Come Down: I.1

I. “NOTHING SO SWEET AS MAGIC WAS TO HIM”

I do wish they’d been beautiful. Plenty of people -- or Romantic poets, anyway, if we’re counting them as people -- have spent their brief lives dashing themselves on the rocks of Beauty, singing themselves hoarse composing paeans to Loveliness, slicing open their veins to write the names of their beloveds red on the white marble altar of Appealingly Well-Proportioned Faces And Bodies. It’s a story an audience can understand. It’s a role whose lines everyone can mouth along to. Paris, Romeo, Echo. I could’ve played it spectacularly. I was Romeo, actually, in college, albeit a modern-ish, gender-bent-ish, political-ish, we’re-so-brave-for-this-retelling-ish version of Romeo. I was alright. Not my best. I’ve improved since.

But they weren’t beautiful, so even though they’re the beginning of the story, even though nothing at all can begin without them, I have to start a little earlier to explain it in a way that will make sense to you.

Bear with me.

~

I was almost certainly complaining, again, of my crushing intellectual boredom to Angus when he finally reminded me of the university’s tuition remission program.

“Isn’t that reserved for real employees, though?” I leaned on my hand truck, stacked high with locking-lid plastic crates in signature maroon and gold. It was a sore point for me. I had thought, upon making the decision to relocate, that a year and a half as the sole employee of a wealthy Northeast Kingdom widow’s pet-project used bookstore might be enough to qualify me for certain behind-the-desk positions at certain libraries, but when I arrived for an interview at the university it became clear that they believed my application for the acquisitions department had been misdirected and I was actually trying to become their new page-slash-courier, running a thrice-daily delivery route between all seven of the campus library buildings (engineering, law, business, medical, early childhood education, special collections, and the main library, which itself housed very few books but two different cafes). Evidently all the real librarian roles -- a phrase spoken to me with no trace of condescension but with a certain weariness at the world of academia -- require at minimum a Master’s degree nowadays, and that I did not, and do not, possess. I took the courier job, but not without quite a bit of grumbling to myself and anyone else who would listen, which is to say no one else.

“You’re full time, aren’t you?” Angus asked.

“I am.”

“So, you get one class every semester. You pay the tuition, and if you pass, the university pays you back over the break. Undergrad, mostly, or some grad classes, I think. I’ve been using it for years. I’m halfway to a BA in art history.” He leaned back in his high swivel chair, folding his broad hands over his broad stomach, keeping one eye on me and one on the empty ECE stacks, just in case some aspiring teacher materialized and needed a stack of picture books right now. It had happened before during my courier runs. 

“Multiple years and you’re still only halfway to a BA?”

Hands still folded, he snorted and gave me the crooked half-grin that made him look, briefly, like an aging movie star rather than an aging librarian. “Might give you something to think about. Keep you out of trouble.”

“Angus, I defy you to name me even one kind of trouble I’ve ever gotten into in my life.”

“Well, how about I get you into some first, and then you take a class?”

I didn’t really think of anybody at the university as my colleague besides Angus. Even the student employees taking phone calls were supercilious when I came in with wrong-book-drop returns and interlibrary loans and packages. But around Angus -- head of the early childhood education library to my lowly delivery boy though he was -- I got to be half of a comedy odd couple, small and mannered and loquacious to Angus’ bear beard and beer belly and cockeyed smile and punchlines like depth charges that he dropped into conversation without so much as a ripple, only to have them hit me when I was halfway back across campus. I liked him, and he liked me, and I couldn’t tell which of us liked the other more but assumed, based on my youth, that it was me, which is, if not the more secure position, at least the more interesting one. For months I’d also been unable to tell whether he was flirting with me in an older-gay-mentor, it’ll-never-happen-kiddo way or an older-gay-available, I’d-like-it-to-happen way, and then I spotted him across the room at a fantasy-themed drag show called Dragon’s Den chatting up the skinniest, mop-top-iest twink I’d ever seen in my life and things clicked into place. Nothing had happened yet, but I was in no hurry. I’ve always liked a slow burn, and even better I’ve always liked a will-they-won’t-they. At the time I wasn’t even sure whether I was leaning will or won’t. Regardless, I listened without giving him too much lip in return when he dispensed advice, mostly because he seemed unable to help it, but, too, with thirty or so years’ life experience on me I supposed he’d earned the right.

On my lunch break, balancing on a stack of pallets in the mailroom, I checked the course catalog for the upcoming spring semester.

I had been in Boston for just about long enough at that point to admit to myself that I missed the theatre. Spelled -re, not -er, because it lent an air of grandeur to the proceedings, but also because if I had tried to spell it the dispreferred way in the off-campus hovel that passed for some kind of actors’ co-op where I lived for the back half of college, I would have been kicked without ceremony to the curb, or rather kicked back into the objectively nicer college-provided housing, and I couldn’t countenance leaving the co-op until I absolutely had to. I liked the theatre department, liked the musicals and the weird experimental black-box shows and especially the Shakespeare plays, liked my fellow actors -- I was the only one who couldn’t stand to leave dishes in the sink overnight, so they liked me too, and in fact when we were all moving out after graduation and everyone else was off to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Minneapolis (only ever one of those four cities) and I was off to a sublet three-quarters of a mile away, many of them donated their spare pans and utensils to me -- and I liked getting to play mostly pants roles well enough that I didn’t even begin to deal with the question of gender until I was staring down the barrel of my senior spring. I came out to my former housemates belatedly, through text, when I’d already been on hormones for months, and they sent emoji-laden messages of congratulations in between their auditions and told me that they were always there for me (aside from when they were in auditions), that they couldn’t believe I’d been carrying my burden alone for so long, that now I was at last free to be myself, hooray! I hadn’t the heart to tell them I just hadn’t thought about it very hard when we were in college.

But quitting being a girl also meant quitting acting. The northern Vermont theatre scene is small, and my voice was changing, and I spent all my free time pushing my employer to keep the bookstore open longer hours so I could earn a few extra dollars to save for top surgery and subsequently staffing the bookstore during those longer hours and sub-subsequently recovering from top surgery, so driving halfway across the state three nights a week for rehearsal was right out. There were, as a lesser problem, no roles onstage for that version of myself, who looked like a butch lesbian but refused to play women, whose voice cracked on every it’s Marco now, actually and who was endlessly, faultlessly polite with pronoun corrections, mostly because he had to make them so often that anything besides endless politeness would have gotten old very quickly. I didn’t mind it offstage; it was pleasant to be the friendly neighborhood queer in the least safe part of a very safe state, to be the one-of-the-good-ones that certain retirees who frequented the bookstore could trot out to prove that they were better and kinder people than their less-enlightened retiree friends. But onstage it would have been a difficult enough sell that I didn’t see the virtue even in making the pitch.

And then I moved to Boston, and saw a few brilliant shows and a few terrible shows, and yes, I missed being part of it -- the terrible ones as much as the brilliant ones. But, stranger still, I had become a boy when I wasn’t looking. Nobody knew me, so there was no need for it’s Marco now, actually. Just it’s Marco. I had a flat chest, dramatically broadened shoulders, a single pierced ear, the stirrings of a bristly mustache, and the voice of a young Ira Glass. There was no question of the role I was to play now, namely ‘cute young twink,’ which meant that any show containing a plausible cute young twink was mine for the participating. I could have been Algernon Moncrieff or Anatole Kuragin or Angel or Ariel -- Shakespeare’s, not Disney’s. But I was out of practice.

Most of the spring theatre courses wouldn’t have been promising anyway. I wasn’t about to take lighting design (not my area) nor props workshop (not my area, and only open to majors, which presumably excluded us poor continuing education saps) nor movement fundamentals (I’d had enough of that for several lifetimes during my own undergraduate career), and I didn’t expect I’d be able to summon up the enthusiasm for nineteenth-century Russia that would have been necessary to pass the Pushkin class and earn my money back. Which narrowed things down neatly to a pair of options: Voice for Musical Theater, or Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage.

If asked about it, I would have claimed that I opted for the latter because the course catalog misguidedly spelled the former with an -er, not the proper -re, but nobody asked, not even Angus, who just wiggled his eyebrows at me when I told him my choice and said it sounded like I’d be getting into trouble after all, so I never had to lie about it. In truth I would have preferred to die rather than try out my creaky new tenor in a room filled with the kind of sweetly catty teenage starlets with whom I had once surrounded myself, with whom I still missed surrounding myself. Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage it was.

~

Rachel and Zach came over for drinks the night before class was due to begin and had exactly the reactions I expected when I told them of my grand plan to alleviate my desperate boredom by taking an undergraduate theatre course: Rachel smiled and said “that’s great, honey!” and Zach snorted into his beer.

I was not strictly truthful when I said nobody knew me in Boston. What I meant was that nobody with a remote interest in the queer experience or my so-called journey therein knew me in Boston. Rachel and Zach Adamson-Gold were the first people I came out to, entirely because I knew they would congratulate me, get my name right, and never give it another passing thought. They were 24, married, heterosexual, nominally Jewish, deeply in love, and the only non-theatrically-affiliated friends I had made in college. I met them already coupled up on a hike with the nature club that I took on a whim my freshman spring, but evidently they had begun dating during orientation week and simply never stopped. If my graduation had been a failure to launch and my theatre housemates’ had been a rocket into the stratosphere, Rachel and Zach’s had been a comfortable Sunday drive. They had attained all the hallmarks of adulthood in one long, graceful swoop: jobs (Rachel an imaging specialist at Brigham and Women’s, Zach a project manager for a biotech startup), their own apartment (Longwood, one bedroom, third floor, HomeGoods decor), a wedding (a tasteful micro-ceremony to which I was not invited, not being family, and a casual reception at their favorite brewery, which I attended with pleasure), and a decorative bar cart (gold, glass-topped, covered in near-boundless varieties of alcohol, most of which had, along with the bar cart itself, been wedding gifts). Having thus achieved everything they could possibly imagine anyone wanting to achieve, they had settled comfortably into the kind of blissful domestic bickering I previously assumed to be an invention of the American sitcom. In my head I always referred to them in the plural. RachelandZach.

“So it’ll be you and a bunch of college kids talking about how Shakespeare is sexy?” Zach asked.

“I assume so, yes, although if I’m really lucky someone else who works for the university might sign up, too, and then I’ll get to talk about sexy Shakespeare with college kids and my coworkers.” I leaned over to the fridge -- my basement (sorry, ‘garden-level’) studio was small enough to make this maneuver possible from the couch -- and swung it open to procure another bottle of January-discounted Christmas ale for Zach. “I know it’s ridiculous, but honestly, what else am I supposed to do?”

“You could come to trivia night with us!” Rachel offered. “Zach’s friends are all kind of bro-y, but they’re nice, and they’d crush it if you were on the team.”

How to explain to Rachel and Zach that the idea of pub trivia with the two of them, perfectly nice, and Zach’s fraternity brothers, also perfectly nice, held in it for me nothing at all? How to make it clear, without making it offensive, that the prospect that I might be living a life like theirs -- work, groceries, uncomplicated friendships, a drink on the weekends, pop bestsellers from the library, comfortable and warm and utterly devoid of thrill -- bored and terrified me almost to tears? How to tell them that the prospect of discussing, yes, sex, but more importantly Shakespeare, was infinitely more appealing by virtue of bringing me in contact with the mere concept of acting? How to say that, were it not for Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage, I was this close to slipping into some unhinged historical hobby like learning to illuminate manuscripts or brewing my own mead?

I probably could have said a version of that, actually, and they would have cut their eyes toward each other and smiled because I was their queer, unattached, theatrical, Bohemian friend, living life according to my own inscrutable whims, and they liked having a friend like me because, besides the fact that we enjoyed each other’s company, the presence of a devil-may-care artist in their social circle reminded them how glad they were to be married and stable and uncool. Never mind that one of the chief appeals of the theatre class, and the theatre generally, was the structure. A syllabus, a reading list, a three-hour discussion seminar each Thursday afternoon. Rehearsal schedules, blocking notes, timed entrances and exits, and everyone knowing exactly what everyone else is going to say ahead of time and being prepared to respond. If nothing else, theatre saved me an awful lot of work figuring out what role I was supposed to be playing conversationally; it was all written down for me. But that anxious attachment to scaffolding is not very Bohemian, so I shrugged.

“Trivia’s only once a month,” I said. “Not that I wouldn’t love to help you guys crush it, but it’s not the same as weekly mandatory intellectual stimulation.”

“You just don’t want to come all the way to Roxbury for trivia,” Rachel said.

“You’re damn right, I don’t. There’s no good way to get the orange line from here.”

She made a broad and-there-it-is gesture at me with her hand, took a swig of her beer, and grimaced.

“Babe, why do you drink it if you don’t like it?” Zach took the bottle gently from her hand and set it down beside the couch. “Marco has wine.”

“I do like it!”

“That was the opposite of your I-like-it face.”

Rachel pouted. “Well, you like it, and I want to learn to like it.”

“Just have some wine. Marco, will you get the lady some wine?”

“Only if I can finish her beer,” I said, rolling over the arm of the couch and into the kitchenette, released from my obligation to answer any further questions about myself or my motivations, settling back into one of my favorite roles as the live studio audience laughing and applauding along to RachelandZach. They, like me, like everybody, were better with an audience.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.