Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  David walked into our apartment and dropped his stethoscope and keys on the nightstand. By this point, he had decided to go into emergency medicine and spent most of his time in the ER.

  “We had another patient with end-stage liver disease today,” he said. “I wonder if that’s how my father will die.”

  I paused. I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Is that something you worry about?” I asked.

  David shrugged.

  “I worry more that he’ll get high, jump in his car, and take a family of five out with him when he goes,” he said. “Liver failure might be a mercy.”

  I nodded.

  “What exactly do livers do?” I asked.

  David scrunched up his face with thought.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s no accident they’re called live-ers. We can’t live without them. They process the toxins in our bodies, for one.”

  I slid my hands around his waist.

  “Did I ever tell you that in Shakespeare’s day, they described livers the way we describe hearts today?” I asked. “They said love grows in the liver.”

  David grinned.

  “I like that idea,” he said. “Love processes our toxins, right?”

  I pressed my forehead into his chest and said nothing.

  “We’re going through a rough patch right now, David,” I admitted.

  David rubbed his hands on my back.

  “I know,” he said.

  I pulled back.

  “I wish—I wish we could talk, you know?” I said.

  David sighed and walked into the bedroom.

  “I’m so exhausted, Jillian,” he said. “You don’t understand what my job is like.”

  I followed him into the other room.

  “I’m exhausted, too,” I said.

  “We do talk,” he replied. “What do you want to talk about? You want to talk about spanking?”

  A shadow crossed my face.

  “Don’t say it like that,” I said.

  David sat on the bed and closed his eyes.

  “Talk to Cyan about it,” he said. “Isn’t that why he’s still around?”

  Tears pricked the backs of my eyes.

  “But when I talk to him, I’m not talking to you,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  David’s eyes opened.

  “Of course it bothers me,” he said. “Fuck it, maybe you should just sleep with him. Get it out of your system.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair with frustration.

  “The fact that you think I want to sleep with him tells me everything,” I growled. “You don’t even know what he gives me that you don’t.”

  “What does he give you?” David replied.

  “I’m not even sure myself,” I admitted. “Friendship, maybe.”

  David shook his head.

  “That guy is not your friend,” he snarled. “He’s just another one of those fucked-up spanking freaks who wants to get in your pants.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. My face said enough.

  David blanched.

  “I’m sorry,” he said right away. “I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t mean that.”

  I nodded. I knew that he believed he didn’t mean it. But maybe, just that once, his words had come from a more honest place.

  “It probably is fucked up,” I agreed. “The truth is, I think I’m fucked up, too.”

  I meant it. I had become my own Janus: the two-faced god that Iago swears by in Othello. In public, I was confident about my sexuality and the sociopolitical and pathological questions it raised. But privately, I hesitated every time a psychiatrist sent me an unsolicited email in response to my New York Times article to offer “reparative therapy” for my “illness.” (“You think you’re happy,” the head of a psychiatry program at a major university wrote to me when he read my article, “but you’re not.”) A handful of paragraphs hadn’t healed my lifelong ache.

  I said one thing but often feared another. How could I expect David to be any different?

  He stood up and wrapped his hands around my upper arms.

  “I don’t think you’re fucked up, Jillian,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m just so tired.”

  I wanted to cry, but couldn’t.

  “I really do love you,” I said, shaking my head.

  David wrapped me in his arms.

  “Just hang in there, okay?” he said. “We’ll figure this out.”

  Would we? Worry gnawed at my insides. I loved David. I had chosen David. But I was excited to spend a week in the same city as Cyan.

  Too excited.

  I boarded the bus at Penn Station. The woman in the seat next to me was already on board. When I saw her face, I swore out loud.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Well, good morning to you, too,” Emilia drawled.

  I plopped down next to her. My sigh sounded like a groan.

  “It’s a bad sign that you’re here,” I muttered, shaking my head. In her most memorable scene, Emilia discusses infidelity with Desdemona—and delivers an impassioned defense of it.

  Emilia chuckled.

  “You didn’t expect to see Desdemona here, did you?” she asked. “She’s an angel, God bless ’er. But you’re no angel, and you have nothing to learn from one.”

  I sighed.

  “I cheated on John,” I said. “I know I have it in me.” I felt sick to my stomach.

  Emilia patted my leg.

  “Well, honey, you know my opinion on this,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “‘It is their husbands’ faults if wives do fall,’” I recited, quoting Emilia’s words to Desdemona from Othello. “But I don’t agree with that. None of this is David’s fault. He’s the best man I’ve ever known. I can’t fault him for being too good for me. I can’t fault him for being less fucked up than I am.” Maybe David, like Dylan before him, was just too good—too whole, too unbroken—for me.

  Emilia crossed her arms.

  “Then what’s really going on, sweetheart?” she asked.

  I began to cry.

  “I’m so lonely,” I admitted. “David says he loves me, and I know he thinks he does. But how can he love me if he doesn’t understand me? He has no idea who I am.”

  Emilia shrugged.

  “Can anyone really know another person?” she asked.

  I pressed my fingertips into my eyes to stop the tears and inhaled a long, shuddering breath.

  “Maybe Cyan knows me,” I muttered.

  At that, Emilia laughed outright. Her laugh was sharp and mocking, like the screech of a bird.

  “Oh, come,” she scoffed. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  I nodded.

  “I know,” I admitted.

  Emilia smoothed my hair.

  “So what are you going to do, honey?” she asked.

  My phone beeped. I reached into my purse to grab it.

  When I sat up, Emilia was gone.

  Cyan had sent me a text message.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Starving,” I replied.

  “Good,” he wrote. “When you get into town, we’ll have lunch.”

  “Don’t talk to me about food right now,” I typed. “Pink elephants and all that.”

  He replied with a question mark.

  “If I say, ‘don’t think of pink elephants,’ you’ll imagine pink elephants, right?” I explained. “Talking about lunch will just make me hungrier. It’s the power of suggestion.”

  “Ah,” Cyan replied. “I understand.”

  His next question appeared on my screen in pieces. Each line echoed like drops from a faucet in a sink.

  “So what would happen—”

  Drip.

  “If I said—”

  Drip.

  “Don’t think of yourself—”

  Drip.

  “Over my knee—”

  Drip.

  “For a so
und spanking—”

  Drip.

  “As your ass turns pink—”

  Drip.

  “And then red—”

  Drip.

  “And then pale purple—”

  Drip.

  “From the weight of my hand?”

  I stopped breathing.

  In Othello, sex goes unconsummated.

  But my Othello chapter is almost over.

  “You’re an asshole,” I typed.

  I did not press send.

  “Are you picturing it?” Cyan wrote. “Or are you still thinking of pink elephants?”

  Drip.

  4.4 Cymbeline:

  What We May Be

  “What are you doing?” Helena shouted, shaking my shoulders.

  I looked at her.

  What was I doing? I was in a taxi, on my way to Cyan’s apartment, smashed between a bunch of opinionated figments who wouldn’t leave me the hell alone.

  What was I doing? I was going to ask Cyan to spank me, just once, just to let myself be myself one last time. David would never know.

  What was I doing? I was going to tell Cyan that our banter had become too explicit and that it had to stop. We could still be friends.

  What was I doing? I was going to negotiate some kind of polyamorous dynamic, where David could have vanilla sex with his species and I could have sexless beatings with my own.

  What was I doing? I was going to kick both men to the curb and get on an airplane again. There’s a whole world of ways to avoid myself.

  An email I had received in response to my first article haunted me.

  “I admire your desire to make it work with this vanilla guy,” a woman had written. “I tried that, too. But people like us are different. Your relationship is doomed. He needs someone who speaks his language. And you need someone who speaks ours. If you love this man, you’ll let him go.”

  Maybe she was right.

  Really—what the fuck was I doing?

  “It doesn’t matter what you do,” Emilia scoffed, twisting around to face me from the taxi’s front passenger seat. “Men are all but stomachs, and we are but food: they eat us hungrily, and when they are full, they belch us. One way or another, you’ll get belched.”

  Caliban nodded beside me.

  “You’re a devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick,” he agreed, putting an arm around my shoulders. “You can’t change.”

  Helena shook her head.

  “This is a mistake,” she insisted. Friar Lawrence nodded in agreement.

  I bristled.

  “But Cal is right,” I pointed out, nestling my head into the space between his neck and his shoulder. “I can’t change this part of me. God knows I’ve tried.”

  King Lear laughed.

  “Thou shalt not die,” he said, with scornful disdain. “Die for adultery? No, the wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive.”

  I glanced up. King Lear winked.

  My skin crawled.

  “You can’t give up!” Helena insisted, her hands on my shoulders. “The course of true love never did—”

  Berowne cut her off.

  “Let affection overpower oaths,” he interrupted, elbowing Helena out of the way. “Admit it—you want to know the thing you are forbid to know.”

  Frustration boiled in my chest.

  “Yeah, so says the guy who ends his play alone,” I snarled.

  Berowne blanched.

  “I do not end up alone!” he insisted. “In Love’s Labor’s Won, the sequel to—”

  “Love’s Labor’s Won doesn’t count!” I cried. “No one has read it!”

  “It does too count!” Berowne shrieked.

  “Oh yeah?” I roared, gesticulating around the taxi. “Then where is Cardenio, huh? If lost plays count, why isn’t Cardenio in here right now?”

  Lady Macbeth stretched out in the backseat.

  “To be fair, Cardenio is probably about the Cardenio character from Don Quixote, who falls into erotic madness,” she mused. “So I could argue that—”

  My eyes widened. I turned on her.

  “Are you about to suggest that I’m the insane one, Purell?” I growled. Iago snickered.

  Lady Macbeth shrugged.

  “Takes one to know one,” she said.

  I lunged at her across the taxi. I wanted to claw out her eyes.

  Friar Lawrence and Hermione each grabbed one of my arms.

  “Shut up, bitch,” I shouted at Lady Macbeth, fighting to free myself from the Friar’s grip. “You just want to watch the world burn.”

  “Deep down, isn’t that what you want, too?” Goneril purred.

  I froze.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, terrified, as Friar Lawrence and Hermione released me. “I don’t want that.”

  “Ignore them all,” Kate whispered. “These opinions mean nothing. What do you want?”

  I blinked at her. What did I want?

  “For the love of God, just do something,” Hamlet groaned. “I can’t tolerate another round of indecision paralysis.”

  Iago reached across the taxi and ran his fingers through my hair. The tips of his nails dragged against the skin on my scalp. Electricity ran down my spine.

  He leaned over to whisper in my ear.

  “After the cats and blind puppies have drowned,” Iago murmured in a cashmere voice, “it’s your turn to step into the water.”

  I recoiled. In his mirror eyes were all my sins remembered.

  I pressed the palms of my hands against my face.

  “Shut up!” I screamed. “Leave me alone! There isn’t enough room in this taxi for all of you!”

  Silence fell.

  “Maybe just one of us, then?” a voice finally said.

  I dropped my fingers from my eyes. Only Helena was still with me. The others were gone.

  She put her hand atop my own.

  “If you won’t listen to me,” Helena said, glancing toward the taxi driver, “at least listen to him.” Then she was gone.

  The taxi pulled to a stop in front of Cyan’s apartment.

  I stepped out of the backseat and walked up to the driver’s window.

  “How much?” I asked, reaching for my wallet. The driver looked up.

  “This ride’s on me,” Fidele said.

  I sighed.

  Cymbeline’s romantic core is not dissimilar to Othello’s: a man (Posthumus), egged on by a manipulative friend (Iachimo), suspects his wife (Imogen) of infidelity. But although they share this seed, Othello and Cymbeline grow into very different plays. To test his suspicions, Posthumus challenges Iachimo to seduce Imogen and bring back proof of her unfaithfulness. So Iachimo sneaks into Imogen’s room while she sleeps and steals the bracelet that Posthumous gave her at their wedding. Just as Desdemona’s stolen handkerchief confirms Othello’s suspicions, Imogen’s stolen bracelet is, for Posthumus, “ocular proof” of his wife’s infidelity. Posthumus orders his servant Pisanio to murder Imogen. But Pisanio, anguished, can’t bring himself to kill her. Instead, he warns Imogen that she is in danger, and Imogen goes into hiding in the caves of Milford Haven, disguised as a young man named Fidele.

  Fidele means “faithful.”

  “Welcome to Milford Haven,” Imogen joked from the driver’s seat of the taxi, pulling off the hat that hid her long hair.

  I fought back tears.

  “This is not my ‘blessed Milford,’” I said, glancing at Cyan’s apartment building. “There is no haven here.”

  Imogen pursed her lips with disapproval.

  “So you’re going to cheat,” she said.

  I looked down.

  “I’ve done it before,” I admitted. “I’ll never be like you.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” she challenged me. “What do I get right? What does Helena get right? What do we do right that so many other characters screw up?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know,�
�� I said.

  “Think,” she insisted. “There is a very specific answer.”

  Cymbeline is listed in the First Folio as The Tragedie of Cymbeline, but it doesn’t meet the traditional standards of a tragedy. In fact, Cymbeline’s most gruesome death is conveyed with dark humor: Imogen wakes up next to a headless corpse and describes it in the form of a lover’s tender blason. But Cymbeline isn’t quite a comedy, either. It turns the traditional comedic form upside down: rather than end with a wedding, it begins with one. Cymbeline scrambles genre.

  “Comedy and tragedy aren’t your only options,” Imogen reminded me. “What other kinds of plays are there? What is Cymbeline?”

  I sighed.

  “It’s a romance,” I admitted. The romances are a category of Shakespeare’s later plays, which includes Cymbeline. The romances tend to be complex comedies with a few common traits: tragic elements mix with comedic ones; young lovers exist, but are not the central point of the work; magic and fantasy blend with reality.

  Imogen nodded.

  “That’s right,” she said. “If your life isn’t a comedy or a tragedy, let it be a romance—a sublime and hazardous journey into the unknown. You want romance because you want adventure. We already know how comedies and tragedies will end. Only romance is unforeseeable.”

  O curse of marriage!

  That we can call these delicate creatures ours,

  And not their appetites!

  —Othello, 3.3

  I inhaled and glanced to Cyan’s door.

  POSTHUMUS HAS A DREAM.

  It’s a weird one.

  At this point in Cymbeline, he believes that Imogen, upon his orders, is dead. He is racked with guilt and regrets his homicidal mistake, even though he still believes Imogen was unfaithful. (He bemoans having killed a wife “much better” than himself for “wrying but a little.”) Britain has gone to war with Rome, and Posthumus, hoping to be killed in battle, disguises himself as a Roman solider and ends up in a British jail, awaiting execution. He goes to sleep in his cell.

  “O Imogen,” he says, as he falls asleep. “I’ll speak to thee in silence.”

  Posthumus is an orphan. It’s worse than that, actually—not only did he lose his parents, he lost his entire family. His father died before he was born. His mother died in childbirth. His two older brothers died in wars. Posthumus never got to know any of them. The grief of these losses haunted Posthumus throughout his life: “He did incline to sadness, and oft-times not knowing why,” Imogen says.