by Jean Hegland
He hung around their room that first afternoon in a dilatory way, trying to do some work himself, but also stewing about his daughter’s unbroken silence and his wife’s ongoing reserve.
“I’m trying to decide what to do about Miranda,” he confessed, when, after several hours, Freya finally took a break to use the bathroom. He was interested in her insights as a former teenaged girl, though he was also half imagining that if she were to offer any advice—and especially if he employed it—she might become more invested in the entire situation than she had been heretofore.
“What about her?” she snapped.
“Today’s her birthday, and I haven’t heard from her all fall—not since she was so rude to me. I’m trying to decide whether I should get in touch with her now or not.”
“She called that one time,” Freya offered absently.
“What? What one time? When?”
“I told you,” she answered, bending back over the new laptop computer of which she was so proud.
“No, you didn’t. I never heard a word.”
“I’m sure I did. You must have forgotten. She was rude to me, too.”
“I wouldn’t have forgotten that. When did she call? What did she say?” He didn’t want to add to the gulf between them by unfairly blaming Freya for anything, but it was hard to temper his alarm.
“She just said she wanted to talk to you.” Freya lifted her head to glare at him. “A month or so ago. She didn’t say why. She hung up on me as soon as I said you weren’t home. I know I told you about it, though if I forgot, I’m sorry. But really, it was probably just a passing whim. If it meant all that much to her, she would have called back.
“Anyway,” she added with a shrug, “if you want to talk to her, by all means go ahead and call.”
After Freya left to meet her dissertation advisor for a predinner drink, he waited nearly an hour until he calculated that Miranda would be home from school, and then he placed the call.
Her hello held that breathless mix of hope and hesitance with which so many teenaged girls answer the phone. Hearing it, he’d been suffused by such a flood of sympathy and love it seemed that every sour memory was instantly washed away. She had so much promise, he thought, she was still so young. Her escapades in London were evidence of a kid with spunk, with spark. And if hearing her tell him to fuck off had come as a cruel shock, maybe it was important somehow, too, as another level of honesty, a new rite of passage. He had never had that kind of clarity with his own father. Perhaps if he’d had, they would not have ended up such strangers to each other.
“Happy birthday,” he announced.
“Thanks,” she answered warily, all the bright expectation having drained from her voice the instant she heard his.
“Are you having a good one?”
“I guess.”
“I can’t believe you’re seventeen already,” he observed, though the moment the words were out of his mouth, he could hear how wrong they were.
“Well, well. How about that?” Her voice was a parody of his, the fake cheer of it so acid it seemed it might corrode the phone line.
“I wanted to tell you happy birthday,” he persisted, “but I also wanted you to know that I’ve missed you this fall. I’ve hated to be out of touch.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“I think you called,” he plunged on, “a couple of months ago. Freya must have forgotten to give me the message, and I’m really sorry. I had no idea. I only just found out. If I’d known, of course I would have called you right—”
But at that moment, Freya entered the room, scowling to find him on the phone.
“—back,” he finished, suddenly reluctant to risk vexing his wife by pursuing that topic any further.
“Anyway,” he added a little awkwardly as Freya bent toward the mirror above the washstand alcove and began to sleek her hair and brush fresh blush along her cheekbones. “I wondered, did you have anything specific you wanted to talk about?”
“No,” she said curtly.
“Really?” He waited another beat, and when she didn’t offer anything more, he asked, “Well, how’re you doing now? Did you have a good Christmas?”
“It was okay.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Christmas crap,” she said sharply.
The insolence of her tone kindled in him an unexpected flicker of the fury and frustration he’d known when the smirking bobbies who’d found her asleep at the base of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square delivered her—pale and teetering and reeking of booze—back to the hotel, observing that although she’d refused to reveal much about what she’d done or where she’d been, p’raps it weren’t too hard to read between the lines?
Trying to override those recollections, he asked, “Everything going okay in school?”
“I dropped out.”
“Dropped out?” he gasped, while Freya narrowed her eyes at the mirror and gave herself a complacent little nod. “Your mother never told me. When?”
“Before Thanksgiving.”
“What were you think—”
“April Fools,” she interjected.
“Oh,” he said with a spatter of uneasy laughter. Nodding at Freya’s signal that she was headed out to meet their group for dinner, he added, “I get it—joke?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” she said, disgust twisting her words. “You have no idea whether I’m joking or not.”
“I’m trying to find out,” he answered evenly as Freya closed the door. “I’m trying to talk to you—right now—to see how you’re doing. I can’t possibly know how you’re doing unless you tell me, Miranda.”
“I’m Randi,” she announced belligerently. “That’s my name.”
“You do know—don’t you?—that in England ‘randy’ means—” He paused, suddenly reluctant to define the word to his own daughter. “Lascivious,” he added a beat later.
“And you do know—don’t you?—that this is America? And whatever the fuck ‘lascivious’ means, well, maybe that’s exactly what I am.”
“Miran—”
“I’m through with this shit—get it? You call me when it’s convenient for you, and then you expect me to be your perfect little paper doll princess—‘happy birthday,’ ‘how was Christmas?’ bla, bla, bla. Well, fuck you all over again. Just fuck you. I never want to talk to you again.”
Afterwards, instead of joining Freya and their supper group, he’d lain on the massive bed, staring at the ceiling and straining to trace the demise of his relationship with his daughter, to pinpoint where things had veered so wrong. But when he tried to determine what he might have done differently, the answer he arrived at was both everything and nothing at all, and when he tried to consider how he should proceed now, the only thought that came to him was that it might be wise to sort things out with Freya before he tried to contact Miranda again.
At supper, John suffers the roast beef, green salad, and mashed potato on his plate while the clown across from him claims a magician walking down the street turned into a bar, and the stout woman at his side warbles about a surrey with a fringe on top, and some beldame at another table weeps as if she has forgotten how to stop.
“E flat walks into a bar,” the long-jawed churl announces, “and the bartender tells him, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve minors.’ Shakespeare walks into a bar, and the bartender says, ‘We can’t serve you—you’re bard here.’”
When John returns to the room that has somehow become a kind of sorry home, he resumes his watch at the window, gazing through the shadowy glass at the darkening wall and pale sky. There is so much that hurts him, so much he doesn’t understand. He has been wronged so many ways, has been thwarted and blighted and sorely abused.
It is the size of the characters’ desires that helps to make a sad story a tragedy. John tells his students that. In the face of all life’s niggling and haggling, despite all the disappointments and petty outrages
that train most humans to smallness, Shakespeare’s heroes’ desires burn bright, demanding that the world make an answer.
But when the answer comes, it comes too late. He tells his students that, too. In his classes he explains that tragedy’s most cruel lesson is not that human beings are flawed, or that fate can be unkind, but that no one can ever slip the bonds of time.
Outside, the dark is deepening. Above the wall a single star shines in the cobalt air. Remote, unerring, silent, it provokes in John a yearning that twists his heart. Bright particular star, he thinks as he studies it, and, yond same star not in the stars, But in ourselves Some consequence yet hanging in the stars Take him and cut him out in little stars
Anon another memory brims in him, and once again he sits in his office in the English department in Michigan, listening as a student recites Juliet’s lines about cutting Romeo into little stars.
She is in his intro class, a senior finishing up her last general ed requirement. He’d spotted her on the first day, watching quietly from the back of the room as he strutted and fretted his hour in the lecture hall, creating the persona that would carry him through the semester—iconoclastic professor, scrupulous scholar, fervent apostle of William Shakespeare.
That first morning, he’d noted her blond hair and creamy arms, the way her breasts stood out from her chest like a second opinion. She was yet another instance of the fresh and luscious coed, but even more than her shiny new beauty or the untapped intelligence he thought he spied in her soft brown eyes, John found himself perversely intrigued by her very lack of receptivity to his professorial charm. While her classmates smiled at his mildest joke and nodded to signal their rapt attention to his merest word, she studied his performance coolly, as if she were immune to both message and messenger.
For the next half semester she hovered at the edge of his imagination, half inspiration and half goad. Often her image appeared in his mind while he planned his lectures, and sometimes in the classroom he realized he was doing what he understood that actors did when they attempted to strengthen their performances by choosing one member of the audience on which to focus their delivery. But despite the extra energy his awareness of her lent his lectures, she remained on the margin of the class, taking notes but never actually offering anything herself.
Because he had a graduate assistant to grade his students’ papers, he did not actually speak with her or even learn her name until one raw-winded day in early November when, as he was walking back to his office after class, he heard someone running to catch up with him.
“Professor Wilson?” Although he had yet to hear her speak, even before he turned to see her sprinting up the walkway he knew it was she.
“Can I talk with you a sec?” she gasped, breathless from the cold wind and her run. “I can never make it to your office hours because I have other classes.”
Her disheveled hair was spread across her face like a shining veil, and for a moment John’s impulse to brush it back into place was so strong that even in his distant cell, his hand twitches in his lap, remembering.
“Talk away,” he answered with a flourish of his arm as if he were an actor playing a courtier instead of an associate professor of English. Beneath her open coat she clutched her books to her chest so that they raised and flattened her breasts like an Elizabethan bodice. Suddenly, the bone-chilling wind seemed invigorating. Glancing past her, John saw how the leaves of the ivy clinging to the building they stood beside fluttered like scarlet pennants in the wind.
Falling in next to him, she explained that she had never before read Shakespeare, that she was having lots more trouble than she’d expected. In fact, even though it would set back her graduation date, she was thinking of dropping John’s course. Bending her head like a swan as they pushed side by side into the stinging wind, she confessed, “I didn’t get hardly anything out of Twelfth Night or Richard II, and now that we’ve started Romeo and Juliet, I don’t understand a quarter of that play, either. And when I do get it—honestly, it’s mainly just a bunch of clichés—‘wherefore art thou Romeo?’ ‘parting is such sweet sorrow.’” She spoke a little timorously, as if she were reluctant to criticize, and yet committed to saying what she saw to be the truth. “All his people ever do is talk.”
Her name was Barbara. Gazing up at that bright star, John thinks that even if he hadn’t been beguiled by her face and breasts and the hair that blew like tangled silk across her lips, he would still have tried to find a way to convert her. In the tavern where graduate students and professors gathered to gossip about grants and deans and complain about the ignorance or the indifference of their students, he always came to the students’ defense. It was urgent to reach them, he argued, barbaric as they might first appear, both for the sake of civilization, as well as for their own inchoate souls.
“Exactly!” he answered her now, punching the cold wind with a triumphant fist. “Don’t you see?—you’re already under his spell! What did you just say? ‘All his people ever do is talk.’ His people. His people. Stop for a minute to think about that.” Pausing in front of the building that housed his office, he turned to face her while groups of students hurried past, their faces buried in their jackets. “Shakespeare’s characters are not people. They do not bleed or cry. Romeo and Juliet never died. Mercutio never scoffed at love. All they are is ideas, just little strings of sounds, little packages of words. They don’t talk—they are talk. Just marks on a page or voices on a stage, and yet already you’re thinking of them as people—human beings just like you and me—people who can bicker and suffer, think and fight, and,” he paused for the merest sliver of a second before the wind whipped the word from his lips, “love.
“Stick with it,” he urged, allowing himself a brief, professorial pat on the sleeve of her coat. “Keep reading. You’re obviously more than bright enough, and I suspect you have more than enough heart. It’ll start to make sense, I promise. Think of reading Shakespeare as listening to a very wise and fun—and funny—friend with a foreign accent. At first it can be a challenge to understand what someone like that is saying. But once you get to know him better, you’ll hardly notice his accent. And later you’ll come to love how much the way he says something adds to everything he says. Don’t give up,” he added with a sage smile. “And in the meantime, if you have more questions, don’t hesitate to let me know.”
And suddenly he is complicit, already in too far. He sees that now, and he wonders why he could not see it then. Looking back from this far lip of time, John feels a terrible shiver of foreboding, a tinge of shame, another knife’s twist of pain. He aches to caution that former self—his former self, he supposes, though the connection between them perplexes him, and he cannot comprehend why he should have to accept as his a self so remote and inexplicable, so beyond his control.
He’d had a wife back then, the wife he’d met as an undergraduate at UC Davis and married the week after they graduated. They’d given their virginities to each other a month before their wedding, and although the act itself had been more awkward than sublime, it had felt both right and worldly to consummate their marriage before they consecrated it.
That wife had put him through graduate school by teaching history to eighth and ninth graders. She moved with him to Michigan when he was offered the job there, and now that he is tenured and well on his way to becoming the youngest full professor in the department, she wants them to begin a family. She wants him to travel with her during their vacations instead of spending his time on articles or conference presentations. She doesn’t like it when he stops by the tavern to argue about the meaning of nothing or the salvation of freshmen instead of coming home to her. She wants more attention from him, more affection—though lately she’s taken to complaining how every hug or snuggle turns his mind toward sex.
Even so, he assumes he loves her—or at least feels for her a complex mix of habit and tenderness, duty and gratitude that much resembles love. And so he is unprepared when he opens his office door a few da
ys later to find Barbara standing outside in the hall, a few melted drops from the season’s first snowfall clinging to her hair like living jewels.
For a second he assumes she has come to continue the conversation it suddenly seems he’s been having with her inside his head all fall. But the hesitant way she stands in the doorway recalls him to his senses, and he invites her in like the courteous professor that he is. She is wearing a pair of leather hot pants over maroon tights and a maroon turtleneck, and when she sits in the chair he offers her, he rations glances at the lean lines of her thighs.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet,” she announces. “I just finished reading it.”
“Really?” he answers. “And?”
“I don’t know what happened, but suddenly it was like it just kind of clicked for me. It’s beautiful, really. So sweet.” Shaking her head at the memory, she adds, “So sad.”
“What makes you call it sad?” he asks. And holds his breath.
“What makes it sad?” She scrunches her lovely brow. “How alone they are, I guess,” she answers slowly. “That no one else in Verona understood the total goodness of their love. Well, maybe the Friar did.” She pauses, tilting her head to one side as if she were listening to her own thoughts. “Though even he wasn’t willing to just let their love exist. He wanted to use it, too—to try to get their families back together.”
“You’re thinking well,” John answers, leaning back in his chair—expansive, casual, in control. “What’s the question you think I might be able to help you with?”
“It’s probably dumb,” she offers shyly. “I mean, I’m sure it is.”
“There’s no such thing as a dumb question,” he answers gallantly. And in that moment he actually believes it.
“When Juliet says, you know … those lines about cutting Romeo into little stars?”
“Yes?”
“It’s just that I recognized them. At least, I thought I did.”
“Really?” John asks, leaning forward.
