Pamela Dean (35 page)

"There is no King," said Molly. "We'll have to ask them."

"I don't think they want to talk to us right now," said Janet. "Let's go drink cocoa."

"I have to talk to Thomas," said Tina, leaping out of her seat.

But the door of the little Green Room was locked and no sound or light came from behind it. They went to Janet's house and drank cocoa and ate spice cookies. They did not talk about the play, but about Molly and Tina's struggles with invertebrate biology and Janet's progress with the small telescope. Tina was fidgety and received the eventual suggestion that they go home with great alacrity. They got back rather late, and found no telephone messages awaiting them.

Janet dug her overdue library copy of the play out from under her bed, and read the ending. Vindice confessed to Antonio, whose wife had suffered from the court's corruption at the play's beginning, that Vindice and Hippolito had killed the Duke and a selection of his sons. Antonio promptly arrested and executed them. Hippolito did not have much to say. Janet felt rather sorry for him; Vindice was the troublemaker, really.

Vindice explained to him that "'Tis time to die when we ourselves our foes,'" went on for a little about how his alter ego the pandar had predicted all this, and ended, "I'faith we're well—our mother turned, our sister true, We die after a nest of dukes! Adieu."

Which made precisely no sense to Janet. No wonder her father had skipped the Jacobeans.

The next day was Thursday, which meant Tina and Thomas would have lunch by themselves, Robin and Molly and Janet and Nick would eat with whomever else they could encounter, and Nick and Janet would have the room in Ericson to themselves for three hours after lunch. Janet and Molly pelted Nick and Robin, when they turned up meekly on schedule, with every question they could think of; and Robin and Nick said they would explain everything at lunch. The four of them had barely sat down, alone for once at a small corner table in Eliot, when Tina flung herself into the empty chair and burst into tears.

"Thomas hasn't turned up," said Molly, patting her on the back and giving Janet the sort of meaningful look she usually despised.

Tina, as usual, was commanding at least as much irritation as sympathy. Janet accordingly left the cooing to Molly, and fixed Nick and Robin with as forbidding a stare as she could manage. "Do you know anything about this?"

Nick put his head in his hands. Robin said blandly, "He is fighting for his life, Christina; if you must cry, do it for that."

"What the hell does that mean?" said Molly; Tina just went on crying into the sleeve of her pink cashmere sweater.

"Academically," said Nick, popping his head up suddenly. "He's having to explain to the head of the Classics Department why he should be allowed to continue at Blackstock."

"Begin at the beginning," said Janet, between her teeth, "go on until you get to the end, and then stop."

Nick and Robin looked at each other; Robin shrugged.

"Robin and I had a scheme," said Nick, "to perform a
Revenger's Tragedy
that would show, subtly, to the initiated, that Medeous runs that department as the Duke ran his court.

She would have known, and the Classics majors, but nobody else would. They might think the play treated women shabbily—which it does, really—but that was all.

"Now Thomas wanted more than that. He's going to switch to English, you know—if he survives—but there is something about Medeous. He couldn't just walk in and tell her so. He had to make a grand and irrevocable gesture. And he was responsible for the costuming, and he held it up so late we could not get replacements. But we could stage the play without the wigs, at least; and we thought, Robin and I, that everyone had agreed to that. You remember, Jack came on, at the beginning, with his gray wig? But Thomas was at them every moment he was backstage; and he must have persuaded them."

"Jack our Duke is graduating this spring," said Robin. "And Ambitioso and Supervacuo are in Modern Languages and Chemistry; she can't touch them. They thought it was a lark."

"What about Rob Benfield, though?" said Janet.

"He said," said Robin, "that Thomas had pointed out how silly the revengers would look if three of them had on those wigs and the fourth did not. Rob hates to make a play look silly; and he hates like poison to look silly himself. His first love is theater; if she won't let him graduate, he'll go off whistling."

Tina, hiccuping, had sat up and was rubbing her blotched face. Nick pulled a large blue handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and handed it across the table to her. She mumbled something, smiling grotesquely, and buried her face in the cotton.

"So hark, Tina," said Robin. "Thomas isn't angry, he is merely occupied. You had better pull yourself together. He's going to be in need of twice as much comforting as you think you are; he doesn't need you weeping all over him."

"He could have called me," said Tina thickly.

"He was probably rather distracted," said Nick.

"What do you know?" said Tina, still from behind the handkerchief, but with somewhat more clarity and vigor. "You never call anybody."

Janet thought it was ungrateful of her to attack the person whose handkerchief she was using, but she looked at Nick to see what he made of the accusation. He was smiling. "So, then," he said, "I must know very well the reasons a man doesn't call, mustn't I?"

"You are certainly perpetually distracted," said Robin. "You got that speech wrong again in Act III. You said, 'those who are known by both their names and prices,' when it is,

'both by.'"

"It scans better that way," said Nick, unperturbed. "Tourneur hadn't much of an ear."

"He had sometimes," said Janet. "'A lord's great kitchen without fire in't'?"

Tina flung the handkerchief down on the table. "How can you talk about poetry!"

"I thought," said Janet, losing her temper, "that we were tactfully giving you time to collect yourself."

Tina jumped up and ran out of the dining hall. Molly got up. "Oh, don't," said Janet.

"Don't spoil her. Why should she get sympathy for making a public scene? Eat your lunch."

"She wants somebody to go after her," said Molly.

"I don't care. She's being childish and manipulative."

"It's rather odd," said Robin. "You'd expect her to sit here suffering in quiet where we could all see her."

"For God's sake!" said Molly, who had started to sit down but now thrust her chair so violently under the table that she splintered the table's edge.

"I am a player," said Robin. "I know how these things are done. She's miserable, yes; but she does with her misery what she thinks will give her the most attention from the audience."

"You are a bunch of cold-blooded bastards," said Molly distinctly; and she left too, though with dignity; she even picked up her tray and deposited it on the conveyor belt before stalking out the door.

Janet felt tears in her own eyes. She had never cared what Tina thought, but to be condemned by Molly was unbearable. She took a huge swallow of milk and eyed her fellow criminals. Nick looked stunned, as well he might. Robin, damn him, was amused.

"Who would like to walk out next?" said Janet.

They looked at her.

"Which reminds me," said Janet, struggling a little. "Why did Medeous walk out? A lot fewer people would have made any connection if she'd just sat there and gritted her teeth."

"She got her revenge," said Robin, in mildly astonished t ones. "By ruining the end of

the play."

"And I thought Tina was childish. Good grief, isn't life too short for that kind of petty behavior?" She had meant this question to be rhetorical, and in fact nobody answered it.

But there was a moment of curious stillness, during which Nick stopped cutting up his hamburger (he never ate the buns) and Robin went on pouring milk into his coffee cup until it almost overflowed. He put the milk glass down smoothly, and Nick squished off a bite of hamburger and put it in his mouth.

Robin said, "It may be that they have similar temperaments. But Medeous has power too, and power can make men petty."

"And women too?" said Janet, rather more sharply than she meant to. The casual denigration of the play was still with her.

Robin looked rather blank.

Nick said, "He thinks 'men' means 'people.' Don't scold him. He doesn't agree with Tourneur, you know."

"Tourneur doesn't agree with me, either," said Robin. "Did you note what they call the image clusters in that play? Money and food and law. That's all."

"And lust," said Janet.

"The word, yes, over and over. But not images of lust. The play's curiously dry in that way. There's a great deal of greasy punning, but they seldom describe the deed. Not like

Lear,
or
Hamlet.
"

"Did you ever play in
Lear,
Robin?"

"I was the Fool," said Robin.

"Can you tell me what it means? We read it in English 10 and it made no sense to me at all. We're about to read it again in 13. I guess Davison might explain it better than Evans, but I doubt it."

Nick looked thoughtful, and Robin erupted in laughter. He almost upset his coffee cup. When Nick righted it for him, he leaned his chair back and whooped. Long after Janet and Nick had given up making sardonic remarks, he was still wheezing. "Dear, dear, dear, dear," he said finally, wiping his eyes with his napkin. "Explain
King Lear?
Nobody can explain
King Lear,
that's the beauty of it.
Will Shakespeare
couldn't explain it. He wrote what he wrote; that's all."

"It's a good thing you don't teach English," said Janet, irately.

Robin snorted feebly. Nick said, "As I was about to say when I was so rudely interrupted, you might think of it as being about authority and the neglect of authority and the abuse of authority. It's a great deal more than that of course—it's about love and hatred, too. But abuse of authority is where it all starts. That may help center your thoughts." He grinned at her."I was in the same production Robin was in," he said. "I played Kent."

"How could you perform a play if you didn't know what the playwright meant by it?"

Robin said sententiously, "A poem should not mean, but be."

"Oh, go on. If anybody else said that, you'd call it modern nonsense."

"You needn't know what the playwright meant," said Nick hastily. "You need to have some reasonable unity in your mind, that's all."

"Huh," said Janet, unconvinced, but aware that it was almost one o'clock.

"Go along, children," said Robin. "If you see Tina, try and salve her affront."

"Huh," said Nick, with more emphasis than Janet had used.

They went hurriedly out of the dining hall and through the wordy tunnels. Somebody had added a verse of a Rod McKuen song, which had already garnered seven rude comments. A little beyond it Tennyson and Robert Blake were warring for space. A few political slogans, predictable and unpoetic, marred what little remaining empty space there was; somebody had then come along and filled in the huge black letters with lines from Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague," written very small in red ink. Janet looked at them thoughtfully as she walked by. Horrible things were happening in the world outside the college, said the political slogans; and they always had, said the interlocutory verse.

"This world uncertain is." She took Nick's hand, quickly. When I graduate, she thought, then I'll think about these things. When I know something.

They went up the steps and down the red-carpeted hall, their fingers entwined, smiling secret smiles at each other. And stopped with a certain shock outside the open door of Janet's room. Nick shrugged and gestured Janet in.

Molly, in her air force parka and her red cap and mittens, a pile of notebooks beside her, sat on her bed.

"Where's Tina?" said Janet, cautiously.

"Wallowing all over Nora," said Molly. "It's Nora's job. I'm sorry I called you names.

She really is completely self-centered; I don't blame you for being sick of it."

"Well, I'm sorry I wasn't more civilized."

"I tried to be, and all it got me was idiocy. She
like
s making the worst of things. She wouldn't listen to any sense or advice; she just wanted to lie around wailing." Molly stood up. "I'm off to lab. I made Tina take her coat with her, so you can go ahead and lock the door. See you at dinner." She stumped out in her heavy boots and shut the door behind her.

"Well, that's better," said Janet, filling her blue enamel kettle at the sink and plunking it down on Molly's illegal hot plate. She crawled under Molly's desk to plug in the hot plate, which was a primitive device without an on-off switch.

"It's not better for Tina," said Nick.

"Fuck Tina," said Janet, without thinking.

"I've considered it," said Nick.

Janet remembered not to bump her head on the underside of the desk. She backed out carefully and sat back on her heels. "Very funny."

"You two aren't just to her."

Janet stood up, carefully. He looked a little troubled; he did not have the look that meant he wanted to be annoying. She said, "If you think you're going to make me more just by telling me you want to go to bed with her, you've fried your brains studying."

"Don't you want to go to bed with Robin?"

Janet sat down on her bed and gaped at him.
"
Robin?
Are you kidding? Robin is an alien. If he treated me the way he treats Molly I'd kill him. I don't even want to go for a walk with Robin without you or Molly as an interpreter."

Nick snagged the hairbrush off her bureau, sat down behind her, and began spreading her hair out on her back preparatory to brushing it. "I did not ask, do you want to marry Robin; I did not ask, did you wish to be a friend of Robin's; I di d not ask, did you wish to go

for a walk with Robin. I asked, did you not wish to go to bed with him?"

"I can't isolate it like that," said Janet. The kettle was boiling. She made herself a cup of contraceptive tea—it tasted like mint that had begun to go rotten—and Nick a cup of Constant Comment, to which he was addicted. They drank in silence, and Janet sat down where she had been.