“My dad was a colonel in the Air Force, but his plane got shot down.” She speaks neutrally, looking not at John but into another world entirely—some near and distant place he suddenly fears he may never reach.
“I’m sorry.” Leaning forward, he asks, “In Vietnam?”
“Khe Sanh.” She shifts her gaze from that other world back to him, looking at him as if she were seeing him for the first time.
He shakes his head at the many sorrows of it—an able man killed, a woman bereft of her husband, a daughter entering adulthood without her father, the waste and horror of the war John is of course opposed to. But before he can form the right response, she says, “My mom wanted those words carved on his headstone. She’d heard Bobby Kennedy say them for his brother, some time or other. She was pretty broke up when she found out it would cost too much to put them on Dad’s marker.”
She gives herself a quick hug, squeezing her maroon-clad arms across her chest so that her exquisite breasts rise even higher. “I don’t think she even knew that Shakespeare wrote it, but I recognized that part when I read the play.
“‘Give me my Romeo,’” she says, looking shyly into some sweeter distance,
“‘and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
that all the world will be in love with night,
and pay no worship to the garish sun.’”
She seems embarrassed to be speaking those lines aloud, but below her discomfort John can hear the irrepressible lilt of the poetry, the natural music of her voice. He sits a moment, basking in the beauty of the words, savoring the little thrill it gives him to hear her speak them to him—even so obliquely.
“You’ve memorized that!” he says to break a silence that suddenly threatens to grow too deep.
“It wasn’t hard,” she answers with another lovely shrug. “Only,” she adds tentatively, “Here’s what I don’t understand. Isn’t it supposed to be, ‘When he shall die’? Not I—not Juliet dying—but he—Romeo?
“I keep thinking that Mom must of got confused, because what she wanted on Dad’s headstone is not the way it says it in our book. But then that’s confusing, too, because it doesn’t make any sense—does it?—for Mom to want to put it on Dad’s headstone if it says, ‘when I shall die,’ since Dad’s the one that’s gone. It’s like the—whatsit?—the point of view is wrong. Why would Juliet want Romeo to be chopped into pieces when she dies? I mean, what if Romeo’s still alive?”
Nodding gravely, John lets a moment pass in silent appreciation of her question before he speaks. “Back when I first began to study Romeo and Juliet, the pronoun in the second clause of the twenty-first line of act three, scene two of all the standard editions of the play was he. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I ran across an edition that used I instead, and when I did, I was sure I’d found a misprint. In fact,” he adds, indulging a wry smile intended to express both fondness and condescension for the ambitious, untutored student he’d once been, “for a few seconds I even imagined I was going to earn a little glory for having caught an error.”
“Yeah?” she says, watching him intently. “I mean—yes?”
“But it turns out that the only original text that uses he is the Fourth Quarto, which is a late and otherwise unauthoritative reprinting of the third. There’s no reason to think the changes that appear in that Quarto are anything other than a typesetter’s attempt to tidy up what he saw as errors in the previous printings. Because the fact is, that in every other Quarto—and in the Folio, too—Juliet says, ‘when I shall die.’ And so we must assume that is what Shakespeare intended.”
“But that changes everything,” she bursts out indignantly. “It changes the whole play.”
“And how does it do that?” he asks, suddenly warmed by a nearly paternal pride.
“It’s one thing if Juliet wanted him cut into little pieces after he’d already died. It’s like she thought he was so perfect that even after he was dead he could still decorate the whole universe.” She stops for a moment, tilting her head to one side in the charming gesture John has already learned signals that she is thinking. “And maybe,” she continues slowly, as if she were in the process of discovering her thought as she speaks it, “maybe after he’s dead, she’d be willing to share him with the world—her Romeo.
“But it just seems so selfish, for her to want him hacked to pieces when she dies. It reminds me of those things in India—what’re they called?—where the wife gets burned alive along with her dead husband.”
“Suttee?” John offers. “Though in this case I suppose the sexes would have to be reversed.”
“Yeah.” She shudders. “That’s so creepy. Juliet never loved Romeo like that.”
“In the balcony scene, she does say she might kill him with much cherishing,” John suggests. He is touched by her fervency, moved by her romanticism, thrilled by what he perceives as her raw intelligence. Despite his own increasing cynicism about Romeo and Juliet, he suddenly finds himself hoping that she will stand up for that other, older, more innocent vision of the play.
“Kill him with much cherishing?” she echoes. She looks puzzled for a moment, and then she says, “You mean like that bird on a string thing?”
“A silken thread, yes,” John answers, watching spellbound as her thoughts move like patterns of sun and shadow across her face.
“But isn’t that different? Isn’t she saying that’s what she wouldn’t want to do—kill him with much cherishing?”
“Could be.” John pauses for a moment before asking, “What do you make of the fact that she’s thinking about dying from practically the moment she first meets Romeo? ‘If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed,’ is what she says after she’s exchanged less than half a dozen lines with the guy. After that, dying is never far from her thoughts. In fact, we might say her anticipation of death saturates the whole play.”
“Maybe she’s willing to die for her love,” Barbara answers, “but I can’t believe she wants Romeo to be killed.”
“There’s one more thing for you to consider,” John says gravely, “yet another fact scholars have found germane to this particular question. And that is, that for the Elizabethans—and certainly for Shakespeare—one meaning of ‘to die’ was to experience sexual ecstasy.”
“Se—?” she begins, and then catches herself, as if startled to be on the verge of blurting such a phrase in a professor’s office.
“As I’ve pointed out in class, Shakespeare explores all of human experience, including the totality of love, and one way some scholars have had of understanding Juliet’s line is in a sexual context.”
Despite her blush, it suddenly seems that some bold new understanding has appeared in her expression, a discovery or a calculation far removed from the additional definition of a word. For a moment they sit together in an odd charged silence, and then, when it appears she has nothing more to ask about the play, John stands to see her to the door. Offering her a grave smile, he says, “I think you’ve discovered a promising topic for your term paper, and I’ll be more than happy to help you work on it if you’d like. If my office hours aren’t convenient for you, perhaps we can make other arrangements.”
What was he thinking, who had he been? he wonders now as further stars appear in the blackening sky. Who was that foolish man who was so unable to interpret a character, discern a motive, or even predict a plot? What’s done cannot be undone. It’s Lady Macbeth who makes that mournful claim, though she is talking about the murder of a king, nothing so trivial as John’s offer to help a coed study Shakespeare. But even so, the stage is set, the great wheel turns, already the charm is firm and good.
He yearns to return to the cramped office where that previous John sits admiring that coed’s lovely thighs, yearns to warn that dotard of his impending folly. He wishes he could smash the bond of time, break the fourth wall—or maybe the fourth dimensio
n—and speak directly to that earlier self. He would tell him to be wary, would remind him that all that glisters is not gold, that his heart is already a tangled web.
But you cannot communicate with the past, despite its being prologue to every now. All those other men that John has been—they can talk to him, but he cannot speak back to them.
“John, John, John,” a woman clucks. “What are you doing, sitting in the dark?” He hears a click and light stabs his eyes as the clucker whisks on down the hall. Suddenly the window has become a black mirror, his own face masking his view of whatever is going on beyond the glass. But surely little lives continue in that garden all night long—the unseen worms and voles and crows doing whatever their kind do when the sun is gone, the hungry snails, the sleeping bees, the dreaming butterflies. The silent stars still shining. Entire universes spiraling beyond his ken while John strains to see the world—or even himself—through his own reflected eyes.
“You can’t see beyond your own dick!” Nancy had shrieked. Though to her credit, she’d shrieked it only once. Otherwise, their demise had been as civil as such a disunion can be—more tears than accusations, more silent suffering than angry battles. Poor Nancy. John hadn’t realized how heartsick she would be when he told her he was leaving. He’d been in such a froth himself, so smitten with the lovely novelty of Barbara that he’d assumed there was no real substance to their marriage for Nancy either, that beneath the veneer of their partnership there existed only a little desiccated affection.
But it seemed to have worked all right for Nancy in the end. Eighteen months after their divorce was finalized, she married the biology teacher at the high school where she taught, and they’d had two children in quick succession. John saw her once years later, when he’d been back in Chicago for some conference or other. They met for a cocktail in the bar of the convention center, and when she showed him photographs of her son in his West Point uniform and her daughter cradling her first baby, there’d been the briefest instant when John assumed those people were somehow related to him, too. A moment later, an image of his own sullen daughter entered his mind, and although it added to his envy of Nancy’s clean-cut brood, he’d also known an odd sense of superiority to think his child was not such a sheep.
Nancy. She’d seemed so drab when he was succumbing to Barbara’s excellent witchcraft. But she’d looked good in that cocktail lounge. Sitting opposite her in the bar’s deep booth, he’d been flooded with a montage of memories from their marriage, and he’d known a sharp regret.
He hears a woman weeping. In the strange and vivid theater inside his mind he sees her, too—Barbara, sobbing among the tangled sheets. Sitting in his worn chair, John stands in the doorway of that long-gone bedroom and watches as she cries.
It’s a scene too tawdry to be a tragedy. From his empty helm in this dimming room, he sees all the sorry meagerness of that moment, and standing in the doorway of what has been their mutual bedchamber, he sees it, too, senses both the futility of the present and the finality of the future he has just made possible bearing down on him. He feels a gut stab of remorse, a million prickles of regret. He yearns for some other, easier way.
As Barb lies sobbing into her hands on the bed that John has not shared for many a night, he wonders yet again if he is right to be leaving her. He wonders if it might not be possible to fix things, even now. Maybe he could find a way to make this not an ending but a new—and truer—start.
It’s not Barb’s fault she knows herself so little, not her fault she is incapable of matching John anywhere but in bed. It is arguably not even her fault she’s begun to dabble in adultery, taking it up like yoga or needlepoint, a hobby to keep herself occupied while he is working and Miranda is off at school. He has made this mistake once before, leaving a woman he did not really have to leave. Maybe this time he just needs grit enough to sleep in the bed he’s made, guts enough to stay with this weeping woman, wisdom enough to trust that time will teach the two of them what true love is.
He knows that one word—or two or three—are all the moment will require, knows the real work will come later, and though he wastes a fleet second in wishing that Shakespeare had had more to say about living—instead of wedding or dying—in the service of love, in that second he believes he could surely find a way to do that, too.
Already anticipating the relief of reconciliation, he makes a step toward the bed while Barb lowers her hands to peek at him over the pickets of her pink-tipped fingernails. Even brimming with tears, her eyes are lovely, and John takes another, swifter step, ready to melt into their melting. But now a flicker of calculation enters her expression. Covering her face again, she continues to weep, though John senses she is also gathering resources, calculating strategies, deciding with all the self-conscious skill of an accomplished actress or a master rhetorician exactly how she will react when he touches her, precisely what she will concede and what demand.
A vision of their future life together sweeps over him, the endless dreary days of boredom and capitulation, the constant concessions for Miranda’s sake, his daily calculations about whether it will be harder on Miranda to have to hear her parents quarrel yet again or to witness him giving in once more to her mother’s narcissistic whims.
When John does not join her on the bed, Barb sneaks another glance. In that instant she seems to recognize he is not coming, that he will never come again, and some precariously balanced power comes crashing down, exploding like his mother’s antique ginger jar when Barb flung it across the living room the week before. He is turning to walk out of the room when she rises off the bed to hiss, “You can take everything else—and I know you will. But I’ll never let you have Miranda.”
As John descends the stairs, he contemplates this new threat. He has always assumed that, like the other divorced parents he knows, he and Barb would work out some equitable way of sharing the remaining years of Miranda’s childhood. If anything, he’s expected Barb would welcome the chance for Miranda to spend more time with him while she pursued her amorous adventures unimpeded. Barb has never been very motherly, and lately she’s seemed more bored than adoring of her daughter.
But maybe, John ponders as he reaches the landing, he’s been wrong about that. Maybe Miranda means more to Barb than John has been aware. And if parenting Miranda is what Barb needs, then perhaps it would be in everyone’s best interests if he let that happen. He knows compromise is important. Despite Barb’s accusations, he wants what’s fair. He has never expected to have everything. He wants what’s best for Miranda, first of all.
But now the sound of weeping has stopped. John hears water running in the bathroom, and he realizes if he doesn’t leave the house before Barb comes downstairs, they will be embroiled yet again. He tells himself he needs to be stoic, needs to finish cleanly what was so messily begun. He knows it has been hard on Miranda, to have to watch her parents snipe and bicker for so long. She needs to see adults being reasonable, finding ways to get along. Despite the fact that it’s dull Polonius’s pompous platitude, he wants her to see how important it is to be true to her own self.
When he hears Barb call his name, he opens the door and steps outside into the damp afternoon. It isn’t as if he will never see Miranda again, he reasons, as he walks away. Even if she ends up living with her mother, Barb will surely want weekends off. Besides, don’t girls need their mothers? How could he give Miranda the help with tampons and proms, bras and boyfriends he knows she will need in the next few years? All will be well, he promises himself as he climbs into his car. In the end, everything will work out just fine.
But he was wrong about that, too, John thinks, staring beyond the black glass of the window he sits facing and back into that hapless past. Nothing worked out at all. He waited for years, and a better ending never came.
“It’s time for bed,” a gentle voice suggests.
A slight, dark woman stands beside him, holding a folded pile of fabric between her outstretched hands as if she were offering him a gi
ft. “Here are your pajamas, Mistah Wilson.” Her voice lilts with an accented English that seems more kin to music than to speech as she helps him stand, helps him find his way out of his shirt and slacks and socks and underclothes, helps him fit himself into the pajamas. In the bathroom she hands him a toothbrush, and when he is finished, gives him a warm washcloth with which to wipe his face.
Once he is flat in bed with the covers tucked around him, she lays her delicate hand against his blanketed chest. “Good night,” she says after a quiet moment.
Sleep tight, his mother’s voice answers as the woman slips from the room, the ghostly iamb of her words echoing down the decades to reach John where he lies swaddled in bedclothes and nightclothes, gazing at the light streaming through the open door.
But his mother is gone.
He remembers. She left him in another century, rode away in the front seat of the Packard in her good wool suit. She’s gone forever now, she’s dead as earth. When he and Sally visited her grave in the pioneer cemetery outside of Kernville, the letters on the granite marker that spelled her name were already softening with the grinding of the years, as if the stone itself were learning to forget her.
Sally’s gone, too.
Or at least she’s not here now—now, when he misses her so urgently it is as if she were some essential organ he is suddenly expected to survive without. He misses her muscled arms and the sunny crinkles around her eyes, misses the friendly press of her soft breasts as he lays him down to sleep beside her. A wife like a gift, a benison beyond his deserving, a wife with beauty in her eye, since, as he is fond of reminding her, beauty is in the eye of the bee holder.
He’d agreed to the mazy plan that led him to this lonely bed because he wanted to ease her worries, wanted anything that pains her to go away. He’d agreed because he loves her, because he pledged his life and troth to her, because he was so loath to fail at marriage one more time.
Back when he first found Sally and was realizing her worth, he thought he’d been given a chance as golden and unearned as any that graced the endings of Shakespeare’s romances. When, borrowing the words from Prince Florizel, he’d told her, I cannot be Mine own, nor any thing to any, if I be not thine, tears had graced her eyes. She’d taken his crabbed hand in her dear calloused one and kissed the hollow at his temple that she claimed to love, and in that moment he’d truly believed a world had been redeemed. At their wedding, he’d said that he and she were like the single pair of eyes which, working together, gives vision its depth.