Come Down: I.3

It would have made for a better story if I hadn’t checked my work email on my lunch break that Thursday. If I had just walked into the classroom entirely unaware and had the world blown open in front of me. But, although I rarely received emails intended for me rather than the entire population of library staff, or university affiliates, or potential phishing targets, I still made a habit of checking my work email at the start of my lunch break, since it was usually the first time I sat down all day. I checked it that Thursday, and tucked neatly between the university newsletters and the reminders about the upcoming library all-hands meeting and the phishing attempts was a message from the theatre department to the students of Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage.

Professor Hannah Weiss had been hit by a car.

She wasn’t dead, or even in the hospital, the email was at great pains to assure us. But being hit by a car, even one moving at slow speeds through a pedestrian-heavy area near the Fens, tended to make one feel a bit too achy and concussed to teach a theatre course, even a theatre course that contained as little theatre as hers did. But not to worry, we would not be forced into other, more theatre-intensive theatre courses this late into the add-drop period. Until Professor Hannah Weiss had completed her recovery, which all parties involved were sure would be speedy and comfortable, the university had located a suitable replacement: a local actor-director with extensive Shakespeare experience who had themself graduated from the university with a degree in theatre thirteen years prior and was happy to stand in as a temporary adjunct in the meantime.

I swiped my thumb along my phone screen to the name at the bottom of the email and experienced a surge of guilt so strong I felt as though I were about to throw up.

Which I know, I know, makes absolutely no sense, but you have to understand: I have always been prone to magical thinking, no matter how many therapists (or, more to the point, pop-psychology-obsessed one-night stands from my brief Grindr phase) tell me it does me no good. And for that instant I was certain that I had done this, that I had -- conjured them, summoned them, something -- for how else could I spend the weekend wishing away my theatre professor and find that, on Thursday, she was suffering from a vehicularly-induced traumatic brain injury and I was now to be taught by Élouan Gage?

Lunch wilfully forgotten, I copy-pasted their name into Google (two tabs, one with and one without the acute accent, just in case) and spent the remainder of the hour reading every scrap of Élouan material I could set my eyes on. I found the incompetent baby’s-first-HTML websites of community theatres in Woburn and Saugus and Reading, archived blurry rehearsal shots and cast lists for Bye Bye Birdy (Élouan Gage as Hugo Peabody) and Uncle Vanya (Élouan Gage as Doctor Astrov) and Speed-the-Plow (Élouan Gage starring as Bobby Gould). In the blurry rehearsal shots, nobody had lorikeet hair. I found a review of an experimental take on Frisch’s Fire-Raisers, produced in 2016 for obvious reasons, that mentioned Élouan’s turn as Eisenring being ‘a remarkably subtle addition to a production whose otherwise heavy-handed and even priggish style became grating by intermission.’ I found the program of their graduation from the university thirteen years prior, B.A. in theatre, their name on the list between William P. Gaffrey, Jr. and Isabella Gagliardi, both economics majors. I found a private Instagram account that I did not risk trying to follow and a handful of old retweets about local theatre under the name Élouan Gage. I found a nearly-empty LinkedIn page that listed only their name, their date of graduation from the university, and their current role (actor, 2012 to present).

All this to say, I found nothing. No recent photographs in which I could discern their face, no expressed opinions of their own, no evidence of how they made enough money to continue appearing in relatively small-time theatrical productions on a regular basis, no hint of what kind of teacher they would be, what kind of person they were, what I ought to expect from them when they weren’t pacing back and forth across a Victorian parlor opining on love in an attention-grabbing hint-of-British baritone.

As I’m sure you have discerned already, I like knowing what to expect. I like knowing my lines. So I spent the remainder of my shift running back and forth between the libraries and the bathrooms, my stomach cramped and my fingers twitchy and my pulse pounding with the feeling of not knowing. I shoved my hand truck along the bare patches of the quad where students’ feet had cut elephant paths into the grass, at one point hitting a loose rock that sent packages careening into the slush. I reloaded them as quickly as I could, dropped them off at the law library, and rushed back to clock out and use the bathroom again, because whatever I ought to have expected of Élouan Gage, I wanted to be there to expect it rather than ducking out to pee in the middle of what promised to be, no matter what, at least a more interesting class than it would have been had Professor Hannah Weiss not been hit by a car. My stomach twisted again.

I washed my hands, waving them several times under the automatic soap dispenser before it noticed their presence, and stared at myself in the mirror. My work pants were flecked with road salt. My hoodie advertised my hometown’s Rotary club. My hair was a mess, and getting too long in the sideburns area. My glasses prescription was out of date and my frames were unremarkable, tortoiseshell acrylic half-rims in something resembling a rectangle. I looked like I wasn’t trying -- which, to be fair, I wasn’t. I looked like I wasn’t an actor -- which was unthinkable. I checked my watch: if I left now, I’d be a few minutes early to class. Plenty of time to try to fix things. Although how to fix them was another matter. I had no change of clothes, no tools at my disposal. I could not even begin to approximate the extensive routine of eyebrow gel and concealer and hair mousse and cologne that had prepared me to see Angus the previous Saturday.

I did what I could. My undershirt was plain white, so I yanked off my hoodie and rolled up my short sleeves to provide the illusion of biceps. I tucked my hem as far into my waistband as it would go, so the still-fairly-new flatness of my chest was on full display. I ran my hands under the water again and raked them through my hair, scraping it back against my scalp, then tore off a paper towel and rubbed at my head until it was dry enough not to freeze outside and the tousling looked more or less intentional. I licked my thumbs and smoothed my eyebrows. In the fluorescent light of the bathroom, I still looked a bit drawn and sickly, not to mention underdressed for Massachusetts in the winter, but I figured the latter would help with the former and I’d be plenty flushed by the time I made it to the English building. I stuffed my hoodie into my bag, gave myself a last once-over. I remained scruffy and haphazard, but now there was an artificial air about it. Someone naturally put together who had been asked to play the role of someone scruffy and haphazard. An actor playing a non-actor.

Which, all things considered, I was.

I ran to class and had to stop to collect myself before descending the stairs into the basement. I didn’t feel sweaty -- it was too cold for that -- but regardless I didn’t want to give the appearance of being sweaty. I took three long box breaths, one hand on my stomach, just as I had at the start of every movement fundamentals class in college, and entered the classroom.

I wasn’t the last to arrive, but Kat was already there, her voice as loud as her hair. She stood beside her desk, one hand on the back of her chair, chatting away at someone sitting on the edge of the classroom’s low semi-stage. I made my way to my desk while Kat delivered the punchline to her story -- “and what do you know, next week, she’s literally knocking on my door at three in the morning!” -- and her interlocutor threw back their shimmery green explosion of hair and laughed.

They were not, as I have said, beautiful. Élouan Gage had a long, bony face, high cheekbones and a hawk nose and a wide mouth with thin, glossed, very pink lips and a sharp, jutting chin like a pharaoh’s goatee. Their Adam’s apple bobbed visibly as they caught their breath, and their eyes, when opened, were huge, very round, watery blue, and framed with fans of pale lashes. I would, for descriptive ease, like to be able to compare them to someone famous (Vincent Price? Adrien Brody? Tracee Ellis Ross?), but the fact is that they looked not quite like anyone else I have ever seen, and I did not want to stop looking at them. Their limbs were long, almost scarecrowlike, and arranged at haphazard angles. They wore a shirt that put me in mind of a pirate, white with an open collar and lantern sleeves, and a long black skirt with knife-sharp accordion pleats, and black Dr. Martens, creased and faded but nevertheless polished to within an inch of their lives. What little exposed skin I could see -- the side of their neck; their hands, long-fingered and knob-knuckled, braced on either side of them on the edge of the stage -- bristled with tattoos, all greyscale, none discernible as anything in particular from across the room, although some struck me as likely to be words and others left sort of a steampunk-ish impression.

Élouan had fully recovered from their laughter when they glanced over at me, a smile still crinkling the corners of their eyes. In their gaze I moved to shrug off my bag and felt my body detach from itself, feet-first, an airy feeling that raced all the way up to my head and made my vision swim and my brain feel full of holes. The room slid sideways, and I slammed a hand on my desk, hard, to stay upright. All the other eyes in the room snapped toward me at the sound.

“You good?” Kat asked.

I took another box breath, steadied myself against the vertigo. Élouan was still looking at me. “Yes, sorry. I worked through lunch today.” Not technically untrue. “Just a little light-headed, is all.”

I saw a change in the angle of Élouan’s lips, although I was too dizzy to discern what it meant, and they pushed themself up off the edge of the stage. “Hold on a second,” they said, no British accent, obviously, but still a warm baritone that seemed to sink into the air around it, bending space toward their voice like some supermassive planet. “I’ve got just the thing.”

There was a black satchel hidden behind the blocky wooden podium, and as I eased myself down into my seat I watched Élouan rummage through the bag and come up with something shiny and screaming yellow. Our eyes met again -- more vertigo. “Catch,” they said.

A family-sized bag of Sour Patch Kids skidded across my desk.

“Thanks,” I said, unsealing the bag and portioning out a handful. The citric acid dusted my fingertips and sparkled in the light. I tipped the whole lot into my mouth at once, wincing as the flavor tightened my jaw, hitting me behind the molars. I took another handful.

“Pass ‘em around when you’ve recovered your strength,” Élouan said. “I brought them to bribe all of you into ignoring the fact that I’m not a real professor.”

Kat laughed at that -- her laugh was ridiculous, deeper than her speaking voice, with distinctive H-sounds interspersed throughout it like a donkey’s bray -- and a couple other people chuckled too, and I passed the Sour Patch Kids around, and class began.

Élouan did not introduce themself, did not even mention the email or the car accident or try to convince us of their credentials beyond the crack about not being a real professor. Instead, they pulled a slightly crumpled packet of printer paper from their satchel, flipped back and forth through it, and said, “So I hear you’ve been reading Romeo and Juliet. Who has thoughts about it?”

I cut my eyes at Kat, who was already cutting her eyes at me with a wicked grin on her Queen of Hearts face. Both of our hands were already halfway up, but we lowered them almost in unison to sit back and see where this was going, to let the others say their piece before we made this class ours.

One of the STEM guys, stick-straight brown hair and round silver glasses, put up his hand, but Élouan waved it back down. “Just talk. Raising hands takes too long,” they told him.

“Okay, well, I’m not too proud to admit I had to look up a lot of the language to understand what was going on, so I might be missing something, but -- it’s weird how often they announce they’re gonna kiss each other, right? The whole scene at the dance, and then the -- hang on, I wrote it down somewhere -- the ‘one kiss and I’ll descend’ on the balcony. Like, it’s a lot.”

Élouan clapped their hands together and sprang forward, at which point I realized again how long their limbs were, how they seemed to naturally arrange themself into a feline almost-pounce and then unfurl all at once. The STEM guy flinched, rattling his desk.

“Yes!” Élouan crowed. “Let’s talk about that. You -- what’s your name?”

“Harris.”

“Thank you, Harris. Of course, we have very few stage directions for these plays, and what we do have in the Quartos and the Folio was almost certainly coming from these actors’ memory of what happened in the play rather than any particular direction that Shakespeare actually wrote.”

Harris made a noise of understanding. “So it’s, like, a hint to the actors? You know there’s supposed to be a kiss there because the characters say it?”

“Well, sure, that might be something. But step inside the world of the text for a minute. Imagine that Shakespeare had a reason for writing it that way. Not just that he wanted to cue his actors. A real reason. Plot. Character development. Emotion. Why does Romeo keep telling Juliet he’s going to kiss her?”

My classmates looked at each other. Kat and I looked at Élouan. Élouan looked at Kat, and then at me. 

“Anticipation?” someone ventured.

“There’s a theory.” Élouan waited for more, but no more came. A few long, fluid beats elapsed in silence. My throat burned with citric acid, although I’d already finished all of my Sour Patch Kids. My mouth watered.

“Here,” Élouan said. “Let’s put the scene on its feet, see if that shakes something loose. No pressure, but does anyone here have any experience with stage kisses?”

Now Kat’s hand and mine both shot up, and behind me one of the STEM guys snorted. “Shocker,” he murmured, and I heard Harris laugh.

“Great,” Élouan said, looking past me toward Harris and his friend, with an upward quirk to their lips that told me they had heard the comment and were not only ignoring it, but making sure the STEM guys knew they were ignoring it, and that in fact they were having a ball ignoring it. “Can I have both of you up here for a moment?”

Kat and I ascended the low steps and positioned ourselves like good actors -- facing each other but cheated out, downstage center, arms at our sides, waiting for direction. Élouan nodded, hopping up after us and moving in a semicircle upstage of us. Their skirt swished around their ankles with a soft sound like pages being turned. They tapped Kat on the shoulder and said, “Juliet.” Then they circled toward me and said, “Romeo,” but they didn’t touch me, and later, when I was walking back toward the T stop through the cold after class, I would wonder why, but in the moment I didn’t even consider that I might consider it, because there was an audience (such as it was) and a stage (such as it was) and a director (a real director!) and I was going to act.

“Juliet, take it from ‘then window,’ please. Romeo, do the farewells, but skip the ‘one kiss’ line. Just jump straight from the farewells to the kiss. Got it?”

Kat and I both nodded, and Élouan retreated back to the podium behind Kat, one eye on the scene, one eye on the class. Kat shook her shoulders, ran her hands through her hair, and fixed me with a wide-open gaze of absolute adoration. She stepped toward me and draped her arms over my shoulders, still cheating out.

“Then, window,” she murmured, pouting her lips (matching, of course, her hair and her glasses), “let day in, and let life out.”

I smiled at her, leaning in to cup her cheek with my upstage hand. “Farewell,” I said, drawing Kat towards me until our foreheads nearly touched. “Farewell.” Then I leaned in, angling our faces away from the audience, and brushed my lips against my own thumb. There was scattered applause -- two or three claps per person -- and Élouan, from their place at the podium, hummed a little tune I didn’t recognize.

“Great,” they said. “Now again, with the full line, Romeo. Juliet, just as you were.”

We reset ourselves -- Kat did her shoulders-and-hair routine again -- to run the scene back.

“Then, window, let day in, and let life out.”

“Farewell, farewell,” I said, leaning back and letting the weight of her arms on my shoulders catch me. As I did, my gaze drifted, or was pulled, to Élouan’s. Behind Kat, their round eyes encompassed the stage, the whole classroom, but they were looking right at me, and their nose cast a shadow over their lips and their chin cast a shadow over their throat and their shirt was white and their skirt was black, so they seemed to be one long upright ripple of light and shadow. They smiled at me, barely, the same smile they’d just given the STEM guys -- we were making eye contact, but they would not acknowledge the eye contact, even as we continued to make it, and I knew it, and they knew I knew it, and they enjoyed it. I felt the terrified thrill of being aware that there’s a joke but not being in on it yet: the unfamiliar shapes in the dark immediately preceding the surprise party, the second of dead air before Allen Funt tells you to smile, you’re on Candid Camera!

I let the moment breathe around me, soft and stretchy. Then I leaned back in toward Kat, although I was only half focused on her face. “One kiss,” I told her with a tone of I can’t say no to you, “and I’ll descend.”

Kat smiled, her perfect little Cupid’s bow splitting as she leaned in and led the second stage kiss, leaving a bright red blotch on the knuckle of her thumb. This time we got four or five claps apiece. Kat dipped into an ironic curtsy, but I stood where I was -- soaking up the applause in the way all actors do, of course, converting it into the necessary sugars to keep me alive a little longer -- but also watching Élouan, who came forward slowly, letting us bask in the approbation (such as it was). The swishing skirt, the wide eyes, the shadows. Although the scene had ended, there was still something expanding and contracting in the air, like the classroom was changing around us, or like we weren’t in the classroom at all anymore. Like we were in Verona, or at least like we were somewhere else.

Like theatre.

“So?” Élouan asked the rest of the class.

One of the athletes raised his hand, but withdrew it almost immediately. “No hands, right,” he said. “Are we gonna have to act in this class?”

“Of course.” Élouan squinted at him. “Don’t worry, I’m not grading on the basis of acting ability. No judgment here. But these texts weren’t written to be read in silence. In Shakespeare’s day, actors didn’t even receive full scripts -- just their lines and their cues. The only way they could perceive the whole text was to participate in it. Plays are meant to be performed… I’m sorry, name?”

“Jack,” said the athlete.

“Plays are meant to be performed, Jack.”

“So we’ll have to get onstage?” Harris asked.

“Well, yes,” Élouan said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as if Harris was perhaps a bit thick for needing this spelled out for him. “It’s a theatre class.”

And finally, as they said it, it was.

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