If We Were Villains: A Novel

I feel, at the end of my story, sapped of life, as if I have been bleeding freely for the past few hours instead of simply speaking. “Demand me nothing,” I say to Colborne. “What you know, you know: / From this time forth I will never speak a word.”

I turn away from the Tower window and avoid his eyes as I walk past him, toward the stairs. He follows me down to the library in respectful silence. Filippa is there, sitting on the couch, a copy of Winter’s Tale open in her lap. She looks up, and the fading evening light darts across her glasses. My heart is a little lighter at the sight of her.

“It is almost morning,” she says to Colborne, “and yet I am sure you are not satisfied / Of these events in full.”

“Well, I can’t ask much more of Oliver,” he says. “He’s confirmed a few long-standing suspicions.”

“Will you rest easier with one less mystery on your mind?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I thought some closure would make it more bearable, but now I’m not so sure.”

I drift to the edge of the room and stare down at the long black burn on the carpet. Now that I’ve told Colborne everything I feel unmoored. I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.

The sound of my name makes me turn back toward the others.

“Oliver, will you tolerate one last question?” Colborne asks.

“You can ask,” I say. “I won’t promise to answer.”

“Fair enough.” He glances at Filippa, then looks back at me again. “What’s next for you? I’m just wondering. What happens now?”

The answer is so obvious I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to him. I hesitate at first, protective of it. But then I meet Filippa’s eyes and I realize she’s wondering, too.

“I’m supposed to go stay with my sister—you remember Leah. She’s doing her doctorate at Chicago,” I say. “I wouldn’t blame the rest of my family if they didn’t want to see me. But more than that—you must know—more than anything, I just need to see James.”

Something strange happens now. I don’t see in their faces the exasperation I’m expecting. Instead Colborne turns toward Filippa, eyes wide with alarm. She sits up straighter on the couch and lifts one hand to stop him speaking.

“Pip?” I say. “What’s wrong?”

She stands slowly, smoothing invisible wrinkles from the front of her jeans. “There’s something I haven’t told you.” I swallow, fighting an urge to run out of the room and never find out what she means to say next. But I stay where I am, glued to the spot by the fear that not knowing is worse. “I was afraid that if I told you while you were inside, you’d never want to come out,” she says. “So I waited.”

“Tell me what?” I say. “Tell me what?”

“Oh, Oliver,” she says, her voice a distant echo of itself. “I’m so sorry. James is gone.”

The world drops out from underneath me. My hand gropes blindly for the bookshelf beside me, for something to hold on to. I stare down at the burn on the carpet, listening for my own heartbeat and hearing nothing. “When?” is all I manage to say.

“Four years ago,” she says, quietly. “Four years ago now.”

Colborne bows his head. Why? Is he ashamed that he dragged the story out of me and all the while he knew, and I didn’t?

“How did it happen?” I ask.

“Slowly. It was the guilt, Oliver,” she says. “The guilt was killing him. Why did you think he stopped visiting?” There’s a note of desperation in her voice, but I have no pity for her. There’s no room for that. No room for anger either. Only a catastrophic sense of loss. Filippa is still talking, but I hardly hear the words. “You know how he was. If we felt everything twice, he felt it all four times.”

“What did he do?” I demand.

Her words are tiny. Barely audible. “He drowned,” she says. “He drowned himself. God, Oliver, I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you when it happened, but I was so afraid of what you might do.” I can tell she’s no less afraid now. “I’m sorry.”

I am wretched. Destitute.

Suddenly it seems there is a fourth person in the room. For the first time in ten years, I look at the chair that had always been Richard’s and find it isn’t empty. There he sits, in lounging, leonine arrogance. He watches me with a razor-thin smile and I realize that this is it—the dénouement, the counterstroke, the end-all he was waiting for. He lingers only long enough for me to see the gleam of triumph in his half-lidded eyes; then he, too, is gone.

“So,” I say when I have just enough strength to speak. “Now I know.”

I don’t speak again until we bid goodbye to Colborne at the Hall. The day is over now, night falling as we walked back through the woods to seal us in a world of darkness. There are no stars tonight.

“Oliver,” Colborne says when we find ourselves standing in the shadow of the Hall again. “I’m sorry today ended this way.”

“I’m sorry for a lot of things.”

“If I can ever do anything for you … Well, you know how to find me.” He looks at me differently than he ever has, and I realize he’s forgiven me, finally, now that he knows the truth. He holds out one hand, and I accept it. We shake. Then we go our separate ways.

Filippa is waiting for me by the car. “I’ll take you anywhere you want,” she says, “if you promise I won’t have to worry.”

“No,” I say. “Don’t do that. We’ve worried enough for a lifetime, don’t you think?”

“Enough for ten.”

I lean on the car beside her, and we stand there for a long time, staring up at the Hall. The Dellecher coat of arms stares back down at us, in all its delusional grandeur.

“Oh, is all forgot?” I ask. “All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?”

I wonder if Filippa will recognize the line. It was hers, once, in the easy days of our third year, when we all thought ourselves invincible.

“We’ll never forget it,” she says. “That’s the worst part.”

I scuff my toes in the dirt. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though.”

“What?”

“If you knew all along, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“God, Oliver, isn’t it obvious?” She shrugs when I don’t answer. “You all were the only family I had. I’d have killed Richard myself if I thought it would keep the rest of you safe.”

“I do understand that,” I say, privately thinking that if it had been her, we probably would have gotten away with it. And really, it could have been any one of us. “But me, Pip? Why couldn’t you tell me?”

“I knew you better than you knew yourself,” she says, and I can hear ten years of sadness in her voice. “I was terrified you’d do exactly what you did.”

My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can’t look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I’ve inflicted—like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.

“How are Frederick and Gwendolyn?” I say, grasping at something easier to talk about. “I forgot to ask.”

“Gwendolyn’s just the same,” she tells me, with a shadow of a smirk, which fades as soon as it appears. “Except I think she keeps the students at a bit of a distance now.”

I nod, don’t comment. “And Frederick?”

“He still teaches, but he’s slowing down,” she says. “It took a lot out of him. Took a lot out of all of us. But they wouldn’t need me directing if it hadn’t, so I guess it’s not all bad.”

“I guess not,” I say, a hollow echo. “And Camilo?” I don’t know how it started, but I have my suspicions about Thanksgiving of our fourth year. How distracted we were, not to notice.

She gives me a small, guilty smile. “He hasn’t changed at all. Asks about you every two weeks when I come home.”

In the short pause that follows, I almost forgive her. Every two weeks.

“Will you marry him?” I ask. “It’s been long enough.”

“He says the same thing. You’d come back for that, wouldn’t you? I’d need someone to give me away.”

“Only if Holinshed officiates.”

It’s not as firm a promise as she wants. But she won’t get that. James is gone, and I’m sure of nothing now.

We stand side by side for a little longer without speaking. Then she says, “It’s getting late. Where can I take you? You know you’re welcome to stay with us.”

“No,” I say. “Thanks. The bus station would be fine.”

We climb into the car, and drive in silence.

I have not been to Chicago in ten years, and it takes much longer than it should for me to find the address Filippa reluctantly wrote down. It is an unassuming but elegant town house, which murmurs of money and success and a desire not to be disturbed. For a long time before I knock on the door I stand on the sidewalk, staring up at the bedroom window, where a soft white light glows. It’s been seven years since the last time I saw her, the only time she visited, to tell me I wasn’t fooling anyone. At least, not her. “That shirt in the locker,” she said. “It wasn’t yours, not from that night. I ought to know.”

I breathe in as deeply as I can (my lungs still feel too small) and knock. As I wait on the porch in the warm summer shadows, I wonder if Filippa warned her.

When she opens the door, her eyes are already wet. She slaps me hard across the face, and I accept the blow without protest. I deserve much worse. She makes a small sound of wounded satisfaction, then opens the door wide enough to let me in.

Meredith is as perfect as I remember her. Her hair is shorter now, though not by much. She wears her clothes a little looser, too, but again, not much. We pour wine but don’t drink it. She sits on a chair in the living room and I sit on the couch beside it and we talk. We talk for hours. There’s a decade of things we haven’t said.

“I’m sorry,” I say, when there’s a pause long enough for me to screw my courage to the sticking-place. “I know I have no right to ask, but … what happened with you and James in Gwendolyn’s class, did it ever happen offstage?”

She nods, not looking at me. “Once, right afterward. We thought we were going our separate ways, but then I walked into the music room, and there he was. I wanted to go right back out again, but he grabbed me and we just—”

I know what must have happened, without her telling me.

“I don’t know what made us do it. I needed to understand, you and him and how he’d wrapped you quite so tight around his finger. I couldn’t think of any other way,” she says. “But it was over as soon as it started. We heard someone coming—Filippa, of course, she must have known something was wrong—and sort of came to our senses. Then we just stood there. And he said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘The same thing you’re thinking about.’ We didn’t even need to say your name.” She frowns down into the red pool of her wine. “It was just a kiss, but God, it hurt like hell.”

“I know,” I say, without resentment. Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated—confusion made a masterpiece of us.

“I thought it was over then,” she says, her voice strained and uncertain. “But the night of the Lear party—I was in the bathroom, fixing my makeup, and I felt a hand on my waist. At first I thought it was you, but it was him, and he was drunk, and talking like a crazy person. I shoved him off and said, ‘James, what is the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ He grabbed me again, but it was violent. Painful. He said, ‘Or maybe you’re the only one who would, but why object? What’s done is done, and even-handed justice for us both.’ And that was enough—I knew. I got away, barely. Got out of the Castle and went straight to Colborne. I told him everything I could. Not about the dock, not that morning, but everything else. And I wanted to tell you, right there in the crossover, but I was afraid you would do something stupid, like help him run off in the middle of intermission. I never thought…”

Her voice fades out.

“Meredith, I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t think. I didn’t care what happened to me, but I should’ve thought about what would happen to you.”

She won’t look at me, but she says, “There’s one thing I need to know, now.”

“Of course.” I owe her that much.

“Us. All that time. Was any of it real, or did you know all along, and we were just a get-out-of-jail-free card for James?” She glares at me with those dark green eyes, and I feel sick.

“God, Meredith, no. I had no idea,” I tell her. “You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”

She nods like she wants to believe me but there’s something else in the way. She says, “Were you in love with him?”

“Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.

“I know.” She sounds exhausted. “I knew then, I just pretended not to.”

“So did I. So did he. I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head, stares out the dark window for a moment. “I’m sorry, too, you know. About him.”

It hurts too much to talk about. My teeth ache in my head. I open my mouth to speak, but what comes out instead is a gasp, a sob, and the grief that shock has kept at bay crashes through me like a flood. I pitch forward, that strange twisted laugh that’s been stuck in my throat for ten years finally bursting out. Meredith lurches out of her chair and knocks her wineglass to the floor but ignores the sound of it shattering. She says my name and a dozen other things I barely hear.

Nothing is so exhausting as anguish. After a quarter of an hour I am utterly spent, my throat ragged and aching, my face hot and sticky with tears. I lie on the floor with no memory of how I got there, and Meredith sits cradling my head as if it’s a fragile, precious thing that might, at any moment, break. When I’ve been silent for another half hour, she helps me to my feet and leads me to bed.

We lie side by side in solemn darkness. All I can think of is Macbeth—he has James’s face in my imagination—shouting, Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, so sleep no more! Oh, balm of hurt minds. I want sleep desperately, but do not hope to have it.

But I wake up in the morning and blink with swollen eyelids as the sun rises and spills in through the window. Sometime in the night, Meredith has rolled over, and is sleeping now with her hair fanned out behind her, her cheek against my shoulder.

Though we never talk about it, it is somehow decided that I will stay with Meredith indefinitely. While her professional life is crowded with people, her personal life is a mostly solitary one, the long hours filled with books and words and wine. For a week we reenact Christmas in New York, but more cautiously. I sit on the couch with a mug of tea at my elbow and a book on my knee, sometimes reading, sometimes staring past the pages. At first she sits across from me. Then beside me. Then she lies with her head in my lap and I run my fingers through her hair.

When I explain all this to Leah, I can’t tell if she’s disappointed or relieved.

Alexander calls and we agree to meet for drinks next time he’s in the city. I don’t hope to hear from Wren—Meredith tells me she’s in London, working as a dramaturg and living like a recluse, afraid of the outside world. We don’t talk about James again. I know that whatever else happens, we never will.

Filippa calls and asks for me. She says there’s something in the mail. Two days later it arrives, a plain brown envelope with a smaller white envelope inside. The sight of James’s handwriting on the second one stops my heart for a moment. I hide it under a couch cushion, and resolve to open it when Meredith is gone.

The next week she’s filming in Los Angeles. She puts a new key on the nightstand, kisses me, and leaves me sleeping in what I’ve come to think of—prematurely, perhaps—as “our” bed. When I wake up again, I retrieve James’s letter.

I know more by now about what happened. He drove north from the small apartment he’d occupied outside Berkeley and drowned in the icy winter waters of the San Juan Islands. In his car, abandoned on the ferry landing, he’d left his keys, an empty bottle of Xanax, and a pair of almost identical envelopes. The first was unmarked, unsealed, and contained a short handwritten farewell, but no explanation or confession. (He respected, at least, the last request I’d made of him.) On the second, he’d written only one word:

OLIVER

I open it with clumsy fingers. Ten lines of verse are scratched in the middle of the page. It’s James’s writing still, but more jagged, as if it had been written hastily, with a pen that had little ink left to give. I recognize the text—a disjointed, mosaic monologue, cobbled together from an early scene of Pericles:

Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rock,

Wash’d me from shore to shore, and left me breath

Nothing to think on but ensuing death.

What I have been I have forgot to know;

But what I am, want teaches me to think on:

A man throng’d up with cold: my veins are chill,

And have no more of life than may suffice

To give my tongue that heat to ask your help;

Which if you shall refuse, when I am dead,

For that I am a man, pray see me burièd.

I read it three times, wondering why he would choose such a strange, obscure passage to leave me—until I remember I haven’t heard these words since he chanted them to me, lying drunk in the sand on some beach in Del Norte, as if he’d been washed up beside me by the tide. I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope. But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.

When I can’t stand another moment’s inaction, I race up the stairs to the office, my head full of what would have been Pericles’s last words—if he had not asked for help.

The computer on the desk crackles to life when I touch the mouse, and after one interminable minute I am on the Internet, searching for every record I can find of James Farrow’s death in the bleak midwinter of 2004. I devour five, six, ten old articles, all of which say the same thing. He drowned himself on the last day of December, and though the local authorities dragged the freezing water for days and miles, his body was never found.