“It’s Hamlet,” Yale said. “It’s supposed to be unnerving.”
“Do you know how long that play is? We’ll be old before it’s over.”
Yale had taken off his loafers and was slipping his feet, again, into Nico’s shoes. They’d stretched a bit, the leather holding the shape of his toes.
“Oh,” Charlie said, “your dad called, I think.”
Yale’s father always phoned within the first few days of the month—regularly enough that Yale assumed it was something he scheduled, an item on his to-do list, like checking the batteries in the smoke detectors. It wasn’t an insult; it was just the way his father’s accountant brain worked. But if Charlie picked up, Leon Tishman wouldn’t leave a message, would just stammer that he must have misdialed. Five years ago, when Yale was so newly in love with Charlie that he couldn’t help shouting it from the rooftops, he’d tried telling his father he was in a relationship. His father said something like “Bop bop bop bop bop,” a sound effect to cover Yale’s voice, to stop his talking.
Yale said, “He was due for a call.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t say anything. Bit unusual. Just breathing.”
“Could be your secret admirer,” Yale said. “Was it heavy breathing?”
But Charlie didn’t find it funny. He said, “Anyone else it might’ve been? Because it was odd.”
Yale didn’t like the direction this was headed. He could have gotten defensive, or he could have just reassured Charlie, but instead he said, “Nico did promise to haunt us.”
Charlie rolled over, buried his face in the pillow. He said, muffled, “I really don’t want to go tonight.”
“Come on, get up. Let’s just do the first half, so you can say you saw the set design.”
“I do want to see the set. I just don’t want to watch the play.”
“What’s this about? Julian? Because I don’t get it. We can’t suddenly not have friends just because you’re going through this paranoid phase.”
“Don’t start that,” Charlie said, and Yale was about to counter that he hadn’t really started it, but Charlie was sitting up now, opening the dresser to change his socks.
* * *
—
It was an all-male production, Ophelia and Gertrude in drag, and not only were Guildenstern and Julian’s Rosencrantz clearly meant to be a couple, so were Hamlet and Horatio. Yale found it all darkly hilarious, with lines like “What a piece of work is a man” suddenly taking on new meaning, but Charlie didn’t laugh, kept folding his program.
Nico’s set design was bleak and postapocalyptic. Hamlet didn’t live in a castle, apparently, but an alleyway—all fire escapes and dumpsters. It was strangely beautiful, if slightly more suited to West Side Story. If Nico had been around to oversee things, Yale imagined he might have added more color, graffiti, light.
Julian looked, as always, made for the stage. His dark hair glowed like wet paint.
In high school, Yale had wished he’d had the acting bug. He didn’t want the social fallout, but he wanted, desperately, something to talk about with the guys who got up there and, with no apparent self-consciousness, sang and even danced their way through Guys and Dolls, through Camelot. But the thought of going onstage was terrifying, beyond just the stigma. He could never have opened his mouth up there.
He’d mentioned it, offhand, to the shrink he’d seen at U of M, a guy who would occasionally suggest that Yale wasn’t so much homosexual as lonely. “Could that desire be about your mother?” he’d said. “A desire to connect with your mother, through the theater?” And Yale had brushed it off, said that wasn’t it at all. But he’d wondered, in the years since, if it weren’t even simpler than that—if he didn’t possess some latent theater gene that would never emerge but that he could feel, now and then, tugging.
It wasn’t till halfway through the first act that Yale spotted Asher Glass two rows ahead. The stage lights glowed through the backs of his ears, turned them translucent so Yale could see their threadlike veins.
At intermission, they found Asher in the lobby, looking at the racks of books and T-shirts the company had brought in for sale.
Yale said, “It’s not bad, right?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here. I can’t concentrate, can you?”
“I think it’s okay to let your mind wander.”
Asher looked back blankly. “No, I mean Teddy. I’m thinking about Teddy.”
Charlie’s voice turned thin. “Is he, what, is he sick?”
Asher let out a strange, short burst of laughter. “Someone broke his nose. Last night.”
“What?”
“They banged his head into the sidewalk. He was on campus at Loyola. He teaches some undergrad class, right? And he was walking back afterward and someone just—” He pantomimed it on his own head, grabbing his hair and thrusting himself forward. “On the sidewalk. It wasn’t a robbery even.”
“Is he—”
“He’s fine. He’s got a bandage across, and two stitches, and a black eye. He’s home, if you—but he’s okay. It’s more the fact of it. They have no idea who did this. One person, five. Students, punks, some asshole just strolling through campus.”
“Have you seen him?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I went to help him deal with the cops. You know how they are. Even if someone’s caught, they’ll say it was gay panic, say you put your hand down their pants, whatever. You’re covering this in the paper, right?”
“In general?” Charlie said. “Violence?”
“No, this. Will you write about Teddy?”
Charlie pulled at his lip. “It’d be up to Teddy. And my editor.”
“You’re gonna cover it. I’m following up tomorrow.”
And then it was time to head back in.
Yale tried to pay attention, but he saw Teddy’s face hitting the sidewalk again and again, and because there were so many different ways he could picture it, he was compelled to picture them all: undergrads following him out of class; teenagers on bikes, a sudden inspiration. Teddy was so small. He closed his eyes, squeezed the image out physically.
He glanced at Charlie a few times, tried to read his face. Charlie drummed his fingers on the armrest, but he’d done that through the first act too.
Afterward, Yale wanted to join the crowd waiting to congratulate Julian—Asher and those guys from the sandwich shop where Julian worked and the chubby accountant Julian used to see—but Charlie had to get to work. “You can hang back if you want,” he said, but Yale wasn’t an idiot.