by Jean Hegland
As they sprint down the final hall, he tries to convince himself he doesn’t need his written-out speech. He knows what he wants to say, and nothing flattens the passion of a talk more than reading it. He reminds himself that in his classes, his best lectures are always the spontaneous ones, when he adds his students’ growing interest to his own enthusiasm and then rides the rising wave of that excitement to reach some thrilling new shore. He can do that now, he exhorts himself. He has both the passion and the knowledge to deliver his best speech extempore.
Then he is standing in the wings of the lecture hall stage as the president of the International Shakespeare Society embarks on her introductory remarks. Teetering between worry and fury, he tries not to imagine where Miranda is at that very minute, tries not to imagine what she might be doing—or what might be being done to her—tries to convince himself that, despite his missing manuscript and the disaster of the last few hours, his lecture can still be the success he hungers for it to be. He tries to ignore the grim epiphany he has just had in the hallway, that although it is still more than likely that Miranda will turn out to be just fine, the damage she has already caused him may never be undone.
“Bedtime,” a soft voice announces. “Mistah Wilson, it is time for bed.” A delicate, dark woman slips into the room. John watches her progress in the black mirror of the window as she takes a pair of pajamas from the dresser, sets them atop the little bed. “Put dese on, please,” she says, her accent musical, her diction enchantingly precise, “and I shall return to help you wit your teeth.”
“Wherefore?” John growls, twisting around in his chair to scowl at her.
“I beg your pardon?”
He makes a small disgusted wave in the direction of the pajamas.
“It’s time for bed,” she answers simply. The badge on her slight front reads ELIZABETH.
“It’s time,” John replies regally, “to leave. I’ve been waiting all day.”
“You have had a long day,” she agrees as she eases him to his feet.
“There’s been a mistake. I don’t belong here. I need to leave.”
“You will soon become accustomed to it here.”
“Who’s in charge? I need to speak with whomever is in charge.”
“Ms. Michaels is de name of our director. But I fear she is not here dis time of night. Perhaps you may speak wit her tomorrow.”
Frustration boils up in John like hot pitch. But he sees he is caught in a seamless trap. He can’t make his true needs known, can’t find a way to hold anyone accountable. There are too many motifs, too many ambiguities he can’t interpret. Any kind of scene will only make things worse. In a slash of revelation, he understands that he can demand to see Ms. Michaels all he wants. But at this petty pace, tomorrow will never come.
“Put on your pajamas,” the woman urges. “And I shall return to help you wit your teeth.”
And then she is gone, leaving John to glare at the foolish pajamas. With their dark blue piping and the tangle of monogram embroidered on the useless chest pocket, they might almost be called handsome. But he hasn’t worn pajamas since he was a child, instead preferring to sleep nude, either luxuriously alone between smooth sheets, or pressed luxuriously against another’s flesh.
He is lonely, suddenly utterly lonely, entirely alone inside his own sad skin, alone in a sorry life he does not recognize, alone in a graceless room, attended by a stranger who wants him to put on his pajamas. He yearns for someone who knows him, for anyone who can tell him who he is. He wants his life back, his right and righteous life. His real life, rife with true tomorrows, rich with mornings and evenings and afternoons. Not this endless empty existence in this institutional room.
“Oh, Mistah Wilson,” a woman remonstrates, nudging him from his sorry reverie. She stands in the open doorway, her slender arms akimbo. The badge pinned to her blue tunic proclaims ELIZABETH.
She leads him toward the bed where the foolish bedclothes lie. Planting herself beside him, she waits until it seems he has no choice but to shuffle off his slacks and shirt and stagger into the pajamas. He feels doltish, frustrated as a child as he attempts to get the tubes of fabric to correspond to his stiff limbs. Twice he has to pull the bottoms off and start again. But finally he stands in the middle of the room, his pajamas on, his hands hanging empty by his sides.
“And now, your teeth,” the woman urges, trundling him into the bathroom, offering him a toothbrush. After he has scrubbed and spat, she escorts him back to the narrow bed, helps him to climb between the bleachy sheets.
“Shall I close de curtains?” she asks, moving toward the window and reaching for the wand to pull them shut. But John waves a curt refusal in the air.
“All right,” she cedes quietly. Crossing to the open doorway, she switches off the light. “Good night,” she says as she slips out of the room, leaves John lying like a corpse beneath the bedcovers.
Cautiously, he turns his head so he can look out the window, trying to discern the creeping burglars or looming monsters, the newts and blindworms, or secret, black and midnight hags lurking for him out there. But he can make out only the lacy silhouette of a tree, a denser darkness beyond. It’s inside where the demons live, in the regrets he cannot conquer, the grievances he cannot overcome.
Who’s there?
That’s how Hamlet begins, with a sentinel’s brief challenge at the midnight changing of the guard. It’s such a simple opening that semester after semester John’s students race right past it. And semester after semester he has to slow them down, to send them back to the beginning to ponder that question more deeply.
But tonight, as he lies waiting in the dark for death or morning, he wonders if he’s ever really pondered that question for himself. Surely he has, he thinks—he must. And yet it seems another thing he has forgotten, another fact that’s drifted off, another shred of understanding lost in the mortal shuffle.
Inside his chest, the meaty engine of his heart thuds out an answer of its own. He can feel it even now, pumping out the primal iamb of his existence—I am, I am, I am, I am, I am—tapping out his life’s long sentence.
The sentence that sentences him to dust: I am.
But who?
How can he have lived so long and still not know?
HE’S IN A ROOM. He’s sitting in an anonymous green bedchamber, gazing through clear glass at a plot of grass imprisoned by a tall brick wall. Ivy festoons the wall, and a row of rose bushes lines its base—crimson, saffron, and ivory roses in full midsummer bloom. John studies that strange garden by the hour, the grass, the bricks and ivy, the roses and the breezes and the passing butterflies.
He’s in a room, but not his own. Though they lie and tell him that it is. Strangers come and say they want him to be comfortable, ask if there is anything he needs. And then don’t wait to hear his answer, don’t stop to question what he means when he barks, “O, reason not the need,” or pleads, “I must needs be gone.” Instead they smile and smile and smile. Instead they pat his shoulder as if he were a toothless dog or a sun-warmed stone, and hurry off to other things, leave him alone.
Alone, like to a lonely dragon.
But that was Coriolanus, exiled from Rome. And he is John—Professor Wilson—exiled from his work and wife and home. He is Dr. Wilson, abandoned like a burned-out chimera in this strange green room.
In theater parlance, a green room is where actors pass the time when they are not performing. Like a decompression chamber, like limbo or purgatory, a green room is a place between, a place where, costumed and ready for the stage, players await that alchemical moment when they shed their other selves and join the play. There was a green room at Blackfriars Theater, John recalls with a burst of pleasure as if welcoming a visitation from a long-absent friend—though in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Peter Quince’s troupe of rude mechanicals gathers in the woods beyond Athens’s walls to rehearse their play, they call it a tiring house instead.
This green plot shall be our stage, Quince
claims, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house. And it’s in that makeshift green room that Bottom gets translated, changed from a stagestruck weaver to the donkey-headed lover of the fairy queen.
Changed in a green room in a green world! John epiphanizes. He wonders if he’s had—or maybe read—that thought before, or if it’s as fresh an insight as it suddenly seems to be. Either way, it pleases him inordinately, to think that the most magic moment in that most magical of plays would occur in such a twice-enchanted place—a green room in a green world.
Green worlds, he thinks with a satisfaction as deep as if he had just taken the first taste of a full-throated, peaty scotch. Settling back into his chair, he lets thoughts about green worlds roll through his mind, savoring that moment of apprehension, the feeling that he is once more in command. Green worlds, he mulls, teasing out the flavors—those luminous, liminal, verdant places where characters are drawn—or maybe even driven—to escape harsh laws, or cruel fathers, or some other wreckage in their working day lives.
Green worlds, John continues with a scholarly nod at the assembled roses, those forests, islands, or distant coasts—Arden, say, or Bohemia, or Illyria, or Prospero’s enchanted isle—where everything is topsy-turvy and the normal rules do not apply, where enlightenment comes by way of confusion, where men and women must lose themselves entirely to find themselves anew.
Changed in a green room in a green world, John rhapsodizes. It’s a thought he yearns to share with Sally. Gazing out upon the bee-kissed roses, he smiles, imagining her pleasure when he tells her. Dream is one of her favorite plays.
Sally has been to see him. He suddenly recalls.
Somehow she managed to find him, even stranded as he is in this desert place. Sally, his last, best, dearest wife. Sally, his soul’s solace and his life’s delight, the wife with beauty in her eye, since, as he is fond of telling her, beauty is in the eye of the bee holder.
She’d worn a dress he did not remember ever having seen her in before, her hair was arranged in some new way, and she seemed so nervous and slightly strange that at first he hardly knew her. Though even before he’d named her and claimed her as his own, his spirits had leapt up at the sight of her as if he were a mere boy, a green, untutored youth glimpsing the lass to whom he had just lost his fresh-minted heart.
She brought with her a whiff of the world beyond, a scent of purpose and busyness, a casual wide freedom he’d nearly forgotten one might possess, the great reckless bounty of the ordinary everyday. He held her for a long time. Eyes closed, standing in that meager chamber they kept insisting was his, he’d pressed his Sally against his chest, inhaling the faint scent of honey that never seemed to leave her hair, and beneath that, her own dear private smell, while he nearly swooned with his longing to merge with her—not just his little tongue or soft old penis, but his entire self commingled and subsumed.
“How are you?’ she’d whispered into his chest. But that was a question past the wit of man to say, and so he’d shook his head, buried his face deeper in her sweet honey hair, breathed her in and in and in.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered. Into the quiet that followed, he’d strained to find something he could say to fit all that he was feeling, but in the end he could only nod and say, “Okay.”
She sat beside him and held his hand, the two of them gazing out the window as if they were attending a play together—watching the rising action of a pair of butterflies, the denouement of a passing squirrel. She asked him about himself, but when he could not muster an adequate reply, she began to cram the air with news of queens and drones and nectar flows, of splitting hives and catching swarms and fixing the extractor.
After her talk dribbled to an end, he’d offered, “You are my—” But his throat squeezed shut before they could find out what.
She sat with him until the color had leached from the scarlet and yellow roses, leaving the white ones glowing like sweet sorrows in the graying air, and when she said she had to go, he’d sprung up, too. “Oh, John,” she answered, her voice raw with pain. “You’ve got to stay.”
“Please,” he’d blurted. “I can’t … bear it.” He’d hated to have to plead his case, hated to reveal how utter his desperation was, hated to have to burden her with him. But even worse than all those hates was the moment that came after, as he watched the pain on her face harden into the same resolve he’d once spied in her expression when the cat dropped a rumpled starling on their doorstep, and rather than allowing the creature to suffer any further, she’d smacked the life from its broken body with the back of her shovel blade.
Sally’s visit was yesterday. Or the day before. Or any day but this one in this odd unjointed time. Today Sally is gone, and John is bearing it still—still chained to his stake and trying to hold his ground while the growling curs ring him round, still fighting the course that will end in only one way, since no bear can live forever with a chain around its neck.
From behind him comes a sound like the near words of a stream, or perhaps the rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb actors learn to murmur during crowd scenes to mimic background talk. Groaning around in his chair, John discovers yet another mooncalf barging into his room, this one a scarecrow who walks with his head bowed nearly to his chest, muttering as he comes.
“Vanish,” John growls, waving toward the door. “Depart. Beat it hence.”
But the dotard marks him not. When he reaches the window, he stops, gazes at the verdant walled world beyond.
“That tuna was bigger than Methuselah,” he interrupts his gabbling to announce. He taps the glass with his forefinger. “This melts when it rains. Did you dress warm?”
“Warmly,” John snaps.
“Sez you,” the man replies. “Goddamn you anyway, you motherfucking whore.” He gives the pane a resounding slap with the flat of his palm.
“Shog off, elf-skin,” John snarls. “Go fill some other grave.” At last the clodpoll turns and drumbles off, babbling as he goes.
A’ babbled of green fields. That’s what Mistress Quickly says when she describes the death of her irksome friend and favorite customer, Jack Falstaff. Or at least, John recalls with a satisfied nod at the squirrel that dashes across the lawn like a brief silk scarf, that’s how Falstaff dies according to Lewis Theobald’s emendation. And a Table of greene fields is what’s printed in the Folio, making it a stretch that Shakespeare himself ever intended babbled. But whatever Shakespeare actually meant is lost in the vapors of time, and although Theobald was no poet—although he plagiarized another man’s play and provoked Pope to write him down a dunce—as an editor of Shakespeare, he was both thorough and inspired.
And how can Falstaff not die babbling, John wonders as the lack-brain blabs his way on down the hall—especially after nearly three hundred years of its being so? As he’s oft explained to students, the most a modern editor can do is gloss the matter, offering up a footnote’s worth of history and a quibble’s worth of question before leaving the fat knight to find his way to Arthur’s bosom according to Theobald’s emendation.
But rather than musing on emendations, John finds himself succumbing to Falstaff’s gravitational tug. Not the faux Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor—the foolish buffoon in that fatuous play that legend has it Shakespeare knocked off in a fortnight because Queen Elizabeth wished to see fat Jack in love—but the real, raw rogue himself, the Falstaff of the Henry plays, Prince Hal’s friend, Mistress Quickly’s sometime lover, Boar’s Head Tavern’s greatest philosopher.
Jack Falstaff, John thinks fondly, one of Shakespeare’s roundest characters—next to bony Hamlet, bonny Rosalind, howling Lear, and leering Macbeth. Sweet Sir Jack, who is born an old man with a white head and a round belly, and who dies a child, playing with flowers and smiling upon his fingers’ ends. True Jack Falstaff, John eulogizes, that great waxing moon of a man compared to Prince Hal’s lean imitation sun.
When the squirrel reaches the base of the tree, it jerks to a stop, studies its surroundings in tense little star
ts like a film being shown one frame at a time. Then, defying gravity, it flows up the trunk, vanishing among the shiny leaves. Long after the tip of its feathery tail has disappeared, the shadows on the ground tremble with remembrance of its passing, while John’s mind trembles with images and broken lines. God send the companion a better prince! We have heard the chimes at midnight I was now a coward on instinct banish plump Jack, and banish all the world
Gazing at the unsquirreled tree, John recalls the first Falstaff that e’er he saw—a jolly, pillow-enhanced version—rollicking with Prince Hal and Poins in Henry IV, Part I. His attendance at that performance is yet another tale engraved upon his heart, another saga from his stored and storied past, and he embarks on it now, grateful for the respite waiting for him at UC Davis more than half a century ago—back when it was his time to play a yearning undergrad.
Other than the Christmas pageants the Baptist Sunday school put on every December and the musicals the senior class of Kernville High produced each spring, that Henry is the first theatrical performance John has ever seen. He is there mainly because Professor Gallagher has offered extra credit to anyone who attends, and John has done none too well on his Faerie Queene essay.
It seems strange to sit in a theater without a bag of popcorn and a coke, strange to be facing a stage instead of a screen. The audience is older than he’d expected, too, comprised of more professors and professionals from town than college students. While he waits for the play to begin, he tries to study the synopsis printed on his program, but the names mean nothing to him, and he finds the background information about Richard II and Bolingbrooke and Mortimer more confusing than edifying. He hopes he will not disgrace himself by clapping at the wrong place as he had earlier that fall when he’d taken a girl he’d thought he liked to hear a string quartet.
Then the curtains part, and suddenly the stage is filled with old men, the King of England—John gathers by the actor’s crown and robe—and a retinue of lords and earls. Because he spent the previous summer memorizing Romeo and Juliet, the language is not all that hard to understand, but the politics they are discussing are both too brisk and too thick for him to follow. Stifling a sigh, he is settling in to wait for intermission when suddenly he hears the King expressing his disappointment in his son. Yea, there thou mak’st me sad, and mak’st me sin