Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  I smiled and let her touch my ears, even though it was more itching than arousing. My soul cried out for a Q-tip. She said, “Has anyone ever told you you have beautiful ears?”

  An ear fetishist. This was promising. “Once.” I said.

  “I could get jealous. Who was it?”

  “I was seventeen, hitching up to Hollywood to hear some band on the Strip, the Shallow Plotz, I think. A guy in a Corvette picked me up. He said I had ears like delicate seashells and started playing with my left one just like you’re doing. Then he reached across and grabbed my crotch.”

  “Not exactly what you’d call romantic, but direct. What did you do?”

  “I jumped out of the car. He had slowed down for some traffic but we were still moving. I sprained my ankle. I’ve never hitched since.”

  “I guess I’ll have to change my approach. I was going to reach over and grab.” Instead of my crotch she grabbed my thigh playfully, her hair dripping cold salt water onto my cheek, and, aware that we were in public and couldn’t make too much of an erotic spectacle of ourselves, we held ourselves to mere ardent kissing and stroking of the lesser erogenous parts: backs, arms, faces, hair.

  After a while we unclinched and stretched out on our backs, and then Diane climbed playfully on top of me. She looked into my eyes and said, in a husky, parodic soap-opera tone, “Let’s go back to your place. I … want … you … now.”

  SIX

  I have dwelt thus far on the well-trodden ways in which my mother fits the stereotype of the clutching yenta who dotes poisonously on her kids—especially on the firstborn son—and even more poisonously if he turns out to be the only child. My new girlfriend, Marianne Evans, reminds us in her latest article on gender-role myths that stereotypes are by their insidious nature mere simpleminded exaggerations, for the sake of chat or cattiness or full-blown bigotry, of real and unique human traits. In the case of my mother, Marianne is right. Even though Ma is the full-blooded Russian Jewish daughter of an immigrant artificial flavorer, she looks less Israeli than Irish, with a blaze of tight red curls, fair skin, upturned colleen’s nose. To add to the confusion, where the cartoon B’nai B’rith princess has a tooth-shattering New York whoiiine, my mother spent four years at the University of Georgia, which mellowed her voice down to a soft, slow, Deep-South sorority purr. Even now, long after my folks’ move to the West Coast, Ma will lapse back into that biscuits-and-gravy drawl if she gets really mad.9

  So, at least in looks and sounds, my mother flies at the vile anti-Semite’s caricature of the Jewess. Going deeper, Ma despised her own Yiddische-mama’s clutching and doting so thoroughly that she put into practice the teaching of humanistic juvenile shrinks from Speck to Piaget, many of whom believed that a kid should be left alone to make his own mistakes and grow thereby. Consequently, Fay Nails has always (since I’ve been around, anyway) been torn between two poles: an instinct to clutch and dote and bar me from using the swingset in the backyard for fear that I would fly off and mash my melon on an ornamental lava boulder; and a firm intellectual belief that kids have resilient little bodies and must be allowed to learn by their knots and scrapes.

  This opposition within my mother has kept her in a constant state of agitation, which makes her dangerous and unpredictable. She might one minute be the most warm-hearted of friends. I might come in exhausted after a long day of classes and flop on the couch, and she will put down her Times to hear me complain hysterically about higher education—more precisely, my straining like a door-to-door brushman to sell college freshmen the idea that Wordsworth’s poetic focus on humble and rustic life provides a better soil in which the essential passions of the heart can attain their maturity, blabla, while my students, mostly business-econ majors and prospective missile-guidance engineers, stare out the window, chitchat idly among themselves, do physics homework on pocket calculators, chew gum, draw pictures, look in mirrors, nod out on the desk (I send them out for coffee when they start snoring). Ma can be a great listener, and she approached sainthood after the failure of my marriage. Without her uncharacteristically judgment-free ministering I would probably still be the hopeless, finger-thin, frosting-eyed game-show addict I became after Brenny left.

  Yet if Ma can be a pal, she can as easily become shrewish, unreasonable, hyper-critical, suspicious, calculating, overbearing … all for no reason save the passage of a little time, which seems to work some kind of devilish neuroscience on her, transforming a delightful, witty, and relaxed human being into a carping bitch. Harsh words for the woman who gave one breath and blood and milk, but I don’t exaggerate, and it’s a stone tragedy. Because of her emotional lability, one has to protect himself by forgetting the good times and treat her as one would a Doberman with a cortical malfunction: Assume the worst, be prepared for a vicious and unprovoked attack on one’s areas of greatest vulnerability. Therefore, although I had directed Diane Droddy to park on the street instead of the driveway to avoid being spotted, and although enroute to the back house I had seen no sign of my mother’s face pressed against any window, I couldn’t help imagining her witchlike, Morgan le Fay Nails plotting some diabolical means of withering my all-too-vulnerable excalibur by remote control.

  My small room was a mess. All the furniture—the teak dining table, the foldout polyfoam futon-couch-bed against the far wall, the antique church-pew bench by the entry, the butcher block in the kitchenette—was strewn with volumes of Browning criticism,10 coffee cups, fast-food hamburger and taco cartons, waxed wrappers and typing paper crumpled and tossed, notebooks in tipsy piles. I set about straightening up the clutter on the table.

  Diane said, “Don’t bother cleaning up. With three roommates, I’m used to a lot more mess than this. Besides, I have other plans for you.” She dug into her bag and, producing a fat cigarette rolled in yellow wheatstraw paper, smiled over at me. “Thai stick.” she said. “It’s killer.”

  I smiled back, although in truth I’m not much of a dope-smoker. In fact, most drugs make me ill. I have a Medic-Alert tag (I never wear it, for the same reason Hell’s Angels don’t wear helmets), which warns any potential good samaritan that I’m allergic to almost every pharmaceutical, legal or otherwise. Antihistamines, decongestants, amphetamines, and cocaine make my heart beat too fast, my hands and feet swell up, and my head feel like it’s acquiring the shape and internal consistency of a crook-neck squash. Barbiturates, opiates and sedative-hypnotics cause me to pass out immediately and suffer two or three days afterward with motion sickness, even when I’m just sitting and watching TV. Psychedelics, not only LSD,11 but even milder hallucinogens like marijuana, force me to focus obsessively on whatever stimulus happens to present itself, including my own obsessive thoughts, on which I focus obsessively, especially on the thought that I’m focusing on my obsessive thoughts, and so on until I realize I’m trapped in a tailor’s mirror of infinitely regressive reflection and I get scared that I’m going crazy and then focus obsessively on that.

  For this reason, and also because it always gives me tonsillitis, I never smoke pot. However, I reasoned that being on parallel psychic planes with Diane was essential to moving in the direction of physical abandon, so I had to make an exception to my dope rule. When Diane, fixing me seductively with her eyes, snapped her disposable plastic butane lighter, took a long hit, and then passed me the joint, I inhaled deeply, too, and held my breath. The smoke was hot and seemed to defy the laws of physics by doubling in volume and temperature while in my lungs and bronchi. A violent coughing fit racked my frame like an old car dieseling on cheap gas.

  Diane Droddy wasn’t deterred by my tubercular routine. She led me to the bed and laid me down. Once again we faced each other and inscribed light finger-traces on each other’s brows. I was feeling relaxed and was even distracted from my usually obsessive thoughts by the rush of pleasurable physical sensations: her fingers on my eyes, cheek, jaw-line, neck; scent of salt and coconut oil strong as we warmed, palms over bellies and backs, then thighs, both draw
ing air in hard gasps and moving flanks subtly against the other as we explored delicately the outer ridges of lips with tongue—tips, then one limpet kiss that lasted longer than some nineteenth-century romantic soaring on laudanum could ever have dreamed, at which point I became self-aware that the Thai stick had made me lose control over the track my thoughts would take and they were moving in a decidedly literary direction; no problem, I could exist on the carnal and the theoretical, one firing the other, which put me in mind of the young Keats, who described foreplay as a winning near the goal, consummation an end that one never wants to reach, itself being a death of spirit, passion, imagination, and Keats must have known someone very like my mother, because at that moment, when two small deities poised at that height, making sounds like sacrificial cattle lowing at the skies and he slid her suit down and then his own and she laughed and called him creepy caterpillar because he was rippling up her body all the while thrusting in time to .…

  … then the Buzzer went off.

  Unfortunately Buzzer, in this context, has nothing to do with the erogenous anatomy. It refers instead to an intercom device that my father had installed some nine years earlier. Anyone in the house could press a button connected by wire to the sounding device in the office. This would prompt my father to pick up the telephone, through which Ma could tell him dinner was ready or that he was late for his haircut. But that was then, and now the hideous protracted cawing could mean only one thing: Ma had seen us go in, had judged the amount of time it would take me to become fully aroused, and then hit the button and held it down with a vengeance born of a widow’s deprivation.

  Caught up as Diane and I were, our first reaction to the noise was to ignore it, although bitter experience told me that Ma wouldn’t lift her finger off the button until I had satisfied her by interrupting whatever horrible perversion she imagined I was engaged in. There was no way to cut off the buzzing, either, without picking up the phone and talking to Ma, which, even when I’m completely straight, is confusing enough, but which, in my current cannabis—and hormone-addled condition, promised disaster.

  The sustained whine gnawed ratlike through our ability to pretend it wasn’t happening. Finally Diane said crossly, “What’s that noise!”

  Too far gone to keep up the pretense, I blurted out tragically, “My mother! I didn’t want to spoil a nice afternoon by worrying you, but she’s been tailing us all day. Remember the scuba diver who crawled up out of the water? It was my mother! And the bag lady with the metal detector? My mother! And the silver El Camino I said was following us? She’s everywhere, there’s no getting away from her …” And on I ranted, driven by exasperated fury, by terror of the demonic manifest in my own sweet mama, and by a malformed last-ditch plan to render the ugly situation comical by exaggeration.

  Diane wasn’t amused. She sneered, “You said you rented this place. You really have a thing for your mother, don’t you? Now that I think back on it, you’ve been talking about her all day.” all the while picking up her things. Juggling sandals, shift, wicker bag in one hand, she opened the door with the other, muttered, “See you around, Harmon.” without turning to look back, and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Crushed, incapable of divining the thinnest tapeworm-thread of logic in the progress of the preceding events, I lifted the receiver and spoke wearily. “It’s all right, Ma; she’s gone.”

  Her voice sounded positively maritime. “Harmon.” she boomed, “what took so long? I was starting to worry. Who’s gone?” Her words echoplexed: “GONE, Gone, gone, gon …”

  “Never mind. What is it, Ma?”

  “What is what?”

  I paused and waited for a vision of endless interrogative loops, spiraling toward a vanishing point far away, to approach and then recede, like a low-buzzing helicopter. “What do you mean, what is what?”

  “I can’t answer what it is until you tell me what ‘it’ is. Harmon, what are those gurgling sounds? Are you running a tub?”

  “Right, just a little tired, you know …”

  “Take a hot bath and a nap before dinner. I’ve got chops, your favorite. That’s why I buzzed.”

  “Sounds good. Bye, Ma.”

  Sleep. I tried once more, hopelessly, to fix on and make sense of the chain of events that led to this almost insupportable fatigue, like the pull of a denser geology where gravity claws at the eye sockets … a car, a beach, a woman. George Eliot, of all people, appeared before me, her every feature etched in genial detail, her homeliness growing in complexity until my whole visual screen filled with fine cross-hatching … my eyes closed and I became Her … saw the world, perceived others as George would … my mother, an odd revolving-headed owl who thought her deceptions opaque while she believed mine transparent. I was synthesizing obscure and disparate bytes of memory now at incredible speed, and all at once my aimless scribbling of the last two years fell into place in an orgasm of intellect. A thesis, a central idea, the heretofore-missing core of my dissertation, took shape in my mind. Seizing the nearest paper—a scrap of newsprint torn from the previous day’s sports page—I recorded like a fanatic scribe each spasm of inspiration. I wrote until I was spent. For safekeeping, I folded the paper and slipped it in the first volume of Doctor Syntax, which happened to be lying nearby. Modern critical brilliancies I had produced, one after the other, like a frogwife laying her eggs. From such prodigious ova would my reputation as a scholar hatch.

  But then they stole Doctor Syntax.

  SEVEN

  I slept through dinner and the late news and my morning instant hot cereal. I came awake just before noon, with the radio tuned mysteriously12 to some evangelical channel and a rapturous congregation of peckerwoods working over a number that sounded like “If You Really Love Me, Then Eat My Sheets.” I am, with all due humility, a hottish lead guitarist and used to work in rhythm-and-blues bands around town before I got locked into this literary thing, so I know fourth-rate gospel when I hear it. Dismissing the white-bread chorale with a turn of the dial, I barely had time to shave and dress for my appointment with Ernst Gablonzer. I had been referred to Ernst a couple days earlier by a library science friend as a “highly regarded but eccentric” local bibliographic researcher and therefore a person likely to know the value of a complete set of Doctor Syntax. I had called him, explained the circumstances of my inheritance briefly to him, and he had made the appointment for today, at one.

  Ernst had an address in Echo Park, one of the oldest and quaintest parts of town, a hospitable blue-collar Latino and Asian neighborhood13 with steep hills, narrow streets laid out at irregular angles instead of the usual tract-development grid, with dogs romping on lawns, kids running through sprinklers, and porches with hanging potted succulents, all just a pop foul from where the Dodgers play ball down in Chavez Ravine .… which is why I’m familiar with the area. I’m a lifelong Dodger fan; my father was from Brooklyn, so I guess it’s in the genes.

  To get to Ernst’s I took surface streets. They’re faster to certain parts of the city. The disappointments and revelations of the previous evening had already retreated to that elephant graveyard where memories born of excess flock to die, and this blurring or complete erosion of detail was in part a blessing—the less I could recall of the incident with Diane, the less despondent I would be—and in part a vexation, since I could not bring to mind even one of the luminous insights I had written on the small scrap of paper. But I had the scrap tucked away safely in my Doctor Syntax, and I took comfort in projecting a future scene in which I would sweep the clutter off my worktable in a symbolic gesture of purgation, I would sit down with a yellow pad, and incontrovertible proof would arrange itself organically, in a manner more suggesting the layered growth of a coral reef than the Brownian erring of a crazed seastar.14

  Ernst Gablonzer greeted me at the door to his cottage. What tapped the eye first about Ernst was not his extreme shortness, although he was indeed extremely short. Even I, well below the surgeon-general’s reco
mmended height for adult males, had an aerial perspective of Ernst’s scalp, mostly bald though covered irregularly by wisps of coarse white hair combed across the top, from ear to ear. But more striking than his baldness or his shortness was a certain force, intangible as the polarizing properties of magnets. I imagined that wherever he walked, pieces of furniture would organize themselves around him, as if awaiting emancipation from their objecthood. Ernst wore a goatee and glasses with frames of thick black plastic and opaquely smoked lenses, all of which added to the mystique. He shook my hand warmly with both of his and took my arm. Usually I’m distrustful of people who touch you before they know you, like certain therapy groupies who enwrap you in a smothering hug whenever they see you, as though you just got off the plane after a long trip, or out of the hospital after a triple bypass; but coming from Ernst, I found the gesture strangely comforting, in a fatherly sort of way.

  He walked me into the study, which in truth encompassed most of the house. The living room, dining room, and even the kitchen were obviously used more as library space than as areas for entertaining, eating, or cooking. Old pine bookcases and metal library shelves filled with hardbound volumes lined the walls, yellowing manuscripts covered the oak drop-leaf dining table, paperbacks overflowed gray plastic milk crates stacked five high, each bearing a freezer-taped label. The scene reminded me of those widows who breed swarms of cats for company in their apartments. Books appeared to have bred unchecked in Ernst’s house and were now taking over, making themselves comfy in every corner of every room.

  Behind one of the banks of plastic crates was the desk, surprisingly free of literature, just a stack of unlined paper, a typewriter even older than my pop’s, a tape-recording device of some kind, and a small vase with pencils and pens in it. Behind the desk a young woman sat, absorbed in some kind of transcription work with the recorder. Bent over as she was, her face was hidden by a fall of wavy red-copper hair.