Part 4.)

The Shakespeare Chronicles

a novel

James Boyle

Click to buy this book at a discount in Hardback or Paperback or as E-book (C C Licensed/DRM free)

Or choose an online bookseller | |

This section of the book is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, NoDerivatives license

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

It should be attributed as follows.

“James Boyle, The Shakespeare Chronicles: A Novel

Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/467168

Published by Lulu Press.

ISBN 978-1-4303-0768-6

This is a work of fiction. With the exception of the Elizabethans, all of the characters are fictional. Immaculata State and its university exist only in my imagination. In particular, the university should not be confused with any educational institutions bearing a similar name. Any resemblance to real people, natural or legal, heretic or orthodox, living or dead, is unintended. I have taken some liberties with Elizabethan history, and freely entered into the labyrinth of transposition, revisionism and conspiracy theory which surrounds this subject like a privet maze. The authors to whose work I refer are real and I am indebted to them, particularly to the ideas put forward by the intriguingly named John Thomas Looney in Shakespeare Identified 1920, [Frederick A. Stokes Co]. A more recent and extensive version of the same hypothesis can be found in Charlton Ogburn’s, The Mysterious William Shakespeare 1988, [Cardinal Books]) Finally, a wonderful (and absolutely hilarious) overview of the authorship question is provided by Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives 1993 [Oxford U. Press.] I must stress, however, that substantial fictional modifications have been made and neither Mr. Looney nor any other of the authors I mention are to be held responsible for the story I tell here. My goal is entirely different from theirs.

Read Part 1 | 2 i.) | 2 ii.) | 3i.)

Jean

December 1st

I have called Jean and told her that I am going to England. She now lives in Northern Virginia with her pusillanimous new husband and the husband’s child by a previous marriage. Our family arrangements are becoming as complicated as the lineages in a Norse saga. The husband is a securities lawyer called ‘Norm’ who specializes in commodity markets and can talk at great length about pork belly futures. Quandary got on well with Norm, probably because he allowed Norm to be condescending about Quandary’s "academic impracticality" and "metaphysics," a term which Norm used to refer to all that was abstract and not concerned with immediate pecuniary gain. Imagine, a man who dealt in the buying and selling of intangible entitlements to the bellies of pigs not yet born, criticizing Quandary for being "metaphysical"! Norm, exemplifying the mediocrity for which he was the eponym, called this cordial relationship between ex- and current husband "modern and civilized." What he really meant was "weak." This is a familiar confusion.

In any event, I capitalised once again on the cordiality for which Quandary’s weakness had paid. Norm and Jean live twenty minutes from Dulles airport and it needed only one hint to get an invitation to sleep at their house the night before I left. Jean sounded pleased and a little puzzled, sensing a resolution unfamiliar to Quandary. Her goodbye seemed slightly wistful, but that may have been my imagination. I put the phone down softly. It was all going to work. I would take her away from him. All that one needs in this world is desire and will and I have large quantities of both.

For this account to make any sense I must tell you something of Jean, but what? Quandary was a conventional man and he catalogued people in the conventional ways, spreadeagled over the four axes of cocktail party cartography: Origins, Body, Occupation, Hobbies. Jean was from upstate New York, five foot six and very slim, with dirty-blonde hair and a birthmark shaped like Iceland draped across the line of her hip. Jean was a librarian. Jean was a librarian interested in communism and heraldry. Quandary thought of her privately as the last rationalist. She was so sure that if people would only listen, she could explain to them why capitalism was unjust. One had to admit, did one not, that labour was the ultimate source of all value? It was obvious, was it not, that those who labour did not in fact get to own the value they created? And that they even came to experience this dispossession as natural and just? That conclusion led, did it not, to the realization that the structure of society was entirely devoted to the perpetration of an enormous hoax? And was it not a remarkable hoax, so successful that it convinced both those who benefitted and those suffered from it? Now that this was revealed, everything looked different, did it not? Did it not? Her prospective employers listened, but showed no signs of enlightenment. After her first few unsuccessful job interviews she had reluctantly decided to take "Communism" out of the hobbies section of her resume and to spend the interviews talking about heraldry instead, a subject on which she was equally passionate. Heraldry was colourful, archaic and irrelevant – qualities much admired by the governing bodies of libraries. It suggested old world sophistication without old world disaffection. On the second interview after her change of tactics Jean received a job offer at a small country library only a few minutes drive from their home in Charlotte Russe. She later attributed it to her discussion of the etymology behind "bar sinister on a field argent." The chief interviewer had been left handed.

Quandary met Jean in a library. Where else? Day after day he saw this quiet, pretty young woman sitting at the desk, cataloguing books with a fan of hair swinging across her face as she turned from one card index to another. He watched her staring into space while she gnawed on the top of a plastic ballpoint-pen. He watched her replacing the mis-shelved books, tongue in the corner of her mouth as she squinted at the faded call numbers, her hip outlined against her baggy jeans as she strained to put something on the top shelf. One night he passed her empty desk when the library was closing. Her pen was lying in the middle of a clutter of papers. He could tell it by the frayed edges, the teethmarks in the little blue stopper. No-one else was in sight. Quandary picked it up and carried it with him to the elevator. If challenged, he could always say that he had needed a pen. He could always say that he meant to copy down some details from the catalogues on the ground floor... No-one stopped him, of course, and he carried the pen back to his apartment. For a week he would toy with it as he ate his breakfast of bagels and coffee. He turned it in his spatulate, hairy fingers, feeling the regular indentations made by her small, even teeth. He even levered the blue stopper out with his teeth and then popped it back with his tongue – the same way she did when she was particularly deep in thought. After a week he carried it back into the library and gave it to her, telling her he had found in on the floor. She thanked him and threw it straight in the trash. "It’s been chewed on, anyway." Quandary longed to scrabble among the scrap paper and retrieve it. Instead, he asked her out for a coffee. She accepted, seemed even pleased. To all appearances, he had successfully traded the obsession for the reality.

It is strange for me to look back through Quandary’s memories of Jean. He was so inept, so obsessed, so sure of failure. There was Jean, ignored by other men because they assumed that anyone so intelligent and pretty and self-possessed already had legions of boyfriends dancing attendance on her. An innocent in a nation of narcissists, Jean herself didn’t realize that her situation was anything out of the ordinary. Enter Quandary. Clumsy, self-conscious, stuttering Quandary. He was like some incompetent geologist stumbling over an unknown oil-field purely by accident. Not that I see women as natural resources, you understand, it is just that everything about his memories annoys me, the lack of self-confidence, the twitchy obsessiveness, the absence of Will. The trouble is, I must admit that all of these qualities were absolutely indispensable in his wooing of Jean. I would have asked Jean out sooner, would have gone to bed with her sooner, would have dominated her, won her, lost her sooner. Poor clumsy Quandary gave her shy offerings of poetry and flowers, said the wrong thing in his stumbling efforts to say the right thing, never went too far in case she thought he was a dominating male. In the end it was Jean who dragged him into bed. They undressed with shy concentration, Quandary stuffing his socks into his shoes because he was frightened that they smelled.

Quandary was not technically a virgin by virtue of a number of insipid affairs and a pedantic study of one of the more tiringly hydraulic sex manuals. Jean, he discovered later, had about the same level of experience without the paper qualifications. But both of them might as well have been Victorian virgins coming to the marriage bed for all the preparation that their prior encounters gave them. I remember Quandary thinking, in one lubricous and sweat-slick moment, that there was so much of her, so many places to explore. It was all so much fun. The sex manual’s view of copulation was more like an assault on Everest – a check list of supplies and safety procedures, base camp to be established in the foothills, some practice forays onto the lower slopes and then a detailed itinerary to be followed in the arduous march through the subsidiary cols to the summit. The manual certainly offered the same kind of pleasure as any highly disciplined and energetic physical pastime – ballroom dancing, say, or synchronized swimming – but it could hardly be described as fun. Not like this at all. He tried to explain his thoughts to Jean who very sensibly silenced him with various parts of her body... The memory is a powerful one for me.

The whole marriage was prefigured in these first encounters. It was a relationship built on the love of sex and books. There are worse foundations. Their affection was solicitous; tentative and diffident in its expression after the sexual frenzy that had come before. They were terribly polite to each other. People often commented on it. Of course, that was about the height of Quandary’s romance – politeness. When I look back now, I cannot believe how little of life he experienced. He was like a radio receiver which picked up only a very narrow band of signals. Romance, revenge, intrigue, consuming passion – all of these raised no resonance in Quandary, just a few ghostly mutterings at the edges of his consciousness. Interference in the signal, voices in the ether. With better filters, finer tuning, perhaps they could all be banished. Now I am come. Not filter but amplifier.

Tomorrow I pack. Quandary lost her because. He lost her by. He lost her because, right up until the final moments, he showed her only a glimmer of his desire. I shall take her back with a bonfire, a conflagration.

***

December 2nd

I am shot of Immaculata and Charlotte Russe. For the moment anyway. I gave all my exams today. "Christopher Marlowe is Faust. Discuss. (Supernal assistance permitted)" "How far could Euphuism have taken Elizabethan theatre? (Measuring tapes may not be used.)" Once they had all finished scribbling I bundled up the blue books and carried them into the Registrar. She was fond of Quandary, despite the fact that he always handed in his grades late.

–– I hope you are going to be on time with your grades this year, Professor Quandary?

This is said with an indulgent tone, like a wife saying "you’re not going to have another piece of that pie, are you?" Women tended to talk to Quandary indulgently. It strikes me now that, having lost Jean, Quandary had tried to make all women his wife, displaying his helplessness like an angler’s lure.

–– Oh, I’m on time. They all get ‘B’s.

–– Sorry?

–– Each student in this pile..

I dump the blue books on the table with a thud. They fan out into a pretty confusion of cheap paper and spidery handwriting.

–– ..gets a B. Should make your record keeping easier. Have a good holiday.

I am into the parking lot before anyone can respond. The Jaguar roars along the main drag, attracting covetous glances from the good old boys in their pick-ups and gas guzzlers. The arousing of envy, fornication, professional misconduct – this is the life! On the way home, I pick up the tickets. I have splurged some more of Quandary’s money on first class. He always flew economy, forced into egalitarianism by imaginary financial needs. What was he saving it for, anyway? Deferred gratification, thrifty investment of capital, respect for one’s superiors and repression of desire – these are sound principles on which to build an industrial revolution, but as a personal credo they are sadly lacking.

I pack with methodical attention to the task at hand. Suitcases are no place for the Dionysian impulse. One bag, and that to be carried on. The only bulky item is Quandary’s grey suit, which I am taking in case I need to cozen those in authority. For the same purpose, I have persuaded the Dean to give me an extremely impressive letter introducing me as a respected scholar and asking the world at large to assist me in my work. He thinks it is to enable me to gain access to the hidden reaches of the British Museum, but it is worded so generally that it might just as well be supporting a security clearance or an application for credit.

I have no more than the most general itinerary. I plan to visit the places most closely connected with Edward and with Shagspur, his catspaw. Stratford, of course, and Castle Hedringham if it still stands, perhaps first spending a few days of preparation in the British Museum Reading Room, or the Bodleian at Oxford. The dreams will guide me. At the moment, I can hardly concentrate on the journey. My thoughts are all on Jean. I must confess to the symptoms of nervous excitement, butterflies in the stomach, sweating palms, frequent and smelly trips to the bathroom. These seem too much like weakness and I will not allow myself weakness. Quandary has used up my ration long since. Once I am embarked on the journey all will be well. The car is ready, the house is locked up. I will write the next entry under Jean’s roof.

***

December 3rd

It is midnight and everything is in motion. The central heating is creaking and a branch is tapping against the window. Norm and Jean are asleep. In the same bed, but I must not dwell on that. Lola is not back yet but perhaps that is for the best. In any event I will have plenty of time to complete my account of the day’s events. Nothing will be happening for at least two hours yet. By rights, I suppose, I should be tired but ever since the Changes I have found that I only need two or three hours of sleep a night. Tonight, I may do without entirely. So..

As I expected, my nervousness evaporated on the drive to Jean’s house. It was my first time driving a powerful sports car on a long journey, so I put aside my thoughts of Jean, put aside my plans, and concentrated on the immediate moment – the spurts of power as my foot hits the accelerator, an oldie from Elvis Costello on the CD player, the feeling of predestination in a gear change that synchronizes with a chord change. I slide by other cars and push them into the past. Breasting the stream of time, my journey is its own justification. Do you understand? I surf on my own bow wave. Do you see? Sometimes the thought of all the moments like this, moments of ‘now’, that Quandary threw away, it makes me sick at heart. And they think I am mad.

When I arrived at Jean’s house, the first person I saw was Lola, Norm’s nineteen year old daughter by a previous marriage. (Norm thought the name was "exotic." And Jean married him!) Like me, Lola has never liked the fact that Norm divorced her mother and remarried. I don’t think she dislikes Jean. It is more the fact that Norm has rejected her mother. Lola takes this, so far as I can see, as a personal slight. On the two previous occasions when Quandary had visited – grimly settling some detail of his repayments for Jean’s share of the oversized house – Lola had made a point of flirting extravagantly with him. This produced the entirely satisfactory result of annoying both her father and her stepmother at the same time. Quandary, of course, stammered and blushed his way out of it, casting covert glances through Lola’s ripped T-shirt at her smooth, flat stomach, the graceful curve of her side.

Today, when I pulled the car into the driveway, I nearly ran over her. Lola was dressed, like me, in black leather and torn silk. For a moment I nursed a desire for her, thought to use her flirtation against her – what a complete revenge it would be on Norm, what symmetry. Then I reconsidered. The idea was a nice one, but too baroque. I must not allow my plans to be cluttered. I am here to win back Jean – or at least to lay the groundwork. Everything else is surplus, even Lola’s pouty lips and thick, ringletted hair.

At first, I think, Lola did not recognize me. My shaven head and earring, my car, my clothes – all of them are unfamiliar. Even my voice has changed.

I must interrupt the narrative at this point to say that I think there may be considerable significance in the alteration of my vocal range since the Changes began. Quandary talked in a mediumly high tenor, his throat always sounding a little constricted, like a singer in a key too high for him. In the last three and half months, I have found that my speaking voice has become progressively lower. Another thing. Quandary could never hold a tune. I have found that I sing quite melodically – albeit in an untrained manner as far as breathing and phrasing are concerned. Most modern songs are sung by tenors rather than by baritones. Quandary, struggling to sing along with the radio, would find his voice cracking. I simply sing along an octave or two lower. Quandary’s laugh was high and uncomfortable; self-conscious and false sounding. Mine, when it comes, is natural and booming.

I bring all this up because it may have some reference to the dreams. I have sometimes wondered if everyone has inside them a Form – an essence of the way that they should be – which, if they diverge from it, makes them sound false and contrived. After all, there are such a wide range of possible mannerisms, speaking voices, body postures and laughs. How else could we explain our feelings that one person is "genuine," is "themselves," and another person is "false"? How can we explain such a feeling unless we assume that we subconsciously identify this Form and recognize divergences from it? A treble laugh or tenor voice sounds natural in one man, but false in another. Why, if not because of some Form inside each? I can see no other plausible hypothesis. Therefore, it must be that there are such Forms, and that the dreams are bringing me closer to mine. This is not only further confirmation of the dreams, it suggests some clues about where they might come from. Perhaps these Forms are like old radio crystals, each "tuned" to a different frequency. Perhaps two people who are attuned to each other, provided they are true to their Forms, can dream about each other, no matter how widely they may be separated in distance or time. Somehow, Quandary and de Vere are attuned to each other. This would explain why Quandary needed to undergo a personal transformation so as to appreciate the dreams fully. He had strayed from his Form, like a radio receiver straying off the frequency. Now that I am moving closer to my Form, the dreams should come more frequently.

I look back at what I have just written and can see no flaw in my reasoning. This is a fascinating hypothesis. I must examine it further at a later point.

The first thing Lola did when she realized that it was actually me, was to laugh hysterically. It did not disturb me, indeed I laughed along with her. Why not? Was it not, in truth, a great joke? The fact that I laughed and didn’t blush or offer explanations seemed to quiet her faster than anything I could have said.

–– You shouldn’t laugh, Lola. We’re dressed almost identically.

This set her off again.

–– What are you doing standing out here in the driveway?

–– Waiting for fucking Josh who’s supposed to be taking me out for lunch but who’s fucking late as fucking usual.

Josh is Lola’s boyfriend. He has an old MG convertible, wavy blond hair and informed opinions on deconstruction. ‘How well he’s read, to reason against reading,’ thought Quandary, who disliked him on sight. The MG, apparently, is prone to breaking down. I suspect that few other things in Josh’s life are allowed to. Norm approves of Josh, and in particular approves of his MG which, being both old and imported, establishes Josh’s bona fides as a worthy person to screw his daughter. Accessories are important.

–– My stepmother is in the house. I suppose it’s her you want to see?

As neither Norm nor Jean were in view, Lola didn’t bother to flirt with me. This only confirmed my earlier decision. She would have been quite happy to engage me in further italicized conversation but I forestalled her by crunching through the gravel towards the door.

Jean was inside. My heart started to beat faster. It seemed to take a very long time to reach the door, as though I was walking through sand instead of expensive gravel. I reached up one of my hands to pound on the door and Jean opened it just at the same moment. Seeing a black-leather shave-pate right in front of her, arm upraised as though to strike her down, she recoiled with a little, almost bird-like, cry of surprise. It was a moment.

–– Stanley, is that you?

Only Jean called him Stanley. Thank God. I wanted to tell her right then. "Not really Stanley, no." But I didn’t. To be honest, I can’t really remember what I said. Smiled at her, muttered something. Came inside. Jean was all around me – offering to take my jacket, fluttering uncharacteristically – shocked from her usual stillness by the Changes in me. It was only twelve hours ago, but it seems like a distant memory. I remember movement, awkwardness, excitement. I remember a funny hollow feeling in my stomach. Do you know the feeling when you try to clench your fist just after you have woken up and all of your muscles are suffused with a warm tingling weakness? That’s the way my stomach felt. I remember feeling that I was short of breath even though I was breathing deeply. I remember a lightness and a confusion, a sudden burst of pictures of Jean, the birthmark like Iceland, a window seen through waving branches, another man’s hand...

I had resolved to say nothing about the Changes, but here I was stammering out some pathetic explanation – did it for a joke, costume party. I don’t remember. Jean was dressed in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. She looked well – a little thinner than when I had seen her last. I mentioned it. "Aerobics" she said, and shrugged. The shrug made me feel weak. I said the first thing that came into my head.

–– So what’s the dialectical materialist explanation for aerobics?

She laughed. I had made a point. Norm thinks dialectical materialism is something to do with computers.

–– Oh, that’s easy.

She started to tick the points off on her fingers like someone double-checking a shopping list. There was a familiar tone of reasonableness in her voice.

–– It’s not the fetishism of commodities, it’s the commodification of the body fetish...

Another smile here, as though she was retelling a dirty joke we both knew.

–– .. we all want to extend the only life we’ve got and make ourselves better looking objects at the same time. Jumping up and down as a substitute for meaning. It’s all so pathetic, isn’t it?

She said this happily, as though it gave her nothing but pleasure. The explanation had relaxed her. She was leaning against a wall, one hip out in an unconscious pose that made her look much younger than she is, her hands clasped in front of her in an almost priestly gesture. As though she could make the ideas hold still by squeezing them. It all brought back too many memories. Outside I could hear tire squeal and gravel spit as Josh finally arrived to pick up a protesting Lola. I looked around. Norm’s interior decorator has done the place in "middle-Eastern dictator" – flocked wallpaper and heavy wooden antiques next to gleaming technological gadgets finished in matte black and chrome. On top of this unlikely combination Jean has stuck a random selection of her favourite objects – a compendium of the British royal family’s heraldic devices, a photograph of Trotsky in Mexico, a scale model of the closed train on which Lenin rode through Europe towards the Finland Station, a stuffed and mounted boar’s head which she had bought to study the anatomical correctness of various coats of arms. The overall effect is disquieting. The boar’s head, in particular, exudes menace. I know that Jean is using it ironically, but a boar’s head (even an ironic one) has an irreducible air of bad tempered bad taste. It flavors the room somehow. I know I should be immune to such things. It affected me, nevertheless.

Jean went into the kitchen to make coffee. I was glad to follow her, if only to get away from the boar. She was telling some story about quotidian disasters, brushing her hair back behind her ear as she did – the car had broken down, Norm needed to be picked up from the station, lost keys. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, to see the hair swing forward again from behind her ear, to say "Wake up. this is now! This is the only life you’ll have and you’re frittering it away on fucking car keys." And again, "I have come to take you back!" My heart was pounding, my leathers felt sweaty and uncomfortable, the pressure of love in my stomach was almost unbearable. I tried to center myself by an act of will but found that I couldn’t. Jean wandered around the kitchen, picking up utensils and putting them down, making the coffee in a distracted way while she brought me up to date on her life, things at the local library, Lola’s latest outrage. Her movements were unsure and halting. She seemed hesitant in front of the enormous steel and glass espresso maker, as though she was in someone else’s kitchen rather than her own. It gave me hope. In a moment, I knew, she would begin to ask me about my life, but I wasn’t ready, I couldn’t do it. This was so far from my fantasies of calm self-control, of the triumph of desire and will, that every moment seemed poignant. I felt that I had to escape, "to draw back in order to jump better" as the French say. But how?

The coffee came hissing and spluttering out of the innards of the machine. Jean decanted it into fluted white cups. I knew that the questions were about to start.

–– Listen, can I take my coffee up and drink it in the shower? I’m still hot and sweaty from the drive and it would do me a power of good. What time does Norm get back?

–– Not til seven thirty, usually. Sure, I should have offered... Do you want to take a nap?

–– No, no. Just give me forty five minutes to freshen up, and then we’ll still have plenty of time to get up to date before Norm gets back.

I put as much spin as I dared on the last phrase and thought I saw a reaction. Jean looked puzzled by the abruptness of my request, but I had managed to make her feel a little inhospitable, so she only smiled and showed me up the stairs. Once again, guilt would be my friend. I lugged up my army duffle bag and dumped it in the guest bedroom. Towels had been laid out on the bed, the bathroom was next door. I did not shower, of course. Once safely behind the bedroom door, I retrieved this journal from the bottom of the bag and leafed through it in an attempt to recover what I had lost. It was all there. Mr. Macy, Bambi, the Dean, the car dealer. With everyone else the Changes have taken effect, but not with Jean. Why? It could be a case of love made tongue-tied by adversity, but I didn’t think it was. That was too simple. No, the reason I could not confront Jean was dishonesty. In all else, I have been ruthless, have concealed nothing, held nothing back. I have bared my soul in these pages and it has made me strong. I have dreamed my heresy and rewritten my character. But with Jean my resolution has faltered. You must have noticed by now that I never mention how Jean and I came to separate. Of all Quandary’s failures, this is the one I have found too painful to contemplate, too awful to reveal. Even at that moment, standing in the bedroom with my coffee cooling and faint noises coming from Jean downstairs, I found my toes curling up involuntarily as I thought of it. I must have given a groan of pain, because Jean called to me up the stairs.

–– Stanley? Are you alright?

–– Fine, Fine. Just working out the kinks from the drive.

It all came clear to me at that moment. Vis B vis the rest of the world I have been honest, open, but when it came to Jean I have tried to hold back, like Achilles’ mother holding her infant son’s heel above the surface of the river that was supposed to confer invulnerability. She had been frightened of the river, frightened to go the whole way, and it had left him with a dreadful weakness. Yes, the parallel was exact. I too, had been frightened to go the whole way. I had tried to hold one thing back and it was there – with Jean – that I was vulnerable. But unlike Achilles’ mother, I could go back and remedy my mistake. I tore some pages out from the back of the journal, seated myself at the dressing table and started to write. I had to hurry, sooner or later Jean would wonder what I was doing. Brevity was forced upon me. The account lacks some of the detail I might have given if circumstances had allowed but, looking over it now with only the creaking nighttime noises of another man’s house for company, I think it is none the worse for that. I will make a fair copy of those scribbled pages here, inserted in the middle of the more leisurely account I can write now that everyone is in bed. You may look upon this as a confession if you wish. For myself, I see it as the operation to mend Achilles’ heel. And, as I will explain in a moment, the surgery was successful.

***

I have no way of knowing how much I must tell, so I will tell all. Quandary did not "lose" Jean. He threw her away. At the time, he did not know this. He thought he was binding her to him even more closely. He thought he was making absolutely sure of his love. And all the while he was destroying it, bit by bit by bit.

The closest I have come in these pages to admitting what really went on, is that section of my description of Jean which points out how incredibly lucky Quandary was to find her. There she was – clever, sexually desirable, personally charming – and there he was, balding, tongue-tied, pedantic; surely destined for a wife who was his direct female counterpart, a life, the sexual summit of which would be masturbation. At first, the knowledge of his luck warmed him. He would lie in bed at night with Jean breathing softly beside him and relish the fact that he was her husband. He would see other men staring at her and, rather than getting annoyed by it, would find in the open incredulity of their glances proof of his own good fortune. Every household task was illuminated by this knowledge. Taking out the garbage or doing the washing up, Quandary would be filled with happiness that he was doing these mundane chores for such a wonderful marriage. It sounds soppy. It was soppy and Quandary reveled in its soppiness.

Little by little his good fortune started to eat at him like a canker. Surely it was too much to ask that Jean would be blind to the fact that other men desired her? Surely she would look at him one day, find him plump and unlovely, say to herself, "I could do better than this"? Surely she found other men, or other women even, to be more desirable, wittier, more exciting? He could see no sign of any such feeling in her. That was enough to make him suspicious. It was ridiculous to think that Jean never had these feelings. If she did not show them, it must be because she was concealing them. Why would she conceal such harmless and inevitable thoughts unless it was because she was acting on them and her guilt drove her to conceal too much? O curse of marriage, that we can call these delightful creatures ours, and not their appetites. She was an adulteress, it was morally certain – or so thought Quandary, held tight by the claws of the monster which mocks the meat it feeds on.

For a while, sanity would return. This was Jean he was talking about, the woman who, at a dinner party, had politely asked a local businessman whether he thought his moral sense had been entirely eroded or whether vestiges of it still remained. Quandary could still remember her expression, head cocked on one side like a bird, waiting with interest for his reply. This was a woman whose innocence was as keen as her intelligence. Once they had gone to a French film together "The Woman Next Door" or some such name, full of compulsive acts of adultery committed in the backs of cars, in dangerous proximity to spouses, and Jean had leaned over to him and said loudly. "This all seems terribly silly to me." The audience, barely repressing their lust as they saw Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu grapple sweatily on a car seat, thought this comment was hilariously funny. Jean thought that was silly, too. Why didn’t the two of them run off together if they loved each other so much? Those plastic car seats must be awfully uncomfortable. Alternatively, why didn’t they remain continent? For all her criticisms of "bourgeois rationalism" Jean was the only person Quandary knew who lived as though the philosophical Enlightenment had happened to her.

I can hear Jean moving around downstairs. I will get up and turn on the shower for a moment. I must hurry or all of this will be in vain.

Very well, then. Quandary would be alright for a while, and then something small – another man’s look, the Dean’s incredulity when he realized that this ‘delightful creature’ was Quandary’s wife – would set him off on his downward spiral of suspicion and fear. This is how he reasoned it out; "My doubts are intangible. Being thoughts themselves they cannot be laid to rest by other thoughts, they require deeds to vanquish them. The absence of adultery is no proof, because it might be due to lack of opportunity. I must put the opportunity in front of her. It can be no sin to test her, for, if she is pure, nothing will come of it. But if I do prove her haggard, though that her jesses were my dear heart strings, I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind to prey at fortune." Paranoid in blank verse, Quandary dreamed that night of a monster, Jean’s head on a hawk’s body, which tore at his chest with its claws and cried like djinn to be free.

To carry out his insane plan, it was necessary that Quandary should withdraw his love from her. He spoke curtly to her, if he spoke at all, touched her but rarely, never smiled at her jokes. They had made love four or five times a week. Now he went to bed early, curled himself into a tight ball, twitched away from her soft hands. Sometimes, giving no reason, he would go and sleep in the guest room on the second best-bed, the one they had exiled from their own room as soon as Quandary’s salary allowed them to buy a bigger one. Never one to hide her feelings, Jean asked him what was going on, told him she was horny. He ached to take her in his arms, to go upstairs to the bedroom and lose himself in her. But some perverse instinct made him refuse, made him see in her love for him proof that she was sexually insatiable. Watching her undress at night he would be unable to control himself, would go into the bathroom and, shamefully avoiding his own reflection in the mirror, would spill his seed like the sons of Onan. (Who can’t have had a locking bathroom door, or they wouldn’t have named the sin for them.) That is better. Sometimes humour is all that sustains me. In truth, this is hard to tell.

Their house became a cold, hard place. The over-large rooms echoed to their footsteps as they avoided each other. It was not enough that Quandary turn her away from him. He must provide another man, someone to put the cuckold’s horns on top of the fool’s cap he already wore. This was harder. He watched Jean closely. There weren’t many men in Charlotte Russe who attracted her. She found his colleagues ridiculous, said they had been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps. Their neighbours were out of the question, pensioners and executives and spotty adolescents, who lacked respectively the ability, the desire and the confidence. In the end, gamekeepers being unavailable, he settled for a gardener.

It was on a day when he had nearly relented. Enough was enough. Jean had wanted to buy some plants, perhaps on the theory that they would help to fill the empty... Get to the point!! I will turn off the shower, which has probably left pools of water all over the floor by now. I must finish this soon, or Jean will have concluded that I am quite mad and there will be no point in going back downstairs.

There. On this particular Saturday, they drove to the garden center just outside of Charlotte Russe. Jean was no gardener and Quandary had no interest so they asked the man who ran it to recommend unkillable plants which needed neither skill nor affection from their keepers. The gardener was muscular with blond hair and thick wrists. He called himself a "landscaper" – as though he was Capability Brown. Have you noticed how inflation presses forward on all fronts? Monetary inflation makes our salaries sound much more impressive while semantic inflation substitutes "administrative assistants" for secretaries and "landscapers" for gardeners? Soon we will all be "vice presidents" and "millionaires." Truly, progress sweeps us all... Quandary! In any event, there was a.. spark, a chemistry.. between Jean and the gardener. Her fingers touched his for too long when the credit card form was being handed over. Afterwards her fingers were stained with loam, his with carbon paper. A symbolic exchange. A smudge so faint one could hardly see. Yet to the jealous, trifles light as air are confirmations strong as holy writ. It pushed Quandary’s dreams of confession and reconciliation right out of his head. He started to talk: he and his wife (the word nearly choked him) had been thinking of having some garden.. some landscaping done, could a house visit be arranged? Jean looked at him as though he had lost his mind. She was right. But the landscaper offered his card eagerly enough.

It took three visits. They had endless discussions about privet, azaleas and fucking "nigra" (the gardener was careful to call it "Japanese holly," racial issues being thorny in Charlotte Russe, perhaps because so many of the leading families had made their fortunes in the slave trade and despised more.... recent sources of wealth.) After an initial meeting Quandary left them alone together as much as possible. He invented conferences, visiting lecturers, used up an entire marriage’s worth of excuses, and all to tempt his wife with another man. Finally, knowing what could happen, he called up the gardener and scheduled the third and last visit for six o’clock in the evening without telling Jean. Then he invented a two day conference in Dayton. Jean drove him to the airport. He was cold and deliberately hostile. My skin crawls to think of it. Jumping out the car, he pretended to remember the appointment just as he ducked into the terminal, shouting it over the waiting herds. For three hours he sat in the airport coffee shop, compulsively eating underdone hot dogs and drinking syrupy Coke. Over and over, he said to himself, "nothing will happen unless she wants it to." And "I’d rather be a toad and live upon the vapor of the dungeon than keep a corner in the thing I love for other’s uses." And "nothing will happen unless she wants it to." But if should she prove faithful... Like a sinner on the edge of a precipice, he promised himself agonies of self-abasement, penitence unlimited. Everything would go back the way it had been. It would all be alright. It would all be alright.

Five times Quandary went to the pay-phone, half-dialed the number and then put the phone down at the last minute. For what seemed like an hour at a time he would force himself not to look at the clock, only to find that fifteen minutes had passed. Eventually, at seven thirty, he rented a car. If all had gone well.. if all had gone as it should, the gardener would have left by the time he got back to the house. He would throw himself before Jean, beg her forgiveness. But when he eased the cheap little subcompact into the end of the road, he saw the gardener’s pick up truck parked foursquare in front of their house. And the downstairs lights off.

Even now, after the Changes, I can remember only flashes of what happened next. I remember Quandary parking the rental car a hundred yards away, and worrying crazily about fire-hydrants and parking stickers. Then he ran, ran as he had not done since he was fourteen, ran round to the back of the house, to the big tree that spread its branches outside their bedroom. He had taken his shoes off. Why, I do not know. Let not the creaking of shoes or the rustling of silks betray your poor heart to a woman. He found them two days later, perched on Mr. Saikewicz’s fence like crows. Anyway. Is that Jean still moving around downstairs, or has Lola returned? Anyway.

Quandary had never been much of a tree-climber in his youth, but he climbed this tree as though his life depended on it. Which, I suppose, it did. The view through the window was mostly obscured by darkness and lashing branches. The noise was covered by the wind. But a lover’s eyes will stare an eagle blind. A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound. Crouched in the tree, forced into a ridiculous, sub-human position between the largest branches, Quandary peered in through the window to see his wife’s slim ankles. Locked above another man’s back. To hear his wife’s familiar little sighs. Accompanying the gardener’s grunts. To see the Iceland birthmark on her hip covered and then uncovered by the gardener’s moving flesh. How strange that they, who had been so close, should now be so far apart. She was a soul in bliss, but he was bound upon a wheel of fire.

There. Now it is public.

He must have moaned and howled and lashed at himself like the branches, for the next thing he knew Jean was looking out of the open window at him, the gardener’s hairy back framed momentarily behind her as he hurried into his clothes. She seemed to understand everything. "Oh, you poor thing," she said "you better come in." The gardener had gone by the time he climbed clumsily down, for Quandary’s arboreal skill had deserted him with his madness. Jean took him in, gave him hot tea, put Band-aids on the scratches and weals which covered his hands, his face, his feet. He said nothing. Like a catatonic he felt that if he could just not move, could just remain in the kitchen for ever, feeling the sting of the rubbing alcohol on his wounds, then it would all be alright. Eventually Jean took his face between her hands, her fingers cool on the scratches. "It’s over" she said. For a moment he thought she meant the affair with the gardener and felt a kind of dog-like gratitude. But no, she meant the marriage.

Nothing he could say would change her mind. Jean, in her calm, rational way, had decided that what little remained of their marriage had been ruined by the fact that he had seen his wife screwing another man. "You will never forget," she told him and he didn’t know whether it was a statement of fact or a curse. Either way it was true. She moved out the next day. Moved back to upstate New York be near her family. Quandary sent letters, made pleading calls but Jean, holding herself responsible for the destruction of their marriage, would not "hurt him more" by coming back to him. A year later she met Norm, visiting his parents after his divorce. Providentially for Norm, Lola wasn’t there. Thus I lost my love to this man, to a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave.

And that is the story. I have dipped myself in the Stygian rivers of memory. I must go downstairs now and find if the pain has healed my weakness.

***

It had, of course. Even the stuffed boar looked different. Jean turned to me, ready to ask all of the questions that anyone would ask (how much of life is rote) about the shower and my enjoyment of it. I reached out before she could say a word and took her gently by the arms. She swayed towards me. I could write volumes about the character of that swaying motion, the tone of the particular bewildered look she wore.

–– Jean, my darling, your husband is a witless bore and your step-daughter is a brat. I love you more than life itself, and I have come to take you back.

And to think that earlier I had found it difficult to think of what to say!

Time has flown. Copying out my afternoon’s confession took longer than I thought. The blinking red light of my digital alarm says 2:13 AM. I have dropped my suitcase out of the window with my passport and my tickets held safely inside. This journal and my jacket will follow shortly. The clothes I have hung in the cupboard can go up with the house.

People believe that it is only at times of great danger that extraordinary feelings gain their utterance. I, being a living example of the extraordinary incarnated in the mundane, know better. But I must recognize the prejudices of others and act accordingly. Ah, there is the sound of Lola returning at last from her fourteen hour ‘lunch date’. I will close here. I hope it goes up soon. For what is about to come it were better that Lola had not yet gone to sleep.

***

Read Part 1 | 2 i.) | 2 ii.) | 3i.) | 3ii.)

Part 4 will be posted on www.shakespearechronicles.com next week. (Note – the sections in this version are slightly different than the chapters in the published book)

[To read the rest of the book now, click here to buy a downloadable, DRM free e-book for $1.50, or here for the paperback version.]