If We Were Villains: A Novel

Part 5 – Act V

The climb from the first floor to the Tower takes a decade. I ascend slowly, like a man on the steps to the gallows, and Colborne comes haltingly behind me. The smell of the place—old wood and old books under a soft sprinkling of dust—is overwhelmingly familiar, though I never noticed it ten years ago when I lived here. The door is barely cracked, as if one of us, twenty-something, left it open in our rush to get to the theatre, Studio Five, the Bore’s Head, wherever. For one instant I wonder if James is waiting on the other side.

The door opens silently when I push—it hasn’t rusted the way I have. The empty room gapes at me as I step over the threshold, braced for the pain of recollection to hit me like a thunderbolt. Instead there’s only a faint whisper, a sigh like the slightest breeze on the other side of the window glass. I venture farther in.

Students still live here, or so it seems. The layer of dust on the empty bookshelves is only a few weeks deep, not years. The beds are stripped of everything, and they look naked and skeletal. Mine. James’s. I reach for one of his bedposts, the spiraled wood smooth as glass. I exhale the breath I didn’t know I was holding. The room is just a room.

The window between my wardrobe and James’s bed—narrow, like an arrow slit—squints down at the lake. If I crane my neck I can see the end of the dock, jutting into the summer’s emerald water. I wonder (for the first time, oddly) if I would have watched it happen from here, had I not spent the night of the Caesar party one floor down in Meredith’s room. Too dark, I tell myself. I wouldn’t have seen a thing.

“This was your room?” Behind me, Colborne is looking up at the ceiling, the faraway central point where all the beams converge, like spokes on a wheel. “You and Farrow.”

“Yes, James and I.”

Colborne’s eyes slowly descend and find my face. He shakes his head. “The two of you. I never understood it.”

“Neither did we. It was easier not to.”

He struggles, for a moment, to find words. “What were you?” he asks, finally. It sounds rude, but it’s just exasperation at his own inability to better craft the question.

“We were a lot of things. Friends, brothers, partners in crime.” His expression darkens, but I ignore it and continue. “James was everything I desperately wanted to be and never could: talented, intelligent, worldly. The only child of a family that prized art over logic and passion over peace and quiet. I stuck to him like a burr from the day we met, hoping some of his brilliance might rub off on me.”

“And him?” Colborne asks. “What was his interest in you?”

“Is it so hard to believe that someone might just like me, Joe?”

“Not at all. I’ve told you more than once that I like you, completely in spite of myself.”

“Yes,” I say, dryly, “and it never fails to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.”

He smirks. “You don’t have to answer the question, but I won’t withdraw it.”

“Very well. This is guesswork, of course, but I think James liked me for the opposite reasons that I liked him. Everyone called me ‘nice,’ but what they really meant was ‘naïve.’ I was naïve and impressionable and shockingly ordinary. But I was just clever enough to keep up with him, so he let me.”

Colborne gives me a queer, evaluative look. “That’s all there was to it?”

“Of course not,” I tell him. “We were inseparable for four years. It’s not something you can explain in a few minutes.”

He frowns, pushes his hands into his pockets. My eyes automatically flick to his hip, searching for the gold glint of a police badge, before I remember he’s changed jobs. I glance up at his face again. He hasn’t aged so much as discolored, the way old dogs do.

“You know what I think it was?” he asks.

I raise my eyebrows, intrigued. People often wanted my explanation of my relationship with James—which seemed inherently unfair, expecting one half of an equation to account for the whole—but no one has ever offered their own diagnosis.

“I think he was enamored with you because you were so enamored with him.”

(“Enamored.” I note that this is the word he chooses to use. It doesn’t feel quite right to me, but it’s not entirely wrong either.)

“It’s possible,” I say. “I never asked. He was my friend—much more than that, truthfully—and that was enough. I didn’t need to know why.”

We stand facing each other in a silence that is awkward only for him. There’s another question he’s itching to ask, but he won’t. He gets as close as he can, starts slowly, perhaps hoping I’ll leap in and finish the thought for him. “When you say ‘more than friends’ …”

I wait. “Yes?”

He abandons the attempt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I can’t help wondering.”

I give him a smile nondescript enough that he will probably go on wondering—about this much, at least—for a good long while. If he’d had enough nerve to ask, I would have told him. My infatuation with James (there’s the word, never mind “enamored”) transcended any notion of gender. Colborne—regular Joe, happily married, father of two, not unlike my own father in some respects—does not strike me as the sort of man who would understand this. No man is, perhaps, until he experiences it himself and deniability is no longer plausible.

What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.