Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  I sat bolt upright in the tub.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. The place with the good tofu was far away, and John had work the next morning.

  “Sure,” he said. “But I want to see you fifteen minutes early next time.” He winked.

  “Totally!” I replied. “Thirty minutes early.” Tofu, like spankings, is a powerful motivator.

  Spain had, and still has, a serious domestic violence problem. During the dictatorial reign of Francisco Franco from 1936 to 1975, wife beating was legal. Women who tried to flee abusive husbands could even be arrested and imprisoned for “abandoning the home.” This laid the cultural groundwork for generations of abuse. In 1997, a brave woman named Ana Orantes had appeared on a Spanish TV show to describe the decades of brutal violence she endured at her husband’s hands. Despite dozens of police reports, she said, Orantes was never able to get a restraining order. After the show aired, her husband attacked her one last time. He doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. Orantes’s murder became a rallying cry for domestic-violence activists around the world.

  Six years later, in 2003, while John and I lived in Spain, violence against women was once again in every conversation and headline. Ms. Orantes was back in the news: that year, the Spanish parliament unanimously passed a bill that might have saved her life, called the Order for the Protection of Victims of Domestic Violence. It empowered victims to fast-track a restraining order against a violent partner. But despite the new law, domestic violence fatalities in Spain continued to surge. The year 2003 was on track to be the deadliest yet. That year, in Barcelona, the same city where John and I lived, an investigation was launched against a judge who ignored thirteen domestic-violence complaints from a woman named Ana Maria Fabregas. The courts finally paid attention only after her husband beat her to death with a hammer.

  As John and I picked through tofu and vegetables in the downtown Chinese restaurant we loved, a depressing thought occurred to me.

  “That sucked this afternoon,” I said.

  “I’ll be more careful with the curtains next time,” he replied. “It’s my fault.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “It sucks that the woman who saw us didn’t call the police.”

  For years, I had tried to convince myself that my personal life was personal. But set against the background of Spain’s history of domestic violence, it was hard to ignore the possibility that my personal life might also be, as the second-wave feminist movement had insisted, political.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel guilty?” I asked John. “As if—well, it’s as if what we do makes light of the real problem. As if we disrespect real victims. Don’t you feel that way?”

  John, frustrated, tossed his chopsticks onto the table.

  “No, Jillian, I don’t feel that way,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s fair. Consent changes everything, doesn’t it? Do women who enjoy sex ‘disrespect real victims’ of rape?”

  “Of course not,” I said, uncertainly.

  “So why would you put that logic on us?” he asked.

  I had no reply.

  “You’re not the only person in this relationship with feelings, Jillian,” John continued. “When you compare what we do to abuse, you compare me to those men. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “You’re nothing like that, John,” I muttered.

  “I just feel really alone in this sometimes,” he finished. “Like it’s only me.”

  I paused. He was right. I had been so fixated on my own insecurities that I hadn’t noticed John’s. He felt vulnerable about our sexuality, too.

  I reached across the table to grab his hand.

  Silence feeds fear, and makes it fat.

  “It’s not only you, okay?” I told him. “You’re not alone in this.”

  “Say it, Jillian,” he said. “I want to hear you say it. At least one time.”

  I swallowed and fixed my eyes on my plate.

  “I like it,” I choked.

  “What do you like?” he pressed.

  I looked up at him. My throat was tight.

  “I like it when you spank me,” I said. “I love it. I think about it all the time.” It was the first time I had admitted such a thing out loud. I looked down and shook my head.

  John pressed his lips together in a tight smile.

  “And sometimes you’re late on purpose, right?” he said.

  I shifted under his gaze.

  “Not today,” I mumbled.

  “But sometimes?”

  With an embarrassed swallow, I admitted that it was true. My “brattiness” was purposeful: I used it to exert control over our game. John nodded. It was a slow nod, thoughtful and deliberate.

  “Listen to me, Jillian,” he said. “You can own this shit, too. If you want a spanking, just ask for one. Is that clear?”

  I couldn’t make eye contact with him. I scuffed my feet against the carpet and nodded at the floor.

  John leaned back in his chair, satisfied.

  “You can have the last piece of tofu, bird,” he finally said.

  “I was going to take it anyway,” I muttered. He laughed.

  Many people assume that the high-spirited “shrew” we meet in the early scenes of The Taming of the Shrew is the “authentic” Katherine. But what if that version of Katherine is a performance? What if Katherine’s shrewishness, rather than being sincere, is a self-aware response to her circumstances before Petruchio enters her life?

  Baptista, Katherine’s father, sees his daughter as an object. At the time, daughters were the legal property of their fathers, to be sold or disposed of in marriage. Katherine can’t control the fact that she is an object to her father and to her culture. But, by pretending to be “damaged goods,” she can control the terms and timing of her own sale. As Stephen Orgel points out, “The idea of a rich man’s daughter deliberately rendering herself unmarriageable through antisocial behavior [would have had] a great deal of cultural resonance in the England of 1590.” In other words, Kate’s brattiness was like my own. She used it to seize ownership of her situation.

  The Taming of the Shrew is, indeed, a play about misogyny and the subjugation of women. Someone does abuse Katherine. But we have the wrong villain in our sights. The abuser is Baptista—and, more to the point, the culture that produced him—not Petruchio. After all, Petruchio silences himself when Kate speaks. He encourages Kate to deliver the most memorable speech in the play. And he is the only person who sees through Kate’s shrewish performance and defends the woman who hides behind it. “Yourself and all the world, that talk’d of her, have talk’d amiss of her,” Petruchio tells Baptista.

  Katherine isn’t “broken” at the end of the play. She is broken at the beginning. In both The Taming of the Shrew’s fictional society and in our own real one, Katherine’s real enemy is the ingrained cultural subjugation of women and children. There is a difference between the abuse inflicted on Katherine in her actual life and the performed abuse in her relationship with Petruchio. As I said, the scenes where Petruchio “tames” Kate do, and should, challenge us. But the feigned submissiveness that Katherine gives to Petruchio at the end of the play is nothing like the forced oppression that her father and her culture inflict. We can’t let counterfeit suppositions blear our eyes.

  Love is a country, with closed borders and a language no foreigner can speak. The only people who can understand its customs, traditions, and history are its citizens. A relationship doesn’t have to make sense to all people. It only has to make sense to two people.

  “If she and I be pleased,” says Petruchio, “what’s that to you?”

  I couldn’t put it better myself.

  AT EIGHTEEN, AFTER many months in Spain, I flew back to Phoenix for the last few days before college. Away from the intoxicating physicality of Spain, I began to move back into my brain. Puzzle pieces I’d never noticed before came into focus. There was no dramatic moment of clarity. It was just a creeping awareness until, one day
, I understood something.

  Trust is a house of cards, and when mine fell, it fell as cards do: quietly. I picked up the phone and dialed long-distance to Spain.

  John answered.

  “It was a lie, wasn’t it?” I said. “The reason you didn’t want to help me pick a humanities course, the reason you wouldn’t recommend classes—you didn’t go to Stanford. You’ve been lying to me. Right?”

  Through the line, I could almost feel John exhale.

  “Yes,” he finally said. “That was a lie.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. I nodded as I spoke, although no one could see. “Was that the only lie?”

  The pause was long. The pause was so long that seasons changed; the pause was so long that children were born, grew, loved and lost, and died; the pause was so long that flowers sprouted and bloomed over their tombstones; the pause was so long that those flowers died, too. My point is, it was a long pause.

  “John, it’s okay,” I finally said. “I just want to know the truth. Was that the only lie?”

  “No,” he replied. “It wasn’t.”

  I wrote before that kink is a trust fall. This is the moment when I hit the ground.

  ACT THREE

  Pain – has an Element of Blank –

  It cannot recollect

  When it begun – or if there were

  A day when it was not –

  —Emily Dickinson

  3.1 Hamlet:

  Nothing, My Lord

  Dylan was so dreamy.

  He had the mix of dark hair, dark eyes, and suave, confident sex appeal that inspires millions of fantasies. He was a twenty-two-year-old Honduran senior at Stanford, where he’d spent the previous four years studying Shakespeare and science. Dylan had the distant refinement of someone who grew up with jaw-dropping wealth, and he was brilliant.

  And he was saying something to me. What was it?

  I didn’t care. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about the sound a belt makes when it slides through pant loops.

  “Don’t you agree?” Dylan said.

  “Um,” I said. “Sure. Yes, definitely. What?”

  “Then how would you respond to Kahn?” he asked.

  Oh, no. Was he talking about Coppélia Kahn? Joel Kahn? Michael Kahn? Victoria Kahn? Damn it! Why was every single person in academia named Kahn? I searched my memory for clues.

  “Uh,” I stalled. “Well—”

  My cell phone rang and rescued me. I answered it.

  “I’m here!” a voice announced through the phone.

  “Great,” I said into the receiver. “Come into the CoHo.” (It was five months into my freshman year, and I’d absorbed the Stanford campus lingo: “CoHo” was short for “coffee house,” “MemChu” was short for “Memorial Church,” “MemAud” was short for “Memorial Auditorium,” and so on. But despite my best efforts, and much to my disappointment, “PoOff” never caught on as an abbreviation for “Post Office.”)

  A minute later, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around.

  “Hi, honey,” I said, standing up.

  I turned back toward Dylan.

  “You remember my boyfriend, right?” I asked him. “This is John.”

  “Of course,” Dylan said, politely. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Hey, man,” John replied. They shook hands.

  John turned to me.

  “It was a long drive up here, bird,” he said. “I’m exhausted. Can we head out?”

  “Of course,” I replied. “See you tomorrow, Dylan?”

  When we got to his car, John didn’t waste any time.

  “I don’t like that guy,” he said.

  “Come on, John,” I said. “There’s nothing to be jealous about. Dylan has a girlfriend. And I have a boyfriend.” I poked John playfully in the arm. He replied with a reluctant smile.

  When I first realized that John had been lying to me, a few months earlier, we didn’t break up. We fought.

  “You’re being a snob,” John had yelled, over the phone from Spain. “Why does it matter where I went to college?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” I’d yelled back. “What matters is that you lied! I trusted you!”

  We went back and forth like this for almost an hour.

  “I didn’t mean to lie to you, bird,” John finally said. “The lies were already out there before you showed up. I got stuck with them. I didn’t expect to meet you.”

  I swallowed.

  “You were in a different country,” I offered. “You wanted to try on a different life for a while.”

  “Exactly,” he replied.

  I could understand the impulse. I sniffled and tried to regain my composure.

  “What about the surfing?” I asked. My voice shook. “Was that true? Was Cloudbreak real?”

  “No,” he said.

  A noise came out of my throat that I had never heard myself make before.

  “Oh, bird,” John said through the phone. “That was a joke! I was just trying to lighten the mood. Of course the surf stories are true. You’ve seen my scar.”

  I was sobbing.

  “Jillian, Jillian,” John said. “What’s going on over there? Why are you crying now?”

  I couldn’t catch my breath to respond.

  “This part is easy, bird,” John was saying. “There are places in Northern California where you can watch me surf. This is the easiest thing to solve. I didn’t mean to upset you. It was just a joke.”

  I gasped for air. My hands trembled.

  “I thought I didn’t know you at all,” I wept.

  “The surf stuff is true, Jillian,” he said. “I swear to God, that part is true.”

  John did have that scar on his calf. (God knows I’d had plenty of opportunities to memorize it every time I was over his knee for some manufactured infraction.) But since I now required two-step verification for every detail of John’s life, when he moved back to the United States and found a job in Southern California only a few months later, I flew down to Los Angeles to watch him surf.

  He did surf—beautifully, and with obvious joy. So that, at least, was real.

  It was also true that he had spent some time in law school. That’s why he had been able to get the paralegal job in Barcelona. But he hadn’t graduated.

  He had also spent some time in jail.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” John brooded.

  “No way,” I replied. “That’s not fair. I deserve the truth. All of it. I’ve earned it.”

  “I’m sorry, Jillian,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Did it have something to do with Luce?” I asked.

  John blinked.

  “Wait—what?” he replied. “What about Luce?”

  “You told me that things with Luce got out of control,” I said. The coldness of my own voice surprised even me. “Did you do something to her? Is that why you went to jail? Is that what you meant when you said things went ‘too far’ with her?”

  “What?” John said. “God, Jillian, no. I had a gun without a permit. Is that enough?”

  “I don’t know, John,” I replied. “How can I believe anything now?”

  This new detail about John’s life—that he had been incarcerated—rewrote every memory. I remembered his heavy sigh when I joked at him to not drop the soap if the Barcelona police came to arrest him. I remembered the night we bought cocaine in Las Tres Mil Viviendas, and his furious fear when I left the car. I remembered a night in Spain when we had rented the movie Wall Street. At the end of the film, when Charlie Sheen’s character gets arrested, he cries.

  “He’s crying?” I’d said, scornfully, at the time. John had bristled.

  “A lot of people cry when they get arrested,” he replied.

  Did that mean John had cried at his own arrest? I had never seen him cry. I couldn’t picture it.

  “I can get over this,” I finally told him. “But you can’t lie to me ever again.”

&
nbsp; “I’ll work to earn your forgiveness for as long as you’ll let me,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “Don’t do that Catholic guilt thing with—wait! We didn’t go over that! Did you really go to Catholic school? That part had to be true, right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” John said, with a smile. “That part was true.”

  And so we tried to get over it. He got a job at a construction company in Los Angeles. I stayed in Palo Alto, five hours north. We were close enough to visit almost every weekend. But something irreparable had broken. In BDSM, we talk about “headspace”—a frame of mind that is far more important in kink than anything physical. When I’m in the right headspace, it feels like there’s no degree of physical pain I can’t savor. But after I learned about John’s lies, my headspace was all messed up. I just couldn’t submit to him as fully as I could before.

  I went through the motions, but it wasn’t the same. Pain started to feel, of all things, painful.

  “Stay there,” John said, as I knelt next to a bed in the Quality Inn on El Camino Real in Palo Alto. “Keep your eyes on that painting. Don’t turn around.”

  I wasn’t blindfolded. In our whole relationship, actually, John had never blindfolded me. It would’ve been easy to turn around and see what he was doing. But I kept my eyes on the painting.

  Cold metal touched the back of my neck. I flinched.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  John didn’t reply.

  The painting was a landscape scene. Green trees stood in the horizon beyond a field. Behind some distant mountains, there was a pink sunset. It was bright, like strawberry lemonade.

  The metal rolled down the length of my spine.

  I didn’t want to look at that prefabricated motel painting: I wanted to want to look at it. I wanted to feel what I had felt in Spain. I blinked, and, for a second, the landscape disappeared.

  “Is that . . . is that my curling iron?” I asked. John paused.

  “Yes,” he finally confirmed, in a blunt, matter-of-fact tone. Its metallic tongue stopped licking my back. I heard the shuffle of movement behind me.