“A double-doc,” the physician repeated, clearly enjoying Bone’s puzzlement. “He’s an MD in neurology and psychiatry. He’s unorthodox, eccentric even. He’s sort of famous for unusual methods, his bedside manner. But he’s wonderful.”
The hospital staff set up an appointment for Monday. Meanwhile Bone was to stay overnight for observation. The room they assigned came equipped with:
· A bed evidently designed for use in outer space
· A wall-mounted TV
· A screen where Bone’s heartbeat rose and fell in a fragile white line, steep mesas dropping into craggy valleys, like someone turning the knob on an Etch-a-Sketch.
A nurse came to check on him—“Oh, he’s wonderful,” she exclaimed when she heard Lemon Jell-O was going to look at Bone. He lay pretending to write notes on his pad, staring at Mary from the corner of one eye as she sat in an armchair by the bed watching the local news.
Car wreck. Crime. Politician. Weather, with a forty percent chance of other weather later on. Then something upbeat to close—a girl gets her dying wish: a photo op with a pop star.
Mary’s shoes lay on the floor, one upright, one on its side. The curve of her smooth calves tucked beneath her made a tilde (~), and two brunette strands fell across her forehead, escaping her bun after a day’s confinement at work, her studious frown and black-framed glasses accenting her beauty: a “plain girl” sitcom character destined to transform into a knockout by removing her glasses and shaking her hair free of its restraint. He did not deserve her, and he knew it.
Father Pepys arrived at suppertime and chatted as Bone lay ill at ease, ruins of chipped beef and two pale peas wading in liquefied red Jell-O in his plastic tray. Since starting work as the church secretary, Mary had become a churchgoer, and Bone attended as often as he could stand it. What got to him was not the homogenized nonsense of Christianity but the unchewable chunks of Father Pepys’s own contribution. Once Mary came home from service and wrote “atonement” on a piece of paper. “Look what Father Pepys showed us,” she said, adding dashes to make the word “at-one-ment.” “It means at-one-ment. Jesus died so we could be at one with God. At-one-ment.” This particular piece of Pepysian poppycock had practically put Bone into apoplexy. Bone’s fury at this was in no way assuaged when to his astonishment he later discovered that the priest’s goofy etymology was actually correct.
After the priest left, Mary looked around the room. “Not many places for me to sleep,” she remarked.
“Oh, you don’t have to stay here,” Bone said. “Go home.” But what he was really thinking was, stay here.
“Don’t be a dope,” she said. “Of course, I’m staying.”
“I appreciate it,” he said. “But I don’t think they’ll allow it anyway. Why don’t you go home and get a good night’s sleep? You can pick me up in the morning.” He heard the words, but they seemed to be coming from someone else’s mouth. What was he saying? Stay here, stay here.
“Are you sure?” she asked. She seemed disappointed.
“Absolutely, I’ll be fine. Go home.” Why was he saying this? What was wrong with him that he didn’t just say thank you, I love you, I’m grateful for you? But he didn’t. She asked if he wanted the light off, and pressed the switch. Her silhouette leaned forward to kiss him, a moment of gardenia. And she was gone.
Even with lights out, a hospital room gets only as dark as an arctic midnight in June. Bone lay disconsolate in what darkness there was. She would have stayed if he’d asked; why hadn’t he? Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped telling her how he loved and needed her and entered the realpolitik of marriage, where above all else, you must never risk shifting the all-important balance of power. Bone rolled onto his side. On the screen, the beat of his heart drew and erased, drew and erased, over and over.
When Bone first met his future wife, he was coming off a near miss of a relationship with Miranda Richter, the medievalist in the office next to his. After a promising start, they’d solidified immovably in the friend zone, the familiar story of Bone’s romantic life. Mary Snyder had been a student in his Composition 1101 class, second row, one seat from the middle. Bone immediately made up his mind to dislike her. Dislike or madness: ignoring her would not do.
Ignore the gormless, slack-jawed freshman, with hair that looked as if he’d combed it in a wind tunnel; the chubby, bubbly, gum-chewing co-ed, always squealing first, loudest, and longest at Bone’s jokes; the stone-faced business majors resenting this detour from their lifework of relentless acquisition and conspicuous consumption; the savant wannabe smoking clove cigarettes on breaks, appending an interrogative “no” to every statement like some sort of damn European: “The typical syntax in Old English was still subject, verb, object—no?”
Ignore everyone else, but not her. The almond eyes beckoning, Gaze into me, fall into my depths, the chestnut hair, lustrous and despicable, that you ached to curl around your fingers, and the adorable, detestable, heart-shaped face—who goes around with a face like that?—and the sweater undulating over the swell and dip from clavicle to hip.
If she’d been beautiful, and beautiful only, he’d have gotten over her, but once, as he slipped in just before the unwritten deadline allowing students to skip when the teacher is a no-show, Mary narrowed her eyes and pointed her finger with a stern “This better be worth it.” It wasn’t the joke that got him but the way she said it, and by the way she said it, Bone knew she was flirting with him. She was flirting with him. The rest of class, his heart hammered at his sternum as if it were putting up siding.
Each semester he held individual student conferences, a chore he enlivened by transforming it into an improvisatory performance, with himself cast in the role of Professor Witherwood, a composite character based on Hollywood depictions of Ivy League professors. The essence of the Witherwood character was his absurdly elevated diction, which fell just short of an Oxford accent. Student reaction ranged from indifference to stupefaction; they never suspected that Bone had drafted them into an unscripted one-act comedy. But then came Mary. During her conference, Bone called her to task for overusing adverbs: “Select sincere verbs and adjectives that know their business, and no further modifiers are necessary.” Her smile at this emboldened him to further flights of eloquence. “Your verbs, my dear, and there’s no point trying to conceal the fact, are not all a good verb should be. They lack the requisite vim. As for your adjectives, they’re evasive and lack conviction. You can tell their hearts are elsewhere.” She laughed outright, and that evening Bone went home, feet scarcely touching the ground.
Mary, he learned, worked as Dean Gordon’s secretary. Close to himself in age—early thirties, Bone guessed—she became Bone’s ally, nodding at cultural allusions no one else shared, laughing at sly aspersions that sailed safely over everyone else’s head, getting, in short, him. By the time he realized he’d broken his resolution to dislike her, he was already half in love. Finally, after enduring an entire heavenly, hellish semester under the heat lamps of her almond eyes, developing a sore neck from avoiding looking toward her heart-shaped face, and getting migraines holding his breath lest he whiff the heady sweetness from that lustrous dark hair, Bone determined to act.
For some, asking Mary out would have been a natural next step, but not for Bone. Life had taught him many things; unfortunately, almost all of them were about grammar and etymology. He could have told you that “kiss” is both common noun and transitive verb, as are “date” and “love”; the mechanics of an actual kiss, however, or arranging a date, let alone finding love, were matters as opaque to him as the steel door of a bank- vault. So, knowing no better, during the final exam, he beckoned her into the hall, “Ms. Snyder,” and then when they were alone, the very molecules of the air holding their breath as if before a thunderbolt, he said, “So when are you going out with me?”
The six-year-old at the state fair wins the plush panda a head taller than himself; the housewife ignorant of sports catches the home run cracked to the stands; the Baptist pastor, morally opposed to gambling, who bought a ticket only to soften