If We Were Villains

by M. L. Rio

  I retreated two steps to watch the peculiar monologue unfold. Alexander’s Mercutio was razor-edged, unbalanced, barely sane. His sharp incisors flashed in the light when he smiled, his mask glittering mischievously as he danced around, first toying with one spectator, then another. His voice and movement both grew more sensual and more savage, until he completely lost control and lunged at me. I staggered backward but not fast enough—he grabbed me by the hair, bent my head back against his shoulder, snarling in my ear.

  Alexander: “This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,

  That presses them and learns them first to bear,

  Making them women of good carriage:

  This is she—!”

  I strained against his hold but his strength was iron, overwrought, at odds with the delicacy of one fingertip tracing the embroidery on my chest. James, who had been watching, frozen stiff, fought off his paralysis and pulled Alexander off me. “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!” He took Alexander’s face in his hands. “Thou talk’st of nothing.”

  Alexander’s distracted eyes latched onto James’s, and he spoke more slowly.

  Alexander: “True, I talk of dreams,

  Which are the children of an idle brain,

  Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,

  Which is as thin of substance as the air

  And more inconstant than the wind.”

  When it was my turn to speak again I spoke carefully, wondering if Alexander was truly, now, safe. Our conversation from earlier in the evening was too close, too recent to ignore, like a fresh smarting scratch on my skin.

  Me: “This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves;

  Supper is done, and we shall come too late.”

  James turned his face skyward, squinting up at the pyramid of glass that seemed so distant, searching in the wash of light from the chandeliers for the secret, far-off glimmer of a star. I thought of the night of the party, when he and I had stood together in the garden, peering up at the heavens through a jagged hole in the treetops. Our last isolated, innocent moment; the stillness that precedes the blows and billows of a storm.

  James: “I fear, too early: for my mind misgives

  Some consequence yet hanging in the stars

  Shall bitterly begin his fearful date

  With this night’s revels and expire the term

  Of a despisèd life closed in my breast

  By some vile forfeit of untimely death.”

  He paused, gazing upward in soft surprise, sadness like drops of blue in both his eyes. Then he sighed and, smiling, shook his head.

  James: “But He that hath the steerage of my course

  Direct my sails! On, lusty gentlemen.”

  I had almost forgotten where we were—who we were, even—but then the orchestra struck up again and reality came rushing back. Another soaring waltz filled the atrium and breathed life into the audience that had gone silent during the previous scene. The Capulets’ ball was suddenly in full swing.

  Alexander grabbed the nearest girl and dragged her forcefully into a dance. The other players appeared from the makeshift wings and did the same, choosing partners at random, pushing other partygoers together. Soon the room was a whirl of movement, surprisingly graceful considering the number of couples. I found a partner at my elbow—indistinguishable from all the other girls except for a black ribbon tied around her throat—and bowed to her before we began to dance. As we turned and revolved and changed places, my attention was constantly elsewhere. Filippa appeared in the corner of my eye, her mask black, silver, purple—she, too, was dressed as male, dancing with another girl, and I wondered if she might be Paris. I turned and lost sight of her again. I looked for James, looked for Meredith, but could not find them, either one.

  The song persisted (in my opinion) overlong. When it ended, I bowed again, hastily, and ducked out of the room, making a beeline for the back stairs to the balcony. It was quiet there, and deeply dark. A few couples had sought that secrecy and were maskless now, joined at the lips, pressed close against the walls. The music had begun again but slower. The lights dimmed, burned blue, except for one bright white circle where James stood alone. When the light struck him the surrounding dancers drew back, fell silent.

  James: “What lady’s is that, which doth enrich the hand

  Of yonder knight?”

  The audience turned to see what he was staring at. And there, faint and ephemeral as a ghost, was Wren. A blue and white mask framed her eyes, but she was unmistakably herself. My fingers curled around the edge of the balustrade; I leaned as far forward as I could without falling.

  James: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!

  For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

  The music rose again. Wren and her borrowed partner turned slowly on the spot, and in pantomime bade farewell. James’s feet carried him closer, his eyes fixed on her as if he were afraid that she would simply disappear if he lost sight of her. When he was close enough, he caught her hand, and she turned to see who had touched her.

  James: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand

  This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

  My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

  To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

  He lowered his head and kissed her palm. Her breath ruffled his hair when she spoke.

  Wren: “Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

  Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

  For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

  And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”

  Partway through her speech, they eased into motion together, palm to palm, revolving slowly. They paused, changed hands, and stepped together in the opposite direction.

  James: “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?”

  Wren: “Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”

  James: “O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

  They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”

  Wren: “Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.”

  James: “Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.”

  They were motionless. James’s finger brushed her cheek; he turned her face up toward his and kissed her, so softly that she might not have even felt it.

  James: “Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”

  Wren: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”

  James: “Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

  Give me my sin again.”

  He kissed her once more, this time long and lingering. My mask was hot and sticky on my face, my stomach twisted inside out and aching like an open wound. I leaned heavily on the balustrade, trembling under the weight of parallel truths that I had, until then, been able to ignore: James was in love with Wren, and I was blindly, savagely jealous.

  ACT IV

  PROLOGUE

  “It’s shorter than I remember,” I tell Colborne, as we stand looking down the dock toward the water. “Back then it felt like it went on for miles.” We’ve wandered through the woods to the south side of the lake, talking quietly. Colborne listens with unfailing patience, weighing and evaluating every word. I turn to him and ask, “Are the kids even allowed down here anymore?”

  “We can’t exactly stop them, but once they realize it’s just a dock and there’s nothing to see, they lose interest. We have more of a problem with people stealing stuff that used to be yours.”

  This has never occurred to me, and I stare at him. “Like what?”

  He shrugs. “Old books, costume pieces, the photo of your class in the hall behind the theatre. We got that one back, but not before someone scratched your face out.” He sees the confusion in my expression and adds, “It’s not all bad. I still get letters trying to convince me that you’re innocent.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I get those, too.”

  “Are you
convinced yet?”

  “No. I know better.”

  I walk down the dock and Colborne follows, one step behind. I know I owe him a new ending for our old story, but I find it unexpectedly difficult to continue. Up until Christmas, we could pretend that we were mostly all right—or that we would be, someday.

  I stop at the end, looking down into the water. I’ve aged well, one might say. My hair is still dark, my eyes still clear bright blue, my body firmer and stronger than it was before prison. I need glasses now to read, but besides that and a few extra scars, I haven’t changed much. I feel older than thirty-one.

  How old is Colborne now? I don’t ask, but I could. Our relationship is not inhibited by expectations of politeness. We stand with our toes peeking over the edge of the dock, not speaking. The green smell of the water is so familiar that I feel a soft tug at the back of my throat.

  “We didn’t come down here as much when it was cold out,” I say, without prompting. “Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we mostly kept to the Castle and sat around the fire, scratching out speeches and scansion. It almost felt normal, except that empty chair. I don’t think I ever saw anyone sit in it after he died. We were a bit superstitious, I guess—plays full of witches and ghosts will do that to you.”

  Colborne nods vaguely. Then his expression changes, shifts, brow furrowing. “Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?”

  The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it,” I say.

  He mimics my smile, though his is tentative, unsure of where the humor really is. “Why’s that?”

  “It’s hard to put into words.” I pause, waste a minute trying to collect my thoughts, then proceed without having collected anything at all. “We spent four years—and most of us years before that—immersed in Shakespeare. Submerged. Here we could indulge our collective obsession. We spoke it as a second language, conversed in poetry, and lost touch with reality, a little.” I reconsider. “Well, that’s misleading. Shakespeare is real, but his characters live in a world of real extremes. They swing from ecstasy to anguish, love to hate, wonder to terror. It’s not melodrama, though, they’re not exaggerating. Every moment is crucial.” I glance sideways at him, unsure if I’m making any sense. He’s still wearing that uncertain half smile, but he nods, so I continue. “A good Shakespearean actor—a good actor of any stripe, really—doesn’t just say words, he feels them. We felt all the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character’s emotions don’t cancel out the actor’s—instead you feel both at once. Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”

  I slow down, come to a stop, frustrated by my own inability to express myself (a frustration exacerbated by the fact that, after ten years, I still think of myself as an actor). Colborne watches me with keen, curious eyes. I wet my lips with my tongue and proceed more carefully.

  “Our sheer capacity for feeling got to be so unwieldy that we staggered under it, like Atlas with the weight of the world.” I sigh, and the freshness of the air derails me. How long will it take, I wonder, for me to get used to it again? My chest aches, and maybe it’s the unfamiliar purity of the air, but maybe not. “The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent … He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.” I stop. Shrug. “You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”

  Colborne lowers his eyes, looks down into the white glare of the sun on the water. “Do you think Richard would agree?”

  “I think Richard was under Shakespeare’s spell as much as the rest of us.”

  Colborne accepts this without protest. “You know, it’s strange,” he says. “Every now and then I have to remind myself that I never actually knew him.”

  “You would have loved or hated him.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “That’s how he was.”

  “What about you? Did you love him or hate him?”

  “Usually both at once.”

  “Is this what you mean about feeling everything twice?”

  “Ah,” I say. “You see, you do understand me.”

  The quiet that follows is comfortable, at least for me. I forget why we’re there for a moment and watch as a leaf breaks loose from a tree and comes twirling down on the breeze to land on the water. Rings ripple out toward the edges of the lake but disappear before they ever get there. I can almost see the seven of us running along the bank through the trees, tearing our clothes off, racing to the water, ready to fall in all together. Third year, the year of the comedy. Light and delightful and distant. Days we can’t have back.

  “Well,” Colborne says, when he’s waited long enough for me to speak. “What’s next?”

  “Christmas.” I turn away, toward the forest. The Castle is close now, the Tower soaring up out of the trees, its long shadow falling over the ramshackle boathouse. “That’s when everything went wrong.”

  “How did it start?” he asks.

  “It had already started.”

  “Then what changed?”

  “We were separated,” I say. “James went to California, Meredith to New York, Alexander to Philadelphia, Wren to London, Filippa … who knows where. I went back to Ohio. Being trapped together in the Castle with our guilt and Richard’s ghost, it was terrible in a way. But being divided from each other, flung to every corner of the world to face it on our own—that was worse.”

  “So what happened?” he asks.

  “We cracked up,” I say, but the phrase feels wrong. It was not so simple, or so clean, as a piece of fractured glass. “But we didn’t really shatter until we were all back together again.”

  SCENE 1

  Christmas in Ohio was disastrous.

  I survived the four preceding days by maintaining a state of mild intoxication and conversing only when required. Christmas Eve passed uneventfully, but Christmas dinner (the thrilling sequel to Thanksgiving dinner a month before) ended in an uproar when Caroline left the table for a suspiciously long time and my father caught her in the bathroom, flushing most of her food down the toilet. Three hours later she and my parents were shouting at one another in the dining room. I had fled the scene and was already packing my suitcase, which gaped open in the middle of my unmade bed. I balled up half a dozen scarves and about as many socks and flung them in.

  “Oliver!” Leah blocked the doorway, sobbing at me, as she’d been doing for the last ten minutes. “You can’t leave now!”

  “I have to.” I swept an armful of books off my desk and dumped them on top of the scarves. “I can’t take this. I need to get out of here.”

  My father’s voice thundered from the floor below, and Leah whimpered.

  “You should get out, too.” I nudged her out of the way and grabbed my coat off the hook on the back of the door. “Go to a friend’s house or something.”

  “Oliver!” she wailed, and I turned away, unable to look at her when her face was screwed up like an infant’s, slick and shining with tears.

  I threw a pile of clothes—dirty or clean, I had no idea and it didn’t matter—into the suitcase and slammed it closed. The zipper skated easily around the edge because I’d only packed half of what I’d come home with. Downstairs, my mother and Caroline were both screaming at the same time.

  I pulled my coat on and yanked the suitcase off the bed, nearly crushing my sister’s foot. “C’mon, Leah,” I said. “You’ve gotta let me go.”

  “You’re just going to leave me?”

  I clenched my teeth against a surge of guilt coming up like bile from the pit of my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I said, then pushed past her through the door.

  “Oliver!” she yelled, hanging over the banister as I rushed down the stairs
. “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

  I dragged my suitcase down a driveway dusted with powdered-sugar snow and waited on the curb for the cab I’d called before packing my bag, wondering what on earth to do next. Dellecher’s campus was closed for Christmas. I couldn’t afford a hotel room in Broadwater or a plane ticket to California. Philadelphia wasn’t far, but I was residually angry with Alexander and didn’t want to see him. Filippa would have been my best option, but I had no idea where she was or how to get in touch. I had the cab drop me at the bus station, where I called Meredith from a pay phone, explained what had happened, and asked if her Thanksgiving offer still stood.

  There was no bus Christmas night, so I had six hours to sit outside the station, shivering and second-guessing my decision. By morning I was so cold I didn’t care how bad an idea it was and immediately bought a ticket to Port Authority. I slept almost the whole way, with my face crushed against the grimy window. When we arrived, I called again, and she gave me an address on the Upper East Side.

  Her parents, eldest brother, and sister-in-law were once again in Canada. Even with me and her and Caleb (the middle sibling, unattached, going kicking and screaming into his thirties), the apartment felt empty and untouched, like a set from a television show. The furniture was expensive, stylish, and uncomfortable, the décor done in blinding white and dull slate gray. In the living room the Architectural Digest aesthetic was blighted by evidence of occupation: a dog-eared copy of Bonfire of the Vanities, half-drunk bottles of wine, an Armani overcoat tossed carelessly over one arm of the couch. The only indication that a holiday had come and gone was a menorah with four half-melted candles sitting crookedly in the window. (“We suck at being Jewish,” Meredith explained.)

  Her room was smaller than I expected, but a high sloped ceiling kept it from feeling cramped. Compared to her room in the Castle it was ferociously tidy, her clothes tucked away in closets and drawers, books neatly arranged by subject on their shelves. What first caught my eye was the vanity table. It was cluttered with black tufted brushes, sleek tubes of lipstick and mascara, but so many photos had been stuck in the frame that the mirror itself was hardly usable. Though one picture of her and her brothers (they were striking children, all auburn hair and green eyes, sitting three in a row like Russian nesting dolls on the bumper of a black Mercedes) was wedged in the topmost corner, the rest were of us. Wren and Richard, faces painted black and white for our second-year mime class. Alexander in the gallery, pretending to share a cigarette with Homer. Meredith and Filippa in cutoff shorts and bikini tops, sprawled in the shallow water on the north shore of the lake as if they’d fallen from the sky and landed there. James, smiling but not at the camera, one hand shyly raised to push the lens away, the other arm hooked around my neck. Me, unaware that we were being photographed, laughing into the distance, a bright autumn leaf caught in my hair.