AND WHAT SHOULD I DO IN ILLYRIA?

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of mean relatives.

I'm borrowing from Shakespeare here. Only he said "the death of kings,” not "mean relatives." But close enough.

I’ve been reading so much Shakespeare that whatever I’m thinking about — like mean relatives — has a way of translating itself into ShakeSpeak. Like the other day at work my boss was asking where the city reporter was, and my first instinct was to turn to a co-worker and say, “You there, fetch yonder scribe.” Then, remembering my century, I said, “Could you go get Chad?”

I’m completely in love with Shakespeare. Seriously. I cannot even look at another writer. (I did, I admit, spend a good part of the weekend perusing my new coffee table book: “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” but that is mostly pictures. I actually came across this gem, however, when I sneaked out of work to buy a copy of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at Borders. Sneaking out of work to fondle books is my secret vice. I say I’m going for coffee, but I actually go browse and fondle; sometimes I buy and then drop the book in my car before returning to work. Then I spend the rest of the night at work fantasizing about what I'm going to do to the book when I get home. For some reason, this tome of Teutonic debauchery was sitting on an upper shelf of the drama section with all the over-sized Shakespeare collections. It caught my eye. “Erotic” and “Weimar” taken together are just too much for me to resist, so I picked it up, along with “The Tempest,” and thought, walking back to work, that Shakespeare, the inventor of Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch, would certainly be down with the Weimar notion that life is a Cabaret. In “The Tempest” itself, I read later that night, he wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Holy crap. Joel Grey could easily have closed a Kit Kat Club show with those exact words.)

But I digress.

If only Shakespeare had told tales of his mean relatives, or any relatives, versus dying kings, there'd be a whole lot less speculation on his personal life. Or it would be of another sort.

But no one — the stray diarist aside — talked about himself in those days. Not explicitly anyway. I wonder if that's a good thing, culturally speaking. Maybe there's something to Freud's theory of sublimation — that great artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci are great not because they express themselves directly but because they sublimate all their personal “baggage” — like their gayness — into their art. So instead of creating a blog post on his pent-up longing for a beautiful boy, Leonardo (didn’t he predict computers and blogging along with the helicopter?) gave us The Last Supper.

On second thought, Shakespeare’s work abounds with screwed-up relatives. Most of the dying kings in his histories had them. “Hamlet” is about nothing if not about screwed-up relatives. Not to mention “Romeo and Juliet.” Same thing with “King Lear” —the most beautiful thing I have ever read. He did write about screwed-up relatives, just not his own, not explicitly, and not in the dour way we are accustomed to as in “Death of a Salesman” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Shakespeare’s darkness is darker than our modern masters’ — honestly, what can rival the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes in “Lear”? — but it’s a darkness glittering with stars. Shakespeare didn’t journey into night; he journeyed always into Hamlet’s russet-clad morn. After all of his plays, even the tragedies, the actors danced on the stage. Horrific sadness. Then life. Merriment.

What Cormac McCarthy said of John Cole in “All the Pretty Horses” is how I think of Shakespeare: All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent-hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

I decided to read Shakespeare’s 38 plays. Rick and I discussed whether I should go in the order they were written (such as it’s guessed at by scholars) or by category. Rick thought there was something to be gained by going in order, to see the intellectual development. But I didn’t know if that was something I could quite grasp. In the end, I proceeded randomly. Still, I thought I should be forming some coherent ideas along the way— but, frankly, my thoughts are a collection of “Wow” and “Holy crap” and “Oh my God” and “How was this possible?” How can someone sit down with apparent ease and pen the opening monologue of “Richard III”? Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.

I read a couple of books about Shakespeare in preparation and as guides, "Will in the World" and "Shakespeare After All." It’s amazing to me that scholars are still thinking up new things to say about him; I mean, beyond “Wow” and “Holy crap” and “Oh my God.” It made me think of my college Shakespeare professor who came into lecture with notes written on the back of junk mail. She had been lecturing about Shakespeare for decades, but she still found new things to say, I imagine, as she watched TV the night before and jotted them down on an envelope.

Another thing is how wildly inventive he was, averaging at least two masterpieces a year. And some of those were lost. I just recently realized that that old saying he is “not for an age but for all time” was said by a contemporary. He was standing the test of time in his own time. It amazes me that he added the word “amazement” to our language, along with countless other words like, um, “countless.” And “majestic,” “lackluster,” “hot-blooded.” Hundreds of new words. Hundreds of new ways of putting them together. Why can’t all these swag-bellied yahoos (an insult I learned from Christy) who are making up new words today and verbizing nouns and such, as Shakespeare did all the time, make up some beautiful ones?

One thing I keep coming back to with every play is how people always say you have to see Shakespeare performed, that it is meant to be seen. But I have preferred reading it, because then you can dwell. A line’s beauty stops your heart. And you can go back and get it beating again with a re-reading.

“Lear’s” ending:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.

One more time.

ICE QUEEN

This falls under the category of not proud of it but, damn, it felt so good: I snubbed my sister-in-law at a family gathering. And not just any family gathering. But on Easter. A major commercial holiday.

Said sister-in-law is the one who allowed her crude children to utter a vile string of homophobisms in my presence at a Christmas dinner. My brother was present at said dinner. But I hold him less accountable, because I have no expectation of decency from him. I didn't get a chance to snub him at Easter because he quite simply doesn't have the good manners to proffer a greeting that could be snubbed. He could say the same of me, but he won't because he's too dumb to think of it.

I didn't plan on snubbing her. I didn't think about it. I just did it. The moment arose and I simply acted the way I felt inside. When she approached me all bubbly and asked, "Hey, how are you doing?" I felt a sudden revulsion and turned away. It wasn't a proper snubbing, though. I did mutter a morose "fine," as I averted my eyes. To cut someone dead with real style, say like Bette Davis, you have to be properly attired. You have to have a highball in hand and a warm circle of socialites for whom you icily forsake the snubbed individual. If you are dressed in jeans and sitting alone at a table with a Dixie cup of lemonade, as I was yesterday, the snub is not nearly as effective, I find.

Tant pis, as the French say. She got the message.

I mean, I hope she got the message. When one opts for the passive-aggressive route, though — letting hostile gestures take the place of direct words — there's always the danger of being misunderstood. Oh, she's upset about Grandpa. Oh, she has PMS. Whatever.

So, to be sure my meaning was clear, I snubbed her a second time. When she came around with a tray of cookies, squeezed my shoulder and asked how I was doing, I squirmed tangibly under her touch and muttered a "fine" even more morose and dark, if possible, than the first. It was sensationally effective, I thought. I was emanating pure frost. The temperature in the room must have fallen 10 degrees. I thought I saw my mom shiver. Then my sister-in-law plopped down in the chair next to me and started blathering, “What’s going on in Lawrence? How was Nashville? Did you see a show?" Blah blah blah.

So I drop the passive-aggression in favor of pure aggression, which suits me better anyway. “Bitch,” I said, “I just snubbed you, not once but twice. Surely you noticed that?”

I must not have said that out loud, though, because the bitch kept smiling and talking. Blah blah blah. I nodded in disbelief for a moment, thinking witty, mature thoughts like “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get my gay cooties sitting so close to me? Aren’t you afraid your kids might think being gay is normal if they see you jollying with me? Don’t you think your grotesquely huge boob-job looks ridiculous at your age? At any age? Don’t you think it’s vulgar to display four inches of cleavage and two inches of nipple at 3 in the afternoon on Easter at a family gathering?”

OK, my thoughts were getting a little off-topic. It was time to cut her dead again, and this time I would do it in style. “I have to use the bathroom,” I announced with an Arctic chill in my voice. But that was not all. When I came back into the room, I purposely struck up a conversation with someone else so that she would get the message loud and clear. And she would have gotten it, too, if the group of properly attired women warmly encircling her, highballs in hand, hadn’t obscured me from her view.

EASTER 2008

Grandpa, Mom, Grandma.

A MILLION AND A HALF A YEAR

When I was a kid I thought my grandparents were rich. The evidence:

They drove matching Cadillacs.
They traveled around the globe.
My grandpa wore a suit to work.
My grandma said “upchuck” instead of “vomit.”
They drank cocktails every night.
They used tablecloths every day. And real silverware.
They had a “summer place.”
Their fragrance preceded them into a room.

They did things my parents did not do, like eat artichokes and play bridge.

My grandpa always gave us kids several dollars after a visit. They lived in Wisconsin and drove down a couple of times a year, on holidays, in their Cadillac. My grandpa had a money clip with precisely folded bills. I take as a significant difference in our personalities that he never had my daily experience of fishing a wadded-up bill from his bag to smooth out and hand to a clerk. He treated money like it was actually his, a possession to be cared for, to be proud of, not something you temporarily stash and pass on. So at our partings there were quick hugs and crisp dollars. Goodbye. Here is my money.

Later I found out that they were not rich, at least not as fabulously rich as I had imagined. They were upper middle class for sure. They had periods of vast prosperity. Trips to Morocco and Japan. Closets full of clothes. The other day my grandpa was telling his hospice nurse about the business he owned, how he had worked himself up from a Royal typewriter salesman to the owner of three office supply stores. “I had 17 employees,” he said, “and I was doing a million and a half a month in sales.”

His hospice nurse, who was sorting his pills into a plastic box, said, “Wow, Paul, that’s great.”

“Did I say month?” he asked a minute later. “I meant year. A million and a half a year.”

“That’s still great,” she said.

Then he said, more quietly, "I lost most of it during the recession."

And she said, "Well, let's elevate your feet."

They are not even my actual grandparents. My real grandparents were Depression era farm people who had six kids, including my mom. Their names were Alma and Edmund. Alma died of breast cancer at 42, when my mom was 7. Edmund died the next year of brain cancer. My mom was adopted by Edmund’s sister, Zella, and her husband, Paul, the typewriter salesman. They had no children of their own. They gave her a different life than she was born to. They took her to a part of the country where she would meet my dad.

My mom used to tell me that if I were a boy she would have named me Paul Edmund, after her two dads. This made me feel a kind of affinity for him, but we never had a deep connection — from the time I was a little kid until I was a grown woman and he was chiding me to take my husband’s name when I got married. I was somehow always upsetting his notion of rightness and order.

I never wanted to sit on his lap. I never wanted to do the chores that he asked only the women in the family to do. “Get me a glass of water.” “Help your grandma with the dishes.” “Put on a dress for church.” My sister did these things gladly, practically without being told.

My sister was his “Princess.” I got the nickname “Angel” only because I asked for it. One day I noticed that he called my sister “Princess," and I said, “What am I?” He said, “You’re my angel.” I observed to my mom that he favored my sister. It was so obvious that it would have been pointless for her to disagree, even at that tender age, even to spare my feelings. It didn’t bother me, though. The observation of favoritism was merely clinical, not emotional. I was my mom’s baby and was coddled by both her and my dad. I didn’t need or want to be my grandpa’s favorite. Plus, my real focus during their visits was on my grandma. The way she smelled, the softness of her skin, her polished fingernails on my back at night — she always slept with me when they visited — the mirthful way she said “oh brother” when I’d tell an unfunny kid joke, the way she’d walk around the house in her bra and slip when only women were around, the way she was always getting ready for something, for dinner, for bridge, for drinks, for an evening of ballroom dancing. I loved her name: Zella Celeste. She had seven brothers. She called her parents “Mother” and “Father,” as a form of direct address and also when speaking about them. Never “Mom” or “Dad” and certainly never “my mother.” She’d say, for example, “Mother always wrapped a wet towel around the jar to keep the cookies moist.” As if in the whole universe there was just one mother and everyone knew who she was and that she was not to be questioned.

My grandpa told his hospice nurse, “My wife is 87 years old, but if she walked through that door right now you’d swear you were looking at a woman who was 67.”

The hospice nurse said, “I wish she were here to hear that. You should tell her that.”

But he wouldn’t do that. The compliment was not meant for my grandma, as maybe the nurse had surmised. It was meant for him. I have a beautiful wife. I made a million and a half a year and I have a beautiful wife.

The differences between my grandpa and my grandma can be summed up in this: When we were kids my grandma took us to a haunted house on Halloween. On the way home, driving in an unfamiliar neighborhood, she crossed some railroad tracks at way too high a speed, causing all of us, unseatbelted, to fly up and bump our heads on the Cadillac roof. Hysteria ensued. “Do it again!” And she turned the car around and assailed the tracks from the opposite direction. Don’t tell your grandpa.

In the hospital, they told him he could have anything he wanted now. The point was to be comfortable. The diabetes doesn’t matter. The congestive heart failure doesn’t matter. He asked for a Miller Lite, and they brought him one. He wanted to watch golf on TV. He said he had wanted to die in Florida. Florida had been their dream. A cushy retirement in the sun with grapefruit trees in the yard. But they got too sick and frail and had to come back. My mom helped them pack, calling me from Florida in disbelief to say, “Grandpa has at least 75 pairs of walking shorts.”

She found them a retirement apartment and they filled it with new furniture. Right before he went to the hospital for the last time, they were talking about how they still needed a kitchen table. “Why can’t you eat off the dining room table?” we asked. “That’s just for show,” my grandpa said.

He introduced me to his hospice nurse like this, “That’s my granddaughter. She teaches at the university. And she’s a lawyer.” I felt like he was talking about someone else in the room. The things I find least remarkable, even tedious, about myself are the ways he identifies me. I have a beautiful wife and my granddaughter is a lawyer.

The hospice nurse tells him he needs a lifeline and a liftchair. He has refused a hospice bed because he is afraid it will detract from their new furniture. He asks what color the liftchairs come in. He wants it to match. The real issue with the chair, though, is that it costs $45 a month. Although this is longer than he will live and less than he might spend on a pair of walking shorts, he doesn’t want to spend this $45. He tells my stepdad that would detract from my mom’s inheritance. “I have always wanted to leave her an inheritance.” There is silence. The hospice nurse looks around, unsure what to say. He has said this many times, but only now do I understand what it is: It is his last affirmation of success. It is love, in his way. A last self-reflection in the Cadillac mirror. Quick hugs and crisp dollars. Goodbye. Here is my money.