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 the embarrassment of facing the cashier with his wife’s tampons, wins the million-dollar jackpot. In this way, by the mysterious cosmic force known by envious runners-up as beginner’s luck, Bone’s untutored tactic brought home the metaphorical bacon.
“How about this Saturday?” Mary asked.
On Saturday at sundown, therefore, Bone stood ready to press the doorbell of Mary’s townhouse apartment. Twilight gave each skinny tree—precisely one per lot—a poetic, wistful beauty. Someone was grilling a steak. Birds tittered in the eaves. But Bone was aware only of the starched shirt leaning on his shoulders like a cardboard sheet. Even he knew that arriving this early was a faux pas; wouldn’t it save embarrassment to wait in the car a few minutes before announcing himself? He turned, stepped toward his car, hesitated—on second thought. Turned. Raised his hand to the doorbell. Stopped. Lowered his hand. Considered. Raised it. Lowered it.
He never knew how long Mary’s roommate, Laurel, had been watching before he finally noticed her face in the window. Once he stopped, Laurel called, “Mare-ree! Your date’s here!” The door opened, and he slunk across the threshold.
As he waited, making strained replies to Laurel’s small talk, Bone’s surroundings—the Jacques Brel poster over the unused ten-speed; the dusty potted ficus; the plastic crate-cum-bookshelf housing Salinger, Vonnegut, and The Fountainhead—stamped his memory, the way the priest’s face, guards’ clasping hands, and clanking leg irons imprint the consciousness of a prisoner en route to the electric chair. Bone had an unignorable foresense of failure.
Indeed, the date was not precisely a success.
He took her to dinner and a movie, which, he’d gleaned, is standard operating procedure on dates, but sitting across a table from the woman he’d fantasized about, rather than inspiring him to gallantry and charm, merely stunned him.
She gave him a roll from the bread basket and held it in his fingers as she buttered it for him, an unexpected intimacy that sent electricity crackling up his arm. “It must be exciting being an author,” Mary said. Bone said it was not that exciting. “When do you find time to write?” Mornings, Bone told her. “I always wished I could write.” Bone said she should try it.
After a few more failed gambits on her part, the silence went unspoiled by human speech until the theater, when Bone’s two-quart paper cup of crushed ice and syrupy grape soda, which a sign at the concession counter ludicrously identified as “medium,” managed to upend into Mary’s lap.
After this episode they left without seeing the rest of the movie.
Back at the apartment, Mary gave Bone her cheek when he went in for the kiss, and his attempt to land on her mouth only resulted in an evasive maneuver resembling an experiment in magnetic repulsion. “So,” Bone said. He felt shortchanged and short-tempered. He was no skinflint, but this rendezvous had run him—between tickets, popcorn, and soda, not to mention the lavish dinner he had barely tasted—a great amount of money, money he could ill afford on a college teacher’s salary. In contrast to this, a kiss—the memory of which might have warmed the cold baloney sandwiches on which he would subsist next month to economize—would have cost her nothing, and yet she withheld it. He hated himself for having these thoughts, but in no way did that stop him from having them.
“So,” he said, “can I ask you out again?”
“Sure,” she said, her reply as insincere as his request. “Give me a call.”
He did call—why, who can say, unless to confirm his bitter hypothesis—four times: the first time she answered; the next two times it was Laurel; each time Bone was informed Mary had a prior engagement. The fourth time no one answered at all.
Bone heard, through a vine of particularly sour grapes, that Mary, “you know, that pretty secretary who works in the dean’s office,” was “involved with” Dr. Gordon, the dean, a serial womanizer whose wife would no doubt “just die” if she found out.
In its long existence the word “love” has acquired its share of false etymologies, to wit: in French l’oeuf, “egg,” is metonymy for zero, the egg’s shape suggesting 0, as “goose egg” does in English. The British anglicized l’oeuf to “love,” and in the way that meaningless coincidences sometimes become meaningful, to this day, in tennis, as in life, love means nothing. Bone warmed himself reflecting on this chilly irony.
The gossip about Mary he added to a preliminary but quickly growing store of data regarding the bad character and otherwise undesirable qualities of Mary and women like her, indeed all women generally, coolly committing himself to the solitary life. As for Gordon, if Bone had not especially liked him before, he loathed him now.
Therefore, when Bone answered his telephone one day and heard Mary’s voice on the other end, you could have knocked him over with a hummingbird feather.
“What’s up?” she asked. The question flummoxed; what was up? The white clouds, he supposed, the yellow sun that warmed the earth, his soaring heart; these things were up, and yet he could make no reply. “You haven’t called in a while,” Mary chided, as if above all things else the anticipation of his call were the chief delight of her existence. “I thought you and I were going out again.”
He gurgled, “I’m glad you’re using the
