Come Down: I.6

Class with Élouan never stopped being transportive -- there was no point at which I walked into that weird little room in the basement of the English building and felt anything like I felt during the other 165 hours of my week -- but the human brain can integrate anything into its idea of routine. My weeks became a regular, almost soothing cycle of wind-up, tightening me like a spring through the weekend, so antsy I could not have sat still even if I’d had the opportunity to do so by the time Wednesday came, and all of that tension released in a three-hour burst of theatre each Thursday afternoon. Friday mornings became the worst part of my week, bright and early, exhausted from whatever up-late fantasy I had constructed about Élouan the previous night (kissing them at a bar; lingering at a stage door until they emerged and signed my playbill with a shockingly filthy come-on; taking my bows as Benedick, as Benvolio, as, yes, Bottom, while Élouan whooped from the front row), but even the crash-out was reliable enough to become almost welcome. 

I went out with Angus a few more times: once to another little black-box play at another little theatre in Cambridge, although that time it was a contemporary piece I’d never heard of and did not enjoy (it contained an author insert character despite ostensibly being a historical drama and was too navel-gazey even for me); once to the MFA for one of their Late Nite programs, where we drank overpriced cocktails and listened to a talk about Afro-Futurism; once, in early April when being outside began to become bearable again, we took a walk along the Charles and got gelato, mine stracciatella in a cup, his orange blossom in a cone, and when it began to drip down his fingers I checked that there was nobody else in eyesight of us in the gathering dusk before taking his hand and licking it off, and he called us a rideshare to his apartment then and there so he could fuck me, and he so wore me out that night that I slept at his place for the first time. I woke up the next morning and had to squint. The sunlight through Angus’ slatted shades was so searingly yellow and bright that I worried for a moment I’d blinded myself.

Rachel and Zach were pleased to hear about my developing thing, whatever it was, with Angus. As far as I can tell, the greatest ambition of all married people is that their single friends be perpetually on the verge of settling down with someone but that they never quite get there, so that the married couple get the warm feeling that everyone will soon experience all the benefits of committed monogamy, but they still get to live vicariously through those first butterfly days of uncertainty. Angus was a sure thing; he did not give me any particular butterflies. But that didn’t make me like him any less, and I was always glad to accept his invitations, and to debrief with Rachel and Zach afterwards. I didn’t tell them nearly as much about class with Élouan, only offering updates when they thought to ask, and only brief, positive, and emotionally inaccurate updates at that. The two of them had a script for Marco’s seeing a handsome older man from work, and they didn’t have a script for Marco would like to climb inside his Shakespeare professor, simultaneously living with and as Élouan Gage for the rest of his natural life, and I enjoyed their script enough that I saw no reason to try to force them into mine.

But Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage continued to be the gravitational center of my life. As the weeks ran on, as Élouan cheerfully and relentlessly put one scene after another on its feet to help us understand the context of performance, some of my classmates came around on acting. Jack, in all his sports scholarship physicality, was a dab hand at playing intimidating villains; Haitao, who rarely spoke more than once or twice in three hours’ worth of discussions, proved surprisingly adept with the truly gushy romance scenes; and I heard Rika talking to Kat after their turns as Beatrice and Hero, respectively, about how to audition for theatre department shows. The others still grumbled every time Élouan pulled them up onstage, but even they weren’t horrible (although of course nobody else was as skilled as Kat or I, and neither of us could in turn hold a candle to Élouan).

Once, during Volpone week when the weather was just barely turning docile and everyone was already on edge with the promise of spring, Élouan’s explanations of some of the jokes (campy, lots of vivid gestural aids) plunged us all into a state of such frenzied hilarity that Harris snorted water out of his nose.

Once, although I continued to treat her as something of a hostile force as long as she continued to monopolize Élouan’s time and attention before class, Kat and I together delivered such a Cleopatra-flirting-with-Thidias that I felt flushed and out of breath for the remainder of class.

Once, Élouan toyed with the idea of cancelling class because none of us could figure out why Professor Hannah Weiss had put Doctor Faustus on the syllabus, being as it was mostly a sixteenth-century prank show with a hasty religious moral tacked on at the end rather than a display of any kind of intimacy. But, not wanting to waste the effort we’d gone to in the reading of it, we gamely had a discussion about knowledge as its own kind of seduction and the play’s obsession with marriage as the only acceptable version of sexuality, and at the end of class someone, probably Jack, made a crack about naked Eve and her apple.

“You know,” Élouan said, “I’ve always interpreted that story differently.”

It was an odd thing to say. There were four or five minutes left before the end of our time -- Élouan was good about not keeping us longer than the university schedule allotted. A few people had been packing in their things, but now there was a general settling back and listening, resigned but intrigued.

“How so?” I asked, since it seemed as though nobody else was going to, although we were all waiting.

Élouan smiled crookedly. “What’s the last thing in Genesis two? They were naked, and they weren’t ashamed. Adam and Eve eat the fruit, their eyes are opened, and they figure out that they’re naked, and now they’re ashamed. But the first thing they do when they hear God coming is hide from Him. They don’t hide from the serpent. They hide from God. It’s not as if they weren’t aware they were naked before, but now they feel like there’s something wrong with it. They don’t want God to see them that way, never mind that He made them that way. Meaning the knowledge wasn’t the problem, was it? The shame was. And shame doesn’t come from the serpent.” They paused for a beat, their smile straightening itself out. “Besides, He tells Eve that obeying her husband is part of her punishment, which means God is well aware that men are the worst and He made them anyway.”

A few of us chuckled, and Kat said, “I knew you had lapsed Catholic energy. Right? Lapsed Catholic?”

Élouan tipped their head toward her. “Close enough. Anyway, I’m just talking to hear myself talk. You’re all free to go. But start thinking about whether you’d like to write or perform for your final project. It’ll be here sooner than you expect.”

It had snuck up on all of us, I think. For the others, likely because the semester was getting busier -- exams and late-season games and rehearsals for the department show -- even as the rhythm of Élouan’s class remained the same, so it was easy to ignore the looming final. For me, it was because I could no longer picture my Thursday afternoons in the absence of Intimacy on the Elizabethan Stage. I had no idea what I would do with myself afterwards, and my few halfhearted attempts to think about it had all dissolved within moments into more Élouan fantasies, so I let the notion drop whenever it arose. But there were two options for the final project: a ten- to fifteen-page paper covering at least two of the plays we’d read in class, or a memorized performance of a single scene from one of the plays coupled with, at most, a three-page explanation of character decisions. Obviously, I wasn’t about to write the paper. The performance would require at least one scene partner, of course, but despite the cold war I already knew Kat and I were competent foils onstage. I brought up the subject with her on our way out of class on Faustus day.

“Do you know what scene you want to stage for the final?” I asked, holding the door open for her as she sailed through it.

“Oh, I’m writing the paper.”

“What?”

Kat rolled her eyes. “I literally can’t learn any more lines. Pyg goes up in two weeks and I will kill myself if I forget anything.”

“Pyg?”

“Malion. I could’ve sworn I told you! I’m Eliza Doolittle.”

“Congratulations, no, you didn’t tell me.”

She shrugged. “Must have been Élouan, then.”

“Must have,” I said, trying not to evaporate into a cloud of steam.

“Besides, I have a really good idea for the paper. I want to use Twelfth Night and R and J to do homoeroticism in duels.” She reached the turn toward her dorm. “Good luck finding a scene partner though!”

“Thanks,” I called after her.

She, as an actor, should have known better than to wish me luck. Over the next two weeks I managed to catch Haitao and Rika after class, only to discover that Haitao had chosen to write the paper, being put off by the memorization requirement, and Rika and Jack were already rehearsing their gender-swapped Petruchio and Katherine and were very sorry they couldn’t include me. May was fast approaching, and I had no scene partner (and certainly no ideas for a fifteen-page paper), meaning I was dangerously close to not getting my tuition money back.

Before our antepenultimate class, I walked in my usual ten minutes early and waved my usual hello to Élouan, only to find Kat’s desk unoccupied. No backpack indicating she’d just stepped out. Not a single flash of cherry-red anywhere in the classroom. Just me and them. Nobody to perform the final with, no Kat, no other options, no help, no hope, nowhere else to turn. The whole classroom seemed to sparkle, citric acid on my fingertips, because given a thousand years I could not have invented a better set-up. I considered seating myself in Kat’s usual spot, but I thought better of it, taking my own desk instead.

“Where’s Kat?” I asked Élouan, who was pacing around the stage, swishing wide-legged linen pants in coffee brown plus a peacock-blue button-up, tucked in tight with sleeves rolled up like a Leyendecker gentleman. The tattoos crawled all the way up their forearms and disappeared beneath their cuffs. I need to get tattoos.

“Tech rehearsal for Pygmalion,” Élouan said. “They open tomorrow. I told her to take all the time she needed.”

“Fair enough.” I waited a beat, and they stopped pacing, coming to the front of the stage and putting their hands on their hips.

“What’s up?”

“Must something be up? This is when I always get here.”

Élouan shook their head in mock annoyance. “Marco, I can hear you waiting for something.”

“What does me waiting sound like?”

“It sounds like you not asking me whatever it is you’d like to ask.”

I blew a puff of air between my lips. “I need help.”

“With?”

“I don’t have a scene partner for the final. Everyone’s either writing the paper or otherwise engaged. And while I could try my best to do sort of a Victor/Victoria half-drag look and play both parts in a love scene, I would like to actually pass this class and get my money back.”

“You could write the paper,” Élouan said, stepping down off the stage and coming towards me. They stood in front of my desk, looking down their nose at me, and I looked up at them, the angle much more flattering to me than to them, I knew, and I was tempted to thank them for it aloud.

“Theoretically, yes, I could.” I didn’t break eye contact. Neither did they. “But it seems a bit unfair to offer the performance option and then tell just the continuing education student that he’s not allowed to use it, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think there’s a systemic disenfranchisement campaign against continuing education students.”

“The one trans student, then?”

Élouan smiled. “Slightly more convincing. What would you like me to do about it?”

“You could give me permission to perform a soliloquy.”

“In a class about the relationships between characters? You’d be better off with Victor and Victoria.”

They were going to make me say it, and I loved them for it. I dipped my chin just a little bit, trying to read coquettish without becoming a cartoon. “Well,” I ventured, “would you be able to be my scene partner, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” they said, leaving no air between the end of my question and the beginning of their answer, obvious that we both knew our lines. They cocked one hip, contrapposto, and crossed their arms, forearms filled with scrawling black linework, stronger, I thought, than they looked. “Special treatment could be an issue. We couldn’t rehearse as much as you might like.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I can get you the explanation paper ahead of time, so you know what angle I’d like to take on the scene, and then as long as we can run it before the actual final, it’ll be fine.”

“You think so?”

“I do think so.”

They tilted their head back and forth, pantomiming consideration. “It’ll be difficult to grade your performance if I’m in it, too.”

“I can ask someone to film it.”

“That could work.” Élouan uncrossed their arms, stuck their hands in the pockets of their pants. “What scene were you thinking of doing?”

I hadn’t decided, had actually hardly considered it at all, being open to playing just about any role that was handed to me and assuming whomever I’d work with would have some particular part in mind, or at least some guiding comfort level that would eliminate kissing scenes, such that I wouldn’t have to make the decision all on my own. But when they asked me that, with their pale gaze trained on me for longer than it ever had been, as far as I could remember, their tongue darted out to wet their lips, just briefly, and I thought of them saying that knowledge wasn’t the problem.

“I’d like to do Faustus,” I said.

“Interesting choice,” they replied, that word again, interesting, and I was very glad to be sitting down the way things tilted and swayed in front of me, and Élouan nodded like I’d done something right and climbed back up onto the stage. “Alright. Faustus. You’re on.”

I was on. 

~

I wrote my explanation of how I’d chosen to characterize the scene that night -- because, as soon as I’d said the word, I could really only remember one scene from Doctor Faustus, which I decided, based on the fact that it was the only one whose shape and dialogue I could recall, must be the only good scene in Doctor Faustus. Mephistopheles appears at Faustus’ summons, only to have Faustus send him away because he’s too ugly. He reappears in the guise of a handsome Franciscan friar, and the two of them have a little verbal tango about whether and how Mephistopheles can serve Faustus. I read it out a few times, weaving between the concrete support pillars that kept my studio from collapsing in on itself, feeling the shape of the words in my mouth.

“Had I as many souls as there be stars,” I declared to my refrigerator, “I’d give them all for Mephistopheles.”

When I’d worn out my voice, I retrieved my laptop and collapsed into the couch (an ancient, scratchy blue camelback for which I’d paid ten American dollars on Craigslist and which I kept covered in a hodgepodge of blankets at all times) and began to write. At the time I had few literary pretensions, despite my many other pretensions, and I thought of myself as at most a serviceable writer, someone who enjoyed reading but was much better at getting his own point across through gesture and tone and expression, someone who well overshot recommended word counts trying to convey in language what he would much rather have crystallized into a single raised eyebrow. But I imagined standing on that strange little stage with Élouan across from me, imagined the way their face glowed with pleasure and diablerie when I flirted while pretending I wasn’t flirting, and the words just poured out of me.

In all the stories since Marlowe’s about deals with the devil, I wrote, the devil has been the mastermind, the seducer, the one in control. And sure, from the outside, it would make sense. Mephistopheles is older, wiser, possessed of supernatural powers, Lucifer’s right-hand man. Of course you’d think Mephistopheles would be the one in control, and of course it looks that way to everyone else, especially when things are falling apart towards the end. But he’s not. Faustus is the one to invoke Mephistopheles, to demand his service, to suggest the bargain and its terms, to offer up his very soul -- Mephistopheles actually needs to be convinced. It’s Faustus who’s in control, I wrote, and I intended to play him as such. I wanted it to be a good old-fashioned seduction scene, but with the duke of Hell, so used to being the predator, suddenly finding himself as the prey. Even as Faustus’ soul was forfeit, I still wanted him pulling the strings. And, importantly, I wanted Mephistopheles to be into it. Because what could be more attractive, more flattering, than a man who couldn’t care less about his soul if giving it up means he can have you instead?

I wrote until it was nearly one in the morning. I did go over the three-page cap a bit -- just shy of a full four when all was said and done -- but the idea of editing out a single line was incomprehensible in my present state, high on creativity and fatigue. I saved the document as a PDF, emailed it to Élouan, and fell asleep on the couch.

I woke up with a dry tongue and a one-line email response, acknowledging receipt of my assignment and encouraging me to develop a healthier sleep schedule. The response was sent at 3:07 a.m. I swallowed. The inside of my mouth tasted sour.

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