It's Not Shakespeare (2 page)

James loved those clouds. Those clouds over the few vacant green fields of mustard flowers left in the state were some of the reasons he ignored his mother’s pleading to move back to Maine, to the nice cushy professorship her community ties could have gotten him there. He liked New England—he did. He liked the open-back-yard neighborhoods where communities of children played. He liked the flat, unfriendly expanse of the Atlantic off the rocky coast of his parents’ home in Maine. He liked the curiously puzzle-pieced squares of cultivated land in the rural areas and the imprecise old buildings that had actual history to them. He
really
liked their gay-friendly legislative environment.

But something… something about the clouds as they rolled off of the Sierras and the way the air smelled like the open Pacific Ocean when it was one hundred and fifty miles away… something about this area of California called to him, even when he was reduced to wearing cargo shorts and sandals to school because the heat of June through September was un-fucking-merciful.

Such was not the case today, and he wore comfortable corduroys, from his slacks to his blazer, although he took off his blazer to throw Marlowe his ball. Marlowe was only three years old—more puppy than grown-up dog, for the most part, and he chased that ball with a slavish devotion and enthusiastic drool.

James would have thrown the ball until his arm fell off for that sort of positive reinforcement.

“He’s a handful!” a woman said, distracting him from getting his face thoroughly licked by a wide pink tongue.

“He’s cute and he knows it,” James replied, looking up at her and smiling. She was his age, frosted hair, narrow face, pointed chin, and a sharp-eyed smile. She was walking a mid-sized pure-bred collie with a lot of lines and angles on a rather disdainful, narrow canine face, and Marlowe panted and slobbered happily on James, completely ignoring both of them.

James, alas, was human, and not so lucky.

“Well, he’s as cute as his master,” the woman said, increasing the wattage of her smile, and James realized with a shock that he was being hit on.

“But not nearly as gay,” he said back, bemused, and was unprepared for the woman’s horrified look or the way she yanked on her dog’s lead, like maybe being near him and his slobbering Boston terrier was a way to decrease her dog’s breeding potential. And her own, he guessed.

“God, Marlowe, sometimes I really hate this area,” James muttered. Marlowe licked his face sympathetically, and James stood up and threw the ball again. Longingly, he thought about Sophie Winchester’s underwear model and how much easier it might have been to deal with a snotty bitch and her inbred bundle of shaking canine neurosis if he had
that
waiting for him at home—or better yet, here at the park, taking turns throwing the ball to Marlowe.

God, when had his dreams gotten so… so
pathetic?
So
ordinary.
He used to dream about taking the academic world by storm! He dreamt about writing the Great American Novel. He dreamt about starting a foundation for young GLBT writers. But not anymore.

Now, he dreamed about finding a lover who wanted to throw a ball in the dog park for his damned dog.

Marlowe licked his face, distracting him from his melancholy, and James smiled and touched noses with him. Marlowe’s nose was wet, and his tail was wagging so hard that his tight, tough little body almost wriggled right out of James’s arms.

Well, sometimes small dreams had grandeur, he thought with dignity. Sometimes, the small dreams were all a person needed to live.

“S
O
, J
AMES
, have you met anyone?” His mother’s voice was one-hundred-percent upper class New England, and James never realized how much Northern Californians did
not
have an accent until his twice-weekly phone call home.

“No, Mom—it’s not exactly gay-topia out here, you know?”

“Which is why you should move back home,” his mother said smoothly, and James resisted the urge to smack his head on the desk in front of his computer.

“Because the gay man living with his mother hasn’t been done to death,” he said instead, and his mother’s disgusted sniff came across loud and clear.

“Don’t be snide, darling. I just don’t like the thought of you there in the wilds of California, lonely and bitter. It would be nice if you had someone to keep you company. I won’t be around to nag you forever, you know!” His mother had just reached official Senior Citizenship, and she was forever reminding him of her own mortality. She took water aerobics, yoga, mall walking, meditation, and senior nutrition classes. She was involved in three charities, various political organizations (all left-wing, of course), and volunteered in the local private school once a week for enrichment activities.

He was fairly certain she was going to outlive him.

“I have Marlowe,” he said with certainty. “Boston Terriers can have pretty long lifespans. He may outlive me—or be buried with me, like a pharaoh’s dog, in my tomb.”

“That’s not funny, James,” his mother said with a little disdain, and James resisted a sigh. He thought Sophie Winchester might have found it fucking hysterical, and his thoughts wandered to the underwear model again. Well, if nothing else, should his libido survive this phone call with his mother, he was fairly certain he had his stroke material for the evening!

“I’m just saying that I’m fine,” he told her firmly. “I’m fine—I love you, and you don’t need to worry about me.”

“We love you too. That’s why we worry.”

The “we” referred to James’s father. Although Alan Geoffrey Richards never actually spoke into the telephone, the two of them kept in touch via James’s mom. She assured James that both parents were still functioning and properly affectionate, and James spent a lot of time picturing his father reading the newspaper while his mother swam/walked/yoga’d circles around him.

“Is Susan coming out for Spring Break?” Susan was his sister, the one who had gleefully announced that since James was gay, she got to have three children and still maintain a zero-population-growth family. James saw his sister and her family over Christmas break and for a month in the summer, and he had to admit, since she was the one with the uterus, it was awfully damned nice of her to give him three beautiful nieces whom he got to spoil unmercifully. In fact, thinking about them now, he added his nieces to his list of things he
didn’t
hate about his life. His sister was also on the list, but not as high up as Pilar, Francesca, and Anabella. (Susan had a master’s degree in Italian architecture—she’d spent a year there before coming back to the states to start her own firm, and she always claimed the culture stuck.)

“As always, darling, and you?”

James sighed. “I’m afraid not, Mom. For one thing, I don’t know what I’d do with Marlowe—I don’t want to bring him out for such a short trip, because that’s hard on a dog, and for another…” And this was just so embarrassing. “Finances are a little tight,” he confessed, embarrassed because a forty-three year old man and a tenured professor shouldn’t have this problem. Unfortunately, the recession had hit teachers hard—community college teachers weren’t immune. His house—bought up in the fashionable Stanford Ranch area—had also had a balloon payment so he could keep his low interest rate. He didn’t want to think about what kind of repairs were waiting on his car. And, well, it didn’t count that he’d had his savings wiped out three years ago by… a person whose name he no longer spoke.

His mother knew about that—and she usually left it alone, because a man had his pride, but sometimes, well, sometimes you just didn’t want to haul your poor befuddled dog three-thousand miles across the country when it meant you might not be able to have that annoying rattle fixed on your ten-year-old car.

Now she sighed, the long-suffering sigh of martyrdom that he always feared.

“James….”

“Please don’t say it.”

“Really, darling….”

“Please don’t say it!”

“But it feels like you’re only staying out there for spite, darling! Not everything about Maine is bad, right?”

“Mother, I like it here.”

“I don’t see why!”

“Well, Marlowe and I are the only ones who need to see why,” he said firmly. “Please, can we not argue about this anymore?”

“But it was only one man, James!” His mother’s voice lost its polish and its equanimity for a moment, and she became the waitress working her way through a Princeton scholarship who had first attracted James’s father. “It was one man—and just because he was a sonovabitch doesn’t mean you have to leave the state forever!”

James sighed. “You don’t get it, Mom. It’s like… like….” He thought about watching those rainclouds come down from the Sierras that day. He thought about the smell of the sea from over one-hundred miles away. The electric tingle of those moments made the thing he was going to say right now sound less silly. “It’s like, you know how sometimes you feel like you’re waiting for something to happen? Well, whatever it is, I want it to happen here.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then his mother gave a laugh that sounded more and more like the girl James saw in his parents’ wedding pictures, and less and less like the sophisticated harridan who specialized in making James feel somehow disappointing without even trying.

“Well, James, knock me over with a feather. I think I finally see the poet in you, darling. You’ll have that best-selling novel out yet!”

“My last book was very well reviewed,” he said with dignity. And it had been—in a publication that specialized in fiction works by academicians only, that maybe five people in the world subscribed to.

“It was wonderful,” she said, and he remembered that same tone of voice when he presented her with a macaroni necklace and a clay ashtray after summer camp.

“Thanks Mom,” he murmured. “I’ve got to go now. Papers to grade.” It was a lie, of course. He’d graded all his midterm assignments the week before. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot else to do, right?

“Bye, sweetheart. I love you. Talk to you on Sunday, okay?”

“Mm-hmm, yeah. Sunday. Love you too.”

And with that, he was alone in his rather nice house in Stanford Ranch, wishing he was anywhere else at all, as long as he could be on his knees, worshipping the cock of Sophie Winchester’s anonymous underwear model. Was it James’s imagination, or had that man had the longest, darkest fringe of eyelashes in the history of mankind?

He focused on those eyelashes as he made himself a small salad with a broiled breast of chicken (he was at the age where he had to worry about cholesterol) and bananas and yoghurt for dessert. He focused on the sloe-colored, blue-black liquid eyes they sheltered as he cleaned up. He thought about the balanced, almost snub nose (the better to make the man look way too young for James, right?) as he surfed the internet for porn and watched
CSI:Miami
simultaneously.

It wasn’t until after all the porn that he started to fantasize about the biceps, the smooth dark skin, the washboard stomach under the tank top, and the entire package under the jeans beneath that.

By then he was ready to head off to bed for his sad masturbatory climax and sleep.

H
E
REGRETTED
his fantasizing on Wednesday, when he had Sophie in class again. He wanted badly to ask her about her friend and the setup and the entire thing but it all felt so adolescent and pathetic. If he’d been straight, dating Sophie was right out of the question—she was barely twenty, and he didn’t like to think of himself as a douchebag. Surely her friend would be out of the question too? Besides, he was doing just fine. He had his dog. He had his small house in the cookie-cutter suburb. He had his crappy car, which would run just fine for another year (or so his mechanic assured him), and he had his dignity. Well, as long as no one saw him at night with his internet porn collection and his pile of come towels in the hamper, he had his dignity.

He finished his lecture on the three major dystopian works and then asked if anyone had read the Vinge enrichment materials and was unsurprised when Sophie raised her hand.

“Can we really call the Vinge works science fiction anymore?” she asked thoughtfully, and he nodded. At least for this one, he was prepared.

“We’re on our way to making some of the technical aspects a reality, I grant you. I mean, how long before we combine our ATM cards with our cell phones, put them on our wrists, and plug them into our neural systems? Absolutely,” he said with confidence. “We’re well on our way. But the thing that has us flummoxed for that one is space travel—and that’s one of the reasons I think this book hasn’t made it into the official canon of dystopian lit.”

“But we don’t have the big baby farms like we had in the Huxley, either!” Sophie objected, and James smiled, because this debate was really the best part.

“No—but we do have the mass education, the government indoctrination, and the distraction from actual real, meaningful political subjects with media and knee-jerk emotional topics. Which, by the by, was a part of
1984,
as well.”

Sophie stopped for a moment and blinked. “Ohmigod, you’re totally right! The proles were
totally
the ones getting all the porn and the alcohol, and they were the ones who got to have the sex. It was the educated party members who had to be distracted with all of the bullshit! You’re right—that
has
come true. But why can’t we say the Vinge stories are good based on
their
similarities to the modern-day realities?”

And the debate was on. Other students began to participate, and soon there was a low murmur asking how to get hold of the enrichment materials, and people were genuinely surprised when class ended.

James smiled at the students as they left and waved, and Marlowe slobbered approvingly at his feet. Sophie Winchester was the last one to leave, though, and she stood at the door and looked back, obviously waiting for him as he gathered his briefcase and his dog lead and started out.