It's Not Shakespeare Read Free

Marlowe, sometimes I really hate this area,” James muttered. Marlowe licked his face sympathetically, and James stood up and threw the ball again. Longingly, he thought about Sophie Winchester’s underwear model and how much easier it might have been to deal with a snotty bitch and her inbred bundle of shaking canine neurosis if he had that waiting for him at home—or better yet, here at the park, taking turns throwing the ball to Marlowe.
    God, when had his dreams gotten so… so pathetic? So ordinary. He used to dream about taking the academic world by storm! He dreamt about writing the Great American Novel. He dreamt about starting a foundation for young GLBT writers. But not anymore.
    Now, he dreamed about finding a lover who wanted to throw a ball in the dog park for his damned dog.
    Marlowe licked his face, distracting him from his melancholy, and James smiled and touched noses with him. Marlowe’s nose was wet, and his tail was wagging so hard that his tight, tough little body almost wriggled right out of James’s arms.
    Well, sometimes small dreams had grandeur, he thought with dignity. Sometimes, the small dreams were all a person needed to live.
     
     
    “S O , J AMES , have you met anyone?” His mother’s voice was one-hundred-percent upper class New England, and James never realized how much Northern Californians did not have an accent until his twice-weekly phone call home.
    “No, Mom—it’s not exactly gay-topia out here, you know?”
    “Which is why you should move back home,” his mother said smoothly, and James resisted the urge to smack his head on the desk in front of his computer.
    “Because the gay man living with his mother hasn’t been done to death,” he said instead, and his mother’s disgusted sniff came across loud and clear.
    “Don’t be snide, darling. I just don’t like the thought of you there in the wilds of California, lonely and bitter. It would be nice if you had someone to keep you company. I won’t be around to nag you forever, you know!” His mother had just reached official Senior Citizenship, and she was forever reminding him of her own mortality. She took water aerobics, yoga, mall walking, meditation, and senior nutrition classes. She was involved in three charities, various political organizations (all left-wing, of course), and volunteered in the local private school once a week for enrichment activities.
    He was fairly certain she was going to outlive him.
    “I have Marlowe,” he said with certainty. “Boston Terriers can have pretty long lifespans. He may outlive me—or be buried with me, like a pharaoh’s dog, in my tomb.”
    “That’s not funny, James,” his mother said with a little disdain, and James resisted a sigh. He thought Sophie Winchester might have found it fucking hysterical, and his thoughts wandered to the underwear model again. Well, if nothing else, should his libido survive this phone call with his mother, he was fairly certain he had his stroke material for the evening!
    “I’m just saying that I’m fine,” he told her firmly. “I’m fine—I love you, and you don’t need to worry about me.”
    “We love you too. That’s why we worry.”
    The “we” referred to James’s father. Although Alan Geoffrey Richards never actually spoke into the telephone, the two of them kept in touch via James’s mom. She assured James that both parents were still functioning and properly affectionate, and James spent a lot of time picturing his father reading the newspaper while his mother swam/walked/yoga’d circles around him.
    “Is Susan coming out for Spring Break?” Susan was his sister, the one who had gleefully announced that since James was gay, she got to have three children and still maintain a zero-population-growth family. James saw his sister and her family over Christmas break and for a month in the summer, and he had to admit, since she was the one with the uterus, it was awfully damned nice of her to give him three