Come Down: I.2

I had not yet grown up quite so much that I suffered from noticeable hangovers after drinking, even on a weeknight, so I carried little more than a soft headache and a dry mouth with me to work that first Thursday of the spring semester, and generous application of my water bottle solved both problems by midday. One of the advantages of a job that kept me running outside in the cold through wind tunnels generated by imposing Gothic campus buildings was that I was allowed to dress appropriately for it (i.e. in grungy boy clothes), and my water bottle lived in one of the baggy side pockets of my work pants (so called in my head in order to avoid referring to them as cargo pants, which they were) while I shuttled my hand truck to and fro across the half-frozen ground.

The engineering library had a whole pile of returns that were supposed to go back to the early childhood education library -- this happened often, presumably because they were clear across campus from each other and people didn’t feel like walking, or possibly because both started with E -- so I got to swing by Angus’ domain just before clocking out and going to class. Despite the fact that my hangover, if I can even justify calling it that, had passed, Angus smirked the moment I faced him head-on.

“Long night?” he asked.

“Not especially. A couple of friends from college came over for drinks.”

“Rachel and Zach?”

“Oh, I forgot I told you about them. Yes, that would be Rachel and Zach.” I began passing him ECE books from one of my plastic crates, one at a time, so he could scan them back into the system as returns. “How could you tell?”

“They’re the only friends from college you ever see. Far as I know, anyway.”

I tugged away the next book as he grabbed for it. “No, genius. How could you tell I was up late?”

“Gimme that,” Angus grumbled, and I handed it over. It had a pig in an elaborately drawn tutu on the front. It looked like a good one to my untrained eye -- months of carrying ECE returns had not made my eye any less untrained. “And I don’t know. I just can. Something around the eyes. And the hair, maybe.”

I ran a hand through my hair, which felt just as orientationally confused as usual. “It’s probably twenty degrees out. Less with wind chill, I imagine. Any disturbances in my face or hair are almost certainly the result of walking into a blast freezer every time I open a door on this campus.”

“Guess I can just tell, then.” He scratched his chin, whose pepper had a little more salt in it every time I saw him. “Can’t blame me for paying attention.”

“I wouldn’t dream of blaming you for paying attention. You’re the only one who does.”

It was, regrettably, one of those jokes that comes out several notches sadder than its maker means it to, and no amount of backpedaling or laughing it off would have made it sound less pathetic. A soft wrinkle appeared between Angus’ bushy eyebrows, and I said a silent benediction for the end of our heretofore light, breezy, flirtatious coworking relationship and the beginning of me being someone who needed minding, kid gloves and caution tape. I have on occasion stumbled into being the fragile young queer (or fragile young artist, before I came out) in certain people’s eyes through ill-timed confessions or dark jokes and I have never once enjoyed it. To lose Angus to the feeling that he might need to watch his mouth around me would have been unbearable.

But there was no pity in his eyes, just curiosity, and I realized the wrinkle was one of skepticism. “That can’t be true,” he said. “You’re, what, 24?”

“25,” I said. “Gap year, pandemic, tale as old as time.”

“You’re 25 and cute. What happened to parties?”

“I’m not really one for getting out much. I go to the theatre, but that’s sort of an experience geared around paying attention to particular people who are not me.”

“Didn’t I see you at the Quartz Club one time?”

The venue for the drag show where I’d spotted him chatting up the twink. Evidently he had spotted me, too.

“You did,” I said. “But I found out about Dragon’s Den from an Instagram ad. I don’t know how people find out about parties generally, let alone go to them, and I’m not sure I’d want to even if I did.”

“You sound like me. You’re too young to be getting old.” The brow wrinkle was gone, and Angus smiled. “Let me take you out sometime.”

“To a party?”

“Jesus, no. I have one of those a year in me. To lunch or dinner or something.”

I cast a stagy look over my shoulder even though we both knew there wasn’t a soul listening to us -- the ECE library was short on adult-sized seating, cramped, smelled aggressively of lemon disinfectant, and was in all other ways a very bad hangout spot even for college students who could slouch or sprawl on any surface. With the three p.m. class block still underway, the place was dead.

“Angus, my goodness, this is a workplace,” I said. “What would the people say if they knew you were coming on to your young, vulnerable coworker like this?”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I’d love to. I’m just scandalized. You’ll be wanting to see my ankles next.”

He shrugged. “People ask their colleagues to lunch outside of work all the time. And if you and I get lunch and anything happens afterwards, well.”

I waited a beat before giving him what he wanted. “Well?”

“It’s outside of work, isn’t it? None of their business.”

I managed to bid him goodbye with a promise to stop in the next day and make proper plans for the weekend, drop off my hand truck in its designated spot by the mailroom, and sign into the time clock software before I caught Angus’ groaner of a pun. At which point, of course, I groaned.

~

Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage was held in an awkward basement room in the English building, which notably was not the same as the theatre building (which was, of course, mostly taken up by the university’s main stage and black box, as well as dressing and rehearsal rooms, but it still contained some classrooms as far as I knew). Three rows of six horrible little plastic chair-desks faced the front portion of the room, which contained a projector screen but seemingly no projector and which was elevated perhaps a foot off the floor by a trio of shallow steps. Pushed all the way to its right-hand wall was a rectangular chunk of dark wood that seemed intended to serve as a lectern. The platform was four feet deep at most, halfway between a speaker’s dais and a proper stage, and I assumed it was the reason a theatre class had been scheduled in the room despite the dual confounding facts that the class itself was a discussion seminar and that the front of the room possessed no wings nor lights and therefore could hardly be used to actually stage anything.

Thanks to the time I spent clocking out and attempting to make myself more presentable than the wind tunnels wanted me to be, I was the last student to arrive, choosing an empty seat all the way at the front left from among plenty of other empty seats, removing my jacket and messenger bag in slow motion so I could scope out the rest of the class. There were about half a dozen of them, and they weren’t the crowd I was expecting, running more to tall, bulky white guys and clean-cut bespectacled types than any theatre class I’d ever been a part of. There was only one unnatural hair color in the whole room, a flaming red bob that belonged to a tiny girl with flushed cheeks and a pointed chin. Her glasses matched both her hair and her face: bright red, heart-shaped. Immediately aware that she and I would be flamboyant, attention-seeking allies against whatever the rest of these non-theatrical dweebs were doing here (never mind that I was wearing work pants -- fine, cargo pants -- and a hoodie emblazoned with my own college’s logo), I gave her a little wave as I sat down. She quirked an eyebrow at me and swept her gaze over the rest of the room, then gave a minute shrug. Yes, she and I were going to be friends, I could already tell. And despite the unpromising vibes of our classmates, we were going to thrive, to understand ourselves and each other more deeply, to become so close that we became a RachelandZach unit of our own (Marco-and-whatever-her-name-was! What a ring it might have!), to draw everyone out of their workaday shells with our sheer élan and joie de vivre, to have a damn fine time learning about Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage, to -- it goes without saying -- be the two career-justifying, all-time favorite students of a brilliant teacher who cared deeply about the subject matter.

Professor Hannah Weiss, for whom I had not spared a single thought since signing up for her class weeks earlier, shuffled in at five minutes past the hour. She wore a thick sweater and sensible shoes, and her first act was to tell us to settle down despite the fact that we were all, at minimum, nineteen or twenty years old, meaning we were not rowdy schoolchildren, and in fact none of us had actually been speaking when she entered. Had Angus not been the only librarian I knew on more than a passing level, thereby skewing my ideas about the profession irreparably toward easy confidence and flannel, I would have compared her to a librarian.

Class was fine. Truly, it was fine. The first half-hour was devoted to introductions, during which I had to out myself as a continuing education student because I had neither a class year nor a major to share alongside my name and pronouns. Introductions also informed me that my cherubic ally was a junior and a theatre major by the name of Kat (MarcoandKat!), and revealed that, with the exception of Kat and myself, everyone else in the room was a sports player, a STEM major, or both. At this revelation Professor Hannah Weiss made what was to be her only joke of the afternoon, offering that she hoped everyone would still enjoy the class even though they were only taking it for an arts distributive requirement, since “Shakespeare isn’t exactly rocket science, after all!” 

Polite chuckles. At most.

We then proceeded to an exhaustive review, complete with assignment grading policies and the academic honor code, of the syllabus, which would at least have us reading a promisingly wide selection of Shakespeare (Othello, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Measure for Measure) as well as The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone, Tamburlaine, and, oddly, Doctor Faustus. I didn’t recall there being anything resembling intimacy in that one, but I hadn’t read it since a freshman review course of the entire English theatre canon, so I was open to being proven wrong. Professor Hannah Weiss also spent a portion of this exhaustive review assuring us that there would be no performance requirement in the class, that our grades would be based exclusively on our participation in discussions, our biweekly written assignments, and our final summative paper, that this theatre class would -- don’t you worry -- contain absolutely no theatre whatsoever. This put everyone but myself and Kat at visible ease.

We were turned loose almost an hour early with reminders of our readings for the next week (the text of Romeo and Juliet as well as a suite of articles on boy actors and the legal status of women in Elizabethan England), and the eight of us drifted out into the hall and up the stairs. The English building had scratched wooden floors, and I squinted at them as if into a bright light, feeling unpleasantly like the past two or so hours had taken place in some black hole through which I had, against my will, been pulled. The only word I could come up with for the experience was mundane, which is, in my opinion, the worst thing one could possibly call the theatre. Into English through French and ultimately from the Latin mundus, meaning the world, the universe, the entire cosmos, its meaning has since been boiled down until the pot scorched. From a grand and flowing idea into the muddy, tarry residue of earthliness, regularity, dullness, boredom. It’s a dirty word.

Kat caught up with me as I was leaving the building.

“That sucked,” she said. “I hope she’s not that boring all semester.”

“The first day is always the worst, though,” I offered, hoping she would challenge me. “Nobody likes syllabus day.”

“I literally should have known it would be an arts for dummies class,” she said, neither agreeing with me nor rebutting me but breezing right beyond my statement, which was also fine, I supposed. “All the ones with cool titles always are. But I’m, like, such a Shakespeare nerd, I couldn’t resist, and here we are. You said you don’t actually go here?”

“I work here. At the library. But I did theatre in college.”

“Which was how long ago? You look so young.”

“I graduated two years ago.”

“Okay, not bad.” She bounced her chin at me, then jerked her head towards a path that led, I thought, toward a cluster of dorms. “This is me. See you next week, I guess.”

I raised my hand to wave goodbye, but she didn’t look back at me. Her backpack, I only then noticed, was a soft purple, but it had bright red ribbons looped through the zipper pulls. Her commitment to color coordination was admirable, and I walked away from the English building and the dorms and the campus, toward my T stop, with the thought (unfair, I know) that Kat and I were wasted on Professor Hannah Weiss.

~

I spent enough of my Friday morning leaning over Angus’ desk at the ECE library complaining about the utter mundanity of Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage when we were supposed to be coordinating the logistics of our weekend nominally-not-a-date that, by the end of the tirade, he had agreed to take me to a show followed by a home-cooked dinner, which I could not help but point out was an awful lot more scandalous than the friendly coworking lunch he had initially proposed.

“Are you always this forward?” I asked.

“Are you always this pretentious?” he retorted.

“Using that as a follow-up implies you’re flirting with me because I’m pretentious.”

“Who says I’m not?”

I sighed. “You’ve got terrible taste. Where should I meet you?”

It turned out he had a line on some local black box production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and he lived not overly far from me -- twenty minutes on my bike were it not late January, two stops on the red line as it was -- so his local was also just about my local. Thus on Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting beside Angus in a jaunty little theatre in Cambridge, trying to decide how much of the show I ought to let elapse before propping my elbow up to share the armrest with him. Now that we weren’t separated by a circulation desk, I had no idea what level of romantic overture I was expected to make, and having settled for the time being on playing hard to get and letting any flirtation on my part look casual and incidental, I leafed through the printer-paper program and did not touch him. We were going back and forth, pointing out all the unusual names among the cast, crew, and generous donors whose support made this and all our shows possible.

“Anita Fujita,” I said, underlining one of those generous donors with my finger. “I hope someone writes a nursery rhyme about her.”

“I don’t even know how to pronounce this one,” Angus said, indicating the actor playing Lord Darlington. There were no headshots, but their bio reeled off a list of Massachusetts-based theatrical ventures that stretched back over a decade. “Ell… Ell-ow-ann. That can’t be it.”

I squinted where he pointed. “Élouan Gage. Sounds fancy.”

“Sounds French.”

“Same difference.” I scanned the donors again. “Pete Parker. As in Spider-Man?”

“Isn’t he supposed to be broke? How’s he keeping this place open?”

“Where do you think his money is going?”

Angus chuckled and, just as a disembodied voice with an affected British accent reminded us to please silence our electronic devices and the lights dimmed, shifted his weight and let his right hand and wrist dangle off the armrest so his fingertips grazed my thigh. I felt a little fizzing spark at each point of contact and settled back into my own seat, stretching my legs forward so those fizzing sparks slid a little further up my thigh. And we watched the show like that.

It was, as shows go, decent. Pretty good. A solid six and a half, maybe seven out of ten. Had I been a theatre critic, I would have written a polite little article praising the cast’s chemistry and believable relationships, critiquing their abysmal faux-posh accents (more than one of which had a trace residue of Southie sticking to them), admiring the costumes, and nitpicking the pacing, which was slow for the first two and a half of its four acts, with lots of airy pauses where the dialogue would have benefited from more snap. But I was not, despite everything about me, a theatre critic, so I was free to focus on the best part of the show to the exclusion of all the rest.

Lord Darlington -- Élouan Gage, they of the fancy and/or French name -- was spectacular. They played their part with an edge of crystalline self-awareness that the rest of the cast seemed to lack, the kind of edge that farces and satires desperately need to avoid becoming the very thing they seek to criticize. But that edge did not detract from the emotion, the conviction, of the role. No nervous, lovelorn sap has ever been so cheeky, so quick with a retort, and no high-society wit has ever been so head-over-heels in love. We were too far back from the stage for me to get any sort of read on what they looked like, but I hardly needed to, because although they wore the same drab well-cut suit as the other lords, their head was crowned with a dramatic undercut, the kind of gravity-defying, waterfalling, shimmery-green number that was only supposed to look good on tropical birds. Aided by their high-visibility plumage, I tracked Élouan’s motions across the stage like a tennis match for the first three acts, and when they exited and Act IV was entirely Darlington-less, I watched the denouement with barely half my interest and allocated the other half to slouching artfully so that Angus’ hand would travel still further up my leg.

Angus, for his part, was the perfect theatre companion, laughing the loudest out of the whole audience at the jokes, for which I felt grateful as an actor despite not being onstage. He didn’t try to lean over and make commentary, although I’m sure it would have been appropriately biting if he had, leaving me free to stare at Élouan Gage as they flirted with Lady Windermere and insisted, a century before Harry met Sally, that there could be no possible friendship between men and women. When Élouan was gone and I tuned back in to Angus as more than a vaguely man-shaped presence beside me, he adjusted his arm a little further and spread his hand, fingers out, palm flat, on my thigh, running his index finger back and forth along the inseam of my jeans. When others, perhaps half of the audience, rose for a standing ovation at curtain call, he remained seated with me, holding the line against standing ovations becoming absolutely meaningless, a trend I thought might have picked up since the pandemic but lacked the research ability to confirm for myself. I couldn’t have asked for a better date than Angus.

And yet, when we emerged into the freezing dark of early evening, I barely managed to thank him for bringing me along before proceeding to talk his ear off, again, for the entire wind-bitten and slushy walk through the side streets of Cambridge to his apartment, about how badly I wished for my theatre class to be something different.

“It’s just -- I mean, that wasn’t even a knock-you-over brilliant show or anything,” I railed. “It was good, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t call it brilliant. But it had so much life in it. Lord Darlington especially.”

“They were great,” Angus agreed. “And I liked -- what’s her name -- the mother.”

“Mrs. Erlynne, yes, she was pretty good. But -- I mean, God, Angus, even when it’s mediocre it’s still supposed to light you up inside! It’s still supposed to take you somewhere else! Even if I hadn’t enjoyed myself -- which I did, thank you again -- I still would have been there, and I cannot honestly believe I am going to spend the next fourteen weeks willingly subjecting myself to a class where we talk about intimacy, for God’s sake, and never actually try to take each other anywhere except that classroom, which is potentially the least intimate space I can imagine. There aren’t even any filmed productions on the syllabus, never mind seeing anything live! Or performing ourselves, heavens forfend.”

He laughed, at me rather than with me, but his grin was so warm that I liked it. “Guess that’s what you get for taking Shakespeare for scientists.”

“It’s not even them. I mean, it might be, but they all seem nice enough. Kat’s great -- she’s the one theatre major. But I bet at least one or two of the others have a real performance in them somewhere. I don’t mean to be too cruel, but it’s obviously a professor problem. She just -- it’s like she’s given up.”

“I’ve known faculty like that,” Angus said, grabbing my elbow to steady me across the bricks, swollen over tree roots and slicked with black ice. I am to this day in awe of Cambridge sidewalks in winter. I have never known their equal in unevenness nor hazardousness. Once we were past the danger, Angus let me go, but I grabbed his hand, not least as one more silent thanks for listening to me. I was, despite my ire, not so shameless that I didn’t understand what a miracle it was that he was willing to let me carry on uninterrupted.

“Yeah?” I prompted.

“Mostly not in the school of ed. Obvious reasons. But the ones like that, they just want to be doing their research and they phone in their classes. Let TAs do all the work. Barely show up. Their poor students.”

“That’s the thing! I don’t even think that’s it with Professor Weiss,” I said. “She seemed fine with teaching a theatre class with no theatre in it. Pleased, even. I just can’t fathom deciding to teach theatre for a living and being comfortable catering to people with no interest in the theatre, let alone love for it. I can guarantee you any one of those actors tonight would do a better job of this class than she’s going to.”

Angus stopped short outside a tall, skinny Queen Anne wedged between other, shorter, uglier buildings and rummaged in his pockets for a key. “This is me. Top floor. Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine, the stairs will warm me up.”

“Anyway, your professor might surprise you. She’s been teaching however many years. She can’t be worse than any random actor.”

“Maybe not any,” I conceded, following Angus into the warm beige entryway, clearly toned down from a much grander style when some developer converted the building into apartments. “But Lord Darlington?”

“With the hair?”

“And the unpronounceable French name, yes. Give me Élouan Gage any day. That’s all I’m saying.”

Angus laughed at me again and guided me up to his apartment, where he made me a very good dinner (hot Italian sausage and peppers and onions and potatoes roasted together on a sheet pan so the vegetables browned in the sausage drippings), and then we small-talked just long enough for the food to settle before he brushed his teeth and we had athletic and pleasurable sex (me riding him, his beard scratching my chin when we kissed, his large strong hands grabbing my hips almost hard enough to bruise) in his bedroom (tasteful black-and-white architectural photography on the walls, a bookshelf so overflowing with a mix of depressing midcentury classics and graphic novels that they were shelved two deep), at which point I declined his invitation to stay over, kissed him goodnight, and let my dying phone guide me back through the warren of slippery side streets to the T stop by the theatre and rode the red line back up to my cozy, dark little basement.

~

I apologize. I realize I am rushing through the payoff to that will-they-won’t-they that Angus and I had spent months building, and in doing so I’m doing Angus an injustice. The food really was tasty, and the sex really did feel good, and he really did like me, maybe even more than I liked him, and I really was buzzing with that same electric pop of his hand on my thigh the whole way home, and in fact before bed I leaned against the wall of the shower with the fingers of my right hand inside myself and the fingers of my left hand gripping my own hip, thinking about Angus as I came, because he was that far toward the forefront of my mind. 

Ordinarily I would be disgusted with myself for hurrying the punch line, for glossing over the climax. It’s just that we are getting so close to the beginning of the story now, and I want you to see it, to see them, to see the beginning, and more than that I want you to understand. Which, of course, you cannot do until the story begins, and I cannot wait even the length of a properly detailed and titillating sex scene for you to understand.

There will be more of Angus. He will get his due, I promise.

But first. The beginning.

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