C.J. swung around to face me. Now the gun was pointed at my stomach.
“What?” he slurred. He had already forgotten I was there.
I nodded.
“I’d like to see it,” I said, taking slow, cautious steps toward him. “Can you teach me about guns? I’d love to learn from someone with your expertise.”
C.J. blinked, waving the gun around. He was confused. He turned to look at David.
“Okay,” he slurred.
I nodded again.
“But I’m not brave like you,” I continued, inching forward. “Can we take out the bullets first?” I forced a giggle.
C.J.’s hands shook as he tried to remove the magazine. Finally, it slid out with a click. He pointed the gun at David.
“Empty now,” he said with a laugh.
By now, I was right next to C.J. I put my hand on his wrist and pushed his arm down. The barrel of the gun redirected from David’s torso to his legs.
“Are you sure there isn’t one more round in the chamber?” I asked. (I had learned a few things from John.)
C.J. roared an odd, terrible laugh and pulled the slide back on the top of the gun. The last bullet leapt out and skittered along the carpet. I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and exhaled.
“Okay,” I said, shooting a glance at David. He was looking at C.J. with murderous eyes.
C.J. stumbled into the kitchen, still holding the empty gun. David and I followed. When we found him, he had the gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
I scanned the room. There were two kitchen knives on the countertop.
“I thought you were going to teach me about your gun,” I said. C.J. nodded and pointed at David with the bottle.
“Scarlett, Scarlett,” C.J. mumbled. “David will take care of you.”
My fingers curled up into the palms of my hands.
“I’m Jillian,” I said, my neck tight.
C.J. pointed at me.
“If some fucker rapes you,” he roared, stumbling around the kitchen, “David will—” C.J. cut himself off. He began to hump the end of his kitchen counter. “If some fucker rapes you,” he repeated, still thrusting his pelvis against the counter, “David will—Bang! Bang!” C.J. fell on the kitchen floor, humped the ground, and performed an elaborate pantomime of David shooting my imaginary rapist. He dropped the gun, and it clattered against the linoleum.
I looked at C.J. rolling on the floor.
I picked up the gun. I had a bullet in my pocket.
Did I mention there is no police station in Credence?
I gave the gun to David.
He had seen C.J. remove the magazine and empty the chamber, but still confirmed that the gun was unloaded before he slipped it into the back of his pants.
This continued nonstop through the night, and past dawn, until eleven the next morning. David and I were exhausted.
“Do you remember the first crop you farmed?” C.J. slurred, pointing at David with a cue from the pool table in the basement.
David was leaning against a wall with his arms folded over his chest.
“Yes,” he replied.
C.J. nodded. For a second, he looked gentle. Then his voice changed again. “You think I never did anything for you,” he snarled, shaking the cue. “But I taught you to farm.”
David didn’t move. He kept C.J. fixed in the crosshairs of his sight and did not say a word.
C.J. stumbled across the basement, toward the suit of armor in the corner.
“We went out and saw the sunflowers when they bloomed,” he slurred. “You couldn’t see the end of ’em. Do you remember?”
David looked at me. I was sitting on the pool table.
“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
C.J. dropped the cue, satisfied.
“So don’t say I didn’t do anything for you,” he snarled, stumbling up the stairs. “I taught you the only thing you’re good for—putting your seeds in dirt.” In case anyone had missed the joke, C.J. shot a pointed glance at me and guffawed. Then he tripped out of the house and disappeared.
Shakespeare did not write monsters. He always hints at some drop of humanity in his characters, even at their worst. They have complex histories and nuanced human motivations. They have scars in their own stories. Even Iago, one of the most evil Shakespearean characters, has glimmers of humanity. As Gertrude puts it in Hamlet, “one woe doth tread upon another’s heel:” pain begets pain. The people who cause harm are the ones who have been harmed. Shakespeare knew that. Shakespeare doesn’t just show people at their worst and leave them there. Shakespeare is better than that.
I am no William Shakespeare.
David sank into a chair. I walked over to him.
“Are you okay?” I asked. David glanced up and gave me an exhausted smile.
“I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m fine.”
He reached up, put his hands on my hips, and pulled me toward him. He pressed the crown of his head against my pelvis. I ran my fingers through his hair.
“What do you need?” I asked. “We can fly back to California tomorrow. We can go to one of your friend’s houses. We don’t have to stay home.”
With his head still pressed against my body, David spoke to the ground.
“You are my home, Jillian,” he said, as his fingers tightened around my hips.
Years later, a friend of mine remarked that this moment must have been frightening. “You see a guy’s blasted home life, and then he tells you that you are his home?” he said. “Scary.”
But it didn’t scare me. I understood. My mother and I had more or less stopped talking a few months earlier, after she “washed her hands of me” yet again because I had ended a phone call, as she put it, “abruptly.” Her love was like her money: hers to spend. I had understood ever since I was nine, when she threw me out of her house the first time, that I wasn’t entitled to anything. And it’s true. I knew that.
But it’s an odd thing, not being loved. The possibility that my mother didn’t, or couldn’t, really love me was exactly like my disease. For months, or even years, I’d feel fine. I’d forget. But these things relapse. Sooner or later, I’d end up back in the same place: on the floor of some bathroom, frozen, waiting out the pain.
I loved. I had so much love: Caliban, Katherine, Hermione, Juliet, Orsino. Even Hamlet, although he annoyed me. Even that damn Friar, although he was always right. But I wanted to love someone who could love me back. I wanted to love someone who could hold me back. It doesn’t surprise me that Juliet, the girl whose father threatens to hit her (“My fingers itch”) and whose mother washes her hands of her (“Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word / Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee”), is also the girl who drowns herself in Romeo.
I had found David once before. And now that I had found him again, I wasn’t going to let mutual interdependency scare me off. So I bent over David’s body, wrapped my arms around his torso, and pressed my face into his hair.
When I think about it, Freud’s Oedipus complex was built on a flaw—or, at least, a lazy misread. In Oedipus Rex, the Greek tragedy that inspired the psychoanalytic theory, Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta, hear a prophecy that their son will kill his father and marry his mother. In fear, Laius orders that the baby be killed. His plan fails, of course. Oedipus survives to grow up and fulfill the prophecy. But the tragedy would have been avoided if, at the beginning, Laius had not tried to kill his son.
Shouldn’t there be a “Laius complex”? Why is a parent’s willingness to murder his child undiscussed, while the child’s inevitable response to that original sin is pathologized?
I think Antony’s love for Cleopatra comes back to geography. Antony is a leader of an empire, but a man without a country. He doesn’t quite fit in Rome, and he doesn’t quite fit in Egypt. In fact, there is no place for him anywhere on the globe. So Antony pulls Cleopatra close to him and plants his seeds in the soil of the only place where he belongs. “Her
e is my space,” he tells her.
When people have no place, we find our place in people.
I slid my hands down the back of David’s neck.
“Should we try to sleep?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We walked out his back door, into a field with tall grasses that stretched up to my waist. Abandoned farm equipment spotted the landscape, a metallic graveyard of old tractor parts. David sat on the rim of a six-foot-tall discarded tire. Tired from the long night’s ordeal, I just stood there in front of him. A cool breeze tickled the back of my neck.
“What kinds of diamond rings do you like, Jillian?” David said after a while.
A cold weight settled in my stomach. It was not the right time for this conversation.
I sank to my knees in the dirt and rubbed David’s calves.
“I don’t wear much jewelry, babe,” I said. “And I don’t like the ethics of the diamond industry.”
He sighed.
“I know,” David said. “I just ask for future reference.” I put my hand on his face. His stubble was rough against my hand, like the boar bristles on my favorite hairbrush.
“Okay,” I said. “For future reference, I want to date for at least five years before we have that conversation.”
David pulled me toward the tire, and into its space inside.
Maybe Aristophanes was right. Maybe once, a long time ago, before the gods interfered, David and I really were one person. Maybe that’s when I learned to crave pain. Maybe when Zeus reached down to cut us apart, I turned my half of our body toward the blade, so that it cut into my flesh and ripped through my nerves, leaving David, for once, unhurt.
ACT FOUR
Therefore, good Brutus, be prepared to hear;
And since you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.
—Julius Caesar, 1.2
4.1 Macbeth:
Double, Double
I was in a bar on the top floor of a skyscraper in Singapore.
And I was drunk. Very drunk.
And I was standing on a table, loudly reciting act 1 of Macbeth, as people in nearby booths looked on with irritation.
I’d love to say this only happened that one time, but I can’t.
“How much of Macbeth have you memorized?” a colleague at the Singaporean theater company where I worked had asked, minutes earlier, as she slid me another drink across our table. I grabbed the cocktail and hoisted it into the air like Yorick’s skull, staring at it through bleary eyes for long seconds.
“The whole thing,” I declared, infused with vodka and false confidence.
“Really?” she said. “Prove it.”
And so I found myself atop the table, swaying as I struggled to maintain my balance and ruining act 1 of Macbeth.
“Doubtful it stood,” I slurred. “As two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.” Some of my drink sloshed over the edge of the martini glass and onto my shoe. I frowned at the unexpected wetness on my toe.
To the American taxpayers who funded my time in Singapore through the Fulbright program: I apologize. I do solemnly swear that sometimes I was sober.
After more than four years together, David and I had been pushed by circumstance to far points on the globe. We were still in a relationship—that point had never been in doubt—but David lived in New York City, where he was in medical school, while I lived in Singapore, where I’d landed a dream job working as the dramaturge for a fancy production of Macbeth. (That means, more or less, I was the theater’s on-call nerd.) I edited the script with the director, Nikolai, defined words for the actors, and helped everyone understand the history, context, and interpretations of the play. I loved my job, and I loved Singapore. But I hated the 9,521 miles between David and me.
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way,
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth remov’d from thee,
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.
—SONNET 44
Long-distance relationships demand effective communication. I grabbed my cell phone.
“Wheree [sic] are you???” I typed to David, in a drunken text. “Come over hrer [sic] and fruck [sic] me.” (I didn’t really want David to “fruck” me. You know what I wanted him to do. But I still couldn’t say that word to him, even when drunk. Although it had been years since my last real spanking, the fervor of my fetish had not calmed. As Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV Part 2, “Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?”)
I had forgotten one detail, though: when you send a sexually explicit text message to your boyfriend at 3:00 A.M. in Singapore, it’s only 3:00 P.M. in New York.
“I would love to,” David typed in reply. “But I’m in a gross anatomy lecture right now.” A second later, he followed up with a helpful addendum: “Also, you’re in Asia.”
It’s hard to be a world away from the person you love.
I’m not only talking about geography.
With David, I had stuffed my real sexuality into a secret space and called it “privacy.” I saw no problem with this. In Oman, I had finally achieved some measure of inner peace. That was enough. Outer peace was too much to ask. David didn’t need to accept this part of me. He didn’t even need to see this part of me. He didn’t need to know that every night as I fell asleep, or every time I gazed out the window during a car trip, I was thinking about my weird, perverted spanking stories. David could continue to believe that I flirted with the trendy fringes of BDSM, and never find out how deep into its core my identity was lodged. My secret life was my own.
Stars, hide your fires: let not my boyfriend see my black and deep desires, you know?
Macbeth is a play about doubles.
And it begins with a prophecy.
SCOTLAND IS AT war.
Macbeth, a general, is returning home from battle with his best friend, Banquo, when they are confronted by three witches. These “weird sisters” predict that Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, has a grand destiny: he will be promoted to Thane of Cawdor, and then King of Scotland. When Banquo demands that they look into his future, too, the witches say that he will be “not so happy, yet much happier;” in other words, Banquo won’t be king himself, but his descendants will be kings.
Who are these witches? Are they even witches at all?
Interestingly, the word witch actually only appears once in the play—and when it does, it’s a recollection of something that happened offstage. (“Aroint thee, witch,” a sailor’s wife said, refusing to share her chestnuts.) More often, the witches refer to themselves as the “weird sisters.” But even that isn’t certain. The first folio, the earliest source text for many of Shakespeare’s plays, describes the women as “weyward Sisters” or “weyard Sisters.”
Today, weyward and weyard aren’t words. Weird is. So is wayward. What’s a modern editor to do?
Most editors choose weird, since wyrd is the Old English word for “fate” or “destiny.” It seems appropriate for these sisters who speak of fortune and prophecy. But what about wayward ? (Sometimes, we can figure out how to pronounce Shakespeare’s words or names through iambic pentameter, since when in dou
bt, it’s safe to assume Shakespeare intended to fill his meter. In this case, the witches speak in trochaic tetrameter, which is four feet of trochees, instead of five feet of iambs, but the point remains: the syllabic rhythm of Shakespeare’s language is a clue. But since weird can be pronounced with two syllables, as can wayward, the meter doesn’t solve this riddle.) What if Shakespeare intended to describe his three frightening prophets as the “wayward sisters,” rather than as the “weird sisters”? Does that even matter?
It’s “a simple vowel shift that effects a striking semantic one,” write academics Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass. As “wayward sisters,” rather than “weird sisters,” the witches are transposed “from the world of witchcraft and prophecy . . . to one of perversion and vagrancy.”
What a difference a word can make, right? In Macbeth, even language is double.
After the weyard sisters—modernize that word how you will—deliver their first prophecy, a messenger appears. He informs Macbeth that the Thane of Cawdor will be executed for treason, and that the title has passed to Macbeth. This development is enough to convince Macbeth that the prophecy is real.
Spurred on by his wife, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth murders King Duncan, implicates Duncan’s sons and heirs for the crime, and becomes the King of Scotland. The weyard sisters’ prophecy has come true—for now.
I wish I could say I found my own prophet on a foggy Scottish moor.
But I lived in Singapore, which means I found my fortune-teller in the most classically Singaporean of places: the mall.
Actually, it’d be more accurate to say she found me.
“Hey, you!” an old woman shouted from a plastic folding table as I walked through the top floor of VivoCity. “You want to hear your fortune?”
I looked around.
“Me?” I mouthed, pointing at myself.
“Yes, you,” she shouted. “I will tell you your future!”
Her T-shirt said: BELIEBER!
I paused. I don’t believe in fortune-tellers. But on the other hand, I was the dramaturge for a play about witches, prophecies, and phantasmagoria. It was my professional responsibility to have a brush with the mystic beyond, right? Maybe I could even write it off my taxes as a business expense! (Note to the IRS: I didn’t.)
Sex with Shakespeare Page 19