In Harmony(98)

A props person pressed a beaded necklace into my hand, then handed me a rolled-up parchment tied with a red ribbon. Hamlet’s love letter, written in Isaac’s own hand.

Never doubt I love…

I peeked through a crack in the side curtains, peering into the audience. My parents were somewhere in the dark theater, watching. So was the casting agent who could give Isaac a new life. I had to protect his chance. If anything good could come out of this nightmare, it would be Isaac finding the success his talent deserved.

And maybe someday…

I couldn’t see someday. Everything felt hopeless. I could only picture a cold and snowy tundra sprawling in all directions. Me dropped in the center, a swirling icy wind whistling over me. And when I turned eighteen, what then? I had no money. All my life, I’d depended on my parents for everything. Now they had me trapped.

The only thing I could do was give Isaac this performance. Give him my best.

Just tell the story.

Onstage, Isaac was deep in his To be, or not to be soliloquy, tearing into it with naked rawness, leaving the audience pinned to their seats. The conflict within him burned bright in every word. The struggle to keep going when the desire was to give up. The ordeal of fighting when all you wanted was to sleep.

At the end, the audience held its breath until a single pair of hands began a spontaneous ovation that swept through the entire theater. I’d never heard of that happening before.

Isaac held still until it was over. I stepped onto the stage.

“The fair Ophelia,” he said. His voice drew inward and he added, “In thy orisons be all my sins remembered.”

Hamlet strolled in a small circle around me, hands clasped behind his back. Black trousers, black boots, and a black doublet with a gold pendant sewn onto the front. Dark and dangerous. And unraveling. His hair askew, tousled and wild above his sleek, neat clothes. His lips bore a tight, mirthless smile. His eyes looked at me with a shifting sea of love, longing, anger, pain.

“Good my lord, How does your honor for this many a day?” My voice was already shaking.

“I humbly thank you; well, well, well.”

With a shaking hand, I held out the letter and the necklace. “My lord, I have remembrances of yours, that I have longèd long to re-deliver; I pray you, now receive them.”

Hamlet gave a small jerk of his chin, as if perplexedly amused. “No, not I; I never gave you aught.”

He continued his strolling around me as I thrust my hand out again.

“My honour'd lord, you know right well you did; And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed as made the things more rich…” I swallowed my tears… “Their perfume lost, Take these again; for to the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” I put the necklace and letter in his hand. “There, my lord.”

Hamlet took them both, not breaking his stride. His lips curled up in a horrible sneer and his laugh was a mockery.

“Ha, ha! are you honest?”

“My lord?”

“Are you fair?”

His circling was making me dizzy as I fought to hold his gaze.

“What means your lordship?”

Hamlet shrugged, as if the answer were simple. “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”

“Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?” I asked.

He replied it was easier for beauty to turn a virgin into a whore, than honesty to turn a whore back into a virgin.

You’re too late, he was saying. The damage is done.

“This was sometime a paradox,” he said, his voice growing soft, his steps slowing. “But now the time gives it proof.” He stopped his slow prowl around me and held my gaze, pain riding the surface of his face. Then he dropped his gaze to the letter and I watched his eyes fill with tears.

“I did love you once.”

Tears slid unbidden down my cheek. “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”

The entire theater held its breath. The air felt crystalline and ready to shatter.

“You should not have believed me,” he said quietly. And tore the letter and its red ribbon to shreds. The pieces fell like snow and blood as he raised his head to look at me.

“I loved you not.”

His words slammed into my chest and sunk deep into my heart. I straightened to my full height, my lips trembling as the cold came back, turning me numb. Uncaring. And this time I reached for it.

Feeling nothing, I thought, would be preferable to the pain that was to come.

“I was the more deceived,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could muster.

Hamlet’s eyes flared at my callous reply. His pent-up anger and pain flooded out on a current of ancient words. He strode to me, loomed over me.

“Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

He gripped me by my shoulders, forcing a gasp out of me. My eyes were locked on his, unable to look away.

“What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery!”

His grip tightened, as he caught his breath, mastering his anger. Up through his eyes rose a plea. One last chance for us.

“Where's your father?” Hamlet asked, his voice cracking open to show Isaac.

The play vanished. The stage and theater disappeared. The audience shrank to one single seat with my father in it. Watching from the dark as Isaac asked me—begged me one final time—to choose him.