My Name Is Will Page 7

  Willie shook his head, both at Todd and at himself for what he was certain was about to be a big mistake.

  “Collect seventeen fifty, and you keep two hundred,” said Todd.

  “Three hundred.”

  “Two fifty, and we’re done.”

  Willie shrugged agreement.

  Todd picked up the entire duffel once more. It jingled. “And I’ll throw in the rental of this fine ensemble of period costume absolutely free of charge.”

  He turned the pack upside down over the bed. Onto the array of dirty clothes, porn, scribbled notebooks, and a now-shattered recording of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music spilled a blindingly colorful bundle of cotton: bright blues and yellows accentuated with red, purple, white, and green silk ribbons. Todd sorted it out, and it resolved itself into a fool’s costume: baggy, tricolored trousers; tights with one red and one yellow leg; a green billowy shirt; a jerkin festooned with knotted strips of colored fabric, on the ends of which dangled small bells; and an elaborate coxcomb, complete with cuckold’s horns.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Willie said. “I don’t think so.”

  “You need a costume to get in for free,” Todd replied. “But wait, here’s the best part.” He dug into the pack for something seemingly stuck inside, then pulled out a battered hunk of leather, fitted with straps and some tacked-on elastic. The piece itself looked not unlike one of the devices featured on the currently open ad pages of the magazine on the bed.

  “A codpiece?” asked Willie.

  “Wicked, huh? Found it at a garage sale. Two bucks. I think it might be an actual antique.”

  Willie took it from Todd and held it up, experimentally, to his crotch. He had to admit, it looked pretty cool. He shrugged.

  “Well . . . if the cock fits . . .”

  With the duffel bag repacked and slung over his shoulder, Willie went downstairs to his own apartment. To his amazement, Jill was still grating cheese, a mound now the size of a basketball on the cutting board in front of her. Willie went into his room and tucked the duffel bag under his own bed. He wanted nothing more than to lie down. The bed had other ideas. It was unmade and covered in nearly as much crap as Todd’s. It would take five minutes just to clear enough space.

  He went back out to the living room, moved a couple of pieces of mail off the couch, and fell heavily into its cushions. He figured he could catch a nap before Jill’s cheese bomb went off.

  Then he opened his eyes with a start: his mind’s eye belatedly recognized the handwriting on one of the pieces of unopened mail. He snatched it up. Opened it.

  Dear Willie, Just a note to see how your doing. Your dad and I are good, just hanging out. We went to see a Shakespeare play last night and I thought of you . It was Twelvth Night, it had some funny parts but I got confused with all the cross-dressing ha-ha. Well I hope that you are happy and you’re school is going good and your getting lots of GIRLS (I know you are!). Are you coming for Thanksgiving? Call sometime soon. Love, M.

  Squeezed in at the bottom of the page was a single line, in a different hand.

  What ho, Son, how’s the thesis coming? Hope you’re well. Dad.

  He put the letter into its envelope and tossed it back onto the table. He was too tired to think about his fucked-up family. Once he wrote the paper, he wouldn’t need them. He had friends here. Maybe young, irresponsible friends, maybe a little eccentric. But good friends. He curled up to try to sleep. Immediately there came a loud bumping from upstairs. Rolling the sofa.

  He grabbed a pillow, put it over his head, and fell asleep.

  And he dreamed.

  I’m backstage during Hamlet at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, about to go on as Rosencrantz. It’s the scene with Claudius, discussing the source of Hamlet’s madness: “He does confess he feels himself distracted; but from what cause he will by no means speak. . . .”

  A light comes up on stage. I take a breath and move forward — but the stage manager stops me.

  “What are you doing?” she says, “you’re not Rosencrantz, you’re Hamlet. You’re the lead. It’s your play!” I look down — I’m wearing the black doublet and disheveled shirt of the melancholy Dane.

  There’s a crowd. Hundreds. All waiting for me — the classic actor’s nightmare. Only it’s real.

  “I can’t,” I say, “I don’t know the part!” But the stage manager’s gone.

  It’s Act Three, I think. To be or not to be. Get thee to a nunnery. Speak the speech, I pray you. . . . I know the big monologues, but the other lines . . . the closet scene . . . I have no idea how that goes!

  Polonius throws me my entrance cue: “I hear him coming: let’s withdraw, my lord.”

  I walk on stage. But it’s not the Greek Theater, it’s not Berkeley, it’s . . . UCSC. The Quarry Amphitheater. The only light on stage is a searingly bright full moon. It’s blinding me, but the audience is there, I can hear them rustling and waiting in the dark, like trees in the forest.

  I open my mouth. “To be or not to be . . .”

  But I’m not speaking, I’m singing . . . holy fuck, I’m singing the scene from Gilligan’s Island where the castaways perform Hamlet as a musical. Fuck! I can’t SING!!!

  The unseen audience is laughing now, and there’s no escape —

  “Good my lord, how does your honour for this many a day?”

  Saved. It’s Ophelia. This scene I know.

  “Are you honest?” I ask.

  “My lord?”

  “Are you fair?”

  “What means your lordship?”

  “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”

  “Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”

  She’s playing this seductively, almost wantonly. I like it.

  “I did love you once,” I tease.

  “Nay, you have not, my lord. Not yet.”

  That’s not the right line. Ophelia smiles mischievously, looks at me with deep blue eyes as she unlaces her bodice . . . And I realize . . . it’s Dashka. Dashka, playing Ophelia . . . how did I not notice that before? Jesus, I think, I’m going to see her naked, and I get an erection. But just then the moon goes out. It’s dark. The audience murmurs expectantly.

  A light comes on . . . from where? I look up . . . it’s coming, impossibly, from a star in Orion’s sword. It forms a pin spotlight, center stage, illuminating a bed in nebulous light. There’s a woman on it. I’m hoping it’s Dashka, naked, but I feel a cold dread and I know it’s not her.

  A tap on my shoulder: Polonius. He whispers, “The Queen would speak with you, and presently,” and slips away.

  I back away from the bed, toward the wings.

  I feel a hand on my arm . . . it’s the stage manager, pushing me. “You have to finish the scene!” I want to tell her no, I quit, I don’t want to be an actor anymore. I open my mouth, but no words come out, and she keeps saying “Willie, you have to go on, Willie. Willie!”

  He awoke to Jojo shaking his arm gently. “Willie! Wake up.” He sat up, disoriented. The bumping upstairs had stopped.

  “What is it?”

  Jojo’s face was white.

  “The feds just raided Todd’s apartment. Narcs. They arrested Todd and André. If you have anything, you’d better flush it, fast.”

  Willie was still in dream world for a moment. He was in Berkeley, an undergrad . . . his mother was alive. No . . . she was dead, and he was broke, and running drugs —

  With sudden panic and realization, he jumped up, ran to his room, and yanked the duffel bag out from under the bed with trembling hands. He zipped it open to assess the danger. A pound of pot, thirty-two grams of mushroom, plus a little more. He could flush it. But it was quiet upstairs. Why should the feds who had raided Todd’s apartment come down here? There were no drug dealers in Willie’s apartment.

  Then Willie had a brief image of Todd in a bare room at a metal desk lit by a single bare bulb. “I don’t have any drugs . . . I gave them all to
Willie, man.”

  Todd wouldn’t do that. Nor would André. Would they?

  He could flush the evidence. But what if the narcs busted in while he was flushing? Caught red-handed. But if he got out now, delivered it —

  Seventeen hundred fifty dollars. Most of it Todd’s, and he’d be needing it. For bail. For legal fees. The rest of it Willie’s, and he’d be needing it, too.

  Willie zipped up the duffel, shoved a change of clothes into his backpack, put on his denim jacket. Jojo watched silently as Willie walked, as casually as possible, toward the sliding glass door in the living room that opened out onto the balcony. “See you later,” he muttered to Jill, who was still grating cheese, a vast Devil’s Tower of dairy teetering over the sink.

  Jill peered out from behind the orange monolith. “What? Where are you going? Aren’t you staying for dinner? I’m making ch — ” was all Willie heard before he slid the door closed behind him. He plowed through a jumble of cheap plastic patio furniture and haggard spider plants to clamber over the balcony’s railing. They were on the second story; carrying the duffel on his shoulder, he awkwardly shimmied down to the balcony below, caught a pant leg on the brake handle of someone’s bike, and plummeted to the ground. He recovered, started down the steep bank of the ravine, tripped, then rolled and tumbled as quietly as possible all the way to the bottom.

  Chapter Ten

  Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are nearly all driven by family dynamics: dysfunctional families, as in King Lear; families overwhelmed by external circumstances, as in Titus Andronicus; families fighting against each other, in the case of Romeo and Juliet; and families fighting themselves, as in Othello and Macbeth. It should come as no surprise that in arguably his greatest tragedy, Hamlet, ALL of these dynamics are present. Shakespeare was the first English playwright to capture the essence of what makes families so frustrating, so frail, and, ultimately, so beautiful.

  For a Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the call to dinner was one ’twere well to heed, and heed quickly.

  In a pot in the Henley house kitchen, over a low fire, bubbled a watery stew of onions, turnips, and leeks. There was a two-day-old quarter loaf of bread and a pitcher of ale on the long oak dining table. William’s mother, Mary Arden Shakespeare, took Mary (the hen) from the spit upon which she slowly roasted and, with six sure strokes of a cleaver, dismembered her. Dishes and mugs clattered noisily as the family passed their pewter plates to Mary one at a time to be filled.

  There were six mouths to feed in the house: John, Mary, William, William’s younger brother Gilbert, his younger sister, Joan, and two-year-old Edmund. When the dinner was chicken, there were nine pieces of meat to be parceled out: two breasts, two thighs, two legs, two wings, and the back. John always got a breast and a thigh. Mary insisted on taking just the back; she was a light eater. Gilbert and Joan each got a leg and a wing. Mary picked apart the other wing and fed it to baby Edmund. William, the eldest, got the other breast.

  That left a thigh.

  It would sit there on the cutting board, oozing its sweet thigh juices as John, secure in his guaranteed, head-of-household second piece, boomed on at the head of the table about the day’s events, local politics, gossip of Queen Elizabeth’s court. The rest of the table ate silently, quickly, with furtive glances up, down, and across the table. Whoever finished their portion first, without appearing to be greedy, got the second thigh. William and Gilbert had the edge in size and reach, but Joan was always a dangerous outside threat.

  William received his bowl of broth and his plate, and casually placed a finger atop the plumpest bit of Mary’s (the hen’s) breast.

  “What men were those today, William?” asked Joan. It was a ploy. William would sometimes slip in a large bite before grace, but he couldn’t eat while he answered a question: and now the focus of the table was on him. Joan never liked to fall behind waiting for her plate.

  “Men? What men? I know not — ”

  Joan rolled her eyes and let out a short, sharp breath of impatience. “The men! Think you I know not a man by his beard when I see one? Though I be only thirteen, I know a man — ”

  “I hope you know not a man yet,” sniggered Gilbert under his breath.

  Everyone now had their plates, so William gave up and removed his hand from Mary’s (the hen’s) breast. John led grace before the meal.

  “Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.”

  “So who was it?” Joan asked as she tucked into her chicken.

  Around his first bite, William replied, “Sir Thomas Lucy, no less. He was — ”

  “Shopping for gloves, methinks, wasn’t it, William?” interrupted his father. “Falconing?”

  “I’m not sure what he was after,” responded William. “He bought a codpiece.”

  “Why be it called a codpiece, Mum?” asked Joan. “The piece covers not a cod.”

  The entire table laughed.

  “Nay, though the piece it covers may smell like one,” Mary answered quietly. “Especially as it ages,” she added with a smile to John. There was a collective groan from the table.

  John replied, “As may the pond in which it swims, as it withers, dries, and becomes choked with weeds, my love.”

  Mary laughed and kissed him on the head.

  “A rare touch for Dad,” whispered Gilbert to William.

  William thought the topic had been successfully deflected from Sir Thomas Lucy, whom his father was clearly loath to discuss.

  But Joan was young and persistent. “I see not why the family Lucy has such a black name in this house. Methinks Spencer a bonny boy, and my age, too.”

  “Four years your senior he is, and his face as spotted as his name,” said Gilbert as he sucked the marrow from Mary’s (the hen’s) right thigh.

  “ ’ Tisn’t!” said Joan. “And what’s in a name, anyway?”

  “Everything,” Gilbert replied. “Lucy is lousy, and lousy is Lucy. The word is one and the same.” In the Warwickshire dialect, the pronunciation was close indeed.

  “Then am I the same as my sister Joan: dead and buried, with a mean headstone marking two years of life and a lifetime of death, and worms wriggling in and out my eye sockets.”

  Joan was named after her own sister. John and Mary’s first child had died at six months. William saw in the pain that passed across his mother’s face the regret — which came whenever Joan mentioned Joan — that she had given her the same name. This Joan seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with mortality: crypts and poisons, suicides and stabbings, skeletons and skulls, fascinated her. She preferred to wear black clothing that contrasted with her notably pale skin and dark eyes.

  “Methinks you find Spencer Lucy’s fine clothes and plumed hats more bonny than his face, Joan,” said Mary Shakespeare as she dug with delicate, crafty hands between two of Mary’s (the hen’s) back ribs for a bit of tender meat.

  “And what harm in bonny clothes?” Joan said. “I should be happy to be Lady Lucy, and live at Charlecote with waiting maids and parks full of deer and rabbits, and attend the Queen. Yes, Your Highness! How fares Your Grace?”

  John, who had been eating and swilling his ale in silence, slammed his mug down on the table. “No more!”

  His family turned to him in surprise. It was not often, in recent years, that he got so worked up. “We’ll have no talk of a union of Shakespeares and Lucys at my table. A plague on their house.” He paused a moment, seemingly taken aback by his own outburst, then took his second piece of chicken.

  As he chewed a crust of bread, William glanced furtively at his father. John used to be quick to anger, when he was bailiff and carried all the cares of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon on his shoulders, but he was just as quick to laugh.

  Those were days that now seemed like a dream. William drifted out of the conversation as it turned to Joan’s sewing and Edmund’s appetite and other family matters. He tried to remember his father i
n his prime. William would have been nine — no, eight — at the peak of John Shakespeare’s wealth and standing in the community. William had fine clothes, and was learning letters and Latin from Simon Hunt, the schoolmaster at the New School before he left scandalously to study in Rheims. The other boys would stare at William in awe as he and his family went in formal procession from their home to Holy Trinity on Sundays, John carrying the ceremonial staff of his office, wearing his bailiff’s scarlet robes, and escorted by two sergeants at arms carrying deadly maces, to the family’s favored place at the front of the church.

  John Shakespeare the glover was the most important man in town, and William his eldest son and heir. Laden wagons would roll in and out of the yard at Henley Street all day long, and John would retreat to the parlor with their drivers, talking tods of wool, the Queen’s monopoly, and the intransigence and corruption of the Guild of Glovers. John, as many glovers did, sold the wool from the sheep they kept for lambskin on a large and profitable black market. Soon he stopped making gloves altogether, and merely bought and sold wool. He grew wealthy quickly, and bought two fair houses in Stratford as investments, and leased them. He had two apprentices who lived amongst the bales of wool in the house’s voluminous attic. There was lamb for dinner more often than not, also beef, venison, veal, rich cheeses, pheasant, rabbit, whole stewed fish, cooked by a cook and served by a serving maid. Sometimes in the winter months a merchant from Plymouth or Lancashire would bring an offering of oysters and they would eat them by the hundred. William loved the oysters with their hint of the far-off sea and something else ineffable and irresistible.

  John reveled in his role as bailiff. He ate, he drank, he held forth, he pomped and he circumstanced. These had always been his favorite things, and now he did them on the town’s penny. Ever a fixture at the Bear (the Catholic-leaning of the town’s two inns), John would now spend public money on his favorite private entertainments. He brought the first professional theater company to Stratford, hiring the Queen’s Men to perform a bit of Italian comedy about a servant trying simultaneously to serve two masters. Sitting in the bailiff’s reserved space in the front row of the Bear’s inn yard, John must have spilled a quart of ale during the performance, nearly choking as he sucked in a bit of cheese pie while laughing during an extended bit of business involving a lute teacher, his young female student, and an amorous salami. The performance was a smashing success, and Master Bailiff Shakespeare leapt on the stage and, with great theatricality of his own and after much bowing, laughing, and clapping on the back, lavished a generous prize of seventeen shillings on the appreciative troupe.