O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But, for your son — believe it, O, believe it —
Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,
If not most mortal to him.
— Coriolanus, V.iii.182
Willie sat slouched in the overstuffed couch facing the picture window that looked out from the Oakland hills toward San Francisco Bay. It was late afternoon. Long shadows stretched across the bay, over the Berkeley Marina, across the flats of Berkeley and north Oakland, and up the foothills to where Willie sat. The sun was sliding behind Mount Tamalpais in Marin to the northwest, and as it did, the fog came cascading in over the coastal mountains.
As Willie watched, the Golden Gate Bridge, its single span effortless and graceful, a bold but earthy red, proclaiming its genius and its industry in every line, every cable, every girder, every head-sized rivet, was slowly swallowed up by the fog. Starting at its northern end, it simply floated away on a grey cloud into oblivion. The bridge gone, the fog rolled across the city, down the Presidio, and across North Beach. Coit Tower disappeared, then the downtown skyline, the Transamerica Pyramid, the Embarcadero, and one by one, the suspension towers of the Bay Bridge, then Treasure Island, Yerba Buena Island, and the ugly cantilevered girders of the bridge’s Oakland side. In the space of two minutes, the flats of Berkeley and Oakland were invisible, too; finally the fog blew in wisps up the foothills, and streamed past the window where Willie sat, alone with Dr. Alan Greenberg and his second wife, Mizti.
“Wasn’t that pretty?!” Mizti gushed. “Do you want another glass of wine, Willie?”
Willie shook his head.
“You sure?”
He shrugged, then held out the glass. Mizti poured, and as she did so she smiled a little too broadly. Tilting the bottle, her hand shook a little bit. She clanked the glass a little too hard with the bottle neck; Willie thought the goblet might crack, but it didn’t. “Whoopsie! Sorry! Maybe you should have mine, too, ha-ha!”
Willie smiled a tight-lipped, utterly insincere smile. “Thanks, Mizti.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. “How’d your errand for Robin go?” Alan asked.
“Fine.”
The duffel bag sat safely between Willie’s feet, tightly zipped.
Willie had run the mile from the campus to Robin’s apartment building. The security gate at the front, which was always ajar, was of course locked, and he pressed her buzzer to no avail. She wasn’t home. Willie didn’t have a key, so he slunk around to the back of the building, scrambled awkwardly up a drainage pipe and onto Robin’s second-floor balcony. He found himself praying to a god he didn’t believe in that the sliding glass door was open. If it wasn’t, he wasn’t sure he could get down again. It was open. He retrieved the duffel and his backpack and left a note under the front door as if he’d slipped it in from the outside:
R, I’m okay. Jail was big fun. Going up to Dad’s for the afternoon. Back ASAHP. W.
The trinity of father, son, and stepmother sipped wine and watched the fog in silence. Finally Alan broke it. “So how’s the thesis coming, son? If this is going to be the last quarter I pay tuition — ”
“Don’t worry, Dad. I told you, it’ll get done.”
Alan shrugged his narrow, tweedy shoulders and pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “Interesting use of the passive, Willie. It won’t just get done. You actually have to write it.”
Willie gave him a withering look, but no answer.
“So what’s it about?” his father asked, and took a slug off a tumbler of single-malt Scotch.
“I’m still working out the details.”
Alan laughed. “You haven’t started, have you? Holy crap, Willie. This isn’t a Ph.D.! It’s a master’s thesis. What is it, fifty pages?”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty. It’s been two years. Just write the damn thing. It’s time to move on.”
“It’s not like I’ve just been sitting around the whole time. I worked last summer.”
“You were waiting tables.”
Willie felt Mizti’s instinctive lunge at the first bit of conversation that didn’t involve academia.
“There’s nothing wrong with waiting tables, honey,” she said to Alan. “He was making good money. More than I used to make.”
Mizti had been working at an hourly hot tub rental place on University Avenue when Alan met her, not long after Willie’s mother died. Willie thought it was too soon: the funeral-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables, he had thought as he loaded up on pastrami and liverwurst at the Faculty Club reception.
Mizti had made a beautiful bride, of course. At five feet eight, 125, she was a little, but not too much, taller than Alan. There was some inevitable whispering and giggling at the wedding, along with a few deadly glares from Sheila’s friends. While in the bathroom peeing, Willie had overheard a conversation in the hallway outside.
“She’s certainly statuesque, isn’t she?”
“If you’re talking about the plaster between her ears, yes.”
“What does she mean, spelling her name that way?”
“She changed the s to a z for the wedding. Alan says she thinks it looks more Jewish.”
“A Judophile shiksa. Alan is finally living his own Woody Allen film.”
“I’m thinking Bananas.”
Snickers.
“More like Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.”
Laughter.
“I just hope the wedding night isn’t Love and Death.”
Guffaws.
“I think in her case it’s Take the Money and Run.” A couple of chortles, and several “ooohs.”
Willie had emerged from the bathroom and smiled wanly into the vortex of embarrassed silence.
And yet, after the wedding, Mizti and Willie had gotten along fine. She was only seven years older than him. She still remembered what it was like to be sixteen, in high school, trying to get a date without a driver’s license. When Alan would lock himself into his study at night, and Willie would come home late from a play rehearsal or a movie with his friends, he’d find Mizti watching Dallas or Dynasty or Falcon Crest and eating popcorn, and he might watch for a bit, especially if Heather Locklear was in a halter top or a silk robe.
At first Mizti would go upstairs at eleven every night, and he could hear her gently coaxing Alan to bed behind the study door, and Alan was coaxable.
But week by week and month by month Alan and Mizti’s bedtime slowly got later and later, and sometimes Willie would come home to find Mizti asleep on the couch.
And then, one night in his senior year, he came home from a coffeehouse where he had been studying, trying to blend in with the UC students, and listening to a classical guitarist playing quietly in a corner. He had been distracted from his SAT studying — the guitarist was beautiful. Straight brown hair, big brown eyes; petite, a little boyish, but not too much . . . like a gymnast. And when she took a break, she had walked past him and smiled, and she had an irresistible crinkle around her eyes, not crow’s feet of age but of impishness, and Willie had not been able to keep his eyes off her jeans as she ordered a coffee from the bar.
Taking the bus home, and then walking up the hill on a warm spring night, Willie had planned to steal a beer from the fridge and go to his room immediately to whack off to the image of the guitar girl. But when he stepped into the darkened kitchen, the refrigerator door was open, its light illuminating Mizti standing in front of it in a short silk robe, pouring into a glass from a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay. Willie started to back out of the room. But she heard him.
“Oh, hi, Willie,” she had said, and as she turned her robe was a little bit too far open. She saw the line of his gaze and she pulled it closed again with a giggle. “Sorry.”
She sounded a little bit drunk. “I’m having some wine. You wanna glass of wine?”
Willie said, “Oh, um, no thanks.”
“Okay,” she shrugged, and turned back to the fridge, bending over to put the bottle back on the lower shelf.
“Actually, sure, why not,” Willie said.
Mizti turned and smiled, pulled out the bottle, grasped the cork, popped it, and filled a glass for Willie.
“Cheers,” she said, and they clinked glasses.
They watched Dynasty, and Heather Locklear was in fact wearing an ultrashort silk robe. Mizti got up to refill her glass of wine one more time. She disappeared briefly upstairs, and when she came back a minute later and said, “Where did I put my wine?” a bit of smoke puffed from her lips. She took an inordinate amount of time to find the glass she’d left in plain sight in the kitchen.
Willie watched Mizti moving around the house, and at the sight of her nipples rippling underneath the silk, and the shape of her ass that while maybe not Heather Locklear’s was still fine, really fine, his groin screamed at him. It asked no moral questions, so Willie did not answer them.
Finally Dynasty ended, and they talked. First just small talk, but then they talked about girls, and Willie’s taste in girls, and Willie’s utter lack of experience with girls. Willie had already had an erection for nearly an hour when Mizti exclaimed with wide-eyed, whispered wonder, “Ohmigod, you’re a virgin!?”
It was all headed exactly where Willie dreaded and desperately hoped it would: to Mizti, on her knees on the Persian rug in the living room, her hair smelling of grass, giving Willie his very first blowjob.
But she had refused to fuck him.
“Trust me,” she’d said, “it would probably mess with your head.”
And now Willie sat in the fog atop the Oakland hills and sullenly sipped at a dark, leathery red wine.
“So try me,” said Alan. “Sometimes just the process of saying something out loud helps clarify it in your mind. Tell me about it. It might help.”
“What?” said Willie with rising panic.
Fuck, I haven’t been listening. Tell him about . . . ? He looked at Mizti, but she was smiling. His thesis, he was asking about his thesis.
“Well, what do you know about persecution of Catholics by Protestants in sixteenth-century England?” said Willie.
Alan Greenberg shrugged. “Not much. I can tell you about the exploration of identity in Robert Bolt’s script of A Man for All Seasons, if you like.”
“Do you know about all the executions?”
“Sure. It happened pretty much everywhere. On both sides. Burnings at the stake, the Inquisition, Huguenots, Bloody Mary.”
Mizti perked up at “Bloody Mary,” but seeing that it wasn’t an offer, she refilled her wineglass and sank back into her chair.
“During Elizabeth’s reign there were several Catholic plots to murder Elizabeth and put the other Mary — Mary, Queen of Scots — onto the throne,” Alan concluded.
“Right,” Willie said, although he didn’t know about the plots, and hadn’t realized until this instant that Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bloody Mary were two different people.
“So Shakespeare fits in how?” asked Alan.
Willie told him the tale of Sonnet 23, and Alan nodded, impressed.
“That’s some clever scholarship.”
“So my thesis is that Shakespeare was Catholic.”
Alan kept looking at him, waiting. “I’ve heard that suggested before.”
“You have?”
“I hate to slow you down on this, but I think you need more. One line in a fairly obscure sonnet isn’t enough evidence to base a master’s thesis on.”
“Well, obviously I have more research to do,” replied Willie, annoyed.
“Obviously. Are you spending some time at the library?”
“Yeah, I’m going to be there all night tonight,” Willie lied.
Mizti had been shifting uncomfortably. “What about the man?” she asked.
Alan and Willie both looked at her as if artichokes had suddenly sprouted from her ears.
“What’s that, sweetie?” asked Alan.
“Shakespeare the man? I mean, so he was being prosecuted by the Protestants — ”
“Persecuted,” corrected Alan.
“Whatever. It seems to me what’s interesting is how that affected him personally. His family. His friends. And then how did it, you know, make Shakespeare Shakespeare? Maybe you could research that.”
Willie looked at his dad. How to explain it to her?
Alan began. “Literary criticism and theory in the twentieth century tends to be entirely focused on the text, cupcake.”
“It’s true,” Willie continued. “The biography, politics, and intention of the author — even his or her interpretation of his own writing — have been deemed irrelevant to interpreting or critiquing his or her work.”
Mizti looked back and forth from Alan to Willie, stunned.
“Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’d be interested in hearing how the persecution of Christians — ”
“Catholics,” interrupted Alan.
“Catholics,” Mizti corrected herself. “If that was going on when Shakespeare was a kid, just imagine how it must have fucked with his head. That kind of trauma in your family, at such a young age. What would that do to you? It must have had some impact on what made Shakespeare Shakespeare. I just think it’s completely dumb that you can’t talk about it.”
Mizti sank back into her chair, sipped her wine, and looked out the window as the lights of Berkeley strove to burn through the fog.
There was another long silence.
“So you’re sure you’re okay for money?” Alan said to Willie at last.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine. But I was wondering . . . could I borrow your car? I’ve got one more errand to run tomorrow.”
Alan looked at Willie with vague disapproval. “Sure.”