him. A crisis is no time to be fussy about dignity. Getting Bone dressed in this condition, his entire body rigid as any mannequin, ruled out slacks and a polo shirt. He blocked the door almost entirely, leaving little room to operate, and it took several unsuccessful trials before she worked his arms, frozen midswing, into her flower-print robe, finally putting it on him backward like a hospital smock and cinching the belt around his waist.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” Mary promised as she squeezed past him into the hall.
“Don’t leave! It’s too small! You didn’t get the belt tight!” Bone shouted, but he already heard her naked feet pad down the hall and the kitchen door close. “The knot will never hold,” Bone said quietly, and as if it to prove that knots could hear, the belt loosened behind his back and undid itself like a vine forced into a shape it will not willingly hold. The robe fell open, and a breeze from the air-conditioning vent ran up his backside.
Bone wondered how long it would be until she returned. How long had it been already? Time hung suspended the way it does when nothing happens to mark its passing. Had she taken the car? He hadn’t heard the engine start, but surely she hadn’t run over to Cash’s house barefoot. Cash lived a street away. Bone imagined Cash answering a doorbell and finding Bone’s wife slightly out of breath, dressed in a slip nightie that barely reached her thigh.
Bone’s reverie was interrupted by a strangled gurgle emanating behind him that told him Cash Hudson had arrived on the scene. The neighbor, however, did not comment on Bone’s wardrobe but merely knelt and set to work getting Bone through the door, which was somehow worse and more humiliating than anything else he could have done.
Bone contemplated the consequences of his actions. If he’d absolutely had to use the bathroom, why hadn’t he put on his briefs so at least his gleaming backformation didn’t stick out behind like two white loaves? This, however, is the sort of thought that strikes one only after it is too late.
Cash gripped and lifted a calf, causing the robe to shift and slide silkily from Bone’s shoulders, down his arms, and onto the floor. Now Bone was completely naked.
I will not cry, Bone resolutely told himself. I refuse to cry.
So naturally, a fat tear rolled from his eye, burning his cheek, and frozen as he was, he could not even lift his arm to wipe it away.
D, d
From the Semitic daleth (d), “door.”
day: The interval between sunrise and -set. The d- rises straight up before sinking to a squinting -a-, after which –y descends beneath the word’s horizon, curving back again toward d-. The Proto Indo-European root for day, déi-no-, is unmistakably kin to the root for god, déyw-o-, that is, “shining.” From these two derive, therefore, not only date, dial, and diary but also deity, theology (owing to a consonant shift d > th), and divine.
door: The sideways lid of a room. The word opens with the ideogram for door itself (see D), a downstroke with a knob on one side. We pass the portals of two -o-s before reaching -r, a panel with a latch closing the word on the far side. The Proto Indo-European root, dhwer, leads back before doors themselves, to the late Paleolithic, evidently a meaning assigned existentially, its creators not knowing what lay behind it.
If there’d been any doubt about seeing the specialist before, there was none now, though Bone still told himself he was keeping the appointment only to humor Mary. As humiliating and frightening as the episodes were at the time, afterward they seemed merely ludicrous. He couldn’t get through doors—who ever heard of a thing like that? His disorder was as impossible to take seriously as death by penguin stampede.
That Sunday was tense and solemn. The obvious topic of discussion, neither of them cared to mention, so the day was spent in speaking little and avoiding eye contact generally; accordingly, Bone had ample time to speculate on his own about the cause of his condition. Perhaps his problem was not physical but—and this is preposterous, of course, but after all, who’s to say what is and isn’t possible?—verbal. And would this really be as far-fetched as it seemed? Many theorists claim consciousness isn’t a mere nebulous state of awareness granted in some degree even to earthworms and horseshoe crabs but the ability to verbalize. Others argue that our identities, our very selves, are constructed out of words. So Bone took a crack at viewing his predicament in light of the subject he taught: grammar.
So what did he know about his condition? Both episodes had to do with crossing a threshold of some sort—stepping out of a tub, crossing into a room. Moreover, each was associated with Mary—spying on her, though he would never admit that, and getting ready to make love.
To demonstrate how syntax could be at the root of his problems, Bone began by diagramming a very straightforward sentence, “Bone loves his wife.” The “sentence tree” style, that lopsided mobile of coat hangers and string, would not do; to really grasp a sentence at its core requires the old-fashioned and unfashionable Reed-Kellogg system.
How elegant. Two short vertical lines separate the subject, “Bone,” from “wife,” the object of the verb “loves,” with the tender possessive pronoun “his” touching the sentence stem like a tentative remora so there’s no mistaking whose wife it is Bone loves.
He took another simple example. “She loves him no longer.”
Almost the same sentence, except for that telltale adverbial phrase drooping like a dead branch beneath the verb “loves.” The adverb “longer” almost offers hope, except that even in its most positive sense, this necessarily implies a termination, and finally you come to the terrible “no” crouching at the sentence’s base.
Interestingly, in diagramming, an interrogative is put in the same subject-verb-complement order as a declarative statement. Thus, a question, such as, “Did you have sex with him?” supplies its own answer when diagrammed:
The “him” hanging by its preposition seems evasive, ashamed to be caught in the main sentence stem, an uninvited neighbor slinking across the street at a crabwise angle. None of English’s polite, Norman-French-derived vocabulary, however, can express the idea without a preposition: “have sex with,” “make love to,” “have intercourse with,” et cetera. To form a clear, straightforward sentence, Bone had to resort to sturdy if vulgar Anglo-Saxon.
There. Now “him” was properly the object of the verb-phrase “Did fuck,” as it should be, and not the wishy-washy object of the preposition.
Having attended to these arbitrary examples, Bone was ready to consider his predicament in a syntactic light: “Bone walks across the threshold.”
This, perhaps, revealed the source of his perplexity. The all-important verb “walks” has no object, no noun to receive its action. The only proper object of the verb might be the reflexive pronoun, “himself,” but if Bone walks himself, he is merely going in circles.
