, fell. His left knee, raised in a high step, also fell, bringing him to rest in a slightly tilted posture that he instantly corrected. Neither he nor Loundsberry found voice for a moment.
A book on positive thinking had once advised Loundsberry that if someone didn’t have a smile, you should give him one of yours. He’d fought lifelong to put this dictum into action, stretching his lips in an affable grin but never managing to sustain it more than two seconds before drooping into his natural expression of a fugitive harkening to the distant baying of dogs. Then remembering his resolution, he’d pull his lips back for another go at a two-second smile. On this occasion, however, Loundsberry was too surprised even to give Bone one of his fleeting smiles but just looked taken aback and mildly horrified.
“Professor King,” he said at length.
“It’s a condition,” Bone said. Loundsberry’s face registered he’d surmised something along those lines. Thus, the full explanation of Bone’s episodic door problem, that the dance Loundsberry had witnessed was not the malady but the treatment thereof, prescribed by a “wonderful” neurologist, poured forth in a rush, a flood of linked and compound clauses, before Bone could plug in a stopper. Throughout Bone’s unburdening, Dr. Loundsberry rose on his toes and lowered to the flats of his feet in a dance of his own, a dance of pensive reflection. “It’s really nothing to worry about,” Bone assured him.
“Ah,” Dr. Loundsberry said, remembering to pull back his lips to show his yellowing teeth. “Ah. Well.” The smile lasted two seconds before falling back.
With a shudder of apprehension so powerful it shook his knees, Bone walked to his car.