Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  The highlight of Henry V is Shakespeare’s famous Saint Crispin’s Day speech. In the film, Kenneth Branagh, who plays King Henry, stands on a hill and inspires his troops (and his audience) with some of the most stirring lines in the Shakespearean canon. “This story shall the good man teach his son; and Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered,” he cries. Violins climax in the background.

  But I didn’t see it. Some things can pull attention away from even the Saint Crispin’s Day speech.

  Kissing Dylan is one of those things.

  The next morning, he appeared at my dorm room with a bouquet.

  “You brought me flowers?” I said.

  “Of course.” Dylan shrugged.

  I looked at them.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said. The last thing John had given me was a welt. I was supposed to prefer the flowers.

  I leaned over to sniff them.

  “Mmm,” I recited. “Beautiful!”

  And just like that, I was cheating on my boyfriend.

  With John, who reminded me of myself, I was free to be raw and uncensored. But Dylan reminded me of the person I longed to be. He seemed as smooth and sweet as refined sugar. I couldn’t inflict my real identity on Dylan, so I tried to be someone else—someone normal.

  My apparent ability to compartmentalize was frightening. I could spend a week with Dylan at Stanford and a weekend with John in Los Angeles without missing a beat. My brain had one boyfriend and my body had another. I tried to excuse the inexcusable by telling myself that it was just a fling; Dylan would graduate in a few weeks, and I would fully recommit to John. If I were ever to experiment with a more socially normative relationship dynamic, Dylan might be my only chance.

  There was one hitch: I had accepted a summer internship in Nicaragua a few months earlier.

  “I thought you were going to spend the summer with me,” John had said.

  “I know,” I’d replied. “But I just—well, I feel like I have to see as much of the world as I can before—I mean, you know things might get bad with my disease, right?”

  At that, John crumbled like feta.

  “Of course, of course,” he had said. “You’re right. You should go.” He was a good man.

  I had rationalized my on-campus infidelity in so many ways. I didn’t have sex with Dylan, so it didn’t count; John had dated me for almost a year under a fabricated identity, so I deserved a big mistake of my own; I had never dated anyone else, so I was entitled to a sip of experience.

  But how could I rationalize the fact that only a few weeks into my summer internship, I quit that job and took a bus from Nicaragua to Honduras?

  “Happy birthday,” Dylan said, with a smile, when I arrived in Tegucigalpa, his hometown. I had turned nineteen a few weeks before.

  “It’s good to see you,” I replied.

  Eight days later, in a cheap motel on the Caribbean coastline, I tasted vanilla for the first time. It was safe and sweet, like cotton candy—and like cotton candy, it left me empty and unsatisfied.

  Dylan and I went through the motions in Honduras—we watched movies, we went to a play, we hung out with his friends. But something was off.

  “My eyes itch,” I said once.

  “Doth that bode weeping?” Dylan asked.

  “What?” I said, annoyed.

  “Othello,” Dylan reminded me.

  I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes.

  Once, as Dylan and I hiked in the Honduran rain forest, I farted. The accidental display of human biology was humiliating enough by itself, but Dylan’s unamused reaction made it worse. It confirmed my suspicions: Dylan wasn’t interested in anything that deviated from his script. It was obvious to both of us that, although we valued our friendship and had enjoyed our Stanford fling, we didn’t click.

  “Did John ever hit you?” Dylan asked me one afternoon as we sat in a café.

  I blinked. I had no idea why he’d asked me that. But, knowing me, I’d probably dropped hints.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, what do I mean?” he said. “It’s pretty binary: Did he ever hit you?”

  I pulled my legs up onto my chair and stirred my latte with a spoon.

  “There’s the kind of hitting that’s violent, and the kind of hitting that’s . . . not violent,” I said. “John was never violent. Does that make sense?”

  Dylan let that sink in. Then he asked: “Was this a dynamic he wanted, or a dynamic you wanted?” It was a moment of truth.

  Of course, Hamlet had to butt in. He took a seat at the table.

  “This above all: to thine own self be true,” he said, with a smug grin.

  “What the hell are you doing in Honduras, Ham?” I asked, rolling my eyes. “And that’s not even your line.”

  “In this play,” he smirked, “they’re all my lines.”

  Dylan looked at me, expectantly.

  “It was a dynamic I wanted,” I admitted.

  Dylan’s expression changed.

  “Honestly, Jillian, that makes me feel sad,” he said.

  It was a simple remark, said kindly and with compassion. But I bristled. It was my first confrontation with the fact that my sexuality might be judged not on whether it was satisfying to me, but rather on whether it was palatable to men. God forbid my sexuality make Dylan “feel sad.”

  In Hamlet, Shakespeare was right: sexual indifference is a beast. My experiment with vanilla romance had failed. I couldn’t survive on food that disappeared so effortlessly on my tongue.

  I turned back to Dylan.

  “Who cares about John?” I said. “It’s not even worth talking about.”

  Dylan nodded and sipped his coffee. Our fling was over. I knew it; he knew it.

  An hour later, I picked up the phone and called California. I hadn’t talked to John in a few days.

  “Where have you been?” John asked. I shuffled my feet against the floor.

  “I’ve been on a bus,” I lied. “From Managua to San Miguel. I’m in El Salvador now.”

  “El Salvador?” he asked. “Why?”

  “I just wanted to see it,” I muttered.

  “Is that guy in El Salvador or something?” John asked. He had been jealous, and suspicious, of Dylan since the beginning of freshman year.

  “Do you mean Dylan? He’s Honduran, not Salvadoran,” I replied. “You know that.”

  “You didn’t answer my question, Jillian,” John said.

  John and I liked to play with punishment and discipline. But I was never going to tell him why I deserved to be punished for real this time.

  “I haven’t seen Dylan,” I lied. “I assume he’s in Tegucigalpa, where his parents live.”

  “And you’re in El Salvador?” John repeated.

  Apparently I’m a gambler.

  “I’m in a restaurant right now,” I said. “I can give the phone to a waitress if you’d like her to confirm it.”

  I held my breath. Could I convince the barista to validate my lie? What if I paid her?

  “That’s not necessary,” John said. “I’m going to come down there.”

  “What?” I asked, blinking.

  “I’m going to buy a flight and come down there,” he repeated. “I want to see you.”

  My stomach fluttered. I wanted to see him, too.

  “I’ve missed you, John,” I told him.

  The next day, I wished Dylan good luck with his Ph.D. program, gave him an awkward kiss good-bye, and left Honduras.

  There’s a beach in El Salvador called La Libertad. It’s one of the best right-hand point breaks in Central America. As John surfed there, cutting through the water like a rattlesnake in desert sand, I sat on the rocks and watched him. I had made a mistake.

  I would never make that mistake again.

  When he finished surfing, John and I bought pupusas by the side of road and ate them next to the water.

  “I should p
unish you for quitting your internship so early,” John said, wrapping an arm around me. “It’s all I thought about during the flight.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder.

  “But if you were still in Managua, we wouldn’t get to be here now,” John continued. “So I’ll cut you some slack—this time.” He pressed his lips to the top of my head in a hard, fierce, kiss.

  We got back to our hotel, and I stepped into the shower to wash away the saltwater in my hair.

  “Where’s your aloe vera, bird?” John called from the other room.

  “In my backpack,” I replied, from the shower. “Check the outer pocket.”

  “Found it,” he said.

  I turned off the water, pulled on my underwear, and stepped out of the bathroom, tousling my wet hair with a washcloth. John was standing next to my backpack. His face was pointed away from me. The room felt oddly still and silent.

  Then I noticed my passport in his hand.

  I froze.

  John turned to look at me. His face was still and hard, cut in ice in a way I’d never seen before. Without saying a word, he walked across the room and handed me my passport. It was open to the page where my Honduran entry and exit stamps were clearly marked.

  I gazed down at it. I couldn’t bring myself to meet John’s eyes.

  John grabbed my jaw, hard, and forced my face up to look at him. This time, no one was playing.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked. His voice was quiet, but cold.

  I heard myself reply, as if from across the room, in a voice I did not recognize:

  “I guess this makes me a liar, like you.”

  I didn’t see it happen. I felt it. A second after I spoke, a hard blow flashed across the side of my face. I fell back a few steps, holding my hand to my cheek. The back of John’s hand was red.

  I was stunned. John had hit me a hundred times before. But this time was different.

  He brought his fingers up to his eyes and pressed them into the sockets, as if he had a headache.

  “Damn it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my knees.

  “I’m sorry,” John said, sitting next to me. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think it matters anymore,” I said.

  Minutes passed in silence.

  “Did he hold you?” John finally asked. His voice was thick and hoarse, just as it had been the first night our better angels gave way to worser spirits.

  I looked at John. Did Dylan “hold me”? My heart curled up into itself. Of all the questions John could have asked, that’s what he wanted to know.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “He did.”

  John nodded.

  The death of Ophelia happens offstage. We will never know for sure exactly why she dies. In defiance of artists, readers, academics, and even the other characters in the play, Ophelia simply slips beneath the water: we cannot follow her.

  John once told me that when a person drowns, there is a moment of peace before the end. When he was trapped under the water at the Banzai Pipeline, John experienced it himself. He looked up toward the surface, at the oxygen he couldn’t reach, and thought how beautiful the sunlight looked as it reflected through the waves.

  “I love you, Jillian,” John said. “I’ll love you forever. You’re the love of my life.”

  His jeans were ripped. There was a big tear over his knee. I picked up a pen from the nightstand and drew a heart in the hole, on his skin.

  “No one will ever understand me like you do,” I said, pressing my forehead into John’s shoulder. He intertwined his fingers with my own, and we locked hands.

  The next evening, we flew back to California on separate planes.

  When John dumped me, over the phone, three weeks later, I sobbed. I begged him to change his mind. I begged him to give me another chance. I suggested we try an open relationship. I tried every humiliating, degrading tactic I could imagine in my tearful campaign to make him stay.

  He refused. He didn’t want to be with me. He wanted to be with someone else. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had explored other options that spring.

  When pleasure and pain disappear, there are no feelings left. John ended the call, and I stopped crying. I tried to guess how many showers John had taken since the last time I saw him. More than twenty, probably. I thought about the little heart I had drawn on his knee. I wondered how many showers it survived before it washed away in all that water.

  3.2 Twelfth Night:

  What Should I Do

  At the beginning of Twelfth Night, Viola survives a shipwreck and washes ashore in a foreign land.

  “What country, friends, is this?” she asks, and learns that she is in Ilyria.

  “And what should I do in Ilyria?” she replies.

  What she does is disguise herself as a male castrato, seemingly devoid of sexual impulses, named Cesario. Her sexuality poses a risk in this foreign country, so Viola tries to get rid of it.

  She can’t, of course. Behind her disguise, she’s still a woman. She’s still herself. She is still able to fall in love—and she does.

  Almost a year had passed since John had dumped me.

  For the first few months, I disappeared. I buried myself in night shifts as an Olive Garden hostess. Between work and classes, I had little time to think or feel anything at all.

  “Welcome to Olive Garden. How many in your party?”

  “Welcome to Olive Garden. How many in your party?”

  “Welcome to Olive Garden. How many in your party?”

  The highlight of every day was just before bed. That’s when I got to write “NJ” on the corner of my calendar, as a reward for resisting the temptation to call John for another day. “NJ” meant “No John,” but it could have stood for “No Jillian.” For those months, I just wasn’t there.

  After my calendar had filled with almost a hundred tiny “NJs,” I tried to wake myself up. I went on first dates with classmates (both male and female; I’d known since high school that either was fine with me) but rarely a second. I spent enough time at a dungeon in San Francisco to realize that although BDSM is a broad term that includes spanking obsessives, like me, we also belong to different subcultures, with different aesthetic styles and mind-sets. I fit in at that dungeon only as well as a gay man might at a lesbian bar: we could relate, but it wasn’t my place. For a brief phase, I wondered if I might be asexual, since spanking mattered to me so much more than anything formally recognized as “sex.” I even hooked up with a classmate and her boyfriend one night, hoping that the triumvirate might remind me how feelings felt. But I discovered only that three scoops of vanilla interest me no more than two.

  So, just as I had done at seventeen, I fled. First, to Oxford, where weekly twenty-page essay assignments for that Shakespearean cartographer helped me pass the time in a numb fog. Then, when Stanford gave me a grant to do honors thesis research abroad, I “stopped out” of college (albeit with the full intention of someday going back) and moved to Oman.

  Oman, like Arizona, is a desert. It’s hard to see the water in its earth.

  I wanted to dry out, too. Over the previous year, the wounds from my twin failures—my failure to find vanilla satisfaction with Dylan and failure to find sadomasochistic sanity with John—had cauterized. Obviously, I was fucked up. I was a toxic person fishing for love in a radioactive pond. I felt hard and indifferent.

  Love was shit. Sex was shit. Shakespeare—well, Shakespeare was too wrapped up with sex for me to separate the two, so Shakespeare was shit by association.

  And spanking? Good grief, fuck that, forget that, forget me. Forget all of it. I’d be a castrato, too.

  Besides, I had a new dominant in my life.

  “No,” Sabihah snapped, when she saw me in the hallway one morning on my way to Arabic class. “You can’t wear that.”

  I looked down at myself. I was wearing a blac
k abaya, just like almost every other woman in the country.

  “What’s wrong, Auntie?” I asked.

  “Those sunglasses,” she replied. “They are ugly. Go put on the other ones.”

  I suppressed a grin.

  “Yes, Auntie,” I replied.

  Oman has close ties to Tanzania: in fact, the capital of the Omani empire used to be the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar. To this day, there is a huge Swahili-speaking Zanzibari community in Muscat. My apartment was in a predominantly Zanzibari neighborhood called al-Azaiba, where a few words of basic Swahili would be more useful than my broken Arabic. One afternoon, on a mission to better understand my neighbors, I went with two friends to a bookstore to pick up a Swahili-to-Arabic dictionary to supplement my Arabic-to-English one.

  As I browsed the shelves, a large group of young Omani men walked into the store and headed for the stationery section. The two women I was with, both Omani, pulled black niqabs over their faces to conceal themselves from the men. Laughing, they began to quiz me to see if I could tell them apart with their faces covered.

  I chuckled with them, but I was startled past genuine mirth. There is a scene in Twelfth Night in which two women, Olivia and Maria, cover their faces to confuse and tease a messenger. In Oman, I thought I could hide from Shakespeare, and every other part of myself. But he had tracked me down in this accidental Omani performance of Twelfth Night.

  Shakespeare exists everywhere on earth. It was futile to resist him.

  In Muscat, there’s an upscale neighborhood called Shatti al-Qurm. It has a restaurant with beautiful nargile pipes and, most nights, live music. I slid into a seat at a table next to a familiar face.

  “Welcome back,” Duke Orsino, Viola’s crush from Twelfth Night, said.

  We ordered some mint-flavored shisha and settled in for the night. Orsino listened to the music, nodding with approval.

  “If music be the food of love, play on,” he said. “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.”

  I nodded and slid the hookah across the table to him. Orsino inhaled a long stream of smoke as the musician’s song reached a tragic crescendo. Its effect on Orsino was immediate: his eyes teared, his cheeks flushed, and he sat up straighter.