My Name Is Will

by Jess Winfield

  William assumed he was talking about the contraband box from Thomas Cottom and glanced nervously at the spy, Munday, and then at his startled friends.

  “I know not of what you speak.”

  The horseman’s dark eyes clouded over as he nodded. “Ay, true enough.” A corner of his mouth twitched an ironic smile. “Mayhap your ignorance will beget your joy, as your joy begat my sorrow. God forgive me, I have in my heart wished you dead many times this day.”

  William shook his head, angry and confused. “I? For what cause should I be so mortally wounded, even if only by the incorporeal arrows of a disturbed mind?”

  “I have had my England taken from me, and I fear, my everlasting soul,” said the horseman quietly. “But I would not have my heart ripped out even as Campion’s was. I will not give her up now, not to thee nor anyone, mark me well.”

  The horseman turned and strode away, glaring at Anthony Munday and crossing himself as he went out the door.

  Richard Field turned to William and said, “Know you what he was on about?”

  “His fifth ale, I guess,” William replied, bewildered.

  “You know him not?” Field asked, confused.

  William looked again toward Munday, who was busy chewing a cheese pie that Barber had brought. William lowered his voice to a level Munday wouldn’t hear.

  “We are strangers who have met. His name is Pray. He is clerk to a London lawyer.”

  “Clerk?” said George Cawdrey, also in a low voice. “I’faith, that was no clerk. He gives his true calling by his false name. Your Pray is a priest, William. ’Tis Robert Debdale of Shottery, one of the many who followed Simon Hunt to the seminaries. I know him from Rheims. An exorcist, ’tis said.”

  Anthony Munday had been pretending not to try to hear their hushed conversation, but now he finished his cheese pie and blinked heavily, like a lizard. “See,” he said loudly, rising and reaching into his pouch, “to what ends our sovereign England might attain, if left to popish heretics? Exorcism of purported demons in public houses.” Munday threw three coins clattering down on the table, then took from the back of his chair an oversize bag. He reached into it and pulled out two pamphlets, then walked over to put them gingerly on the table in front of Richard Field.

  “I give you gratis these my true accounts of the deaths of these villains you would sanctify; consider them my reply to your most eloquent, if misguided, recounting of the death of the traitor Campion. Fare ye well.” He bowed slightly to the group, and left with his head held high.

  After they watched him go, the foursome craned their necks to read the cover of the top pamphlet:

  A Brief Answer made unto two Seditious Pamphlets, the one printed in French, and the other in English, containing a defense of Edmund Campion and his Complices, their Most Horrible and Unnatural Treasons, against Her Majesty and the Realm. By A.M.

  “One might hope the ‘Brief Answer’ briefer than the title,” said George Cawdrey.

  Richard Field flipped through the booklet.

  “Munday has here taken several ballads made upon Campion’s martyrdom that are sung in London, and answered them with his own hateful verse in the selfsame meter. Here . . . I know well the original of this one, it sings achingly of the very buildings and streets of London mourning Campion’s death.” Field sang in a halting voice:

  “The Tower sayeth, the truth he did defend;

  The Barre bears witness of his guiltless mind;

  Tyburn doth tell he made a patient end;

  On every gate his martyrdom we find.

  In vain you wrote yet would obscure his name,

  For heaven and earth will still record the same.

  “This, when perverted and belched forth from Munday’s poison pen, becomes:

  “The Tower sayeth he Treason did defend;

  The Barre bears witness of his guilty mind;

  Tyburn doth tell he made a Traitor’s end;

  On every gate example we may find.

  In vain they work to laude him with such fame,

  For heaven and earth bears witness of his shame.”

  Field flipped another page or two. “He even claims that Campion was given ‘books, as many as he could demand,’ for his trial. Lies and deception!”

  He threw the pamphlet down on the table. William picked up the second pamphlet and stared at it. It was, its cover proclaimed, an account of the execution of several priests, including Thomas Cottom.

  William flipped through it: more of the same, railing against the traitorous priests and the Pope.

  “This must needs be answered.”

  “William, be you Catholic or Protestant,” Field said to his friend, “I know you to be a writer of great craft.”

  William turned to Field. “If I write it, will you print it?”

  “I am but apprenticed to a printer, and a Puritan printer, too. Yet I shall, within a year, have my own press.”

  William flipped through the other pamphlet, shaking his head at Munday’s god-awful balladry.

  “A year. And yet these are injuries that crave immediate redress,” William said. “I have neither the authority nor the learning to write of the death of Father Edmund Campion. And yet I might well and truly pen a ballad of the true tale of Sir Thomas Lucy.”

  Richard Field looked at William for a moment, then stood up and went to have a word with the proprietor. He disappeared briefly, then returned with a quill, a pot of ink, and five sheets of paper. He set the paper and ink down in front of William, then pulled out his own penknife and shaved the tip of the quill. Field dipped it and handed it to William. Then he reached into his purse, pulled out a single coin, and snapped it down on the table.

  “Here is sixpence. I hereby commission, as the first fruit of your invention, a ballad upon Sir Thomas Lucy.”

  William thought for a moment, his pen poised above the paper. But nothing came to him. He picked up the sixpence and twiddled it absently in his left hand, noting as he did so that it had a gash across it, as if it had saved its bearer from the grievous blow of a blade. He noticed that the fleur-de-lis that were part of the Tudor device on its obverse were arranged identically to the luces in the Lucy coat of arms, though the flowers on this coin were smudged, and looked more like little ticks, or . . .

  William suddenly remembered his brother Gilbert’s pun. He began to scribble. He wrote quickly, and when he was done, he sang to an improvised tune:

  “If ‘lousy’ is ‘Lucy,’

  as some folk miscall it,

  Then Lucy is lousy,

  whatever befall it.

  He thinks himself great;

  Yet an ass in his state,

  We allow, by his ears,

  but with asses to mate.

  If Lucy is lousy,

  as some folk miscall it,

  Then sing lousy Lucy

  whatever befall it.”

  His friends listened silently. They laughed at the opening pun; their smiles faded a bit as he went on. When he had done, they applauded.

  Richard Field shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll get better.”

  “Still,” said George Cawdrey, who was by now rip-roaringly drunk, “ ’s fit to the purpose, wrapping the wolf Lucy in an ass’s hide!”

  “Will you print it, Richard, you bonny big dick, you?” said Arthur Cawdrey, who was also beginning to show signs of intoxication. In fact they were all well in their cups by now.

  “I carry not presses in my saddlebags,” Field answered. “And yet we may still disseminate.”

  “Ay! Copy it but three times, and we shall post it about the parish at the places we think most apt,” said Arthur Cawdrey.

  “We’ll nail it to the very gate of Charlecote,” said William, “and to every gate in town, just as Campion’s head and quartered parts were hung upon the gates of London.”

  “Ay!” trumpeted George, “and we shall sing it to the maids in town to win their favor. The great ass’s ears shall be filled to the brim with William’s song!
”

  William took another piece of paper and began to copy the ballad.

  The Cawdreys cheered. Richard Field looked thoughtful. Then George began to sing the ballad himself: “If ‘lousy’ is ‘Lucy,’ as . . . wait, how does it go?”

  They sang it many times that day and into the night, as William dutifully made increasingly illegible copies.

  Chapter Twenty

  O mother, mother!

  What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

  The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

  They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!

  You have won a happy victory to Rome;

  But, for your son — believe it, O, believe it —

  Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,

  If not most mortal to him.

  — Coriolanus, V.iii.182

  Willie sat slouched in the overstuffed couch facing the picture window that looked out from the Oakland hills toward San Francisco Bay. It was late afternoon. Long shadows stretched across the bay, over the Berkeley Marina, across the flats of Berkeley and north Oakland, and up the foothills to where Willie sat. The sun was sliding behind Mount Tamalpais in Marin to the northwest, and as it did, the fog came cascading in over the coastal mountains.

  As Willie watched, the Golden Gate Bridge, its single span effortless and graceful, a bold but earthy red, proclaiming its genius and its industry in every line, every cable, every girder, every head-sized rivet, was slowly swallowed up by the fog. Starting at its northern end, it simply floated away on a grey cloud into oblivion. The bridge gone, the fog rolled across the city, down the Presidio, and across North Beach. Coit Tower disappeared, then the downtown skyline, the Transamerica Pyramid, the Embarcadero, and one by one, the suspension towers of the Bay Bridge, then Treasure Island, Yerba Buena Island, and the ugly cantilevered girders of the bridge’s Oakland side. In the space of two minutes, the flats of Berkeley and Oakland were invisible, too; finally the fog blew in wisps up the foothills, and streamed past the window where Willie sat, alone with Dr. Alan Greenberg and his second wife, Mizti.

  “Wasn’t that pretty?!” Mizti gushed. “Do you want another glass of wine, Willie?”

  Willie shook his head.

  “You sure?”

  He shrugged, then held out the glass. Mizti poured, and as she did so she smiled a little too broadly. Tilting the bottle, her hand shook a little bit. She clanked the glass a little too hard with the bottle neck; Willie thought the goblet might crack, but it didn’t. “Whoopsie! Sorry! Maybe you should have mine, too, ha-ha!”

  Willie smiled a tight-lipped, utterly insincere smile. “Thanks, Mizti.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. “How’d your errand for Robin go?” Alan asked.

  “Fine.”

  The duffel bag sat safely between Willie’s feet, tightly zipped.

  Willie had run the mile from the campus to Robin’s apartment building. The security gate at the front, which was always ajar, was of course locked, and he pressed her buzzer to no avail. She wasn’t home. Willie didn’t have a key, so he slunk around to the back of the building, scrambled awkwardly up a drainage pipe and onto Robin’s second-floor balcony. He found himself praying to a god he didn’t believe in that the sliding glass door was open. If it wasn’t, he wasn’t sure he could get down again. It was open. He retrieved the duffel and his backpack and left a note under the front door as if he’d slipped it in from the outside:

  R, I’m okay. Jail was big fun. Going up to Dad’s for the afternoon. Back ASAHP. W.

  The trinity of father, son, and stepmother sipped wine and watched the fog in silence. Finally Alan broke it. “So how’s the thesis coming, son? If this is going to be the last quarter I pay tuition — ”

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I told you, it’ll get done.”

  Alan shrugged his narrow, tweedy shoulders and pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “Interesting use of the passive, Willie. It won’t just get done. You actually have to write it.”

  Willie gave him a withering look, but no answer.

  “So what’s it about?” his father asked, and took a slug off a tumbler of single-malt Scotch.

  “I’m still working out the details.”

  Alan laughed. “You haven’t started, have you? Holy crap, Willie. This isn’t a Ph.D.! It’s a master’s thesis. What is it, fifty pages?”

  “Sixty.”

  “Sixty. It’s been two years. Just write the damn thing. It’s time to move on.”

  “It’s not like I’ve just been sitting around the whole time. I worked last summer.”

  “You were waiting tables.”

  Willie felt Mizti’s instinctive lunge at the first bit of conversation that didn’t involve academia.

  “There’s nothing wrong with waiting tables, honey,” she said to Alan. “He was making good money. More than I used to make.”

  Mizti had been working at an hourly hot tub rental place on University Avenue when Alan met her, not long after Willie’s mother died. Willie thought it was too soon: the funeral-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables, he had thought as he loaded up on pastrami and liverwurst at the Faculty Club reception.

  Mizti had made a beautiful bride, of course. At five feet eight, 125, she was a little, but not too much, taller than Alan. There was some inevitable whispering and giggling at the wedding, along with a few deadly glares from Sheila’s friends. While in the bathroom peeing, Willie had overheard a conversation in the hallway outside.

  “She’s certainly statuesque, isn’t she?”

  “If you’re talking about the plaster between her ears, yes.”

  “What does she mean, spelling her name that way?”

  “She changed the s to a z for the wedding. Alan says she thinks it looks more Jewish.”

  “A Judophile shiksa. Alan is finally living his own Woody Allen film.”

  “I’m thinking Bananas.”

  Snickers.

  “More like Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.”

  Laughter.

  “I just hope the wedding night isn’t Love and Death.”

  Guffaws.

  “I think in her case it’s Take the Money and Run.” A couple of chortles, and several “ooohs.”

  Willie had emerged from the bathroom and smiled wanly into the vortex of embarrassed silence.

  And yet, after the wedding, Mizti and Willie had gotten along fine. She was only seven years older than him. She still remembered what it was like to be sixteen, in high school, trying to get a date without a driver’s license. When Alan would lock himself into his study at night, and Willie would come home late from a play rehearsal or a movie with his friends, he’d find Mizti watching Dallas or Dynasty or Falcon Crest and eating popcorn, and he might watch for a bit, especially if Heather Locklear was in a halter top or a silk robe.

  At first Mizti would go upstairs at eleven every night, and he could hear her gently coaxing Alan to bed behind the study door, and Alan was coaxable.

  But week by week and month by month Alan and Mizti’s bedtime slowly got later and later, and sometimes Willie would come home to find Mizti asleep on the couch.

  And then, one night in his senior year, he came home from a coffeehouse where he had been studying, trying to blend in with the UC students, and listening to a classical guitarist playing quietly in a corner. He had been distracted from his SAT studying — the guitarist was beautiful. Straight brown hair, big brown eyes; petite, a little boyish, but not too much . . . like a gymnast. And when she took a break, she had walked past him and smiled, and she had an irresistible crinkle around her eyes, not crow’s feet of age but of impishness, and Willie had not been able to keep his eyes off her jeans as she ordered a coffee from the bar.

  Taking the bus home, and then walking up the hill on a warm spring night, Willie had planned to steal a beer from the fridge and go to his room immediately to whack off to the image of the guitar girl. But when he stepped into the darkened ki
tchen, the refrigerator door was open, its light illuminating Mizti standing in front of it in a short silk robe, pouring into a glass from a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay. Willie started to back out of the room. But she heard him.

  “Oh, hi, Willie,” she had said, and as she turned her robe was a little bit too far open. She saw the line of his gaze and she pulled it closed again with a giggle. “Sorry.”

  She sounded a little bit drunk. “I’m having some wine. You wanna glass of wine?”

  Willie said, “Oh, um, no thanks.”

  “Okay,” she shrugged, and turned back to the fridge, bending over to put the bottle back on the lower shelf.

  “Actually, sure, why not,” Willie said.

  Mizti turned and smiled, pulled out the bottle, grasped the cork, popped it, and filled a glass for Willie.

  “Cheers,” she said, and they clinked glasses.

  They watched Dynasty, and Heather Locklear was in fact wearing an ultrashort silk robe. Mizti got up to refill her glass of wine one more time. She disappeared briefly upstairs, and when she came back a minute later and said, “Where did I put my wine?” a bit of smoke puffed from her lips. She took an inordinate amount of time to find the glass she’d left in plain sight in the kitchen.

  Willie watched Mizti moving around the house, and at the sight of her nipples rippling underneath the silk, and the shape of her ass that while maybe not Heather Locklear’s was still fine, really fine, his groin screamed at him. It asked no moral questions, so Willie did not answer them.

  Finally Dynasty ended, and they talked. First just small talk, but then they talked about girls, and Willie’s taste in girls, and Willie’s utter lack of experience with girls. Willie had already had an erection for nearly an hour when Mizti exclaimed with wide-eyed, whispered wonder, “Ohmigod, you’re a virgin!?”

  It was all headed exactly where Willie dreaded and desperately hoped it would: to Mizti, on her knees on the Persian rug in the living room, her hair smelling of grass, giving Willie his very first blowjob.