He finally navigated a meandering route to her street, found a parking space around the corner from her apartment, and sat behind the wheel. He wanted to smoke.
He got out of the car. It was going to be a chilly night in Berkeley, damp with the fog. He looked up and down the residential street. Empty, but for two students shuffling along with backpacks down the street away from him.
He got back in the car. The duffel filled with contraband was in the trunk, but he still had the last bit of Lebanese in his green backpack. He opened it, took out his pipe, loaded it, and looked up and down the street one more time . . . completely empty. He lit and smoked furtively, blowing smoke out of the cracked-open window. Immediately he felt the edge of his two hours with Alan and Mizti fade away, wafting up the street and dissipating over the hills like the fog. He took a second large hit . . . too large, as the smoke expanded beyond the bursting point in his lungs, and into his throat. He tried to hold it in, with one small cough, then two, but couldn’t control it anymore, and the smoke reached up, yanked his uvula, and then exploded out of him in great racking coughs, filling the car with smoke. At the exact same instant he saw, coming across the street toward him and smiling, a friend of Robin’s, one of the F$¢K Reagan gang, the black guy . . .
Tony . . . Tommie . . . Terry? Shit.
Still coughing, he reached over to stash the pipe in the glove box and open the passenger’s side window to let some smoke out. By the time he turned, coughing and smiling, back to the driver’s side window Tony / Tommie / Terry had passed by, without noticing him. Willie saw that he was listening to a Walkman, bopping his head and dorking out and singing “Walk This Way.”
He dorked his way down the sidewalk, heading away from Robin’s apartment. Willie hoped, for the poor brother’s sake, that it was the Run DMC version of the song.
Willie figured he’d tempted fate enough, and he had a pretty good buzz on. He opened the car door, realized he’d left his backpack inside, retrieved it, and slid in through the always ajar security gate of Robin’s building. Up two flights of stairs, navigating around several bicycles and an old used mattress in the hallway, he knocked and entered without waiting for an answer.
Robin was on the phone. She smiled and waved as Willie entered. “Willie’s back. I’ll call you later, okay?” She laughed. “I know. Yeah, okay. Bye.” And she hung up the phone. “Darcy,” she said, in reference to her neediest friend from high school. Willie didn’t even want to know what bad-boy biker, what sidewalk artist, what itinerant, spitting punk rocker, had ruined Darcy’s life this week, so he didn’t ask.
Robin came over and kissed him lightly. “You want to go get some sushi or something? It’s almost eight o’clock. I’m starving.”
Eight o’clock. He ran some quick math in his head. He wanted to get to the Renaissance Faire before everybody crashed for the night. If he made his connection tonight instead of waiting until tomorrow, he’d have some cash beyond the eight bucks in his pocket.
“I’m kinda broke for sushi.”
“I could make some pasta.”
“Here’s the thing,” said Willie, and he leaned awkwardly against the table by the front door. Robin’s lips went as tight as plastic wrap around a lemon.
“What’s the thing?”
“I have to run an errand for my dad. Taking some stuff up to my aunt in Sebastopol.”
Robin’s brows furrowed. “What?!” Sebastopol was a two-hour drive. “What kind of stuff?”
I should’ve thought this out a little more.
“Some jewelry and old letters that he found cleaning out his mom’s garage.”
Better.
“They’re in my dad’s car,” he added, gesturing toward the street to indicate he’d borrowed it and to keep her from asking to see the jewelry.
Willie had told Robin a little lie or two in their years “together.” Of course their entire relationship was based on a big lie, but it was a lie of omission, a mutual agreement to look the other way. This felt different: a ploy; a subterfuge; a deception. It could blow up in his face a dozen different ways. Robin knew his dad and his aunt well. They were friends. She had their phone numbers. They had hers. But he made his lie, stuck to it, and comforted himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t doing it to cheat on her. He was doing it because — the politics of victimless crimes and national drug enforcement aside — he simply couldn’t stand the abject humiliation of having only eight dollars to his highfalutin name.
Robin was obviously a little ticked off. “Okay. Well, don’t hurry back. I mean, drive safe.” She went back to the couch, sat heavily, picked up a book, and started reading.
“I’ll be back tomorrow. We can spend the rest of the weekend together.”
She looked at him coldly. “Okay.”
“I should be able to make the delivery to my aunt tonight.” King of the Fools . . . flag over his tent with a joker on it. “And then I probably won’t be able to get out of having breakfast with her in the morning.” Friar Lawrence. Everybody knows him. “You know, that diner she loves to go out to” — he hit “go out” slightly so that she wouldn’t try to call at his aunt’s because they’d be out — “I’ll be back by noon. One at the latest. I promise. And” — and now he was making shit up left and right — “my dad promised to pay me a little bit for the delivery, too, so after I get the car back to him I should be a little more flush. I’ll take you out to the Buttercup Bakery for brunch.”
This obviously scored a point. Robin smiled at him, but still it was chilly. “Sounds nice.”
“Okay.” He walked to her and gave her a peck on the cheek, which she accepted. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Robin said, already looking at her book again.
“See you tomorrow. Love you,” Willie said again feebly as he slunk out the door.
Willie stood outside the door in the hallway for a moment after it closed. He thought about going back inside, saying, “You know what, my aunt can wait, let’s go get that sushi.” But he really didn’t have any money for sushi. He could go back in and say, “You know what, let’s have that pasta,” but that would seem like he’d decided he wanted her to cook for him. Shaking his head at his own spinelessness, he walked quietly and slowly down the stairs, back out into the fog, and stepped into the car.
Willie rammed the Audi into gear and peeled out of the parking place, scattering a flock of pigeons from the street. He raced around the block, down Haste Street (aptly named, he thought). He stopped at the corner of Shattuck and Center to grab a $1.50 slice of pizza and a Coke, then headed down University Avenue and onto Interstate 580 toward the Richmond / San Rafael Bridge and the Renaissance Faire.
Couldn’t be more than an hour to Novato. I’ll be there by ten. Plenty of time.
He wasn’t on the freeway five minutes, and had just finished his slice, when he passed a sign announcing the next exit as CENTRAL AVENUE — EL CERRITO. He cocked his head. Then he frantically dug into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet while driving, one eye on the road, and found the slip of paper. It said, in a bold script, Dashka, and there was a phone number, and then added as an afterthought:
c/o Kate Whitsett
5700 Central Ave #205
El Cerrito
Willie threw his head back against the headrest. He looked at his watch. He listened to the voice in his head, then the voice in his heart, and then the one in his loins. He wanted to think of Robin, he tried to think of Robin, but instead the image that came to his mind was Mizti, and the sweet smell of pot in her hair, and then of Dashka, not a picture image but a sense memory of touching between her legs for the first time — oh my god. He looked at the paper again; Kate Whitsett was intriguing as well.
He said “shit” aloud, and at the last possible second, swerved onto the Central Avenue off-ramp.
Chapter Twenty-three
Aside from a tenuous alleged pun (hate away = Hathaway) in one sonnet and a cursory mention in his will, the only knowledge we h
ave about the nature of the marriage of Anne and William is a single line in a harried clerk’s register. One can’t help but wonder: was the eighteen-year-old in love with the pregnant woman eight years his senior? It seems unlikely.
William’s back hurt, his shoulder hurt, his knees hurt, his cheek hurt where Rosaline had smacked him. And now his bottom hurt. His new friends Sandells and Richardson had escorted him directly to Worcester after only a brief stop in Stratford for William to pick up a bedroll.
Leaving his soon-to-be brother-in-law in Shottery, William had ridden Bartholomew’s swaybacked horse with its weather-hardened saddle. William didn’t ride much, and the fifty-mile round trip to Worcester was only slightly less torturous to him than Sir Thomas Lucy’s rack had been. He passed the time by reading the translation of “Romeus and Giulietta” in the book Richard Field had given him. It was dreadfully written, but featured a couple of characters not in the versions of the story he knew: a “prating nurse” and a best friend and confidant for Romeus. And yet the one character William always wondered about — the girl for whom lovelorn Romeus pines before he meets Juliet — was still left unnamed.
William wondered if he himself was enacting Romeus: pining for his lost Rosaline when his star-crossed doom was to marry someone he’d barely met and then die.
They reached Worcester at nightfall, slept under a tree outside of town, and on Monday morning walked into the cathedral at the heart of the city. William paused to admire the crypt of King John in the chancel, but was roughly nudged along by Richardson into the south aisle, where they waited in a short queue and finally appeared before a bleary, watery-eyed clerk who took down the information for the marriage license.
“Names?”
“William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway,” said Richardson.
“Parish?”
“Stratford,” said Richardson.
Sandells corrected him. “Nay, let it read Temple Grafton, for we are known to the priest there, and there was she baptized.”
The clerk looked up, lids heavy with suspicion, and gazed at each of them in turn. William said nothing; if he was to be compelled to marry, he was happy to do so as far away from Stratford as possible. He watched as the bored clerk noted in his ledger that the marriage was to be “inter Wm Shaxpere et Anna Whateley de Temple Grafton.” William was used to seeing Shakespeare spelled a dozen different ways: Shagspere, Shaxper, Shaksper, Shakespear, he’d seen ’em all. Some even insisted on making it Shakeshafte, or Shakestaff, which were more common names in those parts. When the clerk mistakenly entered Anne’s name as Whateley instead of Hathaway, William said nothing, hoping that this might somehow make the marriage invalid.
Having taken the other information, the clerk gave a rote speech about the further particulars, indicating that the wedding might take place at any time after the crying of the banns.
Sandells and Richardson looked at each other like people who might never have attended a church. “Crying?” asked Richardson.
The harried registrar explained, “The matrimony must be announced in the parish church of both parties on three consecutive Sundays.”
Sandells did a quick calculation on his fingers. “So the marriage may take place before Christmas — ”
“No, no, no,” the clerk interrupted. “No banns may be read from Advent Sunday, which this year falls on” — he consulted a calendar — “December second . . . until the thirteenth of January. The marriage may then take place in” — he counted the weeks — “February, at the earliest.”
Sandells and Richardson exchanged glances. “Begging your pardon, good sir, but the bride will be waxing toward full by then. Is there no course by which we might hasten the solemnizing of the already consummated union?”
The clerk smirked. Then he handed Sandells a sheet of paper. “The marriage may proceed with but one reading of the banns thusly,” he said. Richardson looked blankly at the piece of paper.
The clerk reached over, turned it right side up in Richardson’s hands, and continued. “It states these requirements: that there appear no impediment by reason of precontract, consanguinity, or affinity; that no suit has begun concerning such impediment; that the groom should not solemnize the marriage without the consent of the bride’s friends — clearly, already given in this case — and that the groom shall pay all costs if any legal action be brought against Bishop Whitgift and his officers for licensing the marriage. It requires a surety of forty pounds against such eventualities.”
Richardson and Sandells exchanged another glance, and turned away to mutter to each other.
“Forty pounds?” said Richardson.
“ ’ Tis more than the worth of my farm and yours put together.”
“Well, they can’t take what we don’t have.”
Sandells looked at William. “If this marriage come not afore God as pretty and true as a ministering angel, in sooth, young lad, we’ll cut your balls off and pay the surety with ’em, understood?”
William said nothing; he couldn’t help but wonder what the sudden local fascination with his testicles was all about.
“Ay, we’ll stand surety,” said Sandells to the clerk.
The clerk signed and stamped things. “You must needs appear in the administrative court tomorrow to stand for the surety. I will then issue the license, but we will also need a statement from the parents of both parties affirming their consent. There is also,” concluded the clerk with bureaucratic glee, “a small fee.”
Sandells and Richardson looked darkly at William, who still, as he thought best, said absolutely nothing.
Chapter Twenty-four
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised, straight,
Past reason hunted and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait . . .
Had, having and in quest to have, extreme
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
— Sonnet 129
It was too easy. The apartment building was two blocks off the freeway, across from a baseball diamond. Willie hung a right, parked, and thirty seconds later he was pressing the buzzer for #205 — Whitsett. A female voice answered “Hello?” a little too loudly.
“Hi. My name’s Willie. I’m looking for Dashka.”
Music played in the background over the tinny speaker. “Dashka! It’s a friend of yours. Willie. Should I let him in?” And then, after a pause: “Come on up.” And the buzzer to the gate went off with a click.
He knocked at #205 and the door was opened by a girl in a terry-cloth bathrobe. Hair still wet from a shower. Pretty. . . . Blue eyes. Blonde. She looked kind of like . . . kind of like the blonde from the Bangles.
“Hi, I’m Kate. Come on in.”
Behind her, Dashka emerged from the kitchen, holding a beer. “Hi, Willie. Glad you could drop by.”
Kate shook out her hair as she turned back toward Dashka. “Your friend’s cute.”
Dashka pointed toward to the fridge. “Would you like a beer?”
“No, thanks, I can’t stay long.”
Dashka cocked her head, and Willie could practically hear her wondering, Then what are you doing here?
What am I doing here? Willie thought. “It turned out this place was right on the way to where I’m headed tonight, so I thought I’d say hi.”
Kate held up a joint. “Do you have time for a smoke?”
Willie felt as though he had walked into something he didn’t fully understand. But he rarely turned down weed. “Um . . . sure,” he said, swinging his backpack onto the couch.
Willie pulled out a lighter from his pocket and lit the tightly rolled cigarette for Kate.
As she leaned over to catch the flame, Willie caught a scent of something in the air, blending with the sweet smell of the marijuana.
“Sour apple,” Willie said.
“That’s my shampoo,” Kate said, impressed. She turned to Dashka. “I do like a man who can recognize a scent.” She held out the joint for Dashka; Dashka’s hands were full with a beer and an ashtray, and instead of taking it she sucked at it softly from Kate’s fingers with lightly pursed lips. Kate passed it to Willie.
Her breath still held, Dashka said, “We were just deciding whether to go out or not.”
Kate looked at Dashka, then at Willie. “I was trying to talk her into staying in. Sending out for Chinese food. Girls’ night in. Pedicures, pajamas . . .”
Kate put her freshly showered feet in Dashka’s lap, and wiggled her toes.
“But now,” Kate continued, “there’s a boy here.”
“Don’t worry, I really do have to go,” Willie said.
But even as he said it, he had the feeling he wasn’t going anywhere.
The next morning he had only jumbled recollections of the threesome. It was Kate who had kept the conversation flirty, nudging them toward it. Willie didn’t object.
What normal, healthy, unmarried male would walk away from this?
The reality, while undeniably picturesque — there were several images he’d hang onto for a lifetime — was complex. Kate gave Willie a little attention at first, hand-jobbing and some perfunctory fellatio. When Dashka took over the job, Kate quickly rechoreographed the tableau, leaving Willie awkwardly to one side as she went hungrily down on Dashka. When Dashka returned the favor and Willie took her from behind at the same time, Kate held Dashka’s lips pinned to her, so Dashka had been both distracted from Willie and completely blocking any view Willie might have had of the cunnilingual action. Willie felt detached, as if he were watching a pretty movie with an all-star cast and a stupid plot in which he was the badly miscast lead. Although he kept telling himself this was “allowed” in his relationship, he still felt shitty. He couldn’t help thinking of Robin, and he also couldn’t allow himself to think of what he was doing because he was trying to hold on to his orgasm. He tried to distract himself by focusing on a tattoo he now saw on Dashka’s lower back: a pair of intertwining rosebushes, one white, one red, over a delicate script that read BY ANY OTHER NAME.
My Name Is Will Page 17