Wanting came with understanding, he said, but I knew straight away I would want him. I knew it the moment he walked into that San Francisco wine bar. He was tall and lithe, a little disheveled in appearance with tousled brown hair, the makings of a beard, and cheekbones that could carve butter.
“Hi!” I called.
The handsome stranger was a little startled by my attention. He had buried his face in his phone, but looked up to respond. “Hello,” he said.
“What do you do?” I asked, sizing up his worn tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.
“I’m an academic,” he said.
He looked far too young to describe himself as an “academic,” but I was intrigued. “Really? What discipline?” I asked.
“Literature and Philosophy,” he answered.
I was excited. “You know, for a long time I have wanted to read Shakespeare with someone who knows their stuff,” I said with a brazen smile.
The academic grinned and dug into his backpack to retrieve a copy of Romeo and Juliet. He laid it on the counter so I could see it clearly. It was a teasing gesture, but I have to admit I found it romantic. He was issuing an intellectual challenge that I was eager to take up. He fetched a pen and piece of paper and wrote down his name and number. Then, as quickly as he had arrived, he was out the door. “Off to meet friends,” he said.
I smiled as I surveyed his neat handwriting, sipping my wine. After a few minutes, I reached for my phone to send him a text: Shakespeare, I just met you at the bar. Should we start reading Hamlet or King Lear?
And so it began with King Lear.
We became Facebook friends soon after. I saw from his profile page that he had studied at Harvard and Stanford. He was no small fry academic.
Our first 'read' together – where we both sat with the text and took turns reading passages aloud – was magic. I also learned the academic was 37, straight, and single. I was only two years older than him and ready to fall in love. Immediately, I felt like meeting him had opened up a whole world of unexpected possibility. Nonetheless, I was still clearing away the residue from my last romantic rejection. I was in no mood for a short-term fling at this point, and the next guy I went for would have to be all in. I was tired of non-committal men.
I was delighted when the academic took the initiative to arrange all of our reads. He was also in daily contact on text or Facebook messenger. His command of the English language was an aphrodisiac and I would share snippets of his musings with my friends back in Australia. All of us kept having to reach for the dictionary to look up the meaning of his words.
During our first meeting, he peppered the conversation with quotes from Hamlet. I was precisely the right audience for that kind of move. I would openly swoon and he’d coyly say, “Why don’t American girls fall for that?” I said a man who quoted Shakespeare would always have my heart, that American women must be crazy. He fixed me with an intense gaze then broke into a wide smile. As we read together - we played rock, paper and scissors to decide who would go first - our legs brushed under the table. His hand would touch mine as he leaned across to point out a word or verse on my page.
During our second reading, after a couple of dry martinis in a downtown hotel lobby bar, he asked if I wanted him to kiss me. Of course I wanted to be kissed, but I was also hesitant. Was this man up for what I needed romantically? Our reading and the experience had been so enjoyable, but I didn’t want to escalate our relationship unless he was ready for something serious.
Nonetheless, our tipsy giddiness took over. He kissed me vigorously a couple of doors down from the hotel on the street. I was startled by his sexual energy but it also enthralled me. This was no thin-blooded bookworm – my academic had Romeo raging inside him.
We continued our readings, and our kisses. He paid meticulous attention to Shakespeare’s meter, word pronunciation and took pause often to recap scenes and examine their meaning. “The Quarto says this, but the Folio version has taken this direction,” he’d explain. It was nerdy, but I was captivated by his focus and attention to detail. His sharp intelligence intimidated me but it also made me feel alive.
He continued to initiate our readings and kiss me passionately after each one until it reached a point where I decided I needed to clarify things. I’d had my fair share of boyish men with devilish good looks play with me because all they had wanted was a casual fling. “Does it bother you that I’m two years older?” I asked. We were having dinner before going to a King Lear film screening in Berkeley.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I haven’t decided yet. If you looked your age, maybe it would, because I look much younger than what I am. It’s a visceral thing,” he said. “It can’t be explained.”
He talked about younger women and how he had never had a problem attracting them. This was my first gut feel that this guy is nowhere near where you need him to be, I thought. As the night wore on, my composure started to crumble. I grew pale. The academic sensed my alarm and sweetly asked whether everything was ok. It was not, I replied, but was not yet ready to tell him why. The younger women conversation had thrown me, triggering my insecurities about being a single, childless woman in my late 30s.
He held my hand and stroked my leg throughout the epic three hour film and continued to hold my hand as he walked me to my car. Seeming to sense my growing unease, he turned to look at me, concern in his eyes. Predictably, my heart melted. Once again we found ourselves kissing desperately in the middle of the sidewalk.
I grew a little more distant after that evening and deliberately brushed off his suggestion of another reading that weekend. He said my response was cold and dismissive and was confused by it. We spoke on the phone that night to clarify. It was during this call that I realized my intuition about him not being ready for me was right. The academic, it turned out, was still grappling with lost love.
He’d been in a relationship that had ended badly ‘not so long ago.’ He described it as perfect (something, even with our connection, I knew we weren’t), but for whatever reason, what he'd had with her was over. I listened as he suggested perhaps given this, it would be wiser to revert to reading alone without all the physical stuff.
The academic said he’d use impulse control next time we read. Inevitably, our ‘powerful physical attraction’ as he called it, got the better of us. As much as I wanted more from him, I came to realize it was foolish of me to think intimacy would shift his readiness or desire for a relationship.
We thrashed out our relationship over Facebook messenger. I told him what I firmly knew – I wanted a boyfriend. He was at pains for me to clarify, “Ok, can you define that? Is it more than what we are doing together at present, in terms of reading?” His words didn’t inspire much confidence and further clarified that I was fighting an uphill battle with him.
We stayed together for three days at a San Francisco apartment I rented not long after. There were the usual teething problems that accompany two people staying together at length for the first time, but for the most part, it was comfortable and nice. By night three however I was tired and emotional. The four wines I’d drunk over the course of the evening didn’t help. I told him I wanted us to be closer. Why couldn’t he give me that? He said I was being pushy, and that our “understanding” was eroding. He told me I was being disrespectful of where he was at. He had tried to be open and honest with me about “still carrying feelings” from his last relationship. The academic wanted to keep seeing me but said my feelings were unrealistic. He and I were in very different places. “I think reading Shakespeare might have tricked us into feeling we knew each other better than we did,” he offered.
“That I want more from you?” I asked. “Yes, more than I can give, at this point,” he said. I suggested perhaps I should date other men, even though I didn’t really want to. My theory was that dating around would relieve some pressure from him, and maybe help me find someone who was more ready for something long-term. Secretly, though, I hoped the academic would say no and that he would commit to a relationship with me in time. My heart sunk when he agreed that dating other men sounded like a good idea. He was pulling back.
We stumbled on for a brief time after that, hovering somewhere between dating and friendship, but the seed of insecurity had been planted and our union was about to implode. He told me he was planning to leave San Francisco in a few months and go back to New York where he had lived eight years before. Maybe London or Paris after that. Apparently, he felt the people in those cities would understand him better. It became obvious that he had no intention of ‘developing’ further with me. My whole body retched physically with rejection.
I had to let go. My heart had no other option but to grieve and move on. In a final text to him, I chose a language we could both understand. I quoted from King Lear, the play we never finished reading because our romantic tussles had intruded. I was finishing the play on my own one evening and the words from the end verse felt like Shakespeare himself was reading them to me as I typed them into my phone:
The weight of this sad time, we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
I knew he would recognize it. Shakespeare had given me permission, I said.
