by Jean Hegland
It made John’s head spin to be surrounded by people laughing and arguing in a language he could not understand. It wearied and irritated him, as if he were trying to live in a place of constant wind or blowing sand, and he’d even begun to suspect that Shakespeare’s Italian prejudices were founded on something more substantial than hearsay and chauvinism. Sally turned as solicitous as the parent of a preschooler after he misplaced his wallet for the third time. But he’d found himself more irked than soothed by the patience honeying her voice, and her little quips about absentminded professors only caused him to become obsessed with keeping track of his possessions, so that he spent the rest of the trip patting his pocket every few minutes to check for his wallet, fingering his passport, clutching his camera strap even as they ate.
Even Sally’s facility with Italian came to seem more like a wedge between them than a bridge, one more thing that placed her squarely in a world that had suddenly and inexplicably turned against him. In the end, he returned to California not invigorated but exhausted, to a house he barely recognized, the freshly painted rooms so unfamiliar that he got lost his first night home, trying to find the bathroom in the dark.
It was as if the plane they’d flown back to California on had somehow got diverted and returned them to an altered world, a place so similar to the one that was his native home that he could work his thoughts into a twist of knots trying to discern the differences, but another place nonetheless, a mazy place where nothing could be entirely trusted or assumed.
After Sicily, it seemed he could not quite get his life back into focus. Following a case of jet lag as debilitating as a month-long bout of flu, he’d at last turned his attention to setting up his office in the spare bedroom and been dismayed to find that the graduate assistant who’d helped him pack up his belongings at the university had fit the books and journals into boxes according to their size instead of preserving their order on his bookshelves.
But rather than let annoyance untemper him, he’d gone straight to work, patiently emptying all the boxes and stacking their contents in piles on the floor, tossing out the incomprehensible stuff that that idiot kid had mistakenly assumed he’d want to keep—old newspapers, programs for conferences decades past, even a strange sheaf of children’s drawings with such confounding titles as “CaLLe BaN,” “ROZlin,” and “ROMeO.”
He’d meant to start by arranging all the volumes whose authors began with A on the shelf next to his desk. But he soon became as confused as a freshman about editors and coauthors, and he began to wonder if maybe he shouldn’t separate his books by play or century or subject instead. Finally, he decided to postpone organizing anything until he’d had a chance to get some writing done. Later, he promised himself, once he’d made some headway with his real work, he could return to the menial chores of housekeeping.
But writing, too, proved unexpectedly frustrating. He wanted to develop his arguments for the reclamation of humanism. But time and again he would begin with a promising hunch for how best to frame his thoughts only to find that when he tried to follow his thinking any further, his ideas seemed to either dissolve or grow infinitely more complicated, bifurcating until they had somehow connected with every other idea he’d ever had, interweaving with so many questions, musings, and epiphanies that he was left thrilled and bewildered in equal parts.
Several times he ran across drafts of other articles that addressed nearly the same material, but when he attempted to incorporate the two sets of thoughts, he discovered they left large gaps in his reasoning or offered subtle contradictions of each other, and any attempt to reconcile or reconnect them sent him back to the plays, back to other scholars, back to his leaning stacks of journals, his tumbling piles of books.
And all the while the mail kept coming, bringing more things that needed reading, needed sorting, required congratulation or rebuttal. Newsletters and journals continued to appear. Letters arrived from former students, asking for recommendations, sending monographs, or wedding, birth, or book announcements. But the names on the envelopes were meaningless, the faces in the photographs morphed into a single nameless face, and he set the letters and pictures aside until he had more energy to respond to them.
Until his mind could clear.
“An amnesiac walks into a bar,” the rustic sitting opposite John gleeks, “and asks, ‘Do I come here often?’
“A pair of jumper cables walks into a bar, and the bartender says, ‘I’ll serve you as long as you don’t start anything.’”
The plates the aides deal out around the table contain salads topped with slices of grilled chicken. John studies his food as if it were some sort of test or trap, the strips of pale meat, the dollops of dressing, the stiff romaine. Wisps of warning circle in his head—Tamora sitting down to the pie that she herself hath bred at Titus Andronicus’s banquet table, the traitors in The Tempest preparing to partake of Ariel’s bewitched feast, the gory ghost of Banquo claiming his place in Macbeth’s dining hall—all the dangers of eating where one does not belong. He misses Sally’s presence across the table, wonders if she’s bothering with food at all, now that he’s no longer there to keep her company. When he first met her, she’d been living on little more than bagels and smoothies, too occupied with trying to establish her apiaries and reclaim her life after her caddish husband’s loutish departure to pause even long enough for a real meal.
“The food is good here,” announces his plump table companion. Reaching for her glass of milk, she adds cheerily, “No dessert until you drink your milk.”
Warily, John takes up his own glass. He hasn’t drunk a glass of milk since before his mother died. Now he takes a sip, lets its cold viscosity fill his mouth as his gaze travels the room, glancing from the busy aides to the other diners, their white or gray or bald heads bent over their food. Swallowing, he sets his glass back down, touches his napkin to his lips. The milk is not as foul as he had feared, and yet he wishes it were wine instead—a sprightly pinot blanc or a spicy zinfandel. Or perhaps the vino nero he and Sally discovered in Sicily—black wine to match Homer’s wine-dark sea—and which they’d first tasted on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the very waters where Odysseus wandered for so long.
“Do you want your chicken?” the stout woman asks, eyeing the strips of meat atop John’s salad with a look akin to lust.
“Children?” the quiet one murmurs, still studying the photo in her lap.
For a long time he’d assumed their trip to Sicily would mark the boundary between the disappointing final chapter of his academic career and the commencement of the real work of his retirement. How much he would accomplish, he’d marveled in advance—how much he would read and write and publish, how much discover and create—in those open, golden days when his time would be his own and he would have no one to answer to but William Shakespeare, Sally, and himself.
Even after over half a century, each time he returned to any of the plays, he still noticed something new. Each line was an inexhaustible garden, every word its own rich trove, each plot so momentous and meaning-laden he knew he could never possibly be finished with it. In his retirement, he could finally work for himself—and for the work itself. He would publish in earnest, he promised Sally, before he perished for real.
How happy he would be in those calm, wide days. With Sally at his side—his fine and final wife. His last and best. After his disastrous marriage to Freya ended, he’d assumed that all he’d finally learned about how to husband would be for naught, since he would never have another chance of wiving at three score and some. But he’d found all the graces he’d ever desired in one woman at last, discovered her on a shining afternoon in early summer, balanced on a ladder propped against the maple tree outside his office window, while she coaxed a shimmering orb of honeybees from the branch where it dangled two stories above the ground.
She was wearing a veil that made her look like a cross between a Victorian dowager and an extraterrestrial alien, but when he opened his window the bett
er to watch her ease the seething mass into the box that sat atop her ladder, he’d been amazed to see that her hands were bare. A moment later, above the hum and sizzle of all those thousands of bees, he’d heard a scrap of tune, and he’d realized to his astonishment that she was singing.
He was waiting at the bottom of her ladder when she descended, the box murmuring in her arms like a sleeping dragon or a captured melody. She was used to people stopping to watch when she caught a swarm, and her greeting was brisk but not unpleasant as she unzipped herself from her bee suit, pushed back her veil and shook out her silvered hair. Given her slender figure and her dexterity on the ladder, she was much older than John had expected, but he found himself pleased by that surprise. The friendly fans of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the veins on her strong, deft, naked hands made her somehow seem more fully human than the golden clones that filled his classes and his seminars. Even so, he’d felt as tongue-tied as Orlando upon first meeting Rosalind as he stood beneath the maple and stammered out some sodden-witted question about the dangerousness of bees.
“Dangerous!” she’d scoffed. “Don’t you read the news? It’s bees who’re in danger, not me. Besides, a swarm of bees is about as docile as a cow. Easier to get out of a tree, too,” she’d quipped as she carried the box toward her pickup and John trotted along beside her, already half-captured himself.
“Where is everyone?” she’d asked, when he appeared incapable of either departing or having anything sensible to say. “The campus looks deserted.” She chuckled. “Usually I draw a larger crowd.”
“We’re between terms,” he explained as she leaned over the wall of the truck bed to set the muttering box carefully behind the cab. “Spring semester’s over, and summer session doesn’t start until next week. I’m just here working on an article.”
“An article?” She paused to give the box a brief caress. “About what?”
“Oh,” he’d shrugged. “Just some thoughts about one of Shakespeare’s plays.”
“William Shakespeare?” she asked, as if there might be others. “Which play?”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he answered warily, already anticipating the inevitable awkward end to their conversation.
“I saw that just a few months ago!” she exclaimed. “They’d made the fairies gay,” she added with a laugh. “The friends I went with had conniptions, but I liked it. In a funny way I thought it kind of fit.
“Let me ask you this—” she’d gone on more seriously. “The other day I read an article that said he was an impostor.”
“Who?” John quipped, dreading what was coming next. “Bottom? Puck? Oberon?”
“No.” She frowned. “Shakespeare. They said that someone else wrote all his plays.”
It was a question he hated, the question he’d grown used to having to field far too often from the kind of tiresome student who also wanted to claim that the world had been created in six days and that global warming was a hoax. It was another reason he avoided revealing his profession to strangers on long-distance flights. But this woman did not strike him as a collector of conspiracy theories or an idiot or a snob, and so, as she swung her ladder from the tree, carted it across the lawn, and stowed it in the bed of her truck, he’d explained a few of the most glaring flaws in that boiled-brained claim that some other playwright, or some nobleman, or even Queen Elizabeth herself must have written—in his or her spare time, and without anyone suspecting it for the next two hundred and fifty years—the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
“I thought that sounded like a loony theory,” she said when he finished his polite polemic. “I’m glad it isn’t true.”
She smiled as if an interesting new thought had just occurred to her. “I don’t know why it matters really. I mean, those plays are still those plays—aren’t they?—whoever wrote them. But somehow it bothered me to think it was all some kind of hoax.”
His heart already humming like a swarm of bees, John assured her that it was always good to see Shakespeare being taken seriously—even as his own impostor. Generously, he added that, misguided as the people were who claimed that no undereducated glover’s son from some backwater village could have ever written Hamlet or As You Like It or Othello, they were only trying to make a miracle comprehensible. Especially in these anti-intellectual times, it was gratifying to see the value of a good education being championed so ardently. But what those naysayers failed to understand, John said, smiling into Sally’s lovely, forthright face, was that no true miracle could ever be explained.
That smile is still illuminating his expression when someone jostles his shoulder and John looks up to find himself in the oddest banquet hall. When he glances down again, a bowl of ice cream has materialized on the table in front of him, a spoon tucked at a jaunty angle between the scoops.
“Oh, goody,” the ancient matron beside him exclaims when a similar bowl appears in front of her. “I’ll get fat,” she gloats, snatching up her spoon.
“‘We fat all creatures else to fat us,’” John offers experimentally, “‘and we fat ourselves for maggots.’”
“For maggots?” she asks, bewilderment crossing her face like a brief fog.
“Magic,” corrects the fool sitting opposite him.
“Hamlet,” John answers curtly, his hopes dashed. “When he refers to Polonius at supper—not where he eats, but where he is eaten. By a certain convocation of politic worms.”
On their first date, he’d taken Sally to a production of Hamlet down in the city. “I’ve never seen Hamlet,” she announced as he drove south through the sleek green hills. “In fact, practically the only thing I know about it is ‘To be or not to be.’”
“That’s not a bad place to begin,” John replied mildly, suddenly dismayed at the thought of becoming even moderately smitten by a woman who knew nothing about Hamlet. Especially at his age, when the heyday in his blood was at least a little tamed, he’d assumed it would be good to have plenty of ready topics of conversation.
“So,” Sally prompted after they’d driven a moment in silence, “I could use a rundown on how the story goes. I’m afraid I haven’t yet had a chance to buy the CliffsNotes, professor.”
He cringed almost as much at “professor” as he did at CliffsNotes, but when he glanced in her direction, he saw her expression was more playful than ironic, and so he’d responded in kind, by clearing his throat theatrically and straightening an imaginary tie. “When the play begins,” he said, allowing his voice to settle into its professorial register, “Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark, has just died, and his mother has already married her dead husband’s brother. If Hamlet weren’t upset enough by this, a ghost appears claiming to be the spirit of Hamlet’s dead father, and maintaining that he was murdered by his brother—”
“—who is now the king and married to Hamlet’s mom—”
“—exactly, and saying that if Hamlet ever loved his father, he will revenge his death by killing his uncle, the new king.”
“Sounds like we’re off to a juicy start,” she observed, craning her neck to study the winery they were passing, with its vast parking lot, drawbridge, and crenellated towers.
He smiled. “The rest of the play is about Hamlet trying to decide whether the ghost was truly the spirit of his dead father, and—if it was—whether revenge is really the right way for him to remember his father, and—if revenge is the right way—then how he should go about getting it. In the end—”
“—no spoilers, please!” She reached across the seat to give his elbow an impish tap. “I’m sure they all die, but I’d like to wait and see for myself how it happens.”
Her hand lingered for a moment on his arm, and suddenly he found it oddly invigorating to be going to see Hamlet with someone who did not know how the play ended, especially when she added, “What I’d really like to know is what you think I should be paying attention to during the show.”
It was a generous question, and as they curved through rolling vin
eyards where the summer’s fresh vines twined across their rows like creatures caught in mid-dance, he savored the moment he took to choose a direction for his thoughts.
“Beginnings are important,” he began, casting a shy look in her direction and then nearly blushing when his glance intersected with her direct gaze, “and, uh, also in literature, too, as auguries,” he fumbled, “or suggestions of themes, intimations of what might be to come. In Hamlet, the beginning is so straightforward that many people hardly notice it. At first it might just seem like filler, simply a way to get the story going. But it’s brilliant, really. Like practically everything else in that play, it’s an invitation to—”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” she said with a laugh, “how does it begin?”
“It begins with a question, and since the entire play is riddled with questions—unanswerable questions, most of them, enigmas that deepen the more one considers them instead of resolving—”
“But what’s the question?” she insisted.
“‘Who’s there?’”
“‘Who’s there?’ That’s the beginning of Hamlet?” She chuckled. “Sounds like the middle of a knock-knock joke.”
Grinning at the road ahead, John admitted, “I never thought of that.”
She fell silent for a quarter of a mile or so, seemingly concentrating on some inward puzzle. Then, suddenly brightening, she exclaimed, “Toby!”
“What?”
“Toby—get it? ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Toby.’ ‘Toby who?’ ‘Toby or not Toby?’
“But why,” she continued before he’d finished his appreciative groan, “do you say ‘Who’s there?’ is a good beginning for the play?”
“Because it’s a play about identity and appearances, about whether the ghost is a true messenger from Hamlet’s father or a goblin damn’d from hell, and whether Hamlet is crazy or only pretending, and whether he loved Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers or whether he loved her not. It’s a play about the difference between ‘seems’ and ‘is,’ and ‘Who’s there?’ suggests all that. In the end—”