The Sonnet Lover (4 page)

As I leave Mark talking to Orlando and find my way to the reserved faculty seating near the front of the auditorium, I feel a pang of concern—not for Orlando, but for Robin. What if Orlando’s accusation of plagiarism has some merit? Sinking into my seat, I realize that it wouldn’t be the first time.

Robin had taken an Intro to Shakespeare class with me his freshman year. He was one of my best students, always lingering after class with a question about that day’s reading. The questions were astute and revealed reading beyond what was assigned. Unlike some of my students who were fascinated by the so-called authorship question (which, I always went to great pains to explain, I didn’t consider a question at all), Robin was fascinated by whom Shakespeare was writing
to
—he wanted to know the identity of the young man and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. He’d written a brilliant term paper on the possibility that Shakespeare had written the sonnets to one of the boy actors in his acting troupe. It was a little too brilliant. One of the phrases in particular echoed in my head with a nagging familiarity: “Of all the motives of dramatic curiosity used by our great playwrights, there is none more subtle or more fascinating than the ambiguity of the sexes.” I submitted it to ithenticate.com—the Web site I used to check student work I suspected of plagiarism—and discovered its source. It had been written by Oscar Wilde in 1899. In fact, Wilde had written a small book (published posthumously in 1921) called
The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,
in which I found the crux of Robin’s theories about the sonnets.

When I called Robin into my office and confronted him with the plagiarism, he burst into tears. He’d meant to credit Wilde for the theory and of course for the quote. Hadn’t I gotten the bibliography attached to the paper? I told him I hadn’t and that I had to give him an F for the paper. In addition, if I ever found any cause to suspect him of plagiarism again, I’d have to report him to the dean’s office.

Although I told him I couldn’t give him credit for it, Robin rewrote his paper. He did good work throughout the rest of the class, and even with the one F he managed to get a B-minus for the term. Most surprisingly, he kept taking classes with me and kept lingering after class. He’d never given me any reason to suspect him of plagiarism since, and I liked to think that he had learned his lesson. Now I wasn’t so sure. Worse, I couldn’t help thinking that by not reporting Robin’s first infraction I might have given him the idea that he could get away with plagiarism. Had I been swayed by how much I liked him? And by how much he obviously liked me? I certainly didn’t relish telling Mark about the Oscar Wilde paper, which I’d have to do if Orlando’s claims turn out to have merit.

When the lights dim I realize how tired I am. I close my eyes to rest them for a moment and only half listen to Mark’s opening remarks. I know the spiel well enough. How Hudson’s film program has grown since Cyril Graham’s generous donation, the many Hudson graduates whose films have won prizes at film festivals around the world, the growing prestige of the internship at La Civetta, which many of tonight’s filmmakers will be taking advantage of this summer…all this glamour casting a reflected glory onto the college in general. I’ve heard it all before—it’s practically all Mark talks about these days—and the reflected glory is beginning to look a bit tarnished to me.

Five years ago a student like Robin with his passionate love of Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry might have chosen to go on to graduate study in English or comparative literature—or maybe an MFA program in playwriting. But instead the new film program has propelled Robin into a filmmaking career that I can’t help but fear—remembering how ragged and tense he looked in class today—is too much for a boy of his age. Perhaps it is even the kind of intense pressure that might compel a boy like Robin to embellish his film with someone else’s words.

As the first film begins, another thought makes me queasy. What if this is what Robin wanted to talk to me about earlier today? Maybe he’d wanted to confess that he’d “borrowed” part of the script to his film and that was why he was worried about how people were going to react to it. He’d asked me to come to his rescue. But what on earth could I do for him? And what would Mark think if I came to Robin’s defense?

I try to concentrate on watching the films, willing my heart to beat slower, willing the voices in my head to quiet. I let the montages of disconnected (at least they seem disconnected to me) images and loud music roll over me until I feel a little numb. I can barely feel my heart beating at all. But then the second-to-last entry is filmed with a hand-held camera that’s so shaky, I begin to feel nauseous. I close my eyes until I can tell by the applause that it’s time for Robin’s film. When I open them, my heart begins to race again.

It’s as if I’ve been transported to the garden at La Civetta at the height of summer. The scene is so lush, so green, that when I breathe in I’m surprised the air doesn’t smell of lemons. The avenue the camera moves down is lined with lemon trees, each one in its own huge terracotta pot. A slim girl steps out from behind one of the pots and, as the camera hovers just over her right shoulder, she opens an old leather-bound book and turns past its marbled endpapers to a page marked with a yellow ribbon. As she begins walking down the avenue of lemon trees, her head bowed to the book as though she were reading, we hear a voice reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet 18.

Shall I compare thee to a summer day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

The camera hovers over the girl’s shoulder, so close that strands of her golden hair stray across the lens, but the angle allows us only to glimpse her profile. The breeze that blows her hair also stirs the climbing rose vines that cling to the arbor arching over the avenue. The camera follows a trail of loose petals as they float down to the tiled walk and drift beside the girl’s feet.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

The girl stops and shades her eyes against the sun for the next line:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And then a shadow moves across her face while the narrator reads:

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

The choreography of poem and image would be hokey if the girl weren’t so mysteriously beautiful and the voice so strangely sad. It’s Robin’s voice, I realize as the girl pauses at the end of the lemon avenue to look out at a view of the Tuscan countryside and the orange-tiled roofs of Florence in the distance.

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

It’s the same poem we read in class today, but while most of my students could barely be bothered to listen to it, this audience seems to be held in thrall as the girl turns from the sunlit lemon avenue to a shady path between clipped yew hedges.

Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

At the end of the yew walk is a marble tomb, surmounted by a statue of a reclining woman, her face veiled. As Robin reads the concluding couplet of sonnet 18 we see the same lines inscribed in the marble:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The tomb and the statue are from the late Renaissance, but the lines were added in the early twentieth century by Cyril Graham’s father, Sir Lionel, who was so taken by Shakespeare that he peopled his gardens with statues of Shakespearian characters and adorned every available inch of bare marble with lines from the plays and sonnets. The tomb stands, I remember, just outside the lower entrance to the
teatrino,
the green theater, so I’m not surprised when we follow the girl into the semicircular grove framed by topiary clipped to look like side wings and footlights. The green stage is peopled by statues modeled after Shakespeare’s leading ladies. The girl strolls by Miranda, Ophelia, and Juliet, and then comes to pause in front of the last statue. This one is of a boy, or rather, I realize, it’s supposed to be Rosalind from
As You Like It
dressed as a boy. But when the girl leans forward and kisses the statue, it becomes a real boy—one I recognize as Orlando. As she embraces him, I recognize her as well—she’s the girl from the park, Zoe, wearing a blond wig. The embrace is so realistic that I begin to wonder whether
this
is what all the fuss was about in the park—a teenage love triangle that’s gone sour. Maybe the real theft Orlando was upset about was of this girl—not a piece of writing after all.

The long embrace is broken by a noise that we don’t hear but sense in the couple’s guilty expressions. While the girl looks behind her, the boy snatches the book from her hand and flees the
teatrino,
disappearing into the shrubbery. We see the girl’s face for one moment, her features contorted with grief; then she plunges into the hedges to follow him.

The camera follows the girl crashing through dense woods. The garden has become a wasteland of overgrown thicket and toppled and broken statuary. It takes me a few minutes to recognize—or even notice—the sonnet Robin’s reciting now: number 35, which begins “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done”—Shakespeare’s note of forgiveness for his beloved’s betrayal. The poem’s images of corruption—cankerous roses and mud-stained fountains—are mirrored in the landscape through which the girl wanders. The rose petals that drifted by her feet in the first scene appear again, but now they stain the tiled walk like splotches of dried blood. Her face is scratched by thorny bushes and her clothes are stained with mud by the time she comes out of the wilderness and sees the dark-haired boy sitting on the rim of a ruined fountain with another woman, their heads bent over the Moroccan-bound book, laughing at what’s written there. We can see from Zoe’s ravaged expression that her degradation is complete. When the couple leaves the fountain, they leave behind the book, which Zoe picks up.

She turns away and begins walking up a wide, bare avenue, which I recognize as the lemon avenue of the first scene—only now the lemon trees are gone and the rose arbor, which had been flowering in the first scene, is bare. In the course of the short film, spring has become fall, afternoon has become evening. We see the sun setting over the Tuscan hills as the girl pauses outside a stucco building, the last light seeping into its rich ochre paint. I recognize the building as the
limonaia,
the lemon house, where the potted lemon trees are kept in the winter. The girl presses her face against the glass and we can see her breath crystallize on the cold pane. Inside, the lemons glow like jewels against the glossy green leaves. The lemon trees, beyond the glass, are like a mirage of summer, more a memory than something real. The camera stays on her face as we hear the last poem.

It’s not one I recognize, which is unlikely considering I wrote my dissertation on Shakespeare’s sonnets. I realize after a moment that although the language, the rhythm, the structure, even the turn of mind, are undoubtedly Shakespearian, the poem could not be by Shakespeare. After all, Shakespeare never wrote a sonnet about a lemon house.

The way the
limonaia
wombs these trees,

Within its sun-veined skin of fragile glass

To be reborn amidst spring’s gentle breeze,

I’ll give to thee, whose face art can’t surpass.

For how thy memory has lingered on—

In spite of cruelest winter’s drear and howl—

By inner mirror seen; I’ve dwelled upon,

I must confess, my treachery most foul.

But then!—I spy such lemons hanging bright,

And delicately sheathed with glass to show,

How prosperous our love might be despite

Betrayal, wombed against entombing snow.

When love feeds on a fruit as bold as wine

I once again can conjure thy love mine.

There’s something heartbreaking about the poem. The lost love trapped behind the glass, the sense of summer giving way to cold winter. Or perhaps it’s just my own associations with the
limonaia
that have brought tears to my eyes.

CHAPTER
THREE

W
HEN THE SCREEN GOES DARK, THERE’S A LONG MOMENT OF SILENCE
. T
HEN
the applause begins, slowly at first, but building to a steady roar. It’s all Mark can do to silence the crowd long enough to announce
The Lemon House
(I must still have had my eyes closed when the title played) by Robin Weiss as the winner of the Hudson College Invitational Film Show. The applause becomes thunderous. As Robin appears on the stage, I feel a sob catch in my throat at the sight of him. He looks so frail and ghostly pale caught in the spotlight.

There’s clearly no way I’ll be able to get through this crowd to congratulate Robin, so I beat a hasty retreat to the reception, where I’ll have less competition. I show my invitation and faculty ID to the security guard stationed in front of the elevators and ride ten floors up to the penthouse suite.