Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  “Fuck Larry. I’m sick of hearing about Larry.”

  “He likes you a lot, you know. He feels terrible about this. He feels like he stole me away from you. It was my choice, completely. He never revealed the slightest interest until I literally threw myself at him.”

  “Literally? Any fractures?” I quipped, all hope dashed.

  “I bent him a little bit, yes.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Will you call Marianne?”

  “No. I’m too broken up. I’ll never get over you. You’re the only woman I’ll ever truly love, you capricious, smug, apostatic, untenanted, punic cow.”

  “Always with the sweet talk, Harmon.”

  “It just came out.” I apologized. “Truly, I hope the two of you will be very happy together.” I said, with every iota of selfless goodwill I could sift out of the arid sands of my despondency.

  “We already are.” she said, measured, relaxed and melodious.

  “I’m glad.” I imagined my hands inclining, tightening around her neck, the thumbs pressing hard into pulsing carotids, nails popping soft white flesh, bringing eructations and floes of bright blood. “I really am glad for you.”

  “Thank you, Harmon. I appreciate your setting aside your hurt and anger like this. It’s a side of you I haven’t seen. I take back puerile.”

  “Does that mean we’re on again.”

  “Harmon.”

  “Just kidding. Hey. This is Nails. I always land on my pedipalps. I’ll get over it.”

  “You’re a wonderful man.”

  “I know. So are you.”

  “Thank you.” she said ecstatically, sideslipping my sly jape.

  “You are more than welcome, Lissa.” And in a voice oozing courtesy: “There’ll never be another you in my life.”

  I called Marianne Evans the same evening. Fay Nails may have raised a private-I despite her earnest libertarian intentions, but she don’t raise losers.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Hard bed.

  In Marianne’s apartment. We had had an early dinner to celebrate our vanquishing the forces of nastiness and returned to her place after. Marianne made some tea and said she wanted to watch the news, in case they had anything on about Sterne. I agreed—not so much because of Sterne, of whom I’d had my fill, as because her tubie was on a stand at the foot of the bed, which seemed like a move in the right direction.

  “Sorry.” she said. “It’s a Japanese futon. It looks cushiony but it’s really not, so it’s kind of a shock when you hit it for the first time. My ex-boyfriend hated it so much he would never sleep here.”

  “I like a firm mattress.” I said reassuringly. I also liked hearing that her boyfriend was an ex. “I sleep on polyfoam and plywood at home because I hate any extraneous motion when I’m trying to sleep. I actually got seasick the one time I tried a waterbed.”

  Most people, when I relate to them my true-life confrontation with the awesome and universally solvent elements untamed within the waterbed, consider the story apocryphal, a mere pleasantry. But it’s no laughing matter to have such a low threshold of motion tolerance when it comes to sleeping apparatus, especially since one finds oneself on so many different beds in one’s life unless one’s a hermit or a celibate. Since I’m neither—at least not usually and never by choice—such a condition is a drag, and also odd if you think about it, since I never get the least bit queasy when I’m waiting for waves, sometimes for fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch, in a restive squall-blown windchop. Go and figure. Anyhow, unlike your average well-adjusted sap, Marianne didn’t laugh. “Me, too!” she exclaimed. “I don’t even like the rocking motion you get with the normal box-spring-mattress setup.”

  “Way too unstable.” I agreed.

  “Plus, if you sleep on your side with your ear to the mattress you can hear the springs vibrate like a bunch of tuning forks or something, which is every bit as annoying as the bounciness.”

  “Amazing.” I said.

  “What is?”

  “I thought I was the only person in the world who gets bugged by box-spring sounds.” Actually, I was so moved by the discovery of this shared quirk of bedding that I considered asking Marianne whether she also pissed in an apple juice jar every night. After brief deliberation, however, I thought better of it. After all, we were only just getting acquainted, and those are the kind of intimate oddities, like wine-colored birthmarks and fungus-eroded toenails, that have to be revealed slowly, organically, as prospective lovers drop by degrees their pretensions to perfection.

  “Well, so far we’re compatible, at least in our taste in beds.” she said.

  Now I’m as prone to getting excited about future intimacies with well-proportioned female journalists as the next guy, but I still had a definite wariness about words like “compatible” and “commitment.” which—due no doubt to the material failure of those very abstractions in my marriage to Brenny—I associated with grief, rage, denial, immobility, buttered toast, and so on. Therefore, even though I liked Marianne well enough thus far in our exordial friendship and was attracted to her well beyond wellness, I dodged her mention of compatibility with the instinctual finesse of a bantam-weight slipping a jab. “Is anything else on besides the news? It’s just more stuff about the election, and Ford’s voice makes my teeth hurt like when you go to take a shower and there’s cleanser all over the bottom of the tub.” I said.

  “Hm, walking on cleanser never bothers my teeth.” she said, and I was glad I hadn’t mentioned the juice jar, “but I agree with you about Uncle Gerry’s voice. The Guide’s on top of the set.”

  I got up and fetched it. “Time you got?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “Seven-thirty.” I flipped through the TV Guide, always a frustrating task because you get hung up on all those cardboard advertising inserts for cigarettes and painted porcelain dogs. Eventually, though, I found the right page. “Gilligan. Mary Tyler Moore. Oh my God.”

  “Paper cut?”

  “No, there’s a Dodger game on. I’ve been out of touch. Usually I mark them on my calendar.”

  “Away game? It must be, if it’s on TV.”

  “No, it’s at home. Monday Night Baseball.”

  “Oh, right, Monday night. I thought it was Friday for some reason. All this undercover stuff has really screwed up my sense of time. Who’s pitching?”

  “Hooton.”

  “I thought he was on the D.L..” she said. “Last time he pitched—against the Reds I think it was—he pinched a nerve in his neck.”

  “You hate box-springs and you know about Happy Hooton’s nerve.” I observed.

  “It’s all true.”

  “I could become fond of you.”

  “Loikwoise, Oi’m shuah.” she said, mimicking the nasal timbre of a brain-dead B-movie gun-moll. Marianne was purposely keeping it light. From hard experience with braces of skittish dudes, she must have discovered that a degree of airy distancing—whether real or manufactured—has a palliative effect on the sensitive New Male, thereby keeping him from acting on his impulse to flee like a groundhog from a grass fire when intimacy threatens. By giving him room to move away, you paradoxically give the New Male room to move toward you as well, and sometimes he will. As a sensitive New Male myself (and I hang my head in shame at the admission), I appreciated the soft manipulation. Marianne Evans was a smart woman.

  “How come you know so much about baseball, anyway?” I asked, moving imperceptibly nearer.

  “I’ve followed the Dodgers since I was a little kid. Typical tomboy syndrome, you know: Daddy wanted a boy but got a girl, loved me anyway and did lots of boy-type stuff with me, camping, electric trains, bows and arrows, throw the ball around in the backyard. We used to have season tickets. These days I don’t see as many games as I’d like, but I still get to ten, maybe twelve a year.”

  “That’s a lot of games.” I calculated. “How do you afford it?”

&nb
sp; “1 don’t. My father’s best friend is a county supervisor. He gets comps. Season boxes, between third and home, ten rows up. We could go sometime if you want.”

  “I think I’m in love.” I said, maintaining the lightsome tone.

  “It’s about time.” Marianne pronounced with authority, apparently tossing aside her strategy of discretion and restraint in favor of a more genuine aggressiveness. “Why don’t we turn off the TV. I think Lasorda can manage without us for a while.”

  The shift in Marianne’s attitude caught me off guard, and I responded with a slight, instinctive drawing in, sort of like an anemone that’s been brushed lightly by a kelp frond in a tide pool, except that we weren’t underwater, of course. “What if I just turn the volume down? I get edgy without a certain amount of stimulus overload.” I said.

  “You’re weird, Harmon.” Marianne responded in a voice at once teasing but also mildly caustic.

  I said, “My shrink—my ex-shrink—told me I’m not supposed to let other people call me weird, even in jest. I’m me, Harmon Nails, a unique and creative individual.”

  “OK. You’re you.”

  “Weird.”

  “Different. Funny.”

  “Aw heck.”

  “Here, how does that feel?” One small hurt past, she had begun massaging my neck and shoulders with a strong, chelate grip that penetrated the armoring of my tendons and fasciae and whatnot. As though by some kind of metaconscious inertial guidance, her thumbs homed in on foci of anxiousness and dread that I had suppressed over the past weeks, in order that I might function coolly, efficiently—that is, without befouling my trousers—while I pursued Doctor Syntax. Not only was Marianne Evans smart, she had brilliant thumbs. Killer combination. I let my chin fall to my chest as she worked the knotted tissues. “Really stiff, huh?” I mumbled, it being hard to talk with your chin to your chest.

  “Like suspension bridge cables.” Marianne remarked. She let off kneading the back of my neck and got serious. “You know, Harmon, the ordeal is over. You can let down now.”

  Marianne was partially right; I could relax, at least as far as Sterne was concerned. When I read in the paper that Eugene Withers—the celebrated criminal lawyer whom I’m sure you’ve heard of in connection with the Little Brown extortion case that was in all the papers—had been retained by Sterne as his defense attorney, I was understandably concerned and immediately phoned my old friend Randy Rhea to pump him for information. Rhea had given up surfing many years before to devote himself to the Absolutest Zero of all—law school—and a subsequent junior partnership with the prestigious and high-powered legal firm of Flumen, Withers and Eyck … the very same firm that, it turned out, Sterne had retained to defend him. Rhea couldn’t tell me much, client confidentiality and all that, but off the record he said Sterne had been slapped with a contempt citation during his bail hearing, “when he began raving about some orphan kid named John Q. Penis and then stood up and accused the judge of banging a housekeeper named Bessie with a broom handle.” After that there was no hope of springing Sterne on bail. The best Withers could be expected to accomplish were reduced sentences on the several counts with which Sterne was charged, with time to be served concurrently instead of consecutively. Withal, Sterne would probably still get twenty-five years on the kidnaping charge alone; after you subtracted good time and parole, he would spend no less than fifteen years behind bars, and that didn’t even take into account the murder of Dill, if they could make that one stick. I could therefore allay my hypervigilance with the knowledge that my archenemy would either die of old age in his cell or at worst would return to the streets a withered, broken, harmless old Combist.

  Unfortunately the tightness in my neck, not to mention in my brainpan and abdominal sump, was a condition borne less by Sterne than by another, more insidious vector. “No I can’t.” I kvetched. “My mother’s coming back in two days, and I’m dreading it.”

  “After what you went through with Sterne, I don’t see how you could be worried about anyone, least of all your own mother” Marianne said.

  “It’s just that we’re stuck in this toxic way of relating to each other, and I’m afraid once we’re under the same roof again we’ll fall back into it.”

  “So why don’t you get unstuck?” she asked.

  This wasn’t at all the kind of question Liz would have asked. Liz would have said, “I see, mm-hmm, a-yes” or, “Can you go with that?” or something equally open-ended and nondirective which would have left me staring off into space, at which she would have said, “What’s going on with you right now?” and so on. Marianne’s lay response, which bored to the logical heart of the issue, set me back on my heels a bit. “We’re talking about twenty-five-odd years of relating to each other in a certain way” I explained. “You don’t undo that kind of conditioning overnight, you know?”

  “I don’t know about that.” said Marianne, “but I’ll tell you what I do know: If you could track down Sterne, crack this case, free Ernst, and wheedle your way into my apartment and onto my bed all in couple of weeks, you can do anything. Look, your mom is your mom, right?”

  “I think so. She never said anything about buying me from Gypsies.”

  “Good. So with parents, sometimes they get set in their ways, and you have to be the one to initiate a change if you want it.”

  “Get the ball rolling, so to speak.”

  “Realize you are the ball, Harmon, and roll where you want to roll.”

  “Wow, that’s deep. So what I hear you saying.” I said, restating the obviously absurd, “is that I should be a ball.”

  “What I’m saying, Lippo.”—she accentuated the idiotic nom-de-pud to mock my obtuseness—“is that maybe it’s time for you to become the adult in the family.”

  “Oh, I get it. A ‘Child is father to the man’ sort of thing.”

  “Right, except in your case the child will be mother to the woman.”

  “I’m not sure I can get behind that.”

  “OK, father to the woman then. Whatever. It’s either that or a perpetual neckache, and I won’t always be around to rub out the kinks.”

  “You could.” I ventured rashly.

  “First you get your own place, then we’ll see.” Smart woman indeed.

  “Fine. So I get my own place, and then what? How do I go about doing this fatherly thing? I have limited experience in that area.”

  “What do fathers do with their daughters?”

  “I don’t know. According to you they go hiking, they shoot bows and arrows, they have season tickets to the Dodgers. Should I take my mother to a baseball game?” I asked jokingly.

  “You could. Sure, why not … change your old way of relating to each other. Treat your mother to a game, get her a Blue Wrecking Crew visor, buy her a bag of peanuts and a Kool-A-Coo.”

  The image of Fay Nails munching away on an ice cream sandwich while filling in a 6-4-3 double play on her scorecard was without precedent in my experience, yet it was not impossible. That such a scene could exist hinted at a universe weighted—if only slightly—toward the good, a happy universe pregnant with the colloidal plasma of possibility, of star-stuff congealed in velvety ether and mystery illumined brightly, of trees blooming in Zion and Dr. J.’s hanging glide shot, of seedless watermelons chilled from the refrigerator and human justice equitably applied, of Velcro shoe-bindings and Albert King’s chill guitar riffs, of orgasms shared and transparent Rincon barrels, and mothers carefree under Dodger caps. Marianne’s suggestion made me laugh—nay, shook me to the very footings with laughter, the kind of uproarious, unreserved, exquisitely painful laughter that reaches down to the molten core of the soul and purges one of contrarieties and adhesions, leaving me finally to breathe the balmy fragrance of release and all-acceptance.

  “That’s right.” said Marianne with considerable animation, “show her you’re a grown man by playing father to the little girl inside her. Everybody wants that once in a while.”r />
  “Grown man.” I said. I rolled the phrase around in my mouth. It felt funny, like credit dentures.

  “I think you know you are, and my intuition is hardly ever wrong. But there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

  “Ooo.” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Brazen.”

  “See, I told you. Should I stop?”

  “What about the Dodgers?”

  “So we miss the Star Spangled Banner.”

  “How about the ceremonial first ball?”

  “I’m willing if you are. Turn over.”

  “Like this?”

  “Very much.”

  “I guess we may be compatible at that.” I allowed, surging against my New Maleness, throwing reticence to the whipping wind, going all in to see that blessed River, the catch that turns marginal possibilities into a lock winner.

  “O Harmon.”

  “O Rick.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “Neeewtn.” I said.

  EPILOGUE

  Hello, Mary. Walt Wessex.

  “Very well, thank you. Yourself?

  “She’s very well.

  “They’re just fine, too.

  “Yes. First year of law school this fall.

  “They certainly do.

  “I don’t know where it goes, either, Mary. Listen. Is Karl nearby?

  “Thanks, Mary.

  “Wonderful talking to you, too.

  “You too.

  “I will. You too.

  “Karl. Walt Wessex. How are you?

  “Glad to hear it. All prepared for the new school year, are you.

  “Never. But we muddle through anyway, don’t we? Ha ha.

  “Ha ha. Listen, Karl. The reason I’m calling. I have received Mr. Nails’ manuscript.

  “Shocked is perhaps too mild. We’re in a bit of a quandary here. Bill Pulsinger wants our decision within a fortnight.

  “A fortnight.