Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  But before Othello and Desdemona can celebrate their new marriage, Othello is ordered to go to Cyprus, where he will command the Venetian forces against a hostile Turkish fleet. Desdemona begs to travel with her new husband, and they leave for Cyprus immediately. Roderigo, Cassio, Iago, and Emilia, Iago’s wife, go, too.

  As I said, geography is destiny. What happens in Cyprus would be unthinkable in Venice.

  THE FIRST TIME Cyan and I met in person, it was on my territory. He had a conference in New York City, and invited me to join him for lunch. Given the circumstances under which we had met, I wore baggy jeans and a blue fleece. I wanted to look asexual.

  I arrived at the pizzeria fifteen minutes early. “If I disappear today,” I texted to Peng as I waited, “I was last seen with Cyan Agbaria at Bleecker Street Pizza on Seventh Avenue.”

  “If you disappear today,” Peng replied, “I’ll kill him myself.”

  I sat on a tall stool, swinging my feet. I already knew that a person named Cyan Agbaria, with a job title and face that matched Cyan’s Twitter profile, did exist. I’d done enough Internet research to confirm that. But it didn’t occur to me until I sat there that, in theory, a sexual predator could have lured me to this pizzeria using a stolen identity.

  I glanced at faces in the crowded restaurant. I glanced at my butter knife.

  The door opened, and I laughed with relief. Cyan’s face matched the one I had seen online.

  “So you’re you,” I told him.

  “Who did you think I’d be?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Someone dangerous,” I joked.

  “I’m not dangerous.” Cyan laughed. An uncertain frown crossed his face. “At least, I don’t think I’m dangerous,” he added.

  He wasn’t. For the next six hours, Cyan and I talked about Oxford, international politics, and his job as an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in D.C. Like a loose thread that unravels a sweater, the conversation didn’t end. Lunch led to a walk, which led to coffee. Coffee led to another walk, which led to yet another coffee.

  In the months to come, I would learn that Cyan doesn’t even like coffee.

  When he first invited me to meet, I had assumed that Cyan would want to talk about kink. Why else would he want to meet me? But the subject didn’t come up. In fact, Cyan ignored the topic with such ease that I began to wonder whether he was even a fetishist at all. Maybe David and I had misinterpreted the ellipsis in his first email. Maybe, once again, I’d imagined connections that didn’t exist.

  When Cyan mentioned D.C.’s hierarchical political culture, it was my chance to probe the mystery.

  “D.C. sounds kinky,” I joked. “All those people in suits running around calling each other ‘sir.’”

  Cyan laughed. It was an odd laugh, both bitter and dry. Then he paused.

  “A colleague once asked me why I’m the only person at the university who never calls the department chair ‘sir,’” he finally admitted. “But I can’t. It’s just too—”

  I bit back a smile.

  “You don’t need to explain,” I interrupted. “I get it.”

  Cyan nodded.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. A pause lingered between us.

  When we finally said good-bye, I was happy. I’m not immune to hypocrisy, and for years I had worried that other spanking fetishists, were I ever to meet them, would be everything I didn’t want us to be: weird, creepy, damaged, subhuman, aberrant, violent, unstable. I feared Cyan might confirm my worst fears about myself. But he did the opposite. Cyan was normal. Even better, he was smart. He was polite. He was successful. When the sunlight touched him, he didn’t burst into flames.

  “He wants to sleep with you,” David declared.

  I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think so,” I replied. “He didn’t flirt with me at all.”

  “Glad to hear it,” David said. “But he still wants to sleep with you.”

  I laughed. “I don’t have to be friends with him if you don’t want me to,” I offered.

  David waved off the suggestion.

  “Be friends,” he said. “I trust you.”

  Othello and Desdemona sail to Cyprus. And Cyan became my friend.

  As months passed, the cautiousness of our first conversation gave way to candor. For more than two decades, I had been walking on eggshells: first, because I was terrified of any disclosure that might reveal my shameful secret, and later because I was terrified that any misstep would reflect badly on kinky people as a group. I even felt that way around David. But with Cyan, I could stop tiptoeing on eggshells and finally give in to gravity.

  I collapsed on the floor of Cyan’s kitchen in D.C. with dramatic flourish.

  “You have a dishwasher!” I gushed, as I lovingly pressed my hands against the appliance’s metal face. “A dishwasher is the only thing missing from my life. I hate washing dishes. It’s the worst thing in the world.”

  Cyan laughed.

  “Some things are worse,” he pointed out.

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said, deadpan. “Nothing in life is worse than washing dishes.”

  He smiled.

  “Then I must be a sadist,” he joked. “Because now all I want to do is make you wash dishes.”

  My work often took me to Washington; his work often brought him to New York. When it did, we hung out. Most of the time, our friendship felt normal. We argued about politics and talked about our jobs. David and Cyan even chatted over the phone a few times, which made the friendship feel aboveboard.

  But it was the first time I’d been friends with another spanking fetishist, and I had to admit that the relationship had unusual details. Once, at lunch with Cyan, I wanted to brush my hair. I reached into my purse to grab my hairbrush—and froze.

  Cyan was browsing the menu. My brush is square, wooden, and thick—in other words, just a hairbrush to anyone other than people like us.

  I excused myself and brushed my hair in the bathroom.

  Later, when I admitted to Cyan what I’d done, he laughed. I didn’t have to explain. He understood. It was as if we shared a linguistic and cultural shorthand only people like us could understand.

  That spring, Al Jazeera English brought me to their D.C. studio to discuss an article I’d written on one of their news shows. It was my first major television appearance, and it didn’t go well. I blew it. Cyan met me outside the studio after the segment to give me a tour of the Washington Mall, but I couldn’t focus. Instead, I scrolled through Twitter, looking for masochistic confirmation that I had been the nonsensical mess I feared.

  Cyan snatched my phone out of my hand and deposited it in his pocket.

  “Stop worrying about your interview,” he said. “Is that clear?”

  I sighed.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes what?” he joked, in a soft voice.

  I rolled my eyes. But my liver had just moved.

  “Very funny,” I said. “You need a girlfriend, Cyan.”

  He sighed.

  “I really do,” he agreed.

  Cyan and I didn’t talk about kink every day, or even every time I saw him. But when we did, it was great. For more than a year, I had explained my fetish: to David, to my friends, to the media. Cyan required no explanations. With him, I could stop being a symbol of kink and just be myself. For once, I didn’t have to answer questions—I could ask them. Cyan and I talked about our fetish’s most challenging details: its intersections with misogyny and heteronormativity; its relationship to child abuse and spousal battery; its place within the broader BDSM community; its comparison to self-mutilation. We laughed about our mutual attempts to access fetish erotica from the Middle East. We argued about the different kinds of spankings—erotic, maintenance, “good girl,” punishment, “funishment,” stress relief, rhythmic, role play, just-for-fun, power exchange—and the irony that people like us use spankings for both pleasure and punishment. (Trust me, our community can debate that paradox until
we’re all blue in the face.)

  “Don’t say ‘community,’” Cyan said.

  “Don’t say ‘spanko,’” I replied.

  “Deal,” Cyan agreed.

  We’re all semanticists, apparently.

  Cyan was a “switch”—someone who alternates between dominant and submissive roles, depending on the partner and context. He was single, but had a long list of play partners. (Every time we hung out, his phone buzzed with text messages from them.) I love leather implements, such as belts and straps; Cyan preferred wood toys, such as paddles and canes.

  “How patriotic,” I joked. “Brits love canes.”

  Cyan stuck his hands into his pockets.

  “It has something to do with our school system, I suspect.” He shrugged.

  I nodded. Like every spanking fetishist in the world, I’d inhaled Roald Dahl’s Boy enough times throughout my childhood to be intimately familiar with Britain’s traditional approach to school discipline.

  “Were you ever caned at school?” I asked.

  Cyan gave me an amused grin. “No,” he said. “It was banned from our government schools when I was about ten years old, so I was a bit too young.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  “But I’ve been caned as an adult,” he added.

  That caught my attention.

  “Wow,” I said. “When?”

  “Not so fast, kid,” he replied. “If I’m going to tell you that, you have to tell me something, too.”

  I leaned against the wall next to him.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  He looked at me. His eyes flickered with thought.

  “Have you ever switched?” he finally asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have a dominant side.”

  Cyan chuckled.

  “I doubt that very much,” he replied. “I don’t think someone without a dominant side would write the way you do.”

  I blushed. That was kind.

  “That’s just my work.” I shrugged. “It’s different.”

  “Is it?” Cyan asked.

  I looked down and scuffed my foot in the soil.

  “I answered your question,” I said. “Now you have to tell me when you’ve been caned.”

  Cyan grimaced.

  “When I was at Oxford, I went into London to see professional dommes a few times,” he said.

  “What was that like?” I asked. He shook his head.

  “In my case, not great,” Cyan said. “At that point, I didn’t want physical gratification so much as I wanted to feel like someone understood me. And that’s not something one can buy, is it?”

  I scratched my nose to hide a smile.

  “It’s hard for me to imagine your submissive side, Cy,” I said. “You’re so dommy around me.”

  Cyan’s lip twitched with amusement.

  “This is Washington,” he said. “Everyone here wants to dominate something.”

  I laughed. Blood flowed to my liver.

  Don’t forget: Othello isn’t about sex. It’s only about the idea of sex.

  But everyone still ends up dead.

  OTHELLO AND THE others arrive in Cyprus prepared for war. But the battle has already been won: a storm felled the Turkish fleet before it even landed on the island. That night, as everyone celebrates, Iago gets his rival, Cassio, drunk and sends his friend, Roderigo, to provoke a fight with him. The ensuing brawl disturbs Othello, who flies into a rage and strips Cassio of his promotion. Cassio, humiliated and distraught, begs Iago for help. Iago assures Cassio that his best bet is to ask Desdemona for help.

  Desdemona is sympathetic to Cassio, and agrees to plead with Othello on his behalf. Meanwhile, Iago subtly suggests to Othello that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair, so that each time Desdemona pleads on Cassio’s behalf, Othello’s suspicions deepen. But Othello is a general, an experienced battle tactician. Mere suspicions aren’t enough. Othello demands “ocular proof” of infidelity. So Iago persuades his wife, Emilia, who is Desdemona’s attendant, to steal a handkerchief that Othello gifted to Desdemona during their courtship. Iago drops the handkerchief in Cassio’s room. When Othello sees Cassio with it, he becomes convinced of Desdemona’s alleged infidelity and strangles her in their bed.

  Emilia realizes what her husband has done and reveals Iago’s deception. Like many Shakespearean tragedies, Othello is a bloodbath: at the end, Iago murders Emilia, Othello commits suicide, and Iago is taken away to be tortured.

  The power of suggestion is a potent drug. On Iago’s lips, words are weapons. Armed with nothing other than language, he engineers a massacre. Iago’s verbal power is so terrifying that, according to Norrie Epstein, during one Old West production of Othello, an audience member pulled out a gun and shot the actor playing Iago to death.

  I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: “Words are a motherfucker.”

  “You identify as a masochist, not just a bottom?” Cyan clarified, the last time I saw him before things changed. “Does that mean you actually love pain?” I was sitting on a ledge in downtown D.C., tapping the heels of my feet against the stone.

  I ran my hands along the front of my jeans. I had puzzled over that question for years.

  “I wouldn’t say I love it, exactly,” I admitted. “I’m curious about pain: how different implements feel, the different marks they leave, how pain changes in different hands. How it never, never feels quite like I remember. How bruises evolve, like sunsets. I’m curious about that.”

  Cyan nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I understand.”

  “But sometimes I think curiosity and love are the same thing,” I added. “So maybe I do love pain after all.”

  Our eyes met, and we burst into awkward laughter.

  “Does that sound twisted?” I asked, bringing a hand to my lips to partially cover my face.

  “Not to me,” Cyan said. “But our kink has a twisted edge. I don’t think any of us is truly comfortable with it.”

  I bristled.

  “I’m comfortable with it,” I snapped. “Why else do you think I wrote that article?”

  Cyan eyed me.

  “I think you wrote it because you’re lonely,” he said. “But it didn’t work. I think now you feel more alone than ever.”

  I didn’t realize it until he spoke, but that was true. It was so true I felt incised by him.

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  Cyan gave me a sidelong glance.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “When will I see you again?” Cyan pressed.

  “I’m coming to D.C. a week from next Thursday,” I admitted. “I’ll be in town a whole week.”

  Cyan hopped up to sit on the ledge beside me.

  “So can I see you then?” he asked.

  I squinted past a memorial into the distance.

  “You want to see me again so soon?” I asked.

  “Jillian,” he replied, “when you’re in town, I want to see you every day.”

  For all Othello’s talk about sex, no one actually has it. I am convinced that Desdemona and Othello never consummate their marriage, and that Desdemona dies a virgin. (I am not the only person to think so: T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines argued the same in their 1983 article “Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage.”) Shakespeare littered his text with hints of this secret. At the beginning of the play, for example, Brabantio summons Othello to the Venetian court, after their secret elopement but before Othello has a chance to sleep with his new bride. “True, I have married her. The very head and front of my offending hath this extent, no more,” Othello explains—in other words, his offense at this point is limited to the wedding ceremony, and nothing else. Their aborted wedding night also explains why Othello is so eager to bring Desdemona to Cyprus with him, and why she is so eager to go. Othello underlines this point when Desdemona joins him at the front, te
lling her: “Come, my dear love, the purchase made, the fruits are to ensue; that profit’s yet to come ’tween me and you.” But, once again, they are interrupted—this time, by Cassio’s drunken brawl with Roderigo, which explains why Othello is furious enough to strip Cassio of his rank. Even Iago knows that Othello hasn’t had a chance to sleep with Desdemona, since he tells Cassio: “He hath not yet made wanton the night with her.” And near the end of the play, when Desdemona asks Emilia to put the sheets from her wedding night on her bed, why would she make that request unless the sheets were unstained with blood, and therefore a symbol that, she hopes, could pacify Othello by reminding him of her purity?

  Othello’s marriage, like his battle plan for Cyprus, remains unconsummated.

  The week after seeing Cyan, when I got back to New York, I was swamped with work. I had an important meeting lined up to pitch a story to The New Yorker, and I was nervous. To make things worse, I was running behind schedule.

  My cell phone beeped. It was a text message from Cyan. He had agreed to give some professional advice to a friend of mine who was working on a Ph.D. in Cyan’s field, and Cyan wanted to apologize for having been slow to respond to my friend’s email.

  Frustrated and in a hurry, I replied automatically.

  “Don’t apologize,” I typed, as I pushed my way through a crowd on Broadway. “You know how I want you to talk to me.”

  It was an unthinking and irresponsible flash of truth.

  I shoved the phone into my purse and rushed into the meeting. I didn’t see Cyan’s response until a few hours later.

  “Oh, Jillian,” he had written. “It makes me so happy when you’re honest.”

  It was my mistake. I opened that door; Cyan just walked through it. The person who is responsible, and culpable, for everything that happened next is me.

  Othello and Desdemona built their marriage on a thousand stories, a world of sighs, the witchcraft of a million words. But it fell apart in a single breath.

  It’s hard to build things. It’s much easier to tear them down.