Ophelia

Written by Laura Vance

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Initially written for a writing contest I forgot to submit to because I got Taco Bell instead, Ophelia is a piece lightly inspired by The Lumineers' "Cleopatra." If you care to look that deep into it, you may see some corresponding events between this story and the lyrics. Coincidentally (but mostly not), "Ophelia" is also the name of one of their other songs on the album. There is also a hint of Wilde's Sybil Vane's characterization throughout, because I think she is a beautiful and tragic character.

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She didn’t act for self-fulfillment or leisure, nor because she was exceptional at it, which she was.

She acted because she needed to.

Natural disasters envied her, and stage directions were her only reigns. They reeled her in from her daily habit of making catastrophic mistakes, where she could take on the edited, crafted, perfected personas of characters that embodied everything she couldn’t be. She didn’t mind that when she stepped off the stage, she was knee-deep in debts and cigarette butts and loneliness. She didn’t mind because she hardly left it at all, cocooned in the warm hues of spotlights more comfortable than her own bed.

She called herself Ophelia. It wasn’t the name her mother called her, which made her like it even more. She was exclusively in love with men who didn’t love her back, and she gave every last one of them the luxury of shattering her heart over and over again.

Every night, Ophelia displayed herself in a dingy, fourth-rate theater with water stains that decorated the ceilings like frescos and a dank smell that festered in your nose well after you had already left. Once the patrons saw Ophelia, though, they typically forgot all about water stains and odd smells. She could make the world disappear and create a newer one quicker than God himself with nothing to aid her but an itchy costume and the ancient words of Shakespeare. She was a living genius in a dirty cage, hiding from the world in plain sight.

It was November when he first entered the theater. The air was dark and biting, and the evidence of a storm still lingered in a damp haze. It was the worst time and place to have one’s car break down, but Fate was tapping her impatient toes and popped his tire directly in front of the unfortunate theater.

He was late for something – which irritated him – and dressed in a dark, tailored suit. The thought of sitting in the dusty seats appalled him, but the smell of the chauffeur appalled him more, and he rationalized that suits could be cleaned easier than hiring a new driver. So, Fate turned his head from the erotic laughter of the nearby pub and shoved him through the theater’s door.

He walked in on the third act of The Winter’s Tale when Ophelia, bathed in the light of irreparable heartbreak, was Hermione. Tragic, radiant Hermione, sprawled across the stage floor like water from a fallen glass, completely fluid and neglecting all masters but gravity.

“Sir, spare your threats,” she uttered, her cadence gently rolling against the ceiling. It looped its way through his ears, tugging his heart to the closest seat. “The bug which you would fright me with I seek. To me life can be no commodity: The crown and comfort of my life, your favor, I do give lost; for I do feel it gone. But I know not how it went.” She went on, speaking with a quiet passion that filled the auditorium, though it barely breached a whisper. All was silent, every body, every sense perfectly trained on the goddess on stage. Missing a single word would be fatal.

He soon forgot all about what he was late for and the fact that his chauffeur had changed the wheel and how his suit was soiled from the dusty seat. He was enthralled and he didn’t want to leave. He couldn’t leave. He wanted to rush to her, raise up her wilted body, caress her downturned lips, wipe the tears from her dewy eyes.

She made acting the noblest art, spinning on the pointe shoes of prose and fusing sentience back into lifeless characters better than a healer. She acted like it was all she had. She performed like the world was good enough to deserve it.

It ended in a rush of silence as every patron remembered that they were real; that they had bodies that were present in a theater instead of mourning the purest of tragedies. Ophelia had carefully placed a rug beneath them, allowing them to grow familiar; to feel its stitches and its tassels before cruelly and unexpectedly snapping it away. The poor audience was left to stumble around, pitifully confused as they braced contact with the cold, hard floor of reality.

They clapped out of manners, merely filling the silence until Ophelia lilted to the front of the stage. She was met with a roar that didn’t seem possible with the sparse audience that speckled the auditorium, but there was something abruptly empty about her; an extravagant vase that was waiting to be filled. Her smile was toothless and uniform, her body only moving out of sociological obligation. She bowed, a small tilt in her hips, and promptly left the stage.

It took little effort to find her dressing room. There was no one keeping him away, and the pure simplicity of the theater’s back corridors almost seemed to beg him to find her. He passed several mildly disconcerted actors drinking in their post-show euphoria before he came across a water damaged door, adorned with a humble sign that read the name “Ophelia.” It could be no one else.

He knocked, desperation shredding him to bits, and when there was no reply, he pushed it open anyway.

The room was bare and smelled of cigarettes and tragedy. There was no decoration but a plain vase that clutched a few wilting stems beside her dirty mirror. She was still in costume and completely beautiful, draped in a white dress that folded like the intricately chiseled limestone of a Greek statue. She could have been an angel divinely knighted with a halo of cigarette smoke. He decided she was rather angelic anyway with her wings of long, midnight hair that cloaked her spindly arms.

If heaven would be made up of spirits like her, he vowed to be good all his life.

She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were locked on her reflection, like it was whispering to her, and she was trying to make sense of it all. Smoke poured from the crumbling end of her obsolete cigarette. It appeared that she and her reflection were not speaking the same language.

He didn’t know how to interrupt their conversation, so he merely did.

“You were marvelous,” he murmured.

Nothing about her changed, not even the slightest shift of surprise in her eyebrows.

“Hermione is marvelous,” she drawled to the mirror. “Shakespeare too, I suppose.”

“But you made her real. Shakespeare has been dead for centuries and you resurrected him only minutes ago. Surely that makes you marvelous too.”

She looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were dark green, and he felt trapped in the splendor of being embraced by a forest. Her smile was sad with a taste of amusement, like she knew exactly what she was talking about.

“What do you know? You only saw the end.”

His pulse stopped. “You noticed?”

She arranged the flowers in her vase. Daisies, perhaps. They were beginning to brown as crisp petals rained on her vanity.

“You made up a fourth of my audience this evening. And you’re wearing that terrible suit. It was difficult not to notice.”

“This is my best suit!”

“I’m flattered, truly, but it’s dirty.”

He smiled at that. “May I know your name? Please.”

“Call me Ophelia.”

Ophelia. It carried the same sacred weight as a prayer. He felt like he was repenting just by saying it.

“If you’d like.”

“I would, thank you.” There was a brief pause. “But you had the advantage of seeing it on the door first. What should I call you?”

He told her his name and she smiled. “Lovely,” was all she said in return.

There was silence, but it belonged there. It sat comfortably between them, smiling.

“Ophelia,” he said, and it thrilled him just to say it. His heart was fighting to escape his chest as the words stumbled out. He tried to suspend his tongue, but she had utterly transfixed him, and the poor man had tripped face first into love. “I can’t return to whatever my life was before I met you,” he sputtered. “I can’t even entertain the reality.”

She looked at him and saw a man who had never felt before, and therefore had no reason to hide from it. She ached for that sort of innocence again. So, she smiled. “You won’t have to,” she said, and she hoped, deeply and desperately, that this time would be different.

---

It was utterly explosive, the way they fell in love with each other. That was Ophelia’s way; she was fluent in epic disaster. She knew her script and played her part in the honeymoon phase well. She kissed him when he least expected it and gifted him with the novel excitement that men of his sort were strangers to. It was among her best performances.

He was a fine sparring partner as well, attending her every production and decorating her stage with expensive roses at each curtain call. His chauffeur drove them to cheap pizza parlors while they shared sweet, tipsy kisses in the backseat of his Italian sports car. It was all in good fun, she thought. Innocent, harmless fun that would inevitably end, which made it taste all the sweeter. She reveled in it, as she always did, unafraid of the pain that she knew would follow.

It became February like a sneeze, unexpectedly and with their eyes closed. The world was holding its breath for its rebirth and things were bleak with a foreshadowing hope. Ophelia adored the anticipation of it all, how everything was dangerously tilting on the edge of the unknown before it blossomed. She just didn’t expect the unknown to cut as deeply as it did.

Her mother’s voice slithered from the receiver, haunting a part of herself that she thought she had forgotten. The tone alone caused something in her soul to corrode, but the message was unbearable. She felt something inside of her collapse beneath it. “Your father has died,” she told Ophelia. She didn’t tell her how he had died, only that the funeral was in a week and that she had to be there. It was all rather business-like. Ophelia didn’t say a word during the entire exchange, and the line was still beeping at her when he arrived at her apartment several hours later. She cried well into the night, even when she had nothing left to cry and was merely shaking in his arms. He never once let go of her.

She wore a simple black dress to the funeral, her shoulders securely protected beneath a dark shawl. She had smoked a dozen cigarettes that morning and was shaking. She said nothing to anyone and offered no eulogy; she didn’t even cry. She sat, dark and stone-faced and reeking of smoke, until he and Ophelia were the only people left in the chapel. When the sky bled to black, he carried her to the car and up the stairs to her apartment, where he placed her on her bed.

“I’m all alone now,” she told him. It was the first thing she had said all day. She uncurled her shawl from her shoulders, revealing two spaghetti straps that sagged like tiny wings from her protruding collarbones.

“Of course you’re not alone,” he replied.

“I will be, though.”

“Why?”

“You love me now, and you may still for a while. But a day will come when we both run out of lines, and you’ll get tired of playing this part with me.”

He looked sad at that. “I’m not playing any part, Ophelia.” He held the side of her face, his thumb gently tracing her cheekbone. “I never have. I don’t have to pretend anything when I’m with you.”

Her dam of tears was about to burst. Guilt made her dizzy. “I wish you had never said that. It’ll make it all the more painful when you leave me, then.”

“What makes you think I will ever want to leave you?”

“Don’t be stupid. Everyone does. That’s just how it is.” She choked on a sob. “Except for my dad. He was always my dad, and nothing could change that. And now he’s gone, too.”

Her hands were shaking as she lit another cigarette. She draped herself across her mattress, basking in her cloud of smoke.

“So, marry me.”

He didn’t mean to say it. His mouth beat his brain to it, but perhaps he had always felt it. The moment he had seen her on that stage, he knew he had to be with her forever.

She didn’t start or gasp, only turning her head just enough to look into his eyes.

“What?”

He swallowed. “Marry me, Ophelia.”

She was frowning. “Why?”

“Because I love you. More than anyone ever has, I’m sure. I never want to leave you, and this is what people do when they love each other enough to never leave.”

She was lost. Her body was sprawled across her mattress, but her mind was elsewhere, flipping through the metaphysical scripts she had filed away. None of them were the lines of a fiancée or could be held by fingers that wore diamond rings. No one had asked this of her before, and suddenly it was there, screaming in her face without drawing any breath. She supposed she had always sensed it creeping behind her, but she figured that if she ignored it, it would go away. Now, though, Ophelia was in the middle of an inescapable labyrinth, and somewhere along the way she had dropped Ariadne’s thread.

She couldn’t remember where or when.

“I can’t,” she said at last. A tear slipped from her eye.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how.”

“I assure you I don’t either. We can find out together.”

“No, no. I… can’t.”

He didn’t understand that she was telling him something entirely different.

“What do you mean?”

She was discovering it all, perhaps for the first time.

“I’m lost,” she told him.

He seemed confused by that.

“And how can I find you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t want you to.”

“Why not?”

She thought of herself and who she saw when she looked in the mirror. A shadow of greatness, a brilliant mimic of poets and heroines that stood immortal through time. She wore so many different costumes and knew every corresponding line. But when it was just her, lying in her black dress, there was nothing. No life or thoughts or substance. She was a perfect pretender, and it was destroying her.

“I’m too lost to even find myself,” she told him, discovering the words as she went, “and I’m terrified of who I might find if I do. It would kill me if you beat me to it and discovered that you’ve been in love with a lie this whole time.”

“A lie? You don’t lie to me, do you, Ophelia?”

She thought about it. Was it a lie? She couldn’t decide.

“Ophelia?”

Her eyes were stinging. She couldn’t breathe right. There was something in the way. “I’m an actress, aren’t I?”

“But we’re not on a stage right now.”

“Yes, we are,” she told him. “I’m nothing without it. If you take away my lines and my directions, I am nothing.”

It was shattering her because it was true.

“You are everything to me, Ophelia.” He was crying now. She had never seen him cry before. “You’re my entire world. And if I must wait forever to have you, I will. I can be patient. I can be patient for you.”

She glanced at him and dragged her cigarette. She looked so sad, so frail and irreparable. He wanted to take the little fragments of her that were scattered across the world and shove them back together again, as if enough force and sheer will could make her the whole woman he wanted her to be. But her appeal was in her lack of repairability, the thrill of chasing a finish line that would never appear. She was a walking conundrum and the beauty of it was ruinous.

He would wait for her forever, and he would die doing it.

The silence between them was a poison, large and awkward as they refused to fill it with anything else, despite so much needing to be said.

It shattered him to say it. “You’ve made me fall in love with you forever, Ophelia,” he told her. “It was cruel of you to do, and I hope that one day, I might be able to forgive you for it.”

She didn’t even try to stop him as he left.

---

For years, Ophelia wondered if his phone number was the same. She ran it through her mind between the lines of soliloquies and put it to the popular songs on the radio. Sometimes she even found herself subconsciously dialing it before stopping herself to light a cigarette, just to make her fingers busy. Time passed, but she didn’t pay much attention to it. It was an annoying thing she shoved on a faraway shelf. It could be dealt with much later.

She broke when her mother died. She had been waiting for it to happen all her life and didn’t understand why it cut her up so brutally. There were plenty of men who could have given her the illusion of comfort, handsome gentlemen and thrilling desperados that filtered in and out of her revolving door of a life.

Always busy, just another part to play, just another line to bring to life.

Line after line after line.

All in good fun, but just not as fun as it used to be. Their connections were easily severable, though, and she hadn’t memorized another phone number in ten years.

She stood in her kitchen in a black dress that had seen the caskets of her mother and father, the shoulder straps still refusing to cooperate. She had run out of cigarettes that morning, so there was nothing to stop her insistent fingers. The phone line rang in celebration, as if the number sequence was rejoicing after a decade of neglect. Her heart was twitching in her chest, attempting to climb up her throat and escape, but she forced it back down. After two consecutive rings, there was an answer.

“Hello?”

Her heart halted and dropped to her stomach.

“Hello?” she said again.

She.

Ophelia’s head was twirling on an axis. Her eyes were lost somewhere on the wall.

Her years of acting expertise couldn’t prune the sick sense of shock from her voice. She asked for him, but the request escaped from her mouth like a deformity of the English language.

“This is his wife,” the lady answered, and Ophelia thought she might faint. “May I take a message?”

May she take a message?

She had practiced her speech hundreds of times without knowing it. It was a plea for a second chance that sang more like an apology, infused with the desperate desire to feel his comfort from so long ago. A sort of comfort that had left her freezing ever since. She hadn’t realized she was shivering until now.

Her mother was buried in the ground and there was no one left to hold her.

There was a child screaming on the other end of the phone as a man’s muffled voice resurrected the silence.

“Who is it, dear?”

Dear.

Ophelia squeezed her eyes shut, but a rebellious tear escaped from the corner and slipped down her cheek. She slammed the receiver down with vengeance, like it was the one who hadn’t waited a decade for her to come around. Like it was her reflection, and she could strangle the stupidity from it. She sank to the floor in a ball. Perhaps if she held herself tight enough, she could fool herself into believing he was on the floor right beside her. It didn’t work.

Too soon it was November again. Every year she hoped it wouldn’t come, but it always smuggled itself into the cracks in her lips and burrowed a cold hole inside her chest. November was the only thing that made her tired of acting. It carried the depressing seduction of remaining in her bed for the rest of her life, and that night, she almost listened.

She was to play Hermione again. She hadn’t done The Winter’s Tale since he first walked through those doors so long ago, and the thought brought her back down from her tendency to float past the rafters in silly daydreams. Though the costume didn’t fit how it used to, she felt much the same, except for her odd lack of desire to smoke.

So, with nothing else to do, she went on stage and did The Winter’s Tale as beautifully as ever. Hermione was full of soul and tragedy, jerking tears from the audience’s eyes and forcing them to cling to nonexistent hope. When she began the monologue in the third act, she was the closest to Hermione she had ever been. She truly became the Queen of Sicily, blood and bone, nursing a broken heart as she tried to find some reason to cling to life. Never in the history of theater had anyone played Hermione so honestly. She was greatness.

That’s when she caught his eye, a mirage of memory barely concealed beyond the haze of spotlights. Trained on her. Unblinking.

At first Ophelia thought she might be dreaming, but she knew her imagination couldn’t capture the exact vividness of his features. She found in his eyes a color she hadn’t seen in years. It looked like love and devotion and heartbreak, like a jarring wound that couldn’t heal.

She had stopped speaking. Hermione was gone; she had run off somewhere far away. She was no longer in Sicily. She was nothing all over again, stuffed in a silly costume and entirely too big for a stage that felt like it was tipping.

At the sight of him in the audience, she had found something deep inside her, a drop buried far beneath the crumbling barricades of her heart. It felt something like sadness, true and honest sadness, but it felt like hers. Not Hermione’s, not anyone else’s. Its fingers reached within her and grasped her throat, scraped her heart, and poked her chest without the hassle of acting. It was a dreadful feeling that made her want to crawl away forever, but it belonged to her.

“To me life can be no commodity,” she continued, her voice cracking with despair. She looked straight at him, no longer an actress reciting lines, for she had lived them to the depths of true misery. Her stomach tickled. Her heart pounded. She didn’t blink. “The crown and comfort of my life, your favor, I do give lost; for I do feel it gone.”

Her breath hitched.

Never had an audience been so attentive since the days of Shakespeare.

His eyes were glistening in the stage light’s reflection.

Her voice was dressed in a stream of tears as she forced the last part out through a delirious sob. “But I know not how it went.”

There was truth in those words, and it killed her to become them instead of hiding behind Shakespeare’s mask.

So, when Hermione died, Ophelia left her there on the stage to rot and whither.

She was grinning as they clapped for her, tears streaking down her flushed cheeks as she tried to decide whether to succumb to the laughter or the heartbreak that tore at her soul. When she bowed, she saw Hermione’s corpse beneath her, and when she rose, she rose as Ophelia. Tragic, radiant Ophelia, who had finally become herself.

When the curtains rippled closed to the music of an enraptured audience, she was still smiling. Ophelia was all alone in the world.

She was all alone, but not truly.