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By Root 921 0

truly. Thank you. I have to admit to a sort of astonishment. I feel like I am getting to know him as a peer, as a friend, as a guy whose path I cross now and then at the theater or the pub. Watching him work—following his thinking from Holinshed to the play. Sensing what was on his mind as a writer—seeing how Arthur leaks over from the other plays at the time, how it seems like a first stab at plays that came later. Do you see seeds of Hamlet and Henry V in Arthur? I think I do sometimes, in the shape of the soliloquies. He’s moved way past Edward III, but he’s not at Hamlet yet, but he’s figuring out how to write something more introspective than Richard III, for example. Dana has been amazing, helping me think all this out. You know I’ve never really been there with you and her on Shakespeare, but I’m catching up, and I’ve never felt happier with work than I do now. It’s not even my own stuff, but I feel better, closer at times to this than I have even to my own books.

I dined almost every evening at Dana and Petra’s, often without Dana as her rehearsals went later into the night in the weeks leading up to her opening. Petra cooked, without recipes but with inherited mastery, every bite an act of love dusted with fennel powder. Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug. When she was there, Dana practiced her lines; as rehearsals progressed, she was living more closely to her role as Emilia, an unmarried girl. It was a remarkable testament to Dana’s talent and beauty that at age forty-five she’d been cast in such a part. Petra ran lines with her: “You shall never love any that’s called man.” “I am sure I shall not,” Dana answered. “I / And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent, / Loved for we did, and like the elements / That know not what nor why, yet do effect / Rare issues by their operance, our souls / Did so to one another. What she liked / Was then of me approved, what not, condemned …” I ate, a gender-bent beagle’s snout snuffling for crumbs in my crotch, and my twin sister took her girlfriend’s hand and pressed it to her lips, and Petra looked across the table to me with an expression I took as embarrassment, confusion, encouragement, even apology.

In Twelfth Night, after all, a woman falls in love first with a female twin dressed as a man and then, when she meets the male twin, she has no trouble at all instantly transferring all that love to the man. I could almost see Dana wooing Petra on my behalf, preparing her for me by being her own open, lovable self, the better version of me that I would then become by the force of Petra’s transferred love.

For this imagined Petra (unlike 99 percent of the world), romantic love would somehow be prior to gender. Identity, the lovable essence, would exist separate from gender. She would not be indifferent to gender (as I hoped she would love my male body), but she would love my gender only because it was subsequently revealed to be attached to my sexless but romantically lovable personality. (Neuroscience has proven this, what Shakespeare described in Twelfth Night: the bit of brain that sparkles with lust is near but not identical to the bit that identifies the sex of others. They can, on rare occasions, operate entirely independently, lust without gender, love without gender, just souls finding each other.)

When we were sixteen or seventeen, Dana and I were walking along Hennepin. This was a spring evening, warm and light, so May or June. I can’t quite place the year, but I have a staticky notion that we were on our way to see a movie at the Uptown. I was complaining about a girl, though I can’t specify which, and I clearly remember Dana saying, “She may be out of reach, killer.” I know, too, that I had recently read a novel, I think by Graham Greene, though I can’t remember which, but I am sure the book had taken hold of me in the way adult novels can overpower a young reader’s own identity and shape him.

We were walking through the darkening air, and the streetlights were buzzing