If We Were Villains: A Novel

Apart from Richard’s unnecessary roughness, opening night had gone well, and the following morning praises were lavished on us in the hallways. The choral and orchestral students remained aloof—unimpressed by anyone who didn’t have the discipline for something so refined as music—but the others regarded us with wide-eyed admiration. How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance. Unable to articulate it, we simply accepted their compliments and congratulations with the appropriate (and, in some cases, entirely contrived) humility.

In class, we were easily distracted. I barely listened to Frederick’s lecture and my mind wandered so far during one of Camilo’s balance exercises that I let Filippa knock me over backward. Alexander gave me an impatient sort of look that clearly meant, Get your shit together. As soon as we were dismissed, I retreated to the Tower with a mug of tea and René Girard’s Theatre of Envy, hoping to distract myself from a dozen distressing premonitions of the night ahead. By then I felt no sympathy for Richard—the relentless, catchall antagonism he’d practiced over the last few weeks left a deeper impression than three years of placid friendship had—but I knew that no retaliation on our part would go unpunished. Any impartial observer would have dismissed it as a grandiloquent grudge match, but when I tried to persuade myself that that was all it was, Frederick’s voice quietly reminded me that duels had been fought over less.

The prospective comeuppance of our feud with Richard, enormous as it loomed, was not the only thing weighing on my mind. Friday night was the night of the cast party; an hour after final curtain, most of Dellecher’s theatre students and the bolder ones from other disciplines would invade the first floor of the Castle to celebrate a good opening and drink to the coming close. Meredith and Wren, neither of whom appeared onstage after Act II, had graciously agreed to sneak back between intermission and curtain call to get everything ready for a night of riotous revelry. When the rest of us arrived, we would have nothing to do but give our thanks to Dionysus and indulge.

At half past six I closed my book and took the stairs down to the dining room. The table and chairs had already been cleared away to make enough space for a dance floor. A set of speakers surreptitiously borrowed from the sound booth was stacked in one corner, cables trailing along the baseboards toward the nearest outlets. I left the Castle and began the long walk to the FAB with a fretful, anxious feeling that became more and more like dread with each passing minute.

It must have been showing on my face by the time I opened the door to the dressing room, because Alexander grabbed the front of my jacket, hauled me out to the loading dock, and stuck a lit spliff in my mouth.

“Don’t get jittery,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

(I’m not sure anyone has ever been so wrong.)

I puffed obediently on the spliff until there was only a half inch left. Alexander took it, sucked it down to his fingertips, threw it on the ground, and led me back inside. My misgivings faded to a vague paranoia at the back of my brain.

Time moved slowly as I put on makeup and costume pieces and went through the motions of a vocal warm-up. James, Alexander, Wren, Filippa, and I leaned on the wall in the crossover, hands splayed on our diaphragms, chanting, “Howl, howl, howl, howl—O, you are men of stones.” When a first-year with a headset appeared to tell us we had five minutes to places, my personal time lag collapsed and everything started to move as if on fast-forward.

The second-years vacated the dressing rooms and scrambled to find their places in the wings, hastily buttoning shirts and cuffs, or hopping down the hall as they tried to get their shoes tied. Filippa threw me in a chair in the girls’ dressing room and attacked me with a comb and a tube of hair gel as the lights came up and the first lines of the play crackled through the backstage speakers.

Flavius: “Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home:

Is this a holiday?”

Filippa gave me a smart little slap to the forehead. “Oliver!”

“Fuck, what?”

“You’re done, get out of here,” she said, scowling down at me, one hand on her hip. “What is the matter with you?”

“Sorry,” I said, as I climbed out of the chair. “Thanks, Pip.”

“Are you high?”

“No.”

“Are you full of crap?”

“Yes.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head, but didn’t reprimand me further. I wasn’t entirely sober, but neither was I entirely stoned, and she probably knew that Alexander was mostly to blame. I left the girls’ dressing room and loitered in the crossover until Richard brushed past, taking no more notice of me than he did of the paint on the walls. I followed a half step behind him, emerged into the glaring lights, and said, with as much sincerity as I could muster, “Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.”

Acts I and II passed not unlike the first rainy front of a hurricane. There was rumble and bluster and a sense of impending peril, but we and the audience knew that the worst was yet to come. When Calpurnia entered, I watched from the edge of the wings. Richard and Meredith seemed to have overcome their difficulties, or had at least put them on hold for the duration of the run. He was rough with her but not violent; she was impatient with him but not provocative. Before I knew it, James was shaking me by the shoulder and whispering, “Let’s go.”

Act III opened with the silhouette of the colonnade against the scrim, which glowed scarlet—a raw, dangerous dawn. Richard stood between the two center columns, the rest of us arranged in a ring around him as Metellus Cimber knelt in the Bowl and pleaded for his brother. I was standing closest, so close that I could see the tiny tic of a nerve in Richard’s jaw. Alexander, waiting with predatory, feline patience on the opposite side of the circle, caught my eye and flicked the front of his jacket open to reveal the paper knife tucked in his belt. (They were more in keeping with the theme than daggers would have been, but no less threatening.)

Richard: “I could be well moved, if I were as you:

If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:

But I am constant as the northern star,

Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament.”

He looked around at the rest of us with bright gleaming eyes, daring us to contradict him. We shifted our feet and fingered our narrow blades, but kept our silence.

Richard: “The skies are painted with unnumber’d sparks,

They are all fire and every one doth shine,

But there’s but one in all doth hold his place:

So in the world; ’tis furnish’d well with men,

And men are flesh and blood and apprehensive.

Yet in the number I do know but one

That unassailable holds on his rank,

Unshaked of motion: and that I am he!”

His voice filled every corner of the auditorium, like a crack opening in the earth’s crust, the boom and tremor of an earthquake. On my right, Filippa raised her chin, just barely.

Richard: “Let me a little show it, even in this;

That I was constant Cimber should be banish’d,

And constant do remain to keep him so.”

Cinna began to object, but I had no ears for him. My eyes were fixed on James and Alexander. They mirrored each other’s movements, turning slightly downstage so the audience could see the steel glinting on their belts. I licked my bottom lip. Everything felt too close, too real, like I was sitting in the front row of a movie theatre. I squeezed my eyes shut, fist clenched on the hilt of my knife, listening for the five fatal words that would spur me to action.

Richard:    “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?”

I opened my eyes, and all I saw was James, one knee bent in genuflection, staring up at Richard with bold contempt in his face.

“Speak hands, for me!” I shouted, and leapt at Richard, thrusting my blade under his upstage arm. The other conspirators came suddenly to life and swarmed on us like wasps. Richard glared at me, teeth bared and grinding hard together. I wrenched my knife away and made to move back, but he seized me by the collar, crushing the fabric so tightly around my throat that I couldn’t breathe. I dropped the knife, groping at his wrist with both hands as his thumb jabbed into my carotid artery.

My vision was already swimming when Richard released me, with a roar of pain—Alexander had grabbed him by the hair and yanked him backward. I fell heavily on my tailbone, one hand flying to my neck. Someone had Richard’s arm bent behind his back and the other half-dozen conspirators lunged to take their stabs at him, all blocking abandoned. In the confusion he lashed out wildly and hit Filippa right in the stomach, hard enough to knock her sprawling. She landed in a heap on the stairs—I’d made it to my feet just in time to watch her fall, and an inarticulate sound of outrage stuck in my throat. I shoved Cinna aside and dropped to my knees beside her. She lifted her head, clutching her stomach, gulping futilely, all the wind knocked out of her.

Suddenly the bedlam subsided, and I turned halfway around, kneeling over Filippa, who was quiet but gripping my leg hard. Richard stood surrounded by panting conspirators, arms pinned to his sides, Alexander’s fist still clenched in his hair. James stood just out of his reach, suit disheveled, knife clutched tightly in his hand.

Richard’s words were thick with hatred as he said, “Et tu, Bruté?”

James took one step forward and placed the blade against his neck.

Richard: “Then fall, Caesar.”

James’s face was unnervingly blank. He slid the knife quickly forward—Richard made a short choking sound, then let his head loll against his chest. Alexander and the rest of the conspirators released him one by one, and he slumped to the floor. When they straightened up again, the second- and third-years looked from me to James to Alexander, wide-eyed, painfully aware of the audience and the fact that the scene had spiraled completely out of control. One of them had a line, but she must have forgotten, because nobody spoke. Alexander waited as long as he could, then spoke for her.

“Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” He gave the nearest second-year a small shove. “Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.” The rest shifted, exhaled, relieved. Filippa gasped as the air rushed into her lungs again. I helped her sit halfway up while Alexander continued barking orders. “Some to the common pulpits, and cry out, / ‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!’”

“People and senators, be not affrighted,” James said to the conspirators, and his calmness seemed to reassure them. “Fly not; stand still; ambition’s debt is paid.”

We relaxed into the text again, as if nothing at all unusual had happened. But as Filippa and I climbed to our feet, I couldn’t help glancing down at Richard. He lay motionless except for the angry twitch of his eyelids, a vein bulging and throbbing in his throat.