The Juliet Club

by Suzanne Harper

  Kate, he noticed, was yawning behind her script.

  He turned back to see that Dan was looking at him with a rather befuddled expression. “I see. Well, let’s leave it for now, but give it a thought, will you, Giacomo? Some time when you felt unsure of yourself, it doesn’t have to be anything to do with love, you know, just a moment of insecurity and self-doubt. You’re doing brilliantly, of course, but I think that will help your performance really come alive.”

  Dan turned to Kate. “Right! Kate, let’s start again and see how you do.”

  “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Kate intoned. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name.” She went on, secretly proud that she had read the play so many times that she hardly needed to refer to her script.

  She barely paused long enough for Giacomo to say his line—“Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?”—before continuing.

  “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” she said. Word perfect, of course. She wouldn’t even need her script by this time tomorrow. “Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man—”

  “Yes, Kate, very good, thank you so much for that.” Dan was sitting in front of one of the large windows, straddling a chair backward, watching her intently. “Your memorization skills are very impressive.”

  She smiled complacently. “Well, I know it’s important to get all the words right.”

  “Absolutely, and you’re going to do splendidly, you’ve done a lot of preparatory work already, I can tell,” he said.

  She hesitated. Something about the way he said that was not reassuring. “But?”

  “Very nicely done, really, but you do sound a bit as if you’re doing a trial summation. Rather brisk and to the point, if you know what I mean.”

  “But if you look at Juliet’s dialogue, it is almost like she’s making an argument to a jury,” Kate said eagerly. As soon as she heard she had won a place in the seminar, she had gone through the play several times, underlining passages and making notes in the margins. Now she picked up her copy and opened it to the speech she had just said. “Look, here, Juliet says, it’s your name that is my enemy, not you. And you would still be you, no matter what your last name was, so who cares about the name Montague anyway?” She lowered the book. “I thought it was a very logical point.”

  Dan nodded. “That’s true, throughout this scene Juliet is practical, down-to-earth, grounded—”

  Giacomo sighed heavily.

  “Yes, Giacomo, you have a comment about that?” Dan asked politely.

  “Well, yes,” Giacomo said. “She’s got Romeo standing under her balcony spouting gorgeous poetry and promising her undying love, and all she can say is ‘How did you get in here?’ and ‘Who told you which balcony was mine?’”

  “Right. While Romeo’s speeches just get more and more extravagant,” Kate said, rather testily.

  “He is expressing his soul,” Giacomo said coldly. He was about to go on, but he caught a glimpse of Silvia exchanging glances with Benno, and Tom nudging Lucy, and remembered, just in time, that he was supposed to be falling in love with Kate.

  So instead of countering her argument with a withering remark, he took a deep breath, smiled, and moved a little closer to her.

  “Here, for example,” he said, pitching his voice so that it was low and intimate, yet carried across the room for the benefit of his listeners. “O, speak again, bright angel!” He looked deeply into Kate’s eyes. Fortunately, he was blocking her from the others’ view, so they couldn’t see the way she was lifting one eyebrow sardonically at him. She did not look at all like someone who was falling in love.

  Undeterred, he pressed on. “For thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head, as is a winged messenger of heaven unto the white, upturned, wondring eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him when he bestrides the lazy-puffing clouds and sails up upon the bosom of the air.”

  From across the room, he heard Lucy sigh. He cut his eyes over without moving his head to see the others’ reactions. Silvia was regarding him with what looked like disgust, but he knew Silvia well and he knew that she was, however unwillingly, impressed. Tom’s mouth was hanging slightly open—he was either struck by the words or Giacomo’s delivery or both—and Benno was shaking his head slightly in disbelief.

  All in all, a most satisfactory response. Giacomo turned back to Kate.

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean,” she said in an accusing tone. “It’s too much! Everything Romeo says is so over the top, any sensible girl would run away as fast as she could, because she’d never be able to live up to his expectations!”

  “Perhaps,” Giacomo said, “Romeo does not want a sensible girl.”

  “He should,” she said tartly. “He needs someone to help him keep his feet on the ground.”

  “Why? Because he has a heart? Because he has a soul? Because—”

  “—he’s an idiot. Look!” She flipped her book open to the first pages. “When the play begins, he’s moping because Rosaline doesn’t love him. Four scenes later, he sees Juliet and falls in love at first sight. And two scenes after that, he’s swearing undying love to her. And then—”

  “Yes, we all know the plot.” Giacomo was trying to keep his temper.

  They stood still, glaring at each other until Dan stepped forward, smiling. “Very interesting discussion, thank you both. I’m sure we’ll make many discoveries together in the days to come. But perhaps it’s time for a small break to really absorb the connections you’ve made today. So! Let’s regroup after lunch, shall we?”

  “Are you absolutely, positively sure this is a good thing we’re fixing to do?” Lucy worried, even as she followed Silvia along the manicured paths in the garden behind the Villa Marchese. “I mean, you are absolutely, positively a hundred percent sure that Giacomo told Benno he likes Kate?”

  “Shh!” Silvia stopped so abruptly that Lucy bumped into her and almost sent her sprawling into the lavender border that edged the walkway. “Yes, I told you! Giacomo and Benno went to the cinema last night and that was when Giacomo revealed his true feelings.”

  “Now what exactly did he say, again?”

  “Stai zitto! Keep your voice down!” Silvia hissed. “I already told you!”

  Fifteen minutes ago, Silvia had spotted Kate from an upstairs window, sitting down to eat her lunch in a secluded bower at the end of the garden. It was the perfect moment to implement the first phase of her plan, so she had grabbed Lucy and they had hurried down the three flights of stairs to the terrace. Now they were trying to creep behind the bench where Kate was sitting, surrounded by bushes and lemon trees, where they would then talk about Giacomo’s supposed love for her, pretending that they didn’t see her.

  But this brilliant plan would only work if they actually made it to the end of the garden sometime this century. Right now, Lucy was standing in the middle of the path as if she had put down roots, waiting for Silvia to repeat, for the thousandth time, the fiction that she and Benno had created last night.

  She tugged impatiently on Lucy’s arm, but Lucy could be stubborn when she wanted to be. A small frown creased her forehead as she went on insistently, “It just seems so odd. I mean, the way the two of them argue in class! And they’re always quoting Shakespeare to score points—”

  “Exactly.” Silvia pounced on this. “A mutual love of literature binds them together.”

  “Well, I was going to say that I never knew Shakespeare could be so sarcastic.” Lucy’s voice held a hint of reproof, and Silvia gave a slight shrug as apology for interrupting. “Although I suppose,” Lucy went on, thinking out loud, “I suppose Giacomo could just be afraid that Kate doesn’t return his feelings.”

  “Exactly,” Silvia said with relief. It had taken some time, but Lucy had finally gotten there. “He’s masking his true feelings, that’s exactly what he told Benno. Now, come, she will finish eating and be gone if we d
on’t hurry!”

  Lucy seemed convinced by Silvia’s urgent delivery. “You’re right, of course! Oh, I really hope this works!” she said as she hurried down the path.

  Silvia followed, silently congratulating herself on her truly superb acting skills.

  A few moments later, she was even more glad that she was a wonderful actress because Lucy, despite years of training in her high school’s drama club, was unbelievably bad.

  They had approached the leafy bower, talking casually—or they would have been, if Lucy had not made every slight statement sound like a pronouncement from Mount Olympus.

  “Oh! Silvia!” she cried. “Are you SURE that Giacomo LOVES Kate that much?”

  Silvia looked at her in disbelief and answered, in resolutely normal tones, “That’s what Benno told me. They went to the cinema last night and Giacomo confessed all.”

  “It does seem STRANGE, though!” Lucy said. “After all, she’s always ROLLING HER EYES at everything he says and telling him that he’s committed another LOGICAL FALLACY and then explaining EXACTLY where he went wrong in his reasoning.”

  No human being who had ever drawn breath on this earth talked like that, Silvia thought, but she seized the opening that Lucy had offered with wicked glee. “You’re quite right,” she said smoothly. “In fact, he told Benno that that’s why he knew that what he felt was true love, because it made no sense at all! He said that Kate is a shrill, argumentative, humorless girl with rather plain looks and no fashion sense at all.”

  There was a thump from the other side of the bushes as if someone had slammed a book shut. Silvia smiled her pleased, catlike smile and went on. “He says that he only acts rudely to her in order to hide his true feelings, because he knows that she would just mock him.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad!” For a moment, Lucy was so caught up in the story they were telling that she responded in a natural, heartfelt way. Then her eyes darted toward the bushes as she remembered Kate’s presence and she began projecting for the balcony once again. “But maybe we could TALK to her and LET HER KNOW how much he LOVES her and get her to BE NICE TO HIM!”

  Silvia shook her head sadly, quite enjoying herself as the scene played on. “I’m afraid that won’t work. After a week together, we know her too well. She’s too proud of how smart she is, and completely unable to act charming.”

  Lucy frowned and whispered, “Don’t you think that’s a little mean?”

  “Fine!” Silvia whispered back. “The next line is yours.”

  “Um…” Lucy looked momentarily frightened, as if they were truly acting in a play and she had missed her cue. Then she got back in the groove and said, “It’s really TRAGIC! Giacomo is so good-looking, and charming, and intelligent, and funny.”

  “Yes, yes, he’s stuffed, as they say, with honorable parts,” Silvia quoted bitterly.

  “What?” Lucy whispered, lost.

  “Never mind,” Silvia murmured. “Let’s bring this scene to an end.”

  Obediently, Lucy called out, “OH! It is almost TWO O’CLOCK! We’d better get back to class!”

  “Yes,” Silvia said, pleased now that they had accomplished their mission. “We wouldn’t want to miss rehearsal.”

  As they ran back up the path, Lucy tried, without much success, to stifle her giggles, and even Silvia found that she was almost smiling.

  Act II

  Scene II

  Giacomo sat on a bench in the church courtyard and gazed at the small poster that had been pasted on a nearby wall to announce the death of a Verona resident. Despite the somber surroundings, he was trying not to laugh. He had amused himself for the last hour as he had watched Benno and Tom try to figure out how to maneuver him into a position where he would be sure to overhear their staged conversation.

  First, they had entered the café where he was enjoying an afternoon espresso and tried to skulk in without his seeing them. That plan had been doomed to failure, of course, since the café was only big enough for eight tables, each of which was only inches from the other.

  “Ciao, Tom,” he had said. “Ciao, Benno.”

  Their faces fell at being discovered, and Giacomo had to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

  He went on smoothly, “On your way to the football field?”

  “What?” Tom had asked blankly.

  Benno gave him an exasperated sidelong glance and tossed the soccer ball he was carrying from one hand to the other.

  Tom’s face cleared as he suddenly remembered their cover story. “Oh yes! Right! We’re going to go play soccer with some, um, guys. But we came in here because”—he glanced wildly at the menu written on a chalkboard—“we were thirsty!”

  Benno nodded at the waiter. “Due aranciate, per favore.”

  Giacomo had smiled to himself and waited until they were served their orange drinks. Then he had taken a last sip of his espresso and said, “I have to go now. A few errands to run for my mother. Ciao!”

  He had chuckled all the way to the pasticceria at the memory of how crestfallen Benno and Tom had looked as they had been forced to sit at the table and finish their drinks. He leaned against the counter as the pasticceria owner slowly wrapped up the loaf of bread he had bought. Fortunately for Benno and Tom, the man moved at a glacial pace. Usually this drove Giacomo wild, but now he hummed under his breath as he gazed out the window, watching the street for the next scene to begin. Sure enough, Benno and Tom came running up, red-faced and panting in the heat, just as Giacomo stepped outside.

  “Hello!” he said, pretending great surprise. “How odd to run into you again.”

  “Verona is not so big,” Benno pointed out.

  “True. But weren’t you going to play football? And isn’t the football field where you usually practice in that direction?”

  Tom shot Benno a wild glance. Giacomo had to stop himself from shaking his head reprovingly at this. Really, Benno couldn’t have chosen a worse person to involve in this conspiracy! Every thought that went through Tom’s mind was written on his face for all to see.

  “Yes, but I have to stop by my aunt Bettina’s to, er, get some tomatoes she picked from her garden,” Benno said quickly, clearly improvising. “Then we’re going to play football.”

  “Ah.” Giacomo nodded. “Well, I have to meet my grandmother at church now. Ciao.”

  He sauntered back in the direction that they had just come from, pretending not to notice as they trailed behind him. He could have kept playing this game all day, but the afternoon was hot and the thought of going home and sipping a cool drink in the shade sounded very appealing. He finally decided to take pity on them and put himself in a position where it would be easy for them to sneak up on him.

  He hadn’t been lying, exactly, about going to the church. He did plan to head there, not because his grandmother had asked him to, but simply because it would take Benno and Tom so far out of their way.

  The inner courtyard had high walls to provide shade, weathered stone benches to provide rest, and the sound of droning bees and church bells to provide a contented and meditative atmosphere. It seemed like a quiet and pleasant spot to while away the time it would take for Benno to coach Tom on his lines and then slip up behind him.

  He settled onto a bench and let his mind drift until he finally heard approaching footsteps.

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Tom,” Benno said, rather too emphatically. “Kate told Lucy that she has a—how do you say this in English? A crush?—on Giacomo!”

  “I can’t believe it!” Tom was doing a credible job of sounding amazed. In fact, Giacomo was impressed. He wouldn’t have thought, given Tom’s performance so far, that he had any acting ability whatsoever. “Giacomo doesn’t seem like Kate’s type.”

  Giacomo smirked a little at this. No girl had ever said he wasn’t her type.

  “In fact, she kind of acts like she hates him,” Tom went on. There was a brief silence, then a whisper, then Tom’s voice again, unnaturally loud. “Oh! But maybe she’s just pr
etending she hates him!”

  “Yes, I think she is a very good actress,” Benno said. “Because Lucy tells me that she sits in her room at night and writes his name over and over in her notebook, then she sighs and even cries a little over the fact that she can never have him.”

  “But why doesn’t she just tell him how she feels?” Tom asked.

  “As you said, she has treated him so badly since they first met,” Benno replied. “That was before she realized she loved him, of course. She says she would be embarrassed to confess her true feelings now. Afraid, even!”

  “Afraid?”

  “You have heard how Giacomo treats her,” Benno pointed out. “He mocks her constantly. She does argue with him, but you must admit that he also disagrees with every point she makes.”

  “Hmm,” Tom agreed. “Well, maybe it’s better that he doesn’t ever know that she likes him.”

  “I agree,” Benno said. “You know Giacomo is my friend.”

  “You guys seem really tight,” Tom agreed, and Giacomo smiled.

  “But still, even I have to admit,” Benno went on, “he does have some faults.”

  Giacomo raised his eyebrows at this.

  “Everyone does,” Tom said fairly. “No one’s perfect.”

  Giacomo nodded approvingly at this sentiment.

  “Very true,” Benno said. “Although . . .”

  Giacomo sat up a little straighter and turned his head to make sure he heard what came next.

  “Although Giacomo, perhaps, has more faults than most people,” his friend went on. “In fact, if I’m being honest, I would have to say that he has a lot more.”

  “Really?” A note of genuine interest entered Tom’s voice. “Like what?”

  “Well, I don’t like to say it, but he is a little vain about his looks. Have you noticed how he dresses?”