said ‘you and I’ instead of ‘you and me.’ I was congratulating you for using the correct pronoun case.”
“Oh.” A longish pause while Mary waited for Bone to speak. “So, you wanted to go out?”
Mary, it transpired, had already picked a place and date, sparing Bone the chore of planning suitable entertainment. At her townhouse, he spent the obligatory awkward minutes with Laurel until Mary emerged in a scrumptious short black skirt and red blouse which offered the additional advantage, which Bone naively believed she did not suspect, of revealing her breast in profile.
It rained; getting lost only once—a shared mishap that seemed to seal the bond between them—they threaded their way through black, rain-bright streets between streetlamps punctuating the night like an ellipsis to the Vietnamese restaurant Mary had chosen. Bone’s hot blood roared in his ears, the fine hairs on his neck tickling his collar as if he were sitting on an electrified fence instead of next to this beauty in mute wonder; what glad change of heart accounted for this good fortune? Had he made a better first impression than he’d thought, and was it only bad timing and bad luck that had kept them apart?
The waiter asked if they wanted iced coffee—an odd suggestion coming before they’d even seen a menu. Meeting their puzzled looks with a puzzled one of his own, the waiter explained that Çhao Gio was renowned for iced coffee, implying it was unusual, if not unheard-of, for customers to be unaware of this. Bone and Mary exchanged looks, and Bone said yes, they would have the iced coffee.
Their wait was relieved by an awkward coincidence when Dr. Gordon and his wife arrived. It was a small restaurant, and the couples sat at adjoining tables. Time dripped in strained camaraderie before the waiter reappeared.
“We ordered the iced coffee,” Bone announced.
“Yes,” Gordon said. “It’s the specialty.” Gordon was his insufferable self, reclining with his arm extended over the back of his wife’s chair. Mrs. Gordon, who even smiling wore frown lines of a long campaign to stay slim and attractive, asked if Mary enjoyed her position and if it got very hard being under her husband, a strange, fierce fire in her eyes. Gordon asked Bone something about teaching, not concealing his lack of interest in Bone’s reply; Gordon was after all a dean, and Bone a mere lecturer.
A surreal and uncomfortable situation, but Mary reached across the tablecloth to hold Bone’s hand, and beneath the table, her knee pressed his own. In his joy, he lost his discomfort; a thousand Dr. Gordons could have marched in with a thousand wives, and he would have snapped his fingers at all of them, aware only of that sweet touch against his hand and knee. Bone said something clever and offhand, a remark that later he could never remember, a modest put-down, at which Gordon’s nostrils dilated in mild displeasure and Mrs. Gordon laughed.
Mary squeezed his hand, and the waiter returned with a tray to prepare their coffee.
In an era of Starbucks’ ubiquity, iced coffee is as mundane a beverage as any, but the folks at Çhao Gio served it with all the solemn ceremony of High Church mass; the only things lacking were a crucifix and incense ball. Before Bone and Mary, the waiter set down two miniature coffee pots, frosty cocktail shakers, and tall glasses with a finger of beige semiliquid that Bone guessed was partially caramelized condensed milk; the waiter made Mary’s first, pouring the hot coffee into the cocktail shaker, giving two judicious rattles, then pouring it, chilled but undiluted, over the condensed milk; the result was a glassful of gray dawn: midnight black near the top, tapering to creamy taupe, and finally the antique white of the condensed milk at the bottom. Mary reached for her spoon, but Gordon said, “Don’t stir.”
Obediently Mary set the spoon back down and watched as the waiter completed the coffee-making operation for Bone.
Velvet.
Each flavor feathered to the next like the color in the glass. The closest thing Bone knew to compare with it was chocolate milk, except it was nothing at all like chocolate milk. Too soon his glass was empty, but he saw it would be gauche to order a second; besides, a single glass, he discovered, was the perfect amount. If only he hadn’t finished so quickly.
“Good, isn’t it?” Gordon said, as if iced coffee, the Vietnamese restaurant, and Vietnam itself were things brought into being for his private amusement, but which, for the sake of their edification, he graciously condescended to share.
After the restaurant, parked in front of her townhouse, a streetlight shining in the gleaming puddle at the curb, Mary was unexpectedly willing to learn all there was to know on the subject of Bone King; even if she were pretending, Bone, unwilling to end the evening, was unusually garrulous.
He talked about growing up in Tennessee, the sharp, sweet smell of sawmills, gullies choked with rusted car chassis and black plastic garbage bags. He told her about Red Man–chewing junior high boys who loved the music of fists on skin and terrified pleading. He told her how, when still a child, he’d discovered his love of the written word in the Cook County Library, and how his work on Words would be not only his dissertation but an expression of that love. He said that in spite of certain memories, he dreamed of going back someday, having a few acres and maybe a couple of chickens, and she said he was really something and kissed him.
She told him that night that he was real, that he didn’t play games, that she was sick of playing games. Bone sensed that she was comparing him to someone else, but he was too wise or lucky to ask whom.
Was that all there was to it? Did Mary, like Othello’s Desdemona, love Bone for the dangers he had passed, and did he love her that she did pity them? No, there was one other triumphant moment.
It was when they’d been seeing each other about three months, and Bone had taken Mary out for her birthday, his mood made more festive by the chill January night that made her huddle against him when they left the car. He’d recently read an article on backformation, removing what seems to be a suffix or prefix to form a new word, deriving buttle from butler, burgle from burglar, and, more recently, an African American neologism, conversate from conversation. Walking arm-in-arm to the restaurant, they played at making backformations of their own: “I might seem feckless, but I’ve got loads of feck.” “Give me a hammer, I need to ham some nails.” “I am so happy. Tonight I am full of hap.”
Seeing the homeless man sitting on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Bone automatically reached into his back pocket—he’d picked up new habits from Mary. The smallest bill in his wallet was a five, but what the heck; Bone gave it to him without further thought.
“Where are your shoes?” Mary asked.
“Someone stole them.”
Inside the restaurant, Bone happily studied the menu. Everything looked so good. Did Mary want to start with an appetizer? Mary stared at the menu as if it were indecipherable. Her chin trembled. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How could they steal that man’s shoes?” A tear went down her face.
A month of anticipation, ruined. It would be useless saying not to worry about the man outside, that there were shelters, that Bone had already given him five dollars. Disappointment, frustration, and annoyance flashed by like overhead lights marking the distance in a long, dark tunnel. Then he saw what he must do.
“Excuse me,” he said. He returned a few minutes later, his face about to split from his grin. “I think we should start with that artichoke-cheese thingy,” he said.
Tears still in Mary’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just can’t stop thinking about it. That poor man.”
“Look
