by Jean Hegland
She wishes she could have got him to appreciate even the smallest inkling of what that degree will mean to her, how thrilled she is to have a chance to play at least a little part in developing an art the world has not yet known.
Recently, she’s realized she has another ambition, too, one that’s been growing parallel to her first desire. Because in addition to helping to shape a new way to enthrall, move, soothe, and challenge an audience, she hopes to expand the roles for girls and women in computer games. She’d thought things would have evolved already, as more and more girls became gamers. But most of the new games are still as unenlightened as ever. Most of the protagonists are still straight males—and most of the playable characters are, too—while all too many of the women are still only props, prizes, or plot devices.
She’s tired of playing characters in chain-mail bikinis, tired of playing games where getting the girl is the end goal and playing like a girl is the ultimate insult. She wants to make games where women rescue themselves. Lately, she keeps thinking of the kid she’d been in London—that eager, gullible girl who was so unable to say or do what she needed to in order to change the outcome of that evening. She can’t escape the feeling that some part of her is still pinned on that fetid bed in that sordid room. And she also can’t shake her faith that she will somehow be helping to free that mute, caught girl—if only she can create the games she dreams of making.
She is already bracing herself to find out exactly what her education will cost. Her letter from ArtTech said financial aid information would be forthcoming, and now that she knows she has been accepted, she plans to start looking for scholarships right away. For months Mink has been promising her they will find a way to pay, and she has been telling herself that if she can only get in, she won’t let herself be defeated by anything as dumb as money. For a moment, when her father mentioned that education fund, she’d thought she’d stumbled across the perfect cheat, a way to please her father at the same time that it eased the way for her.
But as the smoke from her cigarette spills upward into the hot still air, she concedes it was actually lucky that her visit turned out as badly as it had, since however much or little that fund might have contained, it would have been disastrous for her to accept even a dime of it. It was money he’d set aside back when she was still his princess, she thinks sourly, money he’d no doubt believed would pay off any debts he might owe her and at the same time buy himself the kind of daughter he would be proud of having—a daughter with degrees from Harvard or Berkeley—like experience points he could earn to level up in some stupid game.
“So this guy goes to the doctor,” a voice behind her announces, and she twists around to see the man she met last time—Toby? Tony?—walking toward her, his cigarette already emptying smoke into the hot air. “And he’s naked, except for a layer of plastic wrap.”
Dropping into the chair next to hers, he continues, “‘Doc,’ the guy goes, ‘what’s wrong with me?’ ‘I don’t know,’ his doctor answers, ‘but I can clearly see your nuts.’”
Before she can decide whether to wince or laugh, he holds his hands up as if to prove he’s carrying no weapons. “Okay, okay. Then how about this one: What did the elephant ask the naked man?”
“What?” she asks with a helpless shake of her head.
“How do you eat with that little thing?”
“Groan,” she says.
“How’s your dad?” he asks, grinning.
“Who knows?” she answers brusquely.
“That bad?”
“He said I ruined everything.” She tries to make her voice light, to offer that fact like her own black joke, but the sudden wobble in her chest prevents her. Stinging with chagrin, she stares at the wall where the ivy dangles in the heat like limp misshapen hearts.
“He didn’t mean it,” he says.
“And you know this because?”
“You wouldn’t be here if he did. Besides.” For a moment he is quiet, as if he were dipping back into his own thoughts. “I think a lot of what the residents say is like the stuff you’d say in dreams—not what you really mean, or even what you might think but wouldn’t actually say, but just whatever happens to bubble up when the pot gets stirred.” He waves his hand, and the smoke from his cigarette describes a complicated curlicue in the hot air. “Foam, or something. Froth. You can’t take the bad stuff personally.”
“But if I can’t take the bad stuff personally, doesn’t that mean I can’t take the good stuff personally, either?”
“Oh, no.” He grins. “The good stuff he means.”
She shudders. “If I ever get like that, I just hope I can remember how to pull the trigger.”
He tastes his cigarette thoughtfully, studies her through the smoke. “You say that now. But most of the residents, they seem happy enough. About as happy as the rest of us, I’d say. They go through phases, of course. And sundowners can be a pain. But maybe even sundowning isn’t really all that bad. I mean, they don’t seem bothered by it later. Alive’s alive, after all. It beats the alternative, at least if you’re not in a pile of pain.”
“He can’t think. He can hardly remember a thing,” Randi answers bitterly. She is afraid to question him about phases or ask what sundowning means.
“Maybe it’s not all that important,” her smoking partner offers, “thinking, remembering. He can still see the sun and smell the flowers. He can still enjoy my cooking. Heck, he can probably still laugh at my jokes—which is more than I can say about some people,” he adds pointedly.
“I would just want to be dead,” she says.
“Does your dad want to be dead?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t know,” she adds disgustedly. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the man he used to be would want to be dead.”
“People change. Maybe he’s not that man anymore.”
“What are you, some kind of damn philosopher?”
“Me?” Spewing smoke, he gives a blunt laugh. “I’m a cook. He didn’t mean it,” he adds gently, “about you ruining everything.”
Water fills her eyes as instantly as if he had just flung ash-filled sand into her face. Giving a vague wave, she stumbles away down the sidewalk. She realizes she needs to be driving. Suddenly, she is desperate to be racing along the freeway—anonymous and alone—with the windows open so the wind can whip the tears from her cheeks and ruffle her hair like a rough hand. She craves the punch and scrape of music, too, something metal, something feral. And mindless, she thinks with a shudder as the irony of it hits her. She wants music and motion to wipe away her mind.
Something has gone wrong.
Some deeply troublous thing has happened, though John can’t at this moment identify just what. Instead, he paces the room like a caged lion, circling the floor with a gait both impatient and abstracted as he tries to hammer out exactly what is plaguing him. He wants to work his way through his confusion, wants to discern what has been suffered, to understand where blame lies and what the remedy might be.
In the comedies, confusion leads to understanding. In the tragedies, it’s suffering that does. In the romances, it’s a strange blend of both. But now when John tries to understand his confusion or to name what he has suffered, he is overcome with the same dull-headed dizziness he’s felt of late when he attempts to study his investment statements or peer beneath the hood of Sally’s car. Like poor honest Cassio after that monster Iago has got him drunk, John remembers a mass of things, but none distinctly.
Distractedly, he circles the room, stalking the epiphany that seems to orbit just out of reach, the explanation for why he feels so hurt and irked, the reason everything seems grim and doomed. “Think,” he snarls to himself, gnashing his teeth and growling with frustration.
“Think,” he commands, banging his forehead with his fist, hitting so hard he feels the hurt of it in both his knuckles and his temples. “Think, for Christsake, think.”
But in that moment it seems he has forgotten how.
He falls into his chair, clutching the arms, squeezing until his nails carve crescents into the worn leather, until his own arms tremble with the effort. “Think,” he growls, bashing the chair’s arm with the full weight of his fist. It’s what he’s so often urged his students when they seek him out with questions about the essays they are writing. “Think,” he’ll say, his tone encouraging or commanding, depending on their individual personalities and how hard he’s seen them work. What exactly are you arguing here? How else might you support that claim? What other examples can you find? How could you account for this fact, too? How might these insights be connected?
But, although he strains until his temples throb, he cannot identify the argument, cannot locate the main idea, cannot even remember exactly what it is he is trying to think about. And how can that be, he wonders, as he sinks deeper in his chair, when he has always loved to think? How can that be, when he has always been so good at it?
He has been called a great thinker. Gazing at the odd set of old hands lying slack in his lap, he remembers hearing that very phrase used to describe him while he waits, stiff with worry and breathless from his recent sprint, in the wings of the auditorium at the University of London, listening with less than half an ear as the president of the International Shakespeare Society lists his achievements for the benefit of the assembled crowd.
He spent all summer working on that speech, first rereading Plutarch and Erasmus and Foucault, then revisiting all the critics whose insights he valued most, and finally sketching out endless drafts of his own ideas, patiently balancing his condemnations with concessions, trying to make his address more entertaining and more persuasive than anything he’d ever written before.
He has looked forward to this moment for many months, but now he wishes it were already over, now he wonders if he should be standing there at all. When his hearing snags on those words—great thinker—he is momentarily startled to realize that it is to him the president is referring. He wishes he could allow himself even a moment to bask in her praise. But instead he is tearing through his briefcase one more time, searching for the speech he knows is still sitting on the nightstand back in his hotel room.
And now he pauses in his frantic, fruitless search to peer around the heavy velvet curtain and scan the audience for its most unlikely member. But although he spots Freya, sitting on the aisle in her raw silk suit, her legs crossed at the thigh and a pump dangling from one foot as if boredom were her biggest problem at that moment, he can locate no purple-haired teenager among that staid crowd.
Suddenly, the president is calling out his name and the audience is responding as if Dr. John Wilson were a rock star instead of a Shakespearean scholar. Behind the dusty curtain he snatches a breath for luck and inspiration, but as he propels himself out into the lights and applause, he feels a surge of fury to think that this golden chance has been ruined so entirely by his daughter.
He wants to weep. Sitting in his worn chair, he wants to press his face into his hands and weep until tears pour like rivers between his fingers. No, he wants to roar. He wants to roar until the green walls fall, until the very air bursts into flame. He wants to weep and roar and rage. Like Lear, he wants the thunder of his passion to strike flat the thick rotundity of the world. Like Othello, he wants to put out every light.
Fury surges in his limbs, welcome as an orgasm for the way it helps to quell his sorrows. He wants to hurt the world, to make it bleed. He wants to raze the calm linoleum, smash the window, rip up the quiet turf. There is a chair next to his own, and it infuriates him, that chair. Both its presence and the absence it suggests offend him in some keen way. He is angry at that chair, and angrier still that he can’t say why. With a roar, he rises from his own seat, attacks that scurrilous chair, and flings it to the ground.
But its little clatter is too empty, its fall too meager to leave him satisfied. Askew upon the floor, it seems more like a reproach than an achievement.
He turns his passion to the other chair, the larger, hide-clad one. Grabbing its back with both his hands, he shifts his weight, tries to throw it down. Straining like a wrestler, he growls and grunts, fighting until the tendons in his hands stand out like knives. But even with his anger as a fulcrum, the chair remains upright.
It seems such a simple thing, to topple a chair. But in the end, trembling with chagrin and unspent rage, he sinks back into its implacable lap instead. Groaning, his chest heaving with effort and frustration, he bends his face toward his knees, cradles his head in his hands, sits huddled and inert as stone. All his life he has been bright, quick, keen, intelligent. His mind has been an engine, a falcon, a beacon, an open door. Never before have his brains abandoned him.
“Hey, John.” A woman pops into the room like a well-rehearsed bit player, lacking only the letter or the lance that would justify her appearance onstage. Her name begins with a hum. Or a moan.
“What happened here?” she tuts, round arms akimbo as she looks from him to the chair upended on the floor. Bending over, she rights it, then groans and jams her hand into the small of her back as she straightens up.
“They’re having a party down in the day lounge to celebrate the July birthdays. You wanna go?” she asks, reaching down to place her plump hand on his old boned one.
“No,” he answers, the word a stone.
“There’ll be cake and ice cream,” the woman cajoles. In the sky above his walled green world, new clouds are gathering. When he does not reply, she teases, “Aw, come on. Give it a try.”
“I’m busy.”
“Give it a chance,” the woman urges, “it might be fun.”
“Fun, nothing,” he answers. “I don’t have time for …” he says, but though he gropes around inside his mind, he cannot find the word he wants. “Fun,” he adds feebly.
“Are you sure?” Concern warming her tone, she suggests, “I keep thinking you’d be happier if you got involved more, maybe made some friends.” The drench of her care is tempting. But he’s learned about such sweet traps, he’s seen firsthand the emptiness inside. And besides, he thinks contemptuously, there is no fun in Shakespeare. It’s not a word he had, nor one he ever felt the need to coin. For Shakespeare, joy, delight, and happiness sufficed.
“Okay,” she answers with a melodramatic sigh, “just be that way.”
From down the hall comes the sound of “Happy Birthday” being sung. John hears the voluble piano, hears the thin ribbon of old people singing, their voices lagging behind the brisk notes.
He remembers singing “Happy Birthday”—singing, and then watching as a girl of nine or ten expands her skinny chest and puffs her cheeks to gust out the candles on the cake in front of her. He remembers how the sheen of her pleasure seems like another flame, how, despite the tensions that fill the candlelit darkness of that dining room, his heart balloons at the sight of that child’s happiness.
Her birthday always came at an awkward time—three days after Christmas, right at the start of the Modern Language Association’s yearly convention. Back when he was still married to Barb, it had been easier to make sure there were gifts and balloons and a cake whose candles he could witness Miranda extinguishing—either before he left for the conference or after he returned. But once he and Barb had parted, and especially after he left Santa Cruz for a more prestigious position at a less prestigious university three hours north, it became harder to make sure her birthday was adequately remembered.
The winter after the London debacle, he was still trying to decide how he should react to her foul-mouthed rejection when her birthday arrived. Ever since his disastrous visit back in September he’d expected that she would get in touch with him. He had even been rehearsing the words he would use to forgive her when she did. He understood she’d been more hurt than he’d expected by his decision to send her home, and he’d thought he should give her space to regain her equilibrium. But when Christmas came and went without his having heard from her, he began to worry their impasse had gone on too long.
/> He had not had the easiest of times himself that autumn. He’d received nothing but rejections—with no invitations for resubmission—to the article he’d developed from his ISS speech, none of the presses he’d queried about editing an anthology on revitalizing the humanities had even responded, and he hadn’t been asked to review a single chapter, book, or article all fall. When Freya began to sleep in the guest bedroom after they returned from Spain, he’d assumed at first it was because of her book deadline, but after she sent off her manuscript and still did not return to his bed, he finally had to admit which way that wind was blowing.
It distressed him no end to think his third marriage was nearing its final act. He’d left one woman he shouldn’t have left, and another he should never have married, and now a woman he probably should not have married appeared to be leaving him. Freya had seemed so right when they were wooing—not only brilliant and in his field, but also comely and young. He’d been proud—and even faintly astounded—by her interest in him. But now it appeared that he’d been even more of a trophy for her than she had been for him. He’d helped to open some hefty doors for her while she was finishing her PhD and trying to place her book. But as soon as she’d started opening doors herself, she began to dismiss his ideas as plodding and sentimental, to complain about his Eurocentric bias and his privileging of certain worn-out texts.
Over the holidays, he’d begun to hope her feelings were starting to thaw. On their flight to Dallas where the conference was being held that year, he even dared to think he spied in her high spirits some marks of love returning, though as soon as they arrived at the convention center, he was disappointed when she staked out the desk in their hotel room, and began rehearsing for her Harvard interview with the single-minded focus of a presidential candidate prepping for her final debate.
