Keeping Things Whole (19 page)

The Greek myths had their
meddling gods. We have our cellphones and answering machines. As another crucial September week ticked past with the batter still in the oven, I came home in relationship limbo to two more significant phone messages.

First, from Glore.

Hey, kids, great news. With my new backer I got the Capitol Theatre! Kate, don't you think Antony should wear a suit for a change instead of that valet uniform? Let's celebrate. Love vous, Mom.

The second message plucked the hairs on the back of my neck.

Hey, Kate, it's Melissa returning your call. I can meet you Thursday or Friday.

Was it good or bad that my pregnant lover had called up her sex worker acquaintance? Melissa's team definitely knew birth control. And its alternatives. Then again, why would Kate have given Melissa our number, not her cell? The plot thickened along with the zygote.

Another thing about actors: they don't get mad; they get even. In public.
Theatre of war
isn't an accidental phrase. All wars require planning and drama. With my secret backing, Gloria had chosen to direct
Macbeth
that fall long before Kate and I had stepped so far into our own river of blood. Given her months of preparation, Gloria couldn't have set out to include our homegrown content, but she was also never one to miss a creative opportunity on the fly.

With her
Medea
, I'd been utterly impressed. And proud. Best of all was the layered surprise of admitting there was more to her than I knew, and that the unknown bits were admirable. Wicked eyes brighter than diamonds, shoulders and thighs flared with strength. With her child-killing
Medea
, I'd thought about her and my street dealing. With her
Macbeth
, the murderous couple, she demanded I think about Kate and me. She turned
Macbeth
into
Mombeth
.

Macbeth
is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. Where Hamlet ponders, Macbeth does. The thinker and the doer, reason and instinct, opportunity found or made. Here again Billy Shakes coaxed history into the familiar tragic arc of a self-propelled rise and a self-generated fall. This time, though, he did it with a couple. Not just the human heart in conflict with itself, but the human heart in conflict with itself and another heart it loves. Conflict, paired.

By the time Gloria got the Capitol Theatre, we were secretly in the family way. (Excuse the redundancy: families aren't families without secrets.) As Mom moved from design sketches and working concepts to casting and the exploratory first read-through, Kate and I ineluctably moved day by day to parenthood. Gloria used money she didn't know was mine to sign a theatre-rental contract during Kate's sixth week. The show would go up at Thanksgiving, the end of our eleventh week. I prayed for peace in the eleventh hour and was prepared to do plenty to give thanks.

The first month of a pregnancy usually flies below the radar. Best to go for the A-vacuum ASAP. How could you miss what you barely knew you had? The count starts with the last period, not the moment when the white agent provocateur swims on through, so you've already lost a couple of weeks from the get-go. Behind the clock. Under the gun.

You'd think that two atheists with bounders for fathers would be immune to any saccharine delusions about families and Thanksgiving, but tell that to hope and/or hormones. I gambled that the October long weekend would be good for my cause, that a well-fed and traditionally wine-soaked weekend at the one-quarter mark of Kate's final year of law school might remind her how close she was to the time limit on this decision. I could also hope that spending time with her mother and mine, each with their holiday cocktails of judgement, misperception, and arrogance, their
hors d'oeuvres
of manipulation and their entrées of disapproval, would send Kate running for her tallest boots and a cocktail shaker, not mat wear. If you're wondering how I could hold on so long thinking that on Day 48 she'd tell me of an appointment she wasn't willing to make on Day 47, remember that she wasn't just young and pregnant. She was young, pregnant, and surrounded by women her age who were all about to become lawyers.

At the end of August, the calendar had been my enemy. Kate was still isolated, cut off from others and, crucially, out of competition. Anyone on a second university degree has learned to play the whole season, not just the single game or tournament. In summer, Kate might have thought of her, or Cletus, or us. In the fall, she'd have other women to think about, other, striving women.

Generally she hated that law school was yet another girl aquarium, the bright fish illuminated for all to see. But the future contract makers were already involved in a dozen contracts, some of them hard. Each of them knew they could still get great jobs with a B+ average, whereas only a monastic amount of studying would earn them A's. Three years of bags under the eyes and no friends to earn a GPA some firms would find frankly off-putting or three years of some studying, but also movies, books, dinner parties, and weekends away? For the B+ crowd (i.e., anyone who wasn't hoping to work in The Hague), law school was yet another fashion show. The aspiring legal ladies still wanted to be bar girls on Friday nights but now suddenly office tramps as well. The crisp shirts. Oh, the high boots and short skirts. A new tote bag each term.

While the majority of law school may have been another fashion show, Kate had also pointed out its diehard cell, women with chewed fingernails who could give you the daily body count in Iraq. The men with dark stubble, slim cellphones, and zero body fat who had compendious knowledge of Israel and the UN. Blond experts on Kosovo wore combat boots to mandatory classes in real-estate law and tried not to go insane.

I don't hide for a second my hope that Kate's competitiveness or envy or fear of rumour at school would tip the abortion scales she wouldn't tip just thinking about us. Was this hope healthy? Mature? Admirable? No. No. No. Whatever got the job done.

Turn over the rock of many social problems and, yes, you'll find the footprints of a departing father. Bullying. Arson. Illiteracy. All those pleas for attention even if it's negative, all those fuck-yous to the self and the world. Too true, but my preference was to be a non-father, not an absentee father. Also, I did have a Plan B. Nature, gorgeous women, and the insurance industry abhor a vacuum. If I didn't stick around to pay bills, take out the garbage, and run errands, someone else surely would.

Throughout Mom's rehearsal period, Kate and I continued to have our fights, thaws, and freezes, while my shill at Cronus Holdings doled the cash out to Glore. Twice I agreed with her gamble to run Shakespeare and a tragedy during Thanksgiving weekend. I encouraged her both as her son and, secretly, as her backer. Thanksgiving, a long weekend in which southern Ontarians no longer need to flee the climate and polluted landscape in which they make their money. And of course families get together on holidays. What's a family without blood, betrayal, and tragedy?

Originally we planned to see the show twice, on opening and closing nights. Two different dresses and suits, a slightly different show. But that was before we saw what Mom did with and to
Macbeth
. She started with children then got worse.

Act I, Sc. i. Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES.

In Gloria's case, that was enter three girls. We're talking nine or ten years old. All Asian, dressed in rags. Black hair matted and clumped. They wiped runny noses on torn sleeves. Flashes of lightning revealed sores on their lips, dirt-smeared cheeks, and filthy hands. Push a broom down a Calcutta alley and you'd collect these girls. This was the face of global poverty, each of them starving, illiterate, and capable of fleecing your pockets in a second. When Macbeth first saw the witches, this medieval Scottish nobleman's opening question could have been asked by any North American tourist to New Delhi. Macbeth carries a sword, we carry a fanny pack, but each of us asks: “What are these / so wither'd and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth / And yet are on't?” Here were the global poor, of my species yet not, deserving my guilt yet too alien to matter.

When Macbeth continued, “Live you? or are you aught / That man may question?” I heard the first private knife sharpening in the rented theatre. Indisputably, there had been a little emphasis on
man
. “Live you? or are you aught / That
man
may question?” Kate and I kept looking at the stage, not each other. At Macbeth's line, “You should be women—” the little witches drew the backs of their grimy hands to their dirty cheeks. With their elbows pointing high above their shoulders and the backs of their wrists pressed to their blackened cheeks, they wiggled their fingers in front of their mouths to suggest the “beards” Macbeth puzzles over: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” Ten minutes into the play and Mom was talking crotch.
You should be women
and elbows raised in the air like knees in metal stirrups. Fingers as beards at a hairy mouth. And young, Asian girls. Give Gloria some production money and look what she does.

Part of me was still able to admire the risks she was taking. No male director on the continent could do what she'd just done with child actors. But that beard joke was like a road sign pointing exactly my way. Even worse, I felt like a mom in thinking so. Aside from Gloria, dozens of people worked in her cast, crew, and production team to bring a four-hundred-year-old play to life for up to five-hundred spectators across a six-night run, and I thought it was all about me. But how not to? A man on the illegal make who's murderously afraid of children.

You may not want to hear this (but you have thought about it). Sitting in front of this trio of girls (Asian girls: Web porn and gendered abortion) raising their arms/legs to wriggle pubic hair in front of them—well, all this beside my Kate. Those girls on stage inverting age with their raised legs, that was life, not the polite lies we slop around it. Go to a wedding and nothing about the manicured event suggests that two crotches are being joined. No rented chair, centrepiece, rustle of silk, nor (toxic) salmon fillet acknowledges that first and foremost this is a union of genitals. Surely the relevant question is, Do you take his sex and you hers? How can you keep things whole in a rented tux and a dress that never gets worn again?

In a darkened theatre, Mom's darkened theatre, I saw in a flash what I was about to lose with Kate, that patch of private grass, lawn of refuge, picnic, and play. No one else had so captivated me, challenged me, or vexed me, and nowhere was Kate more half-Chinese than between the knees. Every day we saw race in the knitting, my tight curls to her wiry hair. All of this and more was coming at me in the first ten minutes of
Mombeth
.

I was watching witches and thinking of mothers. Both are terrifying in isolation and in packs. Gloria pulling puppet strings in front of me and Kate reorbiting beside me, all with Shakespeare's taunting lines. “Live you? or are you aught / That man may question?” Well, there was every thought I had about what was quickening inside Kate.

Art is a staircase, Mom told me more than once. Learn where it maintains ground and where it rises or falls. I heard that phrase echoed dozens of times when I had carried Gran up and down the narrow staircase of her house, my feet feeling out the risers and treads I couldn't see for the thin body in my arms. In the theatre, Gloria climbed a step in Lady Macbeth's first scene as she read a letter from her travelling hubby. He describes his meeting with “these weird sisters,” the non-father Macbeth claiming the witches as family.
Sisters
, not
witches
,
women,
or
girls
. Gloria extended the stage convention of having an actor read a letter aloud by having a pre-recorded voice track by the Lady Macbeth actor double the recitation. At times the recorded version lagged behind the live, portent echoing portent. At other times, the two versions were layered in stereo, the recording thickening the live and vice versa. When Lady M. lowered the note after she read it, Mom hit us again with a recorded “This have I thought good to deliver thee.” At this echo, Lady M. crumpled the note in front of her hips. Macbeth's words but Lady Macbeth's voice. And body.
Deliver thee
was said directly in front of her hips. Pride, fear, and wonder bit into me.

As Lady M's speech ended with that letter crumpled in front of her hips, I tried a little theatre Morse, pressing my leg against the side of Kate's. She didn't press back.

Family, it'll make you blind
and it'll make you see. Without Mom's production, I'd have gone on misremembering Lady Macbeth's famous line as “unsex me now.” How could I do that, living here in polluted Windsor? We've got one of the highest cancer rates in Canada. We tip the scales for Hodgkins lymphoma and babies born missing chunks of their brains. Our MS rate matches that of third-world toxic dumping grounds. Wind-sore Windsor. The nearby Aamjiwnaang Nation has one of the highest rates of female births in the world, two girls for every boy. And in the hooker capital of Canada, the line is definitely unsex me
here
.

Gloria refracted Lady M's unsex me soliloquy by sending out the three child actors again, this time clean-faced and dressed not as witches but identically to Lady Macbeth. “Come you spirits,” the lady called, and out came these three little Lady M surrogates to mime behind a translucent scrim. “Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” Each of the three mini-Ms mimed the presence of breasts, breasts each child actor clearly did not have, then ripped them away. One minute the miniature trio moved together, three parts of the same whole, then suddenly they were independent. Two girls stood behind the third and moved their hands and arms across hers. This accompanying mime emphasized already memorable lines in a speech that needed no emphasis for Kate or me.

Did Mom know all of the arrows she was firing into us? Could she count the ways?
Unsex me
. The most obvious interpretation, Change my gender. Stop me from being a woman. Whether that means turn me into a man (
sativus
) or neuter me (
sativum
) is a director's choice, and Mom made hers quite clearly. Anything but
sativa
.
Unsex me here
could also simply mean undo the sex I have had. Turn the clock back before that forgotten pill or the night of the vodka bareback. This undoing became more and more apparent each time Lady M uttered that double-agent of a word, “come.” Each child dancer had been cruising about in a slow and exaggerated shuffle, a low-to-the-ground labouring of flung feet, angled knees, and long transfers of weight. At the single word “come,” they simultaneously jolted upright as if shocked.

Their work together was taunting enough. Apart, they were murder. They scattered from their first shocking “come” into separate roles. The middle ex-witch/child/mini-M slid to the ground to recline on her back, knees raised and breath chuffing like a birthing mother. The second knelt behind her head to mop her brow and coach her breath. The third lay between the patient's knees as their madam made her hard bargain: “unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown”—grunts from the birthing child/mother—“to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty!” At the butcher's lines, “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,” the child physician and her child patient suddenly had a very different gynaecological procedure on their hands.

For all my terror, helplessness, and rage, I was still impressed. Once again we watched a woman subordinate her life and career to her husband's and/or her uterus. All that for an audience of mostly women who earned substantially less than men, were promoted less often, were rarely chief executives. Even more undiscussed were the abortions. In a crowd of two hundred adults, how many of the women had responded to pregnancy by saying
not now
?

What balance. Glore never ignored a scene's journey for its destination. Witness her gall. Start to finish, the whole play was one big relationship scrap. She's more impressive; no, he's more impressive. He's nasty; she's nastier. The switching, swinging Macbeths. Notice that the one Shakespearean female with multiple memorable lines is the dominatrix. In Act II, Mom sent her Lady out in a leather corset, all kink and riding crop. You might know a line of Juliet's and a phrase of Ophelia's, but it's Lady Leather we all remember.
Unsex me here. Out damned spot
. If you've got another of her lines, I'll wager it's
take my milk for gall
. “Come to my woman's breasts,” Mom's Lady called as her surrogates cupped air in front of their small chests to latch even smaller, invisible heads onto their imaginary breasts, heads which they suddenly flung aside as the line continued: “Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall.” The next few lines had the weird sisters up and dancing together again briefly before two resumed their work against one. Shifting gears on the third and final call to “Come,” two of the dancers slipped behind the third, one working low on her body and the other, well, high. As their lady called, “Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,” the upper-body dancer worked behind her standing sister to roll and pass her a mimed joint. Below her, the crouching third put something into one of her hands before reaching across to extract something from the other, the classic green handshake. Then for a second time, two of the sisters again attended to the north and south poles of the third, the upper patting a brow and smoothing back hair one second then seizing her arms while her lower co-worker kneeled to yield a shining scalpel. We knew where and how the blade struck as Lady M concluded, “That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry ‘Hold, hold!'”

An abortion production of
Macbeth
from my mother, beside the woman I didn't want to see become a mother. When the house lights came up at halftime, the audience applauding already, I turned to Kate. “You told her.”

If you've heard this from Kate, you'll have heard that I had been the one sitting closer to the aisle and that in waiting for an answer I had blocked not only her exit but also that of the dozen well-dressed people waiting down the row. All true, but listen to her reply.

“Will you let me by?” she asked instead of answering my question. And when that didn't work. “Us?”

Maybe she meant everyone down the row. Maybe.