Bubbles, then silence.
Women and men wearing black lined the banks of the wine-black lake. They appeared, I thought, to be enjoying the show. It must be said that Shakespeare’s genius lies partly in his plays’ ready adaptability to the kinds of high-handed, decadent concepts guaranteed to astonish playgoers and offend the critics. Theater artistes often speak of their disregard for the audience, and it’s a badge of integrity among some in this business to ignore the ostensible needs and desires of that inexpert class the ticket holders. But I think this is a rotten attitude. I’m in favor of putting on a show people will remember and talk about.
Who cared if it was too dark out to really see anything? Who noticed that Mary Victoria Frost was whacked on pot and dropping her best lines? What did it matter if Mustardseed and Moth had stripped off their G-strings in order to sixty-nine atop the tree-house stage set? Puck had sunk, and the important middle acts were nearing conclusion, and this meant it was time for me to cuddle on the grass with Sheila Tannenbaum.
There she was. She looked darling in her black-and-orange cheerleader’s outfit and her mesh tights. She was my Helena, and she came toward me, smiling her awkward smile; and we settled on the wet ground and held each other in the night.
It was time for sleep. Sheila, the Lady Bears basketball star, snuggled warmly in my arms. She made a surprisingly good fit. She rested her head on my shoulder, and we kissed, lightly, and I looked up at trees and saw naked children.
How nice to lie on the grass. Other players, the demons and mere mortals, coupled nearby. It was a world of youthfulness and love. It was our summer at last. Faeries in the old oaks cradled Bottom and their mistress, and you could hear Sam English braying in ecstasy.
Beneath a tree, sprawled face down on the ground, lay Mary Victoria Frost, my poor Hermia. She looked so pale, so stuporous.
There would be plenty of time, later in act four or five or whatever act this was, to wake up, dump Helena, and marry, for a fitting consummation, the right girl.
It was the deep of night, late even for the fireflies. A few appeared here and there. Soon they would be gone. In the meantime, the Lord of Athens lit a cigarette and waited in the wings.
POND, WITH MUD
“The yellow bird made from cloth and / vines sits better in the / window than / the red truck I built last / year of / bottles,” Patrick Rouse wrote, in the fifteenth volume of what he liked to refer to as his life’s work — in reality, a journal crammed with passages written in a metaphorized terminology that Patrick had borrowed, or so he told himself, from the Imagist poets, and which he used to describe his emotions and whatever objects aroused his emotions. The “yellow bird,” for instance, referred to a lingerie bikini set featuring yellow lace woven in a tropical-jungle motif, which he had purchased a few days earlier for his fiancée, Caroline, who, at that moment, was standing in the living room modeling it for Patrick and — though the boy could hardly appreciate the significance of his mother’s erotic poses in bare feet before the hearth … or could he? — for her son, the “three-eyed rabbit.” That being, of course, more of Patrick’s code, or poetry, in this case describing Gregory, Caroline’s five-year-old from her marriage to Roger, an unemployed chamber musician.
“You like it?” Caroline asked Patrick.
He did. He did like it! He said, “That’s a good color for you.”
Caroline turned and peered over her shoulder, as if into a mirror hung on the wall. There was no mirror. She drank from her wine, and said, “It is a good color, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have picked it, because it’s bright. But you spotted it! You had the wisdom to see it.” She took another sip.
“Not wisdom,” Patrick said, as he wrote, in scratchy blue letters on a blank page in the book open on his lap, “Fat airplanes spot cloudless skies / their propellers / soft fans humming / leaking,” which was effectively a reminder to himself that soon he would be taking off his clothes, getting into bed, pushing aside the blue coverlet, climbing atop Caroline, and fucking.
“You always know what colors I can wear.”
“All I need to figure that out is a peek in the closet.”
At that point Gregory, who was sitting in the enormous Mission-style chair beneath the framed photograph of Caroline on vacation, waving from the bow of the USS Wisconsin—Gregory made one of his demands.
“Other! Chair!”
“Do you want to get him?” Patrick said.
“You get him. I’ve got these new things on.”
What was difficult was not moving the boy from one chair to another, exactly; the problem consisted in the likelihood that, once moved, Gregory might become sad. It was grotesque, Patrick thought, always to be hoisting this growing boy, who could, after all, walk. Why did they do it, he and Caroline? Why did they take orders from Gregory? There was nothing wrong with him — at least, nothing Dr. Percy could ever find.
“Here I come, my young boy who is not my own,” Patrick said. It was one of his jokes. He closed the volume on his lap and capped his pen, an ostentatious black-and-red lacquered fountain pen that he had bought for himself as a gift, and which leaked while he wrote. As always, he checked his hands, his shirt, and the front of his pants around the zipper. He found no ink smears. It had been a good writing day.
It frequently happened, when Patrick stopped purposefully making notes in “Pond, with Mud” (his secret name for his encrypted journal), that he began to feel as if he might be on the verge of formulating a concrete idea about the nature of existence, and about his place in the scheme of things. It was a feeling that came, as he thought of it, from deep in his heart. But each time he got this feeling it almost instantly went away. Would he never know what it was that he was trying to think about himself?
He forced himself to concentrate on Gregory. The boy was spread, neither sitting nor lying — Gregory was doing a perverse version of both at once — across the leather seat cushion of the big Stickley that Patrick had carted with him everywhere he’d lived since college. The chair was coming apart in places. Something structural somewhere had broken, and one leg had a tendency to work its way gradually loose from the frame. Every now and then, the leg had to be slapped back into position. Patrick had seduced Amy in this chair. Then Vanessa. Then Caroline.
He said to the sprawling boy, “Funny Bunny, I’m going to do something for you that you are going to like.”
“Don’t get him excited,” Caroline said. She placed her wineglass on the mantel. She did a slow, balletic turn, showing Patrick her body. And Patrick knew — her voice had that angry sound — that the wine had begun to take hold.
He approached the boy. He leaned over and placed his hands under Gregory’s arms. He began to lift. He said, “Do you love it when I hold you in the air? Are you my Bunny?”
In fact, the approval Patrick cared for was Caroline’s. Patrick craved recognition from her, in order to view himself favorably as a man who could function as a father. This had become especially meaningful to him after what had happened a few days before.
He had taken the afternoon off from his job at the printing press and gone with the boy in tow to catch the two o’clock train to the zoo that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, on marshlands that had been home to a chemical-solvent extraction plant that had burned to the ground. Immediately following the zoo’s inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony — or relatively soon after, to be more precise — strange things had begun to happen to the more esoteric wild animals. Why was it that the rare and endangered species, the ones you’d never heard of, all seemed to have compromised immune systems? At any rate, it had been reported in the papers that the board of governors and the director of the zoo were soon to come under indictment for cruelty to animals and for various misappropriations of municipal funds. The zoo’s future was in question. The time for a visit was now.