Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  Credence doesn’t get a lot of visitors.

  “Do you want to see our crops?” David asked.

  I blinked.

  “What?” I said.

  “The wheat crop is out,” he explained. “Do you want a tour of the farm?”

  I suppressed a grin.

  “I like it when you talk about crops, babe,” I said, sharing the inside joke with myself.

  “You’re interested in farm stuff?” David exclaimed. He was flattered.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  I tried to focus on David’s tour of the tractor shed, but it was easy to get distracted. If I had known how much potential for sadomasochistic fantasy there is in farm culture, I’d have rustled up a farm boy sooner.

  “This is the machine we use to thrash—” he said.

  “What?” I interrupted.

  “I was saying, this is the machine we use to thresh wheat,” David explained.

  “Oh,” I replied.

  “Damn, girl, be cool,” said Cleopatra, lounging in the driver’s seat of a tractor. “In a minute, he’s going to show you how to tie different kinds of knots, and I don’t want your head to explode.”

  I blushed.

  “But you see what I’m seeing, right, Cleo?” I asked.

  Cleopatra stretched out and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Oh, yeah,” she replied, eyeing a swivel carabiner tie-down. “This is some perverted farm porn right here.”

  “I’ll show you how to tie a tension hitch,” David said.

  Geography is destiny. It influences our personalities, histories, interests, and even our politics. Roman Cleopatra wouldn’t be Cleopatra; Egyptian Antony would be unrecognizable. Geography shapes us in ways we can understand and in a million more ways we can’t.

  But I wanted to understand. North Dakota was a culture shock unlike anything I had ever experienced. It made Oman feel as familiar as a Starbucks menu. Credence was part of my country, but it wasn’t part of my world. I wanted to understand how this place had produced a man like David.

  I’d known the basics of David’s story from the beginning of our relationship, of course. As we dated, he filled in the details I hadn’t read online.

  In 2001, David had gone to high school with bruises on his face. (David’s older sister had recently graduated and moved away.) The school principal called North Dakota Child Protection Services, which sent a social worker to Credence and ultimately placed David in informal foster care. For the next three years, David, for the most part, didn’t talk to his father, C.J. David didn’t talk to C.J. when he graduated from high school as valedictorian or when he got accepted to college. When he moved to California, he flew there alone.

  In the year before I met him, however, David had tried to reconnect with his dad. They talked on the phone sometimes—usually when C.J. drunk-dialed David at 2:00 A.M., on the dot, because that’s when the bar (“Bar, The”) closed. During my last few weeks in Oman, David had even gone back to North Dakota for Christmas. At the end of that trip, C.J. had punched David in the face (for no apparent reason) and then, to apologize, bought David a lap dance at a strip club several hours away. The stripper was in her late forties and introduced herself as an “old friend” of C.J.’s. As she performed, she asked David maternal questions about his coursework and career aspirations.

  There was the story about the time C.J. got high and had a violent fistfight with an air conditioner on Main Street. There was the story about the time C.J. violated a restraining order to break into David’s foster home, and the story about the time C.J. took nine-year-old David to a makeshift golf course just outside of Credence and tried to shoot golf balls with a Colt .45. (There were many other people on the golf course at the time, scurrying from the bullets; no one called the police.)

  David and I had been on the farm for three days, but we hadn’t yet seen his father. C.J. had agreed to pick us up at the airport, but when we got off the plane, a voice mail on David’s cell phone instructed us to “find the rental car with a cigarette box behind the back tire” and drive to Credence ourselves. We wandered around the airport parking lot until we found the cigarette box, which had the rental keys inside. When we got to Credence four hours later, C.J. was nowhere. He stayed gone for the first two nights.

  C.J. had apparently not paid his bills in some time, because neither the Internet nor the lights in the house worked. By candlelight, David’s childhood home was a circus tent. Dead animals, posed in taxidermy as if alive, decorated every single room; so did framed pencil portraits of Native Americans and Jesus. Guns were everywhere: in closets, on shelves, under a mattress. Drugs and condoms were everywhere, too.

  There was a full-size suit of silver armor in the basement.

  Above the bed in David’s childhood room, someone had hung a mirror. There was a mirror next to the bed, too.

  “Did my father turn my bedroom into a fuck pad?” David said, his forehead in his hands.

  “I might need to be celibate this week, honey,” I replied.

  David rubbed his eyes.

  “I might need to be celibate for the rest of my life,” he said.

  To escape, David and I explored the farm.

  “What do you want to do after graduation?” he asked me on our third evening in Credence, as we sat atop a thirty-foot grain bin, waiting for sunset.

  I shrugged.

  “I like living in different places,” I told him. “I’d love to get a job abroad.”

  “You move around too much, Jillian,” David replied. “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

  I had no idea how to respond to that.

  “Well, I’m not . . . trying to gather moss.” I laughed, confused.

  David shook his head.

  “It means that if you move around too much, you won’t make any money,” he insisted. “I learned that in high school. Moss is green, and money is green, so that expression is about money.” He said a teacher had explained this, and the students had written essays on the subject.

  I blanched. Squinting into the distance, I chose my words with care.

  “Honey, all literary interpretations have value,” I said. “Even that one. Authorial intent doesn’t necessarily matter.”

  David looked at me.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “But that proverb is from, like, sixteenth-century England,” I said.

  “That sounds about right,” he agreed.

  I rubbed his knee.

  “Okay,” I said. “In what countries, and for how long, has money been green?”

  David’s eyes widened.

  “Oh, my God,” he breathed. From our perch on the grain bin, David looked down at Credence. “What the hell is wrong with this place?” he said.

  I laughed.

  David shook his head. “No, I’m serious,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with this place?”

  I shrugged. “So why do you come back here, babe?”

  “I keep hoping things will change,” David said. “But they never do.”

  I squeezed his knee and frowned at a water tower in the distance.

  Scarlett, David’s mother, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when David was five. Her health deteriorated fast, and by the time David was ten, Scarlett was in a wheelchair. C.J. decided this was a good time to abandon his family and move to Ohio to live with a woman he had met online. One year later, after that other woman filed a restraining order against him, C.J. crawled back to Credence.

  Scarlett had two children and a serious disease. She told David to make a “welcome home” banner for his father.

  When David was placed in foster care, he didn’t trust C.J. to take care of Scarlett. So one evening, when David noticed C.J.’s truck parked outside the bar, he realized it was a chance to check on his mom.

  Inside the house, David’s fears were realized. Scarlett was sitting on the couch, alone. David had no idea how long she had been there, but it had been hours, at least. It was clear that she
’d been sitting there all day. Maybe all through the previous night, too.

  At that point, Scarlett couldn’t move without help, so there was no way for her to leave the couch to get food, move into bed, or walk to the bathroom. Mercifully, David told me, she didn’t seem upset or scared. Mostly confused.

  And cold. The windows in the house were open, and it was winter. Scarlett was shivering.

  That night, fifteen-year-old David put his mother in a car and drove her to her parents’ house, in another city. She died a few months later.

  Why does Antony love Cleopatra? He has so many reasons not to be with her—political, personal, geographic. Today, readers adore Cleopatra, but there are reasons (some valid, some not) that readers despised her for a long time, too. Cleopatra is often moody, insincere, or manipulative. She’d be a fabulous person for a fun night on the town. But how many people would want to be in a long-term relationship with her?

  Oh, she’s a sexual firecracker, sure. That’s a given. Shakespeare makes it clear. But that can’t be the only reason Antony loves her, can it?

  Although Antony and Cleopatra stands alone, it’s useful to remember that it is a kind of sequel. Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599; Antony and Cleopatra premiered eight years later, in 1607. Mark Antony is a character in both plays, and details of his personality are consistent in both. In Julius Caesar, Antony already has a reputation as “a reveller,” who “is given to sports, to wildness, and much company.” When Caesar describes to Antony why he prefers him to the more austere, classically Roman Cassius, he says: “He loves no plays, as thou dost, Antony. He hears no music.” These moments hint at the untamed Egyptian personality that Antony later tries to embrace in Antony and Cleopatra.

  In the context of both plays, Antony’s filial admiration for Julius Caesar raises interesting possibilities about his affection for Cleopatra. Cleopatra was previously in a relationship with Caesar; in fact, she bore his son, Caesarion. (Shakespeare also found ripe potential for sexual innuendo in farm culture, since he summarized Cleopatra’s history with Caesar with the phrase “He plowed her and she cropped.”) Antony hasn’t forgotten Cleopatra’s history with Caesar. In one moment of fury, he snarls at her: “I found you as a morsel cold upon dead Caesar’s trencher.”

  It’s enough to make a girl wonder if Antony’s devotion for Cleopatra is inspired, in part, by an unresolved need to fulfill Oedipal impulses by sleeping with his father figure’s spouse.

  Over the previous year, David and I had joked a few times about how the fact that I share a disease with his mother cast unfortunate Oedipal shadows over our relationship. But we had never confronted the fact that I could die exactly as Scarlett had.

  The water tower was the tallest structure in my line of sight. Nothing scrapes the sky in Credence.

  David had said he kept hoping for things to change.

  “Is it cruel for me to be with you, babe?” I asked him. “Is it cruel to risk putting you through the same shit all over again?”

  David put his hand on mine. “I don’t care about that,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s the right thing to say,” I told him. “But you’re saying it too quickly.”

  “I’m not,” he insisted. “I’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  I swallowed. “You’ve thought about this a lot?”

  David nodded.

  I looked at the ground, thirty feet below. We were so high up.

  I touched David’s hand.

  “You know I’m not your mom, right?” I said uncomfortably.

  David laughed.

  “Trust me,” he said. “I know you’re not my mother.”

  “And you’re not C.J.,” I replied. “If you need to protect yourself and walk away from this relationship, it’s okay. I’ll understand.”

  David’s jawline tightened.

  “You worry that I stay with you because I don’t want to be like my father?” he asked.

  “Do you worry about that?” I replied.

  David let go of my hand and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “The risk of pain is part of the deal. Love isn’t love if it never hurts.”

  I looked at him.

  “I’ll try to stay healthy for as long as I can,” I promised.

  David wrapped his arm around my shoulders and kissed my temple.

  Somewhere beneath our feet, as the sun inched toward the horizon, a pickup truck pulled onto Main Street.

  For three days in Credence, David and I had puzzled over a grand mystery: Where was C.J.? We had only one clue. The first time I stepped into David’s childhood home, I found it almost immediately. C.J. had left a note on the staircase. It was at once ominous and childlike. It read [sic]:

  Jillian Welcome To N. Dak.

  Hey, you play Pocahonta’s +

  DAVe will play Capt. John Smith

  + I will play the Villian!

  So I can’t say he didn’t warn us.

  SHAKESPEARE PLAYED JAZZ music with words. Every time the English language failed him, he invented new terms and phrases. He coined words as familiar as hurry and phrases as seemingly modern as skim milk. When the perfect color wasn’t on his palette, he mixed paint and invented new shades.

  For the rest of us, language often fails. If the Sami people, who live in the northern parts of Scandinavia and Russia, can create more than a thousand different words to describe reindeer, a more loving culture could produce more words for love. But we are not that culture, so we have only one: I “love” my cat. I “love” New York. I “love” tacos. No wonder the word so often rings hollow.

  Pain suffers the same linguistic famine. There is pain that empowers; pain that arouses; pain that frightens; pain that motivates; pain that discourages; pain that encourages; pain that recalls; pain that predicts; pain that breaks; pain that heals. There is the pain that Cleopatra describes, “which hurts, and is desired.”

  For all those pains, we have only one word.

  David and I climbed down the grain bin and walked back into his dark house. We lay on the bed in his basement, talking, until I drifted off.

  Hours later, something loud startled me out of sleep. I blinked awake and squinted at my cell phone. It was almost 3:00 A.M.

  Cleopatra was standing at the foot of the bed. There was no one else in the room.

  “Where’s David?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she replied coolly.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Why had David left?

  I sighed.

  “Cleo, is Antony’s love for you just an Oedipal thing?” I asked.

  “That’s none of your business,” Cleopatra snapped. “If you want to know why David is attracted to you, ask him yourself. Stop displacing your fear onto us.”

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

  “I’m not ‘displacing’ my feelings onto you,” I replied. “I’m processing them through you. That’s how people experience literature.”

  Cleopatra scoffed.

  “Are you sure there isn’t something more?” she asked. “Something you’re unwilling to face?”

  I bristled.

  “Hey,” I said, pointing my finger at her. “I faced it. I was honest with David about that shit from the beginning.”

  Cleopatra’s lip curled with contempt.

  “Good grief, I’m not talking about your ‘kink,’” she said. “This incessant whining doesn’t impress me at all.”

  There were angry shouts upstairs. I slid off the bed and stood up.

  “Is there a point to any of this?” Cleopatra pressed, her voice rising to a yell. “Or are you just wasting our time?”

  The muffled sound of glass shattering echoed above me. I looked up toward the ceiling.

  “What’s going on up there?” I asked.

  Cleopatra stepped back to the corner of the basement, almost invisible in shadow.

  “I fled from Actium, but I know when and why to g
o to war,” she said. “Do you?”

  I turned my back to her and ran upstairs.

  As a child, I was scared of the dark. David’s house, still illuminated by candles, flashlights, and other battery-powered sources of light, came straight from my nightmares.

  I stepped into the living room.

  In his earlier years, C.J. had been a bodybuilder. His muscle mass had long since disappeared into rolls of alcohol fat, but it was easy to see the formidable man he had once been.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” David was shouting. “Why can’t you hold it together for one goddamn day?”

  C.J. shook his head, stumbling around the room.

  “Meth makes a man think different,” he slurred. His eyes, wide and insane, shifted in their sockets.

  “Meth makes a man fucking worthless,” David snarled.

  I picked up a flashlight and turned it on.

  David turned his head to look at me.

  “Go back downstairs, Jillian,” he said, in an even tone of voice.

  I scanned the room.

  David looked furious. His eyes were fixed on his father, who was wearing—good Lord—a Native American Halloween costume. (It wasn’t Halloween.) C.J.’s eyes bulged from his head. Drool dripped from his mouth, like from a dog’s. There was broken glass on the floor.

  “Hi, C.J.,” I said. “We met a few months ago in California. Remember?”

  C.J. blinked at me with obvious confusion. He hadn’t realized there was someone else in the house.

  “Go downstairs, Jillian,” David said, again.

  I shook my head.

  Something was wrong.

  A handgun, I’ve decided, is like a typo: you don’t notice it until you do.

  But then it’s the only thing you see.

  The gun was hidden in the thick flesh of C.J.’s paw. Only a hint of barrel betrayed its transformative presence in the room, but it was pointed in David’s direction.

  I reflexively put both of my hands in front of me. All the muscles in my body were tight. I wanted to claw C.J.’s face off with my fingernails.

  “That’s a cool gun,” I said. “Can I see it?”