The Elizabethan Sonnet

By Ryan Napier

My teeth hurt. A sip of cold water or a quick breath on an icy day was enough to make me wince. I compared my smile to the way it looked in old pictures: the gums were definitely receding.

When I started to see pink blood in my spit after I brushed, I broke down and went to a dentist. “You should be coming in every six months,” said the hygienist. “We’d have caught a lot of this before it got so bad.” I might have explained that the university didn’t offer dental insurance to grad students and I had a hard enough time paying my share of the rent as it was, but her hands were in my mouth, so I nodded with my eyes and let her continue poking. I left the office with a series of follow-up appointments and an estimate that amounted to three months’ rent.

I watched the department’s listserv for short-term jobs, and at the end of the spring semester, I found one that looked promising. A retired faculty member had recently completed a manuscript and wanted a grad student to type it, since he had never learned to use a computer. In a couple of weeks, I figured, I could make enough to fix the left side of my mouth. I emailed the department administrator to express my interest, and a few days later, she wrote back to say that the job was mine. I would start after Memorial Day and receive half of my pay up-front and the other half when I finished—however long that took. 

There was a catch. The professor didn’t want to part with the manuscript, so I would have to work out of his home. That was fine with me: it would get me out of my broiling apartment. 

The professor lived on Carr Street in a tall, yellow Victorian trimmed with fussy white woodwork. There are parts of Cambridge that seem to exist outside the density that surrounds them—this was one. Three spreading trees shaded the house and the yard, enclosing them from the rest of the city. Porter Square and Mass Ave were only a quarter of a mile away, but within the professor’s wooden fence, it was so still that I could hear the bees passing from flower to flower.

I arrived at ten, as instructed, and knocked. When no one came, I double-checked the address in the email and called out the professor’s name; nothing was moving but the bees. Thinking that I had come to the wrong door, I followed the porch around the house and came to the backyard, which was screened from the neighbors by a row of evergreens and an ivy-covered wall. Against the house, a black-cherry tree bloomed with clusters of white flowers, and beneath it, in an Adirondack chair, a young woman sat reading and drinking coffee. She wore a blue sweatshirt and cotton pajama shorts; her bare crossed ankles rested on a glass table, and her book lay open across her thighs. A bird began to sing overhead; another responded. The woman brought her coffee cup to her lips and was about to drink when she saw that she was not alone. She acknowledged me with what must have been, behind the cup, a smile.

This was O., the professor’s granddaughter. She had just finished a master’s degree at the New School and was living with her grandfather for the summer while she interned at the A.R.T. I learned these details later, and I could never quite square them with my first sight of her in the blooming summer stillness. I often wondered whether she would have struck me in the same way if I had met her somewhere else; there were, in a two-mile radius, several hundred women with similar educations, professional trajectories, and tastes. But I met her there, beneath that flowering tree.

“You can come in next time,” she said. “The front door’s unlocked.”

O. led me through the house, which was full of dark wood and bow windows, to the professor’s office. It took me a moment—amid the stacks of books, papers, and frames that covered the furniture and most of the floor—to find him. The professor picked his way through the clutter, shook my hand, and asked O. to bring us some cookies and sherry.

“I’m fine,” I said. “No need, really.”

“The cookies are on the counter,” he said to O., “and the sherry’s in the door of the refrigerator.”

While O. was in the kitchen, the professor moved some books to make a place for me on the couch. An envelope with my name on it lay on the coffee table, containing what I assumed was the first half of my payment; it would be rude, I decided, to take it immediately. O. returned with a plate of gingersnaps and a brown bottle of sherry, which she poured into three bell-shaped glasses. With nowhere else to sit, O. squeezed in next to me on the couch; our elbows brushed when we drank, and her hip pressed against mine. I could hardly focus on the questions that the professor asked me about myself, and I was glad when he and O. began to banter.

“Don’t let us keep you, dear,” said the professor. “She’s very busy,” he said to me. 

“I’m just reading,” O. said.

“Reading is work.”

“Some of us do it for pleasure.”

“I never understood the difference. We—” The professor gestured at me— “do both at once.”

O. looked at me; I shrugged. “We’re very efficient,” I said.

“Clearly.” She nodded at our sherry glasses. “Most people wait until after noon.”

“Leave the bottle!” said the professor, but O. had already disappeared into the hallway, laughing.

A breeze came in through the open window, stirring the acid smell of old paper in the room. As we finished our sherry, the professor told me about his book, which was about the development of the Elizabethan sonnet. I was writing a dissertation on Joyce, but I recalled enough about the Renaissance from my oral exams to follow his argument. The professor pronounced the names of sixteenth-century sonneteers—Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney—as if they were old friends, and I remembered what I had thought grad school would be like, all those years ago.

The professor had cleared a working space for me on the rolltop desk by the window. “I’ll be here,” he said, patting the arms of his chair, “if you have any questions.” While I set up my laptop, he sifted through a stack of magazines and chose a copy of the TLS. He was an active reader, purring and murmuring and humphing as he went. Several times, he started to say something to me, but stopped himself. Finally, he couldn’t hold back: “There’s a new book on Nabokov in America,” he said. He read aloud from the article and gave his commentary (“Bit of a snot. But a good novelist”). I told him I liked Pale Fire, and we compared our theories of what happens in it for ten minutes before he remembered that I was supposed to be typing. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “Just here to answer questions.” Five minutes later, he was telling me what Geoff Dyer had written about Teddy Wilson.

This continued for the rest of the morning. I didn’t mind, in part because we were eventually joined by O., now wearing a loose blue shirt-dress. She leaned in the doorway of the office, her hands in the pockets of her dress, listening to her grandfather explicate a New Yorker article about the election. “‘There is a common denominator,’” he read, “‘between support for Trump and Sanders: white male rage.’”

O. groaned.

“She voted for Bernie,” said the professor.

“So did I,” I admitted.

“So did you,” O. said to her grandfather.

He grinned. “You were very persuasive.”

In the afternoon, the office was flooded with sunlight. The professor napped in his chair, and I got to work on the manuscript. The introduction discussed the blazon, in which the poet catalogs the features of his beloved. The professor quoted heavily from the sonnets; I typed line after line of their excessive praise—snowy brows and starry eyes, golden hair and rose-red cheeks, lips like rubies and coral. And though she was dark-haired and brown-eyed, the face that came to my mind was O.’s.

That night, as I was brushing my teeth, I realized that I had forgotten to take the check.

⁂

The first day set the pattern for the summer. In the mornings, the professor read—usually magazines, but sometimes academic journals, which inspired him to discourse on the state of the field. In the afternoons, I typed the manuscript. I had planned to finish it in a few weeks; at this rate, it would take me until the end of July, at least.

But instead of working more efficiently, I found myself stretching out the time. While the professor dozed, I crept out of the office and went to the kitchen, ostensibly for a glass of water, hoping to encounter O. on the way. Her internship rarely required her to be on-site, so she spent most of the time working in InDesign at the kitchen table or reading beneath the black-cherry tree. At first, I came up with pretenses to speak to her—offering to get her something from the kitchen, asking about the house—but soon it was understood that I could simply sit with her at the kitchen table or lean against the tree.

Sometimes we discussed her internship and my dissertation, which didn’t seem as dull as usual when I explained it to her. More often, however, I listened to O. recall her previous visits to her grandfather. We wandered together through her childhood: the red and gold leaves that blanketed the yard, the smoking fireplace that the professor insisted on lighting at Christmas, the sulky gray cat that once ruled the second-floor landing, the dry smell and shadows of the garret. Other people’s nostalgia is usually boring, but with O., it was different: I felt like I was being enfolded into the strange, separate universe of the house.

As the summer wore on, the white flowers on the tree were replaced by small, round cherries, green at first, then red, then purplish-black. O. taught me which ones were ripe, and we harvested a bowlful every few days. The taste was bitter; O. laughed at the scrunched face I made after my first bite. But with practice, I could eat as many as she could without a grimace. We compared the stains that they left on our fingers and tongues, and the image of her smudged mouth lingered even after I had returned to the love poems of the English Renaissance.

I thought about asking her to get a drink or go to a movie, and once or twice, O. hinted that I should. Yet something in me hesitated. I didn’t want us to drink nine-dollar IPAs in Davis Square and describe what we’d seen on Netflix to each other, like other people of our age and class. What we had was rarer, but it could only exist, I felt, in the private world of Carr Street. When I passed through the gate each morning, I left behind my rotting gums and debt and mild depression and entered into an elaborate intimacy, built on years of love between O. and the professor and the house. It was like one of those magical forests in a Shakespearean comedy—a place apart, where lovers lose themselves and take on new identities—and I didn’t want to break the spell.

One afternoon, a heavy thunderstorm rolled in, turning the sky pale green. O. lay on the couch, eating a peach and designing a poster on her laptop; I stood at the window and watched the rain. Something was moving under the black-cherry tree; after a minute, I recognized that it was a wild turkey, pecking at worms uprooted by the storm. Turkeys weren’t unusual in this part of Cambridge, but when I mentioned it to O., she rushed to the window. She had loved them as a child, she said, but hadn’t seen one all summer. I crouched to give her a better view; as she leaned forward, her chest pressed against me. I waited for her to pull back, but she didn’t, and when thunder shook the house, I felt her heart leap.

⁂

In August, the A.R.T. staged Hamlet. O. got tickets for one of the previews and invited me to come with her and the professor. On that day, instead of leaving the house at four like usual, I stayed and helped O. with dinner, slicing the tomatoes and mozzarella for a caprese salad while she made the balsamic glaze. The three of us walked to the theater, cutting across the Radcliffe Quad, and arrived in time to drink a glass of red wine in the lobby and admire the posters, which O. had designed. The professor praised her subtle use of the ornament from the title page of the quarto, and O. glowed with pride.

The production was experimental; four actors played all the parts, changing character in mid-scene by throwing off a hat or putting on an accent. I appreciated the skill it required, but I had no patience for the play itself: I was too happy for a tragedy. Before the final act, the cast called the audience onto the stage, and we stood in a ring to watch the graveyard scene and the duel. The jostling of the crowd separated me from O. and her grandfather, and I ended up on the opposite side of the stage. As Hamlet lamented poor Yorick, O. caught me looking at her. She returned the glance and mouthed something at me, but I couldn’t make out the words.

After the play, the professor insisted that I come home with them for a nightcap. O. lit a citronella candle, and we sat under the black-cherry tree and drank from the same glasses we had used on the day I first arrived. The professor delivered his verdict on the production; a bird or squirrel rustled in the branches above us.

“These cherries are edible, you know,” said the professor.

“We’ve been eating them for weeks,” O. said.

“And saving none for me?” 

“You said they didn’t agree with your stomach.”

The professor began to recite:

“Sweet garden nymph, which keeps the cherry tree,

“Whose fruit doth far th’Esperian taste surpass,

“Most sweet-fair, most fair-sweet, do not, alas,

“From coming near those cherries banish me.”

“Astrophil and Stella,” I said. “Sonnet 82.” (It was analyzed in chapter 2 of the manuscript.)

“I’m outnumbered,” said O.

“I’ll even things out,” said the professor, finishing his sherry. He stood, kissed the top of O.’s head, patted me on the shoulder, and wished us both a goodnight.

O. poured more sherry. She looked different—softer, her features more finely shaded. It was the first time, I realized, that I had seen her at night. The rustling in the branches stopped; a baby rabbit darted out of the darkness of the yard, froze in a square of light from the house, and darted back into the darkness.

“It’s so quiet here,” O. said. “I’ll miss it.”

My words stuck in my throat: “When do you leave?”

“The internship is basically over, but the girl who’s subletting my apartment isn’t moving out until the 15th, so I’m here for another week, at least.”

“That’s so soon.”

“Don’t your sonnets have something to say about that? The shortness of the summer, enjoying it while you can?”

I knew, of course, that it would end. Even if O. had lived at her grandfather’s house, I couldn’t type the manuscript forever. Until now, however, I had managed to lock this knowledge away in the part of my brain where I kept other unpleasant but inevitable things, such as going on the academic job market and death. 

Our glasses were empty, but neither of us moved. I decided that I wouldn’t be the first.

⁂

A few days later, I finished the final chapter of the manuscript. All that was left was the works cited: the heavy stack of the professor’s handwritten pages had been reduced to a couple of sheets that fluttered off the desk if the window was open.

It was two in the afternoon, and the professor was sleeping, but rather than complete the job, I went looking for O. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the backyard, so I walked along the porch and found her in front of the house, refilling the bird feeders that hung from the trees. She stood on her tiptoes and braced the heavy bag of seed against her hip. The awkwardness of the pose sharpened my tenderness for her, reminding me of the privacy that we would lose when, at the end of the week, she returned to New York.

I crossed the lawn and helped her with the bag. When the feeder was full, we leaned against the fence and waited to see if the birds would return. O. asked about the manuscript, and I told her about the chapter I’d just completed, which was on the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“I’d hate to be one of those women—to have someone constantly comparing you to things. Exhausting.”

“The men of Astoria aren’t writing sonnets in praise of your beauty?” I said.

“Somehow, no.”

“Their loss.”

O. laughed; it was still possible, at that point, to take it as a joke. A sparrow landed on the feeder and tried to eat, but the dispenser was jammed. O. walked over and tried to fix it.

“I feel bad for the poets,” I said. “Most of the sonnets are about unrequited love.” My instincts told me to stop; I didn’t. “It’s painful to want someone like that. To know that it can’t happen.”

O. was facing away from me, still tinkering with the feeder, but I saw her shoulders tense. “I’ve read some of those poems too,” she said. “Not as many as you, I’m sure. But enough. And I get the sense that even if it were requited, the poets wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

She picked up the bag of seed and carried it back to the house. I remained there in the corner of the yard. I was at the edge of the professor’s property, and after a minute, I heard, somewhere on Mass Ave, the hiss of a bus’s airbrake.

About the author:

Ryan Napier is the author of Four Stories about the Human Face (Bull City Press). He lives in Massachusetts. More at ryannapier.net and @ryanlnapier on Twitter.