Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  Helena smiled. She leaned close to my ear.

  “Speak to him,” she said.

  I exhaled with audible frustration.

  “From Twelfth Night, I know,” I said, dragging my fingers through my hair. “And in Hamlet, he wrote ‘speak to her.’ Speak to him, speak to her. Shakespeare wants us to speak. Everyone keeps telling me that. But I’m speaking! I’ve spoken! He doesn’t hear—”

  Helena grasped my chin and leaned forward. The tip of her nose was inches from my own.

  “When did I give up on Demetrius?” she pressed.

  My breath stopped in my throat.

  Helena never gives up on Demetrius.

  Every nerve ending in my body tingled. I reached out and put my hands on Helena’s face, running them against the smooth perfection of skin that had never been damaged by a day off the page. She pulled me toward her, and we kissed. Our kiss was deep and furious, as if effort and intensity would break the skin barrier between us.

  I pulled back and scanned her torso, letting my gaze linger on the pockmark at its core. I reached out to touch it. My fingers dipped into the dent.

  “Why do you have a belly button, Helena?” I murmured. “Most Shakespeare characters don’t have mothers. You don’t have a mother.”

  Helena forced a smile.

  “I cut it into myself,” she said. “I wanted to reach my liver.”

  My chest squeezed tight, like a fist.

  I bent down and pressed my lips against the wound, circling the tip of my tongue around the scar she had sliced into her core.

  “Wrong hole,” Helena said. I glanced up to meet her eyes.

  She giggled.

  I wrapped my hands around Helena’s hips and flipped her over, onto her knees. She laughed with surprise at the abrupt gesture. I smacked her bruised butt, hard, with my palm.

  “Get on your stomach,” I ordered.

  Helena put her face in her hands.

  “Jesus Christ, Jillian,” she groaned, laughing uncomfortably.

  I tilted to the side to catch her gaze.

  “What?” I asked, my eyes wide and innocent. “Did I say something weird?” Helena cringed and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead.

  “It’s just a bit soon to joke about that, isn’t it?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I replied, patting the palm of my hand gently against her ass. “It is much too late.” I pushed forward against her hips, and Helena rolled down onto her belly, like a wave.

  I bent over to rest my forehead on her bottom. Helena winced as my weight pressed against her welts. The space between her cheeks was warm and soft, like a pillow.

  “You’re the one I want to speak to,” I told her, pushing my face into that dark crevasse between her hips. “You’re the one I want to know.” I reached up to grab the sharp handles of her hipbones, ran my tongue along the line at the bottom of her ass and in a circle around the spot I had punctured earlier. Helena moaned with pleasure and pressed her pelvis against the floor. My hands traveled down the curves of her body to slip inside her from the front.

  “You already know me,” she murmured.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t,” I admitted. “But I’m trying.”

  Helena exhaled and stretched her body along the ground. I ducked my head down to see what my fingers were doing between her legs. I had never really looked at a vulva. Culture told me to expect a flower, but there was nothing horticultural about it. Instead, what filled my eyes was pink and vulnerable, like the raw flesh of an open wound. It mirrored the marks I had left on her ass in perfect red-and-pink symmetry.

  “Do you like what you see?” Helena asked, propping her chest up on her arms.

  “There’s a path that leads inside you,” I replied. “I like that.”

  She rolled onto her back to face me and reached up to touch my face.

  “Would all other women could speak this with as free a soul as I do,” she murmured.

  My mouth followed my hands. I found a slip of delicate tissue, as fragile as an oyster, with my teeth. I bit down on it—gently at first, and then harder, until a barrier gave way and cherry salt, as warm as semen, slithered onto my tongue.

  As she groaned, Helena’s hands strained against the floor. Her back arched above the ground, revealing, for a second, the purple fingerprints I had left on her skin. Helena’s gasps were colored with pleasure and with pain; with every physical detail that silences the cerebral for the sexual. In climax, we found Shakespeare. He lives in the moment when doubt, self-consciousness, and fear disappear, even if only for a second; the moment when our bodies alight with feeling, and we do not ask or even wonder what it means; the moment when the physical world takes over and we speak to each other in a voice more wondrous than language.

  Then I sat up and looked around the room. Helena was gone. On the ground next to me was a book, thick with pages as delicate as tissue. I didn’t hesitate. In one fluid tear, I ripped a page free and wiped away the oil between my legs.

  ACT FIVE

  Is Shakespeare a masochist?

  Of course. He is the king of masochists; his writing thrills with that secret.

  —The Black Prince, BY IRIS MURDOCH

  5.1 As You Like It:

  What You Will

  The word lonely didn’t always exist.

  Shakespeare invented it.

  Before him, the word lone existed. But Shakespeare was the one who took that solitary state and turned it into a feeling. In Coriolanus, the title character describes himself as “like to a lonely dragon, that his fen makes fear’d and talk’d of more than seen.” That’s the first time lonely appeared in print. It makes a perfect sound. The o at its middle gasps for help. The y at its tail trickles out just as the world itself ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper.

  Lonely.

  I came home.

  “Why are you crying?” David asked.

  He wasn’t angry. He was concerned.

  I shook my head, looking at the floor of our apartment.

  “I asked Cy not to contact me anymore,” I said. “He won’t.”

  I put my face in my hands.

  David wrapped his arms around me. My face dampened his shirt.

  “I love you,” he said.

  And that was true. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t even understand it. But that afternoon, as I cried in my fiancé’s arms over the loss of another man, David held me, and did not let go.

  “I won’t ever be really sadistic, you know,” he said, softly.

  I paused.

  “Good,” I finally replied. “Because a real sadist would refuse to hurt a masochist.”

  Shakespeare invented the word lonely.

  But he also invented its cure.

  As You Like It is my favorite play.

  It begins, as so many of Shakespeare’s stories do, in a bad place. This time, it’s a dukedom in France. Duke Frederick usurped his older brother, Duke Senior, and exiled him into the forest of Arden. Duke Senior’s daughter, Rosalind, was only allowed to stay at court because of her close friendship with her cousin Celia, who is Duke Frederick’s daughter.

  Things are bad elsewhere in town, too. Orlando, the son of a nobleman, has fallen on hard times and decides to challenge Charles, the Duke’s prized wrestler, to a match. But Orlando’s brother Oliver, who hates Orlando, persuades Charles to “accidentally” kill Orlando during the course of the wrestling.

  The wrestling match takes place before the entire court, including Rosalind and Celia. Rosalind is almost immediately taken with Orlando. “O excellent young man!” she cries with delight when Orlando, despite his smaller stature, overpowers Charles. After the match, Duke Frederick congratulates Orlando—but the mood sours when Frederick realizes that Orlando is the son of Sir Rowland de Bois, who had allied himself with the deposed former Duke, Rosalind’s father. Rosalind and Celia are both horrified by how Duke Frederick treats Orlando. Rosalind gives Orlando her necklace t
o console him. Orlando is so mesmerized by Rosalind that he cannot even find the words to thank her for the gift. “Can I not say, ‘I thank you’?” he berates himself, as Rosalind leaves.

  At the sound of Orlando’s voice, Rosalind gets excited. “He calls us back!” she cries, and then calls out to him: “My pride fell with my fortunes, I’ll ask him what he would! Did you call, sir?!” She runs away from Celia to return to him.

  Orlando still cannot find the words to speak.

  Rosalind never has that problem.

  “Sir, you have wrestled well,” she flirts, “and overthrown more than your enemies.”

  When Orlando returns home, his servant warns him that Oliver plans to kill him that night. Meanwhile, Duke Frederick has changed his mind about allowing Rosalind to remain at court. Orlando and his servant flee the dukedom just as Rosalind and Celia, joined by a court jester named Touchstone, also leave in search of Rosalind’s banished father—Rosalind disguised, for safety, as a young man called Ganymede.

  Orlando and Rosalind both go to the same place: the Forest of Arden.

  The Forest of Arden is where things get good.

  “IT’S NOT THAT I want David to ‘slap my ass,’” I told Peng, rolling my eyes.

  For non-fetishists, spanking seems easy and obvious. But it’s not. The details of our fetish are so specific that it’s even difficult for people from other branches of the BDSM tree to fully absorb them. We can tell the difference. (“I need a real spanko spanking,” a friend, who met her boyfriend through the general BDSM community rather than our specific subculture, complained to me once.) If it’s difficult to teach other kinky people what we need, how could I explain it to David?

  “He’ll never know me if he can’t understand this part of me,” I said.

  Peng nodded.

  “And it felt like Cyan could,” she offered.

  I sighed.

  “It was just easier,” I said, frowning. “This thing is part of him, too.”

  Peng shrugged.

  “So it’s like you’re engaged to someone from a different religion,” she pointed out.

  I winced with embarrassment.

  “Spanking isn’t my religion,” I said.

  Peng squinted at me.

  “No offense, Jillian, but it kind of seems like it is,” she said. “How do religions attract converts?”

  We were waiting for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in East Harlem. As I mulled over the question, Peng absentmindedly arranged her fork and knife to rest parallel to the edge of the table. I smiled.

  Peng and David could be the same person. In temperament, demeanor, and outlook, they’re identical. (Which might explain why they’re among the rare breed of people with the superhuman patience it takes to tolerate me.) Their similarity is perhaps best expressed by their mutual affection for parallel lines. Whenever I clean the apartment, I focus on dust, grime, and other bits of dirt. When David “cleans” the apartment, as far as I can tell, he just puts things in parallel lines.

  “I guess religions have conversion classes?” I said.

  Peng nodded.

  “So why not think of it as a class?” she suggested.

  I laughed.

  “You want me to design a syllabus?” I deadpanned. “The Art and Practice of Beating Me?”

  Peng shrugged.

  “Why not?” she said. She was serious.

  I should have thought of it myself. That’s more or less what Rosalind does.

  Rosalind and Celia settle into the Forest of Arden. (They are safe there, but Rosalind nevertheless chooses to remain disguised as Ganymede—her disguise offers her more than protection: it’s a liberation.) Orlando also finds safety and comfort in the forest, but he still pines for Rosalind and carves simple love poems to her on the forest’s trees.

  Orlando’s poems aren’t amazing. Touchstone, the court jester who joined Rosalind and Celia in their flight, mocks them:

  TOUCHSTONE

  If a hart do lack a hind,

  Let him seek out Rosalind.

  If the cat will after kind,

  So be sure will Rosalind.

  Wint’red garments must be lined,

  So must slender Rosalind.

  They that reap must sheaf and bind;

  Then to cart with Rosalind.

  Sweetest nut hath sourest rind,

  Such a nut is Rosalind.

  He that sweetest rose will find,

  Must find love’s prick and Rosalind.

  The last syllable of Rosalind’s name, you’ll notice, does not actually rhyme with hind, kind, lined, bind, rind, or find—Touchstone is exaggerating Orlando’s clumsiness. And he’s not the only one: the scholar Bertrand Evans called Orlando “only a sturdy booby.” But Rosalind doesn’t want Touchstone (or me, or Bertrand Evans) to tease Orlando.

  “Peace, you dull fool!” she snaps at Touchstone. “I found them on a tree.”

  “Truly,” Touchstone points out, “the tree yields bad fruit.”

  Rosalind hopes the verses could have been written by Orlando, but doesn’t dare to think it’s possible—after all, she believes he is still back at court. So when Celia tells her that she ran into Orlando in the woods, Rosalind is at first shocked into near silence. (“Orlando?” she asks. “Orlando,” Celia confirms.) But Rosalind, unlike her beloved, rarely lacks for words. She recovers and goes on:

  ROSALIND

  What did he when thou saw’st him? What said

  he? How look’d he? Wherein went he? What makes

  him here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he?

  How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see

  him again? Answer me in one word.

  Rosalind is stuck in her Ganymede disguise, but she decides to make the best of it. “Ganymede” finds Orlando in the forest and confirms that Orlando is indeed the author of that arboreal poetry. When Orlando complains how awful it is to be mired in unsatisfied love, Ganymede offers to cure Orlando of his love sickness by pretending to be Rosalind and enacting every terrible stereotype about lovers.

  “I would not be cured, youth,” Orlando responds.

  “I would cure you,” Ganymede replies, “if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.”

  In other words, Orlando and Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, will act out the fantasy of the relationship they desire.

  Bingo.

  “That’s what I need to do?” I asked. “Turn kink into a class?”

  Peng nodded.

  “Take that tangle,” she said, pointing at my head, “and put it into parallel lines.”

  Years of experience have taught me that it is best to follow Peng’s advice immediately, and in the most literal way possible. The next day, when David and I were in the shower, I drew a horizontal line in the steam on the shower wall. It was parallel to a crack in the tile.

  “I like this already,” David said.

  I laughed.

  “Imagine this line is a pain scale,” I said, pointing at the shower wall. “This end is no pain, and that end is extreme pain.”

  I drew a short tick mark through the line, about three-fourths of the way to the “extreme pain” end.

  “Imagine this line is my pain threshold,” I explained. I drew an x just past that point. “That’s where I need to go,” I said. “Just past my limit.”

  “That’s the sweet spot, huh?” David said.

  I smiled.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I can only get there if I’m in the right headspace. That’s why I need your help.”

  In 1896, George Bernard Shaw described what sets Rosalind apart from other characters. “She makes love to the man,” he wrote, “instead of waiting for the man to make love to her.”

  It would be, just as Imogen had told me, a sublime and hazardous journey into the unknown. We had a lot of work to do.

  I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth.

  “Thanks, Jilly,” David breathed happily. “Your turn!”

&
nbsp; He picked me up off my knees and dropped me on the bed.

  I shook my head.

  “Nope,” I teased. “I don’t want sex. You know what I want.”

  David rolled his eyes.

  “We can do both,” he pointed out.

  I shook my head again.

  “Nope, nope, nope,” I insisted. “Spanking isn’t a side dish to sex for me. I want you to really understand that it satisfies me fully. And today, it’s all I want.”

  I rolled onto my stomach. David started spanking me.

  “This is really all you need?” David asked. “It’s enough?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I murmured into the pillow.

  “But you come so easily,” he mused.

  I turned my head to the side to make eye contact with him.

  “And what do you think I’m thinking about during every orgasm?”

  David laughed.

  I didn’t. I was dead serious.

  David raised his eyebrows.

  “Every time?” he asked.

  “Every. Single. Time.” I turned my face back into the pillow.

  “Huh,” I heard David mutter behind me.

  He kept spanking me. I dropped into the blissful oblivion of my fetish, and didn’t realize how much time had passed—forty-five minutes, David later guessed—until, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed him pause for a second to shake out his hand.

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows.

  “Does your hand hurt?” I asked, surprised. It had never occurred to me before that spankings would hurt his hand, but of course they can. (In the fetish community, we even have an expression for it. If a bottom says, “I assed his [or her] hand,” it means he or she took such a long hand spanking that it left bruises or blood blisters on the top’s palm.)

  David’s from the Midwest. He tried to tough it out.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “I’m fine.” He kept hitting me.

  I suppressed a smile.

  “There are other things you can use,” I pointed out. (I’d assumed that was obvious—after all, I literally handed him a belt on, like, our fifth date. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that when it comes to human sexuality, nothing goes without saying.)

  “Like what?” David asked.