The Juliet Club

by Suzanne Harper

  He pointed an accusing finger at Tom’s pocket. Tom looked down and realized that he had automatically reached for the letter, unnerved by Benno’s interrogation. He looked back into Benno’s triumphant face.

  “Nothing.” Tom sighed, surrendering to the inevitable. He handed the letter over. “Just this.”

  “Oh, Tom.” Benno lowered the letter and stared at his friend in dismay. “This is not good.”

  “I know.” They were sitting on a bench overlooking the river. Tom was resting his elbows on his knees and had his head in his hands. “It’s terrible.” He raised his head to look beseechingly into Benno’s face. “Silvia makes me nervous.”

  “Only nervous?” Benno said. “She makes me fear for my life.”

  This made Tom smile slightly, but then his smile disappeared. “I know. But still, I kind of, you know . . . like her.”

  Benno stared at him, horrified realization dawning. “Perhaps my English is not as good as I thought. You like her? As in—”

  “As in, I like her!” Tom said, exasperated. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to say it!”

  He stood up and began pacing back and forth in front of the bench. “I know it’s crazy,” he said, running his hands through his hair.

  “Insane,” Benno agreed. “Mad, nutty, bonkers, completely barmy.”

  “Your English seems to be getting better.” Tom had stopped his pacing long enough to give Benno a cold look.

  “I’m sorry, those are words I’ve had reason to look up,” Benno replied, injured.

  Tom sat back down. “No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t take it out on you. I just . . . I don’t know why I feel this way when I really don’t want to feel this way, you know?”

  Actually, Benno couldn’t quite follow this sentence—he had a feeling even his English teacher might have struggled with it—but he nodded sympathetically. “Yes,” he said, “I understand.” He thought for a moment, then came to a decision. “Actually, I do not understand this at all, but you are my friend. If Silvia is the girl you want, what can I do but help you get her?”

  Act IV

  Scene III

  Dear Juliet:

  I like a girl who hates me. At least, I think she does. She ignores me a lot of the time, and when she’s not ignoring me, she’s making fun of me. On the other hand, she does that to everybody. The thing is, I know she would like me if she gave me a chance. So, I have a favor to ask. Can you write a letter to her, telling her how I feel? I think it would mean more, coming from you. At least she might read it.

  Mark B.

  There was a brief silence after Benno finished reading, broken, predictably enough, by Lucy.

  “Well, I think this girl sounds absolutely terrible,” she declared. “We should tell this Mark to find another girl. One who likes him.”

  “That was easy.” Giacomo took the letter from Benno and flicked it across the table to Lucy. “Next.”

  Tom looked alarmed. “Hey, wait a minute!”

  Everyone looked at him with a questioning look except Benno. When Tom seemed unable to say anything else, Benno jumped in to help. “Yes, wait a minute!” he echoed, then stopped, unsure what to say next.

  Puzzled glances were exchanged around the table.

  “Wait for what?” Silvia asked, impatient. “Why waste our time on another stupid letter”—she took the letter opener from Benno and thrust it into the paper to emphasize her point—“from another stupid boy”—another thrust—“who is too stupid to see the truth that is staring him in the face!” The paper ripped in half, and Benno winced.

  “But what if—” Tom began.

  Silvia was still holding the letter opener, which was now pointed at him. He went on doggedly. “What if he likes this girl? Really, really likes her?”

  “Oh, well then.” Giacomo threw his hands in the air. “As long as he really, really likes her, that is all that matters.”

  “Tom is right,” Benno said stoutly. “Another girl will not do. We must help, um, Mark win this one.”

  “How?” Kate asked. Love had a logic all its own, she was willing to concede that, but this situation sounded dire. “It sounds like a battle that’s already been lost.”

  “I don’t know, let’s see. . . .” Benno pretended to think, then brightened. “I have an idea! Why don’t we write a letter to this girl, explaining why Mark likes her, and she will be so moved that—”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Silvia snapped. She snatched up the letter again and scanned it furiously. “He doesn’t even say why he likes her!” She tossed it back on the table. “Typical.”

  “So we write a letter that says that her eyes are lovely and her hair is beautiful—” Benno had raised his voice. A tactical mistake, he soon realized.

  “Oh, and it doesn’t matter what color her eyes are, I suppose!” Silvia raised her voice even louder. She was almost shouting. “Or her hair!”

  “Why should it? She knows what color they are, why should it matter whether that’s in the letter?”

  “Because it shows he’s paying attention to her!” Silvia pushed her chair back and stood up, the better to yell at him. She was even waving her arms a bit. She looked insane, Benno thought as he sank back in his seat. Really, what did Tom see in her anyway? “Because anyone can say”—Silvia switched to a mocking, falsetto voice—“‘Oh, you are so beautiful. I love you soooo much.’ Even though”—back to the yelling—“I’ve never even bothered to notice who you really are!”

  Silvia flung herself back in her chair, crossed her arms, and glared around the table. There was a brief, thrumming silence that, clearly, no one wanted to break. Finally, Lucy said cautiously, “But maybe he has noticed. And he just didn’t write it in the letter. Shouldn’t we at least give him the benefit of the doubt?”

  The members of the Juliet Club looked at Silvia, holding their breath.

  After a long moment, she gave a slight shrug, and they breathed again. “If you wish,” she said offhandedly. “It is nothing to do with me.”

  “I don’t know,” Tom cleared his throat. “I kind of think you should write the letter for him.”

  The look she turned on him was scorching. “I should write the letter? For this imbecile who is too stupid to figure out whether this girl likes him? And too scared to talk to her himself? I should help an idiot like that?”

  Tom could have cursed himself. He had said that without thinking, as usual, and now he was sitting here with his mouth open, as usual, and he was frantically searching his mind for an answer, and, as usual, his mind was blank. “Well . . . yes.”

  She scowled, but she took the paper from him. “Fine! I will tell this girl to give him a chance,” she said as she began writing with a fast, furious scrawl. “But only one. If he can’t win her with my help, he doesn’t deserve to win her at all.”

  Act IV

  Scene IV

  Although it was almost ten o’clock at night, it had been a hot day and the evening was still warm. Giacomo wandered aimlessly in the streets near the church, too restless to go back to the villa and too preoccupied with his thoughts to be sociable.

  Rehearsal had gone all wrong again. He wasn’t sure why, he had been so good at the beginning, but now he couldn’t seem to say a line without stuttering, he couldn’t seem to take a step without tripping, he couldn’t seem to make a move without Dan stopping them and suggesting, ever so kindly and gently, that perhaps they should start over.

  Kate, somewhat to his surprise, had been quite understanding about all this. In fact, now that he thought about it, she seemed like a very different person than the girl he had met almost a month ago. She didn’t lift her eyebrow sardonically when he made a mistake, or offer a minilecture on Shakespearean action when he forgot where he was supposed to stand. She just waited patiently until he regrouped, and then started the scene again.

  But that, of course, was part of the problem, because Kate was playing her part brilliantly. She said Juliet’s lines with passion;
her timing was perfect. And she seemed lit from within; she glowed. Giacomo could see it, and he knew the others could, too. Yesterday, when they had been rehearsing in the garden, with Kate standing on the balcony, some of the college students had been on the terrace, reading and talking. They had stopped what they were doing to listen, and Giacomo wasn’t an idiot; he knew they weren’t paying attention to him.

  When she had said the last line, “A thousand times good night,” they had applauded.

  Giacomo rounded a corner and suddenly stopped under a streetlight, struck by an awful thought. Was he jealous of Kate? Was that the reason that he was stumbling through their scenes, unable to say a simple sentence?

  He worried about this for a moment, then he thought of Kate’s radiant face as she looked down on him from the balcony, and his worry vanished. In fact, he felt quite happy. . . .

  Quite happy, that is, until Saint Rosaline appeared in the window of the drugstore he was standing in front of, looking exasperated.

  Of course you aren’t jealous! she said. You are in love!

  Giacomo felt that he had walked for miles through the small, narrow streets of Verona, but still he couldn’t go home.

  He wanted to dismiss Saint Rosaline’s comments out of hand, but this was impossible because he knew that the comments came from the recesses of his own mind. Either that, or he was truly going mad, which at this point seemed like an attractive option.

  But surely one’s subconscious sometimes got things wrong? Because it was clearly, obviously, patently ridiculous that he would really fall in love with someone like Kate. No, they were just pretending to fall in love, and his difficulty with the balcony scene was just an acting problem. He simply needed to find the key to solving it, and all would be well.

  He turned another corner and found himself walking past a pastry store. Eager to think about something else, he stopped to examine the baked goods on display. After several moments, he suddenly realized that he was no longer staring at the biscotti but at his reflection.

  It had taken him a moment to recognize himself. Perhaps it was the moonlight that made him look so pale and grim—

  Suddenly, another face popped up in the reflection and a voice yelled, “Giacomo! There you are!”

  Giacomo whirled around to glare at Benno. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you, of course. And it took forever, too. First, I went to the villa and your mother didn’t know where you were, but I stopped in the kitchen and your nonna said you had left her at the church and headed toward the river, so I stopped by the comic shop and Angelo said he saw you walk toward the piazza, so then I went there because I thought you might have stopped at the café and Stefano said I had just missed you and . . . hey!” Benno stopped his rambling long enough to take a closer look at Giacomo. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Benno gave him a penetrating look. “So why have you been doing the grand tour of Verona, anyway?”

  Giacomo did his best to make his voice light. “‘A troubled mind drove me to walk abroad.’”

  “Troubled about what? Oh, you’re quoting again, aren’t you?” Benno said in disgust. “Listen, I need your help. Where can we go that’s quiet?”

  “I’m telling you, this situation is terrible! Tragic! A disaster in the making!” Benno cried. He flung himself back in his chair and shot Giacomo an accusatory glance. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

  Giacomo groaned and put his head into his hands. They were alone in the library. It was almost midnight. Moonlight was pouring through the windows, turning the room silver and gray; church bells chimed in the night; and he wanted nothing more than to be asleep. Instead, he was sitting at a table strewn with crumpled pieces of paper, racking his brain to find the right words to write in a love letter. And why?

  Because Benno had decided he absolutely must commit his precious feelings and innermost thoughts to paper and that it must happen this very night, and because Benno was perhaps the most ill-equipped person in the world to take on that task, and because Benno had asked for his help, and because he, Giacomo, was softheaded enough to have offered advice and counsel for more than an hour, simply because Benno was his very good friend.

  “I can’t believe you call yourself my friend!” Benno ended bitterly.

  Giacomo closed his eyes to send up a brief prayer to Saint Rosaline. Give me strength, he pleaded, because my friend is an idiot.

  “Don’t make it so difficult,” Giacomo snapped. “Just write what you feel.”

  “But that is difficult!” Benno protested. “It is the most difficult thing of all!”

  “Because you don’t know how you feel?”

  “No! Because what I feel is so enormous, so overwhelming, it’s like, like . . .”

  “Yes?” Giacomo prompted Benno.

  His friend threw his hands into the air in despair. “I don’t know! Like being swept out into the ocean by a huge wave, it’s like waking up one morning and discovering that the world has been made brand-new, it’s like, it’s like . . .”

  “Perhaps you should write that you’re suffering from ‘a madness most discreet, a choking gall, and a preserving sweet,’” Giacomo began. He had barely finished before Benno threw a pen at him.

  “Stop quoting!” he yelled. “You know I can’t understand you when you quote!”

  “I was just saying, far more poetically and beautifully, of course, what you’ve been rattling on about for the last forty-five minutes.”

  “Exactly! And everything you say is even more confusing, which proves my point!” Benno cried triumphantly. “What I feel cannot possibly be expressed in words!”

  Giacomo gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and imagined himself in church, staring up at Saint Rosaline’s faded fresco.

  Have patience, she advised. Your friend is an idiot, but remember, he is in love.

  “What you are feeling is nothing new,” he said to Benno, doing his best to at least sound patient. “Throughout the centuries—”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t, please don’t start talking about history, I beg you!” Benno clutched his head with both hands. “That’s even worse than quoting Shakespeare. And don’t even think of telling me that my problem will seem like nothing when one considers the great span of time, or I swear I will hit you.”

  “I was going to say,” Giacomo went on, even more patiently, “that millions of other people have felt the same way that you do.”

  “I don’t care about millions of other people!” Benno’s eyes were blazing. “They’re all dead, anyway, so what good can they do me?”

  Giacomo counted to ten, then to twenty, and reflected that, since patience was a virtue, this session with Benno might just qualify him for canonization. “Fortunately for you, some of those useless dead people were poets.” He paused, then added meaningfully, “Poets of love and romance.”

  “Oh?” Benno lowered his hands and looked at his friend with dawning hope. “Good poets?”

  “The best,” Giacomo reassured him. “And I was further going to suggest that perhaps you could take a page or two from some of them who have, after all, managed to write down what, er, cannot possibly be expressed in words.”

  “Hmm.” Benno was nodding now, and looking somewhat happier. “So you have a poem I could copy?”

  “Not copy, no. You should always use your own words when telling a girl that you love her,” Giacomo said sternly.

  Benno looked crestfallen, and Giacomo relented. “But perhaps you could paraphrase a poem in your own words, add a few little touches that would make it your own, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh.” Benno was looking daunted again. He pointed out the obvious flaw in this plan. “But I already told you, I don’t know what my own words are!”

  “Yes, I know.” Giacomo selected a book from the pile on the desk, opened it, and pushed it across the table. “But perhaps you can find a sonnet that will fit your situation.”

&n
bsp; After much deliberation, Benno finally chose a sonnet, admitting—somewhat begrudgingly—that it just might articulate the monumental passion and adoration he felt for Lucy. Then, after a lengthy discussion about the poem’s meaning, he managed to paraphrase the sonnet’s sublime beauty into a few halting sentences of his own. And after a short but spirited argument, he got Giacomo to agree that quoting one other piece of poetry was permissible, given that, without such a quote, his letter would completely lack beauty, grace, or felicity of expression.

  “But now I have to find another poem,” he cried, clutching his hair.

  “Here.” Giacomo searched through the pile of books, grabbed a familiar volume, opened it to a fitting verse, and shoved it across the table. “That will do very well.”

  “Grazie,” Benno said with relief.

  Then he looked at his letter, which had many laborious cross-outs and corrections, and said sadly, “If only my handwriting wasn’t so horrible. Even after I copy this out, it still won’t look the way a love letter should.”

  Giacomo sighed and held out his hand.

  Fifteen minutes later, Benno finally left, beaming, with a beautiful letter, written in beautiful handwriting, that he could drop at the beautiful Lucy’s door on his way out.

  Giacomo tilted his chair back to lean against the wall and closed his eyes. It was a wonderful thing to have reached such a deep understanding of the inner mysteries of love that he was able to help others. Now if only he had the faintest clue about how to help himself.

  Act IV

  Scene V

  “Oooh, you look wonderful!” Lucy gave Kate an approving nod as she stepped into the bedroom. Lucy was already wearing her dress, a filmy creation in several shades of blue, and she twirled around to show it off.

  “So do you,” Kate said. She smoothed down her hair and glanced at herself again in the mirror, feeling her heart beat a little faster. It was the night of the dress rehearsal. They would all be wearing their costumes, performing their parts, practicing the timing of each scene and dance and sword fight. Professoressa Marchese had been prowling the corridors all day, issuing sharp commands and dramatically throwing her hands into the air when she saw anything that wasn’t quite right.