Could such inordinate and low desires,
Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,
Such barren pleasures, rude society,
As thou art match’d withal and grafted to,
Accompany the greatness of thy blood
And hold their level with thy princely heart?
— King Henry IV to Prince Hal, 1 Henry IV, III.ii.12
It was past dawn by the time Willie came down from the mushrooms. He and his fellow night-trippers returned from the cow pastures to the South Remote parking lot near Cowell College via a tiny, rickety redwood set of steps between two sentinel oaks that allowed humans, but not cows, to pass over the barbed wire fence and move back and forth between the humdrum life of classes and the spirit world of the cow pastures at night. He walked Dashka back to her car, but she’d been strangely quiet since the discovery of the giant mushroom. She gave him a distracted good-bye kiss, then turned back to him suddenly after she opened the door to her faded red Honda Civic.
“Do you want to get together sometime?”
“Um, yeah . . .” Willie said. “Maybe next week. I don’t know . . . I’m taking the library jitney to Berkeley tomorrow.”
Dashka cocked her head oddly.
“To work on my thesis,” Willie added, convincing himself that he wasn’t lying.
“Really?” Dashka replied, nodding. She seemed to be making a decision. Finally she said the last thing Willie expected to hear: “Me, too.”
With a last spark of energy, she managed a mischievous smile. “I guess I’ll see you in the back seat.” Then she got in the car and drove away down the hill.
The Graduate Student Residences at UCSC consisted not of traditional dorms, but coed apartments of four small single bedrooms with a common kitchen, dining room, and living room. Willie awoke at noon to the sound of the sofa rolling upstairs. No one else was home. He had a meager breakfast — a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge — and read the third act of Hamlet for the zillionth time, spinning his Rubik’s Cube and wondering why Hamlet didn’t kill his usurping uncle when he had the chance. Then he went to his afternoon fencing class, the only one he’d registered for this quarter. He came back in time for dinner, and found a note tacked to his bedroom door with a pushpin: Dood . . . some chick called. He plucked off the note and turned to the common area, holding it aloft.
“Hey, who took this note?”
Jill, standing at the kitchen counter grating a huge, bright orange brick of cheddar cheese, shrugged.
Jojo, a mess of dyed-black hair and black nail polish, sat at the dining room table, hunched over a new Macintosh SE, an early Christmas gift from her parents, clicking away on a mouse. “Dunno,” she said without looking up. “Josh and those guys were here earlier. Probably one of them.”
Now he looked again at the note. “Some chick . . .” Dashka, or someone else? He crumpled it up and tossed it toward the kitchen garbage can, missing. He peeked over Jojo’s shoulder at the Macintosh.
“What are you working on?”
“A fucking ‘no pass’ in Gender and Globalization, you oppressive pig.” She was playing Dark Castle, maneuvering a little warrior man with a pageboy haircut through a medieval dungeon, throwing rocks at bats. Every time a bat took a hit, it plummeted to the floor with a dying squeak. Squeak, squeak. Squeak. “Wanna play?”
“No, I’m good. Oh, hey,” Willie said too innocently to Jill, “you cooking?”
“Of course I am,” responded Jill, leaning into the grater with a vengeance. “It’s my night. Not that that means anything to anybody else around here.” There was a calendar on the side of the refrigerator with nothing on it except, in Jill’s fussy backward-slanted script, a schedule for the three nights each week when one of the apartment mates was responsible for cooking dinner. In theory, it saved on groceries and kept everyone from eating in the cafeteria or coffee shop every meal. In practice, it meant Jill cooked them all dinner once a week or so, and then bitched about it. “I don’t understand why no one else will cook. What’s the point of being independent and living in an apartment if you don’t take advantage of the kitchen and cook sometimes? It’s not even like everyone has to cook every week. There’s a rotation.” No one answered. “Hello, is anyone even listening to me?”
Jill was working on a Ph.D. in sociology.
The phone rang. Willie, glad to get away from Jill, picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Willie.”
Willie immediately wished he’d responded to Jill instead.
“Oh . . . hi.”
“Did I catch you at a good time?”
“Actually, I’m tired, just back from a class.”
“How’s the thesis?”
“Good, good, I’m rolling on it.”
A pause.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I got the topic approved yesterday.”
He waited for what he was certain would be an outpouring of approval — or at least relief — from his father. Instead there was a longer pause. And then:
“Well . . . then either you’re a liar or the provost is.”
“The provost?”
“I just got off the phone with him.”
“What? Why?”
“Last week I asked him to find out how the academic career of my only child is going. I called today to follow up, and he told me that he talked to your advisor, Professor Walsh.”
“Welsh. And he’s — ”
“He told the provost that he hadn’t seen you academically in months, that you hadn’t given him the abstract for your thesis — ”
“That’s because — ”
“Let me finish, please. The provost also said that he personally is concerned about you and marijuana, that you looked stoned the last couple of times he saw you around the college. So, I just wanted to ask you if, for the past year, when I thought I was investing in your education, you’ve been merely sponging off of me and buying drugs?”
Willie’s hands were shaking with anger, but he tried to control his voice. “Are you finished now?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sponging off you, I’m working on the thesis. I was just researching the influence of religion on psychological development in Hamlet this afternoon. And I’m not lying to you, either. Professor Welsh is on a book tour, but his TA approved the topic. Yesterday.” This news, Willie thought, would surely change the tone of the conversation.
There was a longish pause.
“Well, that means nothing. TAs mean nothing. You need to get approval from him.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! I’m doing the best — ”
“Don’t curse at me, it’s extremely rude.”
“I’m rude? You just called me a sponge.”
“I know I don’t have to tell you that you can’t get anywhere in academia without a master’s. But the pace of your career matters, too. By the time I was your age I’d worked my own way through grad school and was starting on my dissertation.”
“Right, well . . .” Willie took a deep breath, but the anger he held back had turned into a snake in his mouth, and he couldn’t keep it from striking. “I guess I’m just not finding my inner Shakespeare as fast or as completely as you found your inner Woody Allen. How’s the Manhattan lecture going over this year?”
There was a very, very long silence. Willie knew he’d gone too far, but it was already said.
On the other end of the line, he thought he heard the sound of ice clinking into a glass, followed by another long pause. “Perhaps it would be best for both of us if I simply stopped paying your way. Your tuition for the quarter is paid. Your thesis is approved, you say. So write the damn thing. If you need extra money, you could get a job.”
Now the pause came from Willie’s end. What could he possibly say? He’d painted himself into this corner; he might as well grab a stool and a dunce cap and face the wall.
“Fine. I don’t need your money.”
Another eternal pause.
“My point is — ”
“Okay, well, I gotta go. Bye.”
“Willie, wait — ”
Willie hung up.
There was a studious hush in the room, broken only by the rhythm of Jill, still grating, and the occasional death of a bat in the Dark Castle. Squeak . . . squeak.
After a few seconds, Jojo broke the silence without looking away from her game. “Fuckin’ parents.”
Willie was cut off.