Tam Lin

by PAMELA DEAN

  Janet dug her overdue library copy of the play out from under her bed, and read the ending. Vindice confessed to Antonio, whose wife had suffered from the court's corruption at the play's beginning, that Vindice and Hippolito had killed the Duke and a selection of his sons. Antonio promptly arrested and executed them. Hippolito did not have much to say. Janet felt rather sorry for him; Vindice was the troublemaker, really.

  Vindice explained to him that "'Tis time to die when we ourselves our foes,'" went on for a little about how his alter ego the pandar had predicted all this, and ended, "I'faith we're well—our mother turned, our sister true, We die after a nest of dukes! Adieu."

  Which made precisely no sense to Janet. No wonder her father had skipped the Jacobeans.

  CHAPTER 13

  The next day was Thursday, which meant Tina and Thomas would have lunch by themselves, Robin and Molly and Janet and Nick would eat with whomever else they could encounter, and Nick and Janet would have the room in Ericson to themselves for three hours after lunch. Janet and Molly pelted Nick and Robin, when they turned up meekly on schedule, with every question they could think of; and Robin and Nick said they would explain everything at lunch. The four of them had barely sat down, alone for once at a small corner table in Eliot, when Tina flung herself into the empty chair and burst into tears.

  "Thomas hasn't turned up," said Molly, patting her on the back and giving Janet the sort of meaningful look she usually despised.

  Tina, as usual, was commanding at least as much irritation as sympathy. Janet accordingly left the cooing to Molly, and fixed Nick and Robin with as forbidding a stare as she could manage. "Do you know anything about this?"

  Nick put his head in his hands. Robin said blandly, "He is fighting for his life, Christina; if you must cry, do it for that."

  "What the hell does that mean?" said Molly; Tina just went on crying into the sleeve of her pink cashmere sweater.

  "Academically," said Nick, popping his head up suddenly. "He's having to explain to the head of the Classics Department why he should be allowed to continue at Blackstock."

  "Begin at the beginning," said Janet, between her teeth, "go on until you get to the end, and then stop."

  Nick and Robin looked at each other; Robin shrugged.

  "Robin and I had a scheme," said Nick, "to perform a Revenger's Tragedy that would show, subtly, to the initiated, that Medeous runs that department as the Duke ran his court.

  She would have known, and the Classics majors, but nobody else would. They might think the play treated women shabbily—which it does, really—but that was all.

  "Now Thomas wanted more than that. He's going to switch to English, you know—if he survives—but there is something about Medeous. He couldn't just walk in and tell her so. He had to make a grand and irrevocable gesture. And he was responsible for the costuming, and he held it up so late we could not get replacements. But we could stage the play without the wigs, at least; and we thought, Robin and I, that everyone had agreed to that. You remember, Jack came on, at the beginning, with his gray wig? But Thomas was at them every moment he was backstage; and he must have persuaded them."

  "Jack our Duke is graduating this spring," said Robin. "And Ambitioso and Supervacuo are in Modern Languages and Chemistry; she can't touch them. They thought it was a lark."

  "What about Rob Benfield, though?" said Janet.

  "He said," said Robin, "that Thomas had pointed out how silly the revengers would look if three of them had on those wigs and the fourth did not. Rob hates to make a play look silly; and he hates like poison to look silly himself. His first love is theater; if she won't let him graduate, he'll go off whistling."

  Tina, hiccuping, had sat up and was rubbing her blotched face. Nick pulled a large blue handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and handed it across the table to her. She mumbled something, smiling grotesquely, and buried her face in the cotton.

  "So hark, Tina," said Robin. "Thomas isn't angry, he is merely occupied. You had better pull yourself together. He's going to be in need of twice as much comforting as you think you are; he doesn't need you weeping all over him."

  "He could have called me," said Tina thickly.

  "He was probably rather distracted," said Nick.

  "What do you know?" said Tina, still from behind the handkerchief, but with somewhat more clarity and vigor. "You never call anybody."

  Janet thought it was ungrateful of her to attack the person whose handkerchief she was using, but she looked at Nick to see what he made of the accusation. He was smiling. "So, then," he said, "I must know very well the reasons a man doesn't call, mustn't I?"

  "You are certainly perpetually distracted," said Robin. "You got that speech wrong again in Act III. You said, 'those who are known by both their names and prices,' when it is,

  'both by.'"

  "It scans better that way," said Nick, unperturbed. "Tourneur hadn't much of an ear."

  "He had sometimes," said Janet. "'A lord's great kitchen without fire in't'?"

  Tina flung the handkerchief down on the table. "How can you talk about poetry!"

  "I thought," said Janet, losing her temper, "that we were tactfully giving you time to collect yourself."

  Tina jumped up and ran out of the dining hall. Molly got up. "Oh, don't," said Janet.

  "Don't spoil her. Why should she get sympathy for making a public scene? Eat your lunch."

  "She wants somebody to go after her," said Molly.

  "I don't care. She's being childish and manipulative."

  "It's rather odd," said Robin. "You'd expect her to sit here suffering in quiet where we could all see her."

  "For God's sake!" said Molly, who had started to sit down but now thrust her chair so violently under the table that she splintered the table's edge.

  "I am a player," said Robin. "I know how these things are done. She's miserable, yes; but she does with her misery what she thinks will give her the most attention from the audience."

  "You are a bunch of cold-blooded bastards," said Molly distinctly; and she left too, though with dignity; she even picked up her tray and deposited it on the conveyor belt before stalking out the door.

  Janet felt tears in her own eyes. She had never cared what Tina thought, but to be condemned by Molly was unbearable. She took a huge swallow of milk and eyed her fellow criminals. Nick looked stunned, as well he might. Robin, damn him, was amused.

  "Who would like to walk out next?" said Janet.

  They looked at her.

  "Which reminds me," said Janet, struggling a little. "Why did Medeous walk out? A lot fewer people would have made any connection if she'd just sat there and gritted her teeth."

  "She got her revenge," said Robin, in mildly astonished t ones. "By ruining the end of

  the play."

  "And I thought Tina was childish. Good grief, isn't life too short for that kind of petty behavior?" She had meant this question to be rhetorical, and in fact nobody answered it.

  But there was a moment of curious stillness, during which Nick stopped cutting up his hamburger (he never ate the buns) and Robin went on pouring milk into his coffee cup until it almost overflowed. He put the milk glass down smoothly, and Nick squished off a bite of hamburger and put it in his mouth.

  Robin said, "It may be that they have similar temperaments. But Medeous has power too, and power can make men petty."

  "And women too?" said Janet, rather more sharply than she meant to. The casual denigration of the play was still with her.

  Robin looked rather blank.

  Nick said, "He thinks 'men' means 'people.' Don't scold him. He doesn't agree with Tourneur, you know."

  "Tourneur doesn't agree with me, either," said Robin. "Did you note what they call the image clusters in that play? Money and food and law. That's all."

  "And lust," said Janet.

  "The word, yes, over and over. But not images of lust. The play's curiously dry in that way. There's a great deal of greasy punning, but they seldom
describe the deed. Not like

  Lear, or Hamlet. "

  "Did you ever play in Lear, Robin?"

  "I was the Fool," said Robin.

  "Can you tell me what it means? We read it in English 10 and it made no sense to me at all. We're about to read it again in 13. I guess Davison might explain it better than Evans, but I doubt it."

  Nick looked thoughtful, and Robin erupted in laughter. He almost upset his coffee cup. When Nick righted it for him, he leaned his chair back and whooped. Long after Janet and Nick had given up making sardonic remarks, he was still wheezing. "Dear, dear, dear, dear," he said finally, wiping his eyes with his napkin. "Explain King Lear? Nobody can explain King Lear, that's the beauty of it. Will Shakespeare couldn't explain it. He wrote what he wrote; that's all."

  "It's a good thing you don't teach English," said Janet, irately.

  Robin snorted feebly. Nick said, "As I was about to say when I was so rudely interrupted, you might think of it as being about authority and the neglect of authority and the abuse of authority. It's a great deal more than that of course—it's about love and hatred, too. But abuse of authority is where it all starts. That may help center your thoughts." He grinned at her."I was in the same production Robin was in," he said. "I played Kent."

  "How could you perform a play if you didn't know what the playwright meant by it?"

  Robin said sententiously, "A poem should not mean, but be."

  "Oh, go on. If anybody else said that, you'd call it modern nonsense."

  "You needn't know what the playwright meant," said Nick hastily. "You need to have some reasonable unity in your mind, that's all."

  "Huh," said Janet, unconvinced, but aware that it was almost one o'clock.

  "Go along, children," said Robin. "If you see Tina, try and salve her affront."

  "Huh," said Nick, with more emphasis than Janet had used.

  They went hurriedly out of the dining hall and through the wordy tunnels. Somebody had added a verse of a Rod McKuen song, which had already garnered seven rude comments. A little beyond it Tennyson and Robert Blake were warring for space. A few political slogans, predictable and unpoetic, marred what little remaining empty space there was; somebody had then come along and filled in the huge black letters with lines from Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague," written very small in red ink. Janet looked at them thoughtfully as she walked by. Horrible things were happening in the world outside the college, said the political slogans; and they always had, said the interlocutory verse.

  "This world uncertain is." She took Nick's hand, quickly. When I graduate, she thought, then I'll think about these things. When I know something.

  They went up the steps and down the red-carpeted hall, their fingers entwined, smiling secret smiles at each other. And stopped with a certain shock outside the open door of Janet's room. Nick shrugged and gestured Janet in.

  Molly, in her air force parka and her red cap and mittens, a pile of notebooks beside her, sat on her bed.

  "Where's Tina?" said Janet, cautiously.

  "Wallowing all over Nora," said Molly. "It's Nora's job. I'm sorry I called you names.

  She really is completely self-centered; I don't blame you for being sick of it."

  "Well, I'm sorry I wasn't more civilized."

  "I tried to be, and all it got me was idiocy. She like s making the worst of things. She wouldn't listen to any sense or advice; she just wanted to lie around wailing." Molly stood up. "I'm off to lab. I made Tina take her coat with her, so you can go ahead and lock the door. See you at dinner." She stumped out in her heavy boots and shut the door behind her.

  "Well, that's better," said Janet, filling her blue enamel kettle at the sink and plunking it down on Molly's illegal hot plate. She crawled under Molly's desk to plug in the hot plate, which was a primitive device without an on-off switch.

  "It's not better for Tina," said Nick.

  "Fuck Tina," said Janet, without thinking.

  "I've considered it," said Nick.

  Janet remembered not to bump her head on the underside of the desk. She backed out carefully and sat back on her heels. "Very funny."

  "You two aren't just to her."

  Janet stood up, carefully. He looked a little troubled; he did not have the look that meant he wanted to be annoying. She said, "If you think you're going to make me more just by telling me you want to go to bed with her, you've fried your brains studying."

  "Don't you want to go to bed with Robin?"

  Janet sat down on her bed and gaped at him. " Robin? Are you kidding? Robin is an alien. If he treated me the way he treats Molly I'd kill him. I don't even want to go for a walk with Robin without you or Molly as an interpreter."

  Nick snagged the hairbrush off her bureau, sat down behind her, and began spreading her hair out on her back preparatory to brushing it. "I did not ask, do you want to marry Robin; I did not ask, did you wish to be a friend of Robin's; I di d not ask, did you wish to go

  for a walk with Robin. I asked, did you not wish to go to bed with him?"

  "I can't isolate it like that," said Janet. The kettle was boiling. She made herself a cup of contraceptive tea—it tasted like mint that had begun to go rotten—and Nick a cup of Constant Comment, to which he was addicted. They drank in silence, and Janet sat down where she had been.

  "I forget how young you are," said Nick, beginning to brush her hair.

  "You, of course, are as old as Methuselah."

  "Not quite."

  "Come on, you're a freshman too."

  "I took a long time to get through high school."

  "How come?"

  "That," said Nick, "is a very good question. Let us answer it together."

  They both fell asleep afterward, sleep being in as short supply as free time at this point in the term. Janet woke up first. Luckily Nick was not sleeping on her watch arm. She looked at the watch; it was three-fifteen. Nick could have another half hour or so.

  She lay staring at the ceiling, blue and gray with snow light, and found her brain picking over the day's conversations as if they were a poem. A clichéd question about the shortness of life had been greeted oddly; Nick had said she was young, as if he were not; and there were other remarks, Thomas's about how long Nick and Robin had known one another; the large number of plays they seemed to have been in together. She had called Robin an alien; what if that were true? On the other hand, Nick, for all his affected speech and peculiar notions, was as human as he could be; and Robin, however maddening, was not nearly as weird as people could get. Anyway, why in the world should old aliens attend a liberal-arts college in Minnesota? If they could get here without being noticed, they must have better sources of information than this. It was a nice plot for a science-fiction novel, but it really made about as much sense as The Revenger's Tragedy.

  "Insufficient data," muttered Janet, and went back to sleep herself.

  Tina was intolerable for two weeks. Janet and Molly finally got together and made a schedule, based on the difficulty and urgency of their classes on a given day, of which of them was required to be nice to her and which could retreat to the library or be monosyllabic. Molly ended up with a heavier burden, since she and Tina shared a class and a lab period, but she professed not to mind.

  Tina spent so much time listening for the telephone and flying out to answer it that Nick suggested she take her mattress out into the hall and camp out under the phone cabinet; it would just fit, he said, between Nora's door and the bathroom. This piece of wit caused Tina to flee wailing. If it had not been Molly's day to be kind to her, Janet might have come to blows with Nick. As it was, she lacked the energy.

  On the eve of finals, Thomas called Thursday afternoon at three-thirty. Peg answered the phone, and banged on the door. Janet was dressing; she buttoned her shirt in a hurry and went barefoot to answer it. "It's Thomas for Tina," said Peg.

  "I'll take it," said Janet, and marched grimly out into the hallway.

  "This is Janet. Tina's got lab,
you know that."

  "How is she?" said Thomas's resonant voice.

  Janet was strongly tempted to tell him she was happy and singing and going out with one of the football players in Dunbar. "How the hell do you think she is, you dimwit?"

  "Bad, huh?"

  "As bad as you can imagine, and add seventy-five percent."

  "Well, shit. Will she speak to me?"

  "I'm sure she will. I don't know what exactly she'll say, though. If you have something fireproof and waterproof, I suggest you put it on. She won't know whether to sear you to a crisp and serve you up in Taylor, or weep all over you."

  "I couldn't help it."

  "Don't practice your excuses on me." There was a silence at the other end; Janet suddenly remembered that Thomas had been through an ordeal that was probably worse than Tina's, even if equally self-inflicted. "Are you staying?"

  "Yes. I am now a proud member of the English Department."

  "Congratulations, I think."

  "We'll see. Will you ask Tina to call me?"

  "Don't be so stupid! Get over here with a dozen roses and look as sorrowful as you can."

  "That won't be hard," said Thomas. "I'll see you this evening."

  "You will not. Molly and I are going to be absent. Don't you have any idea how to conduct an apology in a romance?"

  "Apparently not," said Thomas, and hung up.

  Janet slammed the receiver down and stamped back to her room, full of the particular anger that meant she was ashamed of herself. What was the point of snapping at Thomas?

  And why encourage him to make things up with the detestable Christina? The first sign of trouble and she turned into a whining brat. On the other hand, Thomas had no business breaking up with her by disappearing for two weeks and then not apologizing properly. She rounded the corner from the little hallway into the room proper. Nick was sitting up in her bed, dressed but very tousled.

  "That was Thomas," said Janet. "I yelled at him."

  "I heard you," said Nick. "Anybody would think Tina was worth defending."