Herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
— Prince Hal, 1 Henry IV, I.ii.197
Willie awoke to the sound of a banana slug rustling along the forest floor a few inches from his right ear. He sat up with a start and checked to make sure the duffel bag next to him was undisturbed. After his fall, he had limped a few hundred yards up the ravine until he found a closely circled stand of redwoods, crawled into the depression between them, and spent a cold and fitful night listening for the sounds of approaching dogs and jackboots before finally falling asleep.
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around.
It was a foggy morning, and still gloomy in the misty ravine. The forest floor was punctuated by bright yellow exclamation points: more banana slugs.
Fascinating creatures, banana slugs. Peculiar to the redwood forests of the Pacific Coast, they are plentiful in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Though they can change color over time to adapt to the amount of light and moisture in their environment, the ones in Santa Cruz are a bright yellow: fireman’s-coat yellow, bomb shelter sign yellow, Yellow Submarine yellow. After a rain, they would litter the forest floor like banana-flavored condoms after Mardi Gras. On damp days like today they would come out to suck what moisture they could from the air. They are hermaphroditic. And though they will eat anything — living or decaying vegetation, droppings, animal carcasses — they are particularly fond of mushrooms. Willie watched them for a few minutes, crossing with infinite patience from one side of the ravine to the other, inserting themselves into cracks in fetid logs, soaking up the mud under the occasional rock, and busily digesting bits of local mushroom, which caused who knows what joyous waves of banana slug psychotropia.
Willie tended to look kindly on the banana slug. He was not alone: the shining mollusk was the unofficial mascot of the university.
Willie stretched, gathered up his bags, and walked warily back down the ravine among the redwoods and the slugs. After he had passed his own apartment atop the bank, he scrambled back up the slope beneath the wide span of a footbridge. He crossed Heller Avenue and passed out onto the expanse of a second redwood bridge, which disappeared into the fog long before its far end. Mist wafted up the ravine, though there wasn’t enough wind to disturb the redwoods. It was silent but for the sound of a few birds, and, perhaps, the rustle of banana slugs inching along below.
He was halfway across the bridge when he heard footsteps running toward him, audible long before the runner became visible — just like Hitchcock would do it, Willie thought. His heart raced as he flashed on the image of Cary Grant pursued by a crop duster.
But then the footsteps became sneakered feet, and a pale, haggard face — computer programmer — sprinted past him looking pissed off. “Fuck!” he blurted as he passed Willie, and Willie realized that the bus engine he now heard rumbling down Heller toward the town must have been the programmer’s, and he’d missed it.
Willie glanced at his cheap digital watch, and broke into a run. The library shuttle was scheduled to leave at seven thirty . . . now.
He took a quick shortcut across Steinhart Way and down a well-trodden embankment, around the dismal gray modern cement of Kerr Hall, and arrived at the library. He fast-walked through the foyer and atrium and toward the driveway at its rear entrance.
Crap, I hope I didn’t miss it. . . .
But no, there it sat, steam chugging from its exhaust. There was no one waiting to board, and the driver was in his seat. Willie rushed up the steps.
“Thanks. Just made it, huh?” Willie said to the driver, an older man with smoker’s wrinkles and gray, stubbled hair peeking out from a motor oil cap.
“Only because your friend said to wait,” he growled with a twitch of a nod toward the rear.
Willie glanced down the aisle. There, sitting in the back row, looking over the top of a book, was Dashka. He had really, truly forgotten she would be there. “Thanks,” he murmured to the driver, and started down the aisle. There were only two other passengers on the bus: one mousy, bespectacled girl who looked as though she was actually going to Berkeley to use the library for the day; and an older student, thirtyish maybe, probably a grad student, with a black mustache and long hair pulled into a ponytail. Willie nodded at him instinctively; he had the vague impression he knew him from somewhere. The word “clerk” and an image of Dashka came to mind; was he the guy at the adult bookstore where he’d bought the porn rag? But the mustachioed man showed no sign of recognizing Willie and didn’t nod back, so Willie sidestepped with his backpack and duffel all the way to the rear of the jitney bus.
Dashka lowered her book and gave the disheveled Willie a once-over. “Hey, morning glory. Take the window,” she said, and slid slightly toward the center aisle. She moved her knees aside to allow Willie access. As she did, he noticed that her cotton skirt was sheer.
He complied.
The idea of the library jitney was that students with more serious research needs than UCSC’s modest McHenry Library might accommodate could go to Berkeley for the day on the university’s dime. There they could run free in an orgy of academic delights, of chemistry libraries, antiquities libraries, botany, chemistry, theater, arts, theology, and nuclear engineering libraries: all the musty edifices of higher learning.
The drive from Santa Cruz to Berkeley takes ninety minutes. The first half hour is over a sinuous four-lane mountain freeway through Pitchen Pass, from Santa Cruz on the coast to Silicon Valley inland, a beautiful drive but one of the most dangerous in the country: it’s narrow, the curves are treacherous, and people drive it fast.
It didn’t seem to bother the jitney driver. He had turned on the radio to a local AOR station, which was playing “Synchronicity” by the Police. The driver slowed once, suddenly, as a black BMW tailgated him, passed him on the right, then cut him off at eighty mph on a wicked turn and sped ahead, its smug REAGAN / BUSH ’84 bumper sticker glinting in the sun. “Goddamn Reaganites!” the crusty bus driver muttered to no one in particular. “Think they own the damn world.”
“Maybe they do,” replied the mustachioed man.
Dashka had nudged her glasses up onto her nose and returned to her book. Willie, seated next to her in an awkward silence, had a sudden urge to check on the mushroom. Taking off his jacket — it was warm in the jitney, and he was sweating from his run to the library — he laid it across his lap. Dashka glanced over at the movement, then returned to her book and turned a page. After she turned the next page, Willie bent down, quietly opened his backpack, removed the mushroom gently from its coffee can, and held it in his lap, under his jacket.
As he fondled the mushroom and thought his thoughts, he found himself thinking less and less about the mushroom and any sense of danger and more and more about Dashka and what she would look like naked.
As they descended the winding mountain road toward Los Gatos, Dashka suddenly marked her place in her book, set it aside, and took off her glasses.
“I’m feeling a little queasy. Mind if I lie down?”
“No, of course, go ahead,” Willie said.
She went to put her head in Willie’s lap.
Don’t let it break, he heard Todd saying. “Let me move my jacket.” Willie managed to slip the mushroom back into its can and drape the jacket over it in one relatively smooth motion. “Okay.”
“What were you doing under there?” Dashka asked with a wry smile. Willie just smiled back, thinking he might let her guess wrong.
Dashka laid her head in his lap and then lay there, perfectly still. She did look a bit pale; if there was any color in her face it was a faint shade of the deep blue of her eyes. Willie put a hand on her arm and stared straight ahead.
From the front of the van came political discourse. “Say what you want, Ronald Reagan’s a great American, a great politician, a real patriot. He’s turned this country around.” It was the mustachioed man speaking.
“Turned it into a shit pile, I’d say,” replied the driver. “Rich getting richer, poor getting poorer. We’re spending all this money on Star Wars while people in mental institutions are getting thrown out into the streets. Then there’s the whole ‘trickle down’ theory. Well, it ain’t trickled down to me.”
Willie noted absently the incongruity of the mustachioed graduate student taking Reagan’s side against the crusty old liberal bus driver, but mostly he was trying not to think about the weight of Dashka’s head in his lap, the smell of her hair.
The radio had moved on to a new tune. Phil Collins could feel something coming in the air tonight.
Willie tried to distract himself.
Phil Collins should have stuck to drums and singing backup for Peter Gabriel. Still . . . pretty catchy tune.
“Then there’s the whole war on drugs,” the driver continued. “I lived through Prohibition, and I can tell you now it ain’t gonna work. People get high. It’s part of life. I mean, you get high somehow, right?”
The grad student, or clerk, or whatever he was, checked his watch and changed the subject. “What time do we get to Berkeley?” They chatted on, about the traffic and the weather.
After about twenty minutes, Dashka finally stirred in Willie’s lap. “Mmmm . . . much better.”
Rather than sitting up, she left her head in his lap. In fact, she nuzzled in a little bit farther, and brought her hand up onto his thigh next to her cheek. “So . . .” she said, “tell me more about your paper.”
“Really? Now?”
After a beat, Dashka shifted her head, ever so slightly. “Why not now?”
Willie felt a stirring in his jeans, like he might have to change position a little bit.
Dashka continued. “I mean, your thesis . . . it’s a big proposition, isn’t it? I’m thinking the premise could use a little massaging.”
Dashka caressed his thigh.
“Well,” Willie responded carefully, “it’s definitely already a hard topic, and I know it’s only going to get harder. I’m sure the more I research it, the more it’ll expand.”
“Mm-hm,” Dashka hummed, and the vibrations went right through his lap into the seat cushion beneath him. “What makes you so sure Shakespeare was a closet Catholic, anyway?”
Willie’s dick was trying to get erect, but it was pinned between his thigh and the seat. He shifted position. “I was reading Sonnet Twenty-three. You know it?” The shift in position did the trick.
“Not offhand,” she said, and began to move her hand up his thigh.
Willie said,
“As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.”
As Willie spoke, Dashka began to rub her cheek against Willie’s lap. Clever cheek that it was, it found the swelling bulge along his left thigh. She began to move her cheek slowly up and down its length. Her caresses on his thigh moved slowly upward, until she brushed a hand lightly against his balls. “Don’t stop,” she said.
“O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.”
In the space of four lines, Dashka had deftly and silently unbuckled Willie’s belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers, extricated his dick from his boxers, and taken two deep, silent sucks. Now she ran her tongue lightly up its length twice, and flicked quickly across its tip. Two more deep movements and he was fully erect. She pulled her mouth away, and stroked him with one hand.
“More than that tongue that more hath more express’d,” Willie said, reiterating the last line of the sonnet.
“More tongue?” repeated Dashka, and obliged.
“That’s the key line. Notice anything?”
“It’s hard to say,” she said, and as she spoke she stood up and straddled him, facing toward the front of the bus. He reached under her skirt, unsure how he would deal with her underwear, and was thrilled to find none.
“You never really know what a sonnet’s like until you reach the end, do you?” she said. “That’s what really allows you inside the poet, don’t you think?”
He stroked her utterly smooth and firm ass, then reached two fingers around between her legs to find her already wet. Oh my god.
She said, in an utterly conversational tone that belied the fact that she had reached down and placed the head of his cock on her clitoris and was circling it there, “How does the final couplet go?”
“O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.”
Dashka lowered herself down on him, gasped almost imperceptibly, closed her eyes for just a moment, and as she began rocking slowly back and forth said, “It’s a good sonnet, very good. But what does it mean to you?”
“It’s that . . . ah . . . final line . . . before the couplet. That’s the, ahm . . . crucial point,” Willie said, and reached around her waist to finger her as she moved gently on top of him.
Willie brushed Dashka’s hair aside from her left ear to look past her, up toward the front of the van. The mousy girl was asleep; the driver had reengaged the grad student–clerk in political discussion. “Hell, did you read that thing in the paper today where Reagan was selling arms to Iran and giving the profits to the Contras? It’s against the goddamn law, but ol’ Ronnie’ll just smile and shake his head and get away with it. Could be worse, I guess, we could have Pat Robertson or one of those other born-again nut jobs as President.”
“Or George Bush,” said the grad student, and they both laughed.
“Tell me,” Dashka said as she bit her lip, “tell me . . . more . . . about the crucial point. What’s the line again?”
“It says to let the poet’s books ‘plead for love and look for recompense / More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.’ ”
“His poet’s pen speaks of love more eloquently than his tongue,” Dashka said.
“Only on one level,” Willie replied. He reached up with his other hand inside her shirt, and unhooked her bra. “But I think there is another, hidden level.” He slid his hand under her loosened bra. Smallish breast, soft. Small nipple, hard. “ ‘More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.’ You’re a grad student. What does it mean?” He nibbled her ear, and flicked his tongue lightly into it.
“More . . . more,” she breathed. “It’s an unusual locution. His tongue has expressed more things than . . . more . . . No, it doesn’t make sense. There’s an extra . . . ‘more’ . . . in there . . .”
He quickened the pace of his middle finger, circling faster now, but lighter. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. Unless,” Willie said, “unless the second ‘more’ is capitalized.” And with that he began to write an imaginary “M-o-r-e” on her with his middle finger, trying to replicate the most florid script he could picture in his head.
Almost immediately Dashka began to breathe audibly harder, rocking more quickly now. Willie watched a beaded earring with a feather on the end that hung halfway down her neck. It was beating silently with her motion, like a sparrow’s wing, as though there was an invisible breeze causing it slowly to wave back and forth, back and forth.
“More . . . than that tongue that More . . . hath more . . . express’d.” She was breathing hard now, and he began to move also, writing with the right, kneading gently with the left, and thrusting quietly in the middle.
“Sir . . . Thomas . . . MORE!?” she whispered urgently, and then she tightened, wrapping each of her legs around each of his, as if climbing a rope. He felt her spasm once, twice, three times, and that made him come too, shuddering silently and trying not to cry out into the rushing void of oneness the words that again came to him inexplicably, “O true apothecary!”
After a few moments of ragged breathing together, Dashka slid off of Willie and onto the seat next to him.
Dashka leaned back, with her eyes closed. After a minute, she finally said, “Sir Thomas More.”
“Saint Thomas More, if you’re Catholic,” Willie replied, putting himself away. “Henry the Eighth’s Lord Chancellor. He refused to honor Henry’s divorce from his first wife, and from the Catholic Church, and was beheaded. The first great Catholic martyr in England. A hero.”
“You’re telling me Shakespeare’s writing coded, dissident Catholic messages?”
“Yeah,” Willie said, “I think so. ‘Learn to read what silent love hath writ.’ He’s telling his reader to look for the code in his poetry that reveals his ‘silent love’ of the Catholic faith.”
Dashka thought for a moment, nodding. “That,” she said, “sounds like a very compelling thesis.” She took a deep breath, and shook out her hair. She put on her glasses, and picked up her book.
“I very much look forward to your outline,” she said, and read silently for the rest of the trip.