If We Were Villains: A Novel

Christmas in Ohio was disastrous.

I survived the four preceding days by maintaining a state of mild intoxication and conversing only when required. Christmas Eve passed uneventfully, but Christmas dinner (the thrilling sequel to Thanksgiving dinner a month before) ended in an uproar when Caroline left the table for a suspiciously long time and my father caught her in the bathroom, flushing most of her food down the toilet. Three hours later she and my parents were shouting at one another in the dining room. I had fled the scene and was already packing my suitcase, which gaped open in the middle of my unmade bed. I balled up half a dozen scarves and about as many socks and flung them in.

“Oliver!” Leah blocked the doorway, sobbing at me, as she’d been doing for the last ten minutes. “You can’t leave now!”

“I have to.” I swept an armful of books off my desk and dumped them on top of the scarves. “I can’t take this. I need to get out of here.”

My father’s voice thundered from the floor below, and Leah whimpered.

“You should get out, too.” I nudged her out of the way and grabbed my coat off the hook on the back of the door. “Go to a friend’s house or something.”

“Oliver!” she wailed, and I turned away, unable to look at her when her face was screwed up like an infant’s, slick and shining with tears.

I threw a pile of clothes—dirty or clean, I had no idea and it didn’t matter—into the suitcase and slammed it closed. The zipper skated easily around the edge because I’d only packed half of what I’d come home with. Downstairs, my mother and Caroline were both screaming at the same time.

I pulled my coat on and yanked the suitcase off the bed, nearly crushing my sister’s foot. “C’mon, Leah,” I said. “You’ve gotta let me go.”

“You’re just going to leave me?”

I clenched my teeth against a surge of guilt coming up like bile from the pit of my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I said, then pushed past her through the door.

“Oliver!” she yelled, hanging over the banister as I rushed down the stairs. “Where are you going?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

I dragged my suitcase down a driveway dusted with powdered-sugar snow and waited on the curb for the cab I’d called before packing my bag, wondering what on earth to do next. Dellecher’s campus was closed for Christmas. I couldn’t afford a hotel room in Broadwater or a plane ticket to California. Philadelphia wasn’t far, but I was residually angry with Alexander and didn’t want to see him. Filippa would have been my best option, but I had no idea where she was or how to get in touch. I had the cab drop me at the bus station, where I called Meredith from a pay phone, explained what had happened, and asked if her Thanksgiving offer still stood.

There was no bus Christmas night, so I had six hours to sit outside the station, shivering and second-guessing my decision. By morning I was so cold I didn’t care how bad an idea it was and immediately bought a ticket to Port Authority. I slept almost the whole way, with my face crushed against the grimy window. When we arrived, I called again, and she gave me an address on the Upper East Side.

Her parents, eldest brother, and sister-in-law were once again in Canada. Even with me and her and Caleb (the middle sibling, unattached, going kicking and screaming into his thirties), the apartment felt empty and untouched, like a set from a television show. The furniture was expensive, stylish, and uncomfortable, the décor done in blinding white and dull slate gray. In the living room the Architectural Digest aesthetic was blighted by evidence of occupation: a dog-eared copy of Bonfire of the Vanities, half-drunk bottles of wine, an Armani overcoat tossed carelessly over one arm of the couch. The only indication that a holiday had come and gone was a menorah with four half-melted candles sitting crookedly in the window. (“We suck at being Jewish,” Meredith explained.)

Her room was smaller than I expected, but a high sloped ceiling kept it from feeling cramped. Compared to her room in the Castle it was ferociously tidy, her clothes tucked away in closets and drawers, books neatly arranged by subject on their shelves. What first caught my eye was the vanity table. It was cluttered with black tufted brushes, sleek tubes of lipstick and mascara, but so many photos had been stuck in the frame that the mirror itself was hardly usable. Though one picture of her and her brothers (they were striking children, all auburn hair and green eyes, sitting three in a row like Russian nesting dolls on the bumper of a black Mercedes) was wedged in the topmost corner, the rest were of us. Wren and Richard, faces painted black and white for our second-year mime class. Alexander in the gallery, pretending to share a cigarette with Homer. Meredith and Filippa in cutoff shorts and bikini tops, sprawled in the shallow water on the north shore of the lake as if they’d fallen from the sky and landed there. James, smiling but not at the camera, one hand shyly raised to push the lens away, the other arm hooked around my neck. Me, unaware that we were being photographed, laughing into the distance, a bright autumn leaf caught in my hair.

I stood staring at the wistful collage she’d created until I felt a lump form in my throat. When I glanced over my shoulder at the pristine impersonality of the rest of the room—the smooth flat bedspread, the bare hardwood floor—it occurred to me at last how alone she was. Unable (as always) to find the words to express my own belated understanding, I said nothing.

For three days Meredith and I lounged around—reading, talking, not touching—as Caleb came and went, indifferent to my presence, rarely sober, always on the phone with someone. Like his sister he was almost unfairly good-looking, their shared features strangely (though not unpleasantly) delicate and feminine in him. He had a quick smile, but his eyes were distant, as though his mind was perpetually preoccupied with important business, elsewhere. He did promise, though it made little difference to us, an extravagant New Year’s party. Caleb, for all his shortcomings, was a man of his word.

By nine thirty on December 31, the apartment was packed with people in glamorous party attire. I knew none of them, Meredith only a handful, Caleb a quarter of them at best. By eleven everyone was drunk, including me and Meredith, but when people started snorting lines of coke off the kitchen counter, we slipped out, unnoticed, with two bottles of Laurent-Perrier.

Times Square, like the apartment, was teeming with people, and Meredith clung to my arm to keep from being swept away down the sidewalk by the crowd. We laughed and stumbled and drank pink champagne straight from the bottle until it was confiscated by an exasperated police officer. Snow fell like confetti on our heads and shoulders and stuck in Meredith’s eyelashes. She glimmered in the night like a precious stone—vivid and flawless. I drunkenly told her as much, and at midnight we kissed on a Manhattan street corner, one of a million couples all kissing at the same time.

We wandered the city until the champagne wore off and the cold set in, then clumsily made our way back to the apartment. All was dark and quiet, the last partygoers sprawled on the living room furniture, asleep or too high to move. We crept to Meredith’s room, stripped off our wet layers, and huddled under the blankets on her bed. The search for warmth turned slowly but predictably to more kissing, then gradual undressing, cautious touches, and eventually, inevitably, sex. Afterward I waited for the guilt to come, the compulsion to beg Richard’s phantom for forgiveness. But for once, when I most expected to open my eyes and find him standing over me, he declined to show himself. Instead the silhouette I saw on the wall belonged, inexplicably, to James—who had no business in that room, in my thoughts, at that moment. Anger rushed through me, but before it went to my head Meredith moved, nestled closer, interrupted the illusion. I exhaled, relieved to think she’d woken me from some disturbed half dream. I let my fingertips trail from the tip of her shoulder to the smooth inward curve of her waist, comforted by how soft and feminine she was. Her head rested on my chest, and I wondered if she felt the fleeting stillness of my fitful, troubled soul.

The next three days passed in much the same way. By night we drank just barely too much, tolerated Caleb as long as we could, then tumbled into bed together. By day we roamed New York, wasted time and the Dardennes’ money in bookstores and theatres and cafés, talking about life after Dellecher, realizing at last that it was only a few months away. We’d had so much else on our minds.

“They’ll have scouts down for the spring production,” Meredith said one afternoon as we wandered away from the Strand, empty-handed only because we’d been there once already. “And then we’ll have showcase in May. I haven’t even thought about what I’ll read.” She nudged me with her elbow. “We ought to do a scene together. We could be … Oh, I don’t know. Margaret and Suffolk.” She tossed her head and said, airily, “Would you carry my heart like a jewel in a box?”

“I dunno. Would you carry my head around in a basket if I got decapitated by pirates?”

She looked at me like I was crazy, but then—to my relief and my delight—she laughed, the sound wild and lovely, like a tiger lily bursting open. When her mirth had subsided she glanced around at the other people on the sidewalk, moving in a steady stream toward Union Square. “How odd it’ll be,” she said, more soberly, “to have everyone here in the city.”

“It’ll be fun,” I told her, wondering if we’d all stay with her the week of showcase, sleep on the floor like it was a middle school slumber party. “Like a test run. This time next year we’ll all probably be living here.”

“You think so?”

“Well, we’ve got to go somewhere there’s Shakespeare. Will you stay in the apartment?”

“God, no. I need to get out of there.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to move into some hovel in Queens with the rest of us.” I leaned toward her until our shoulders bumped together and she gave me a tentative smile.

“We’re all going to live on top of each other, like it’s the Castle all over again?”

“I don’t see why not.”

The smile slipped and she shook her head. “It won’t be the same.”

I looped one arm around her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her temple. I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in. No, it wouldn’t be the same. I couldn’t argue with that.

On Sunday evening we flew back to O’Hare, first class—Caleb’s treat. We were the first to arrive at the Castle, as classes didn’t resume until Wednesday. (I was grateful for this. Whatever Meredith and I were doing—we hadn’t actually talked about it since our unfortunate “date” at the Bore’s Head—I wasn’t ready to discuss it with anyone else.) I tore the LaGuardia tag off my suitcase and left it at the foot of my bed. For a moment I paused, staring into James’s corner of the room. What with family histrionics and the enormous distraction of Meredith, I’d managed to push him, for a week or two, out of my mind. I’d told myself that the jealous dismay that seized me during the Christmas masque was merely a moment of insanity, a side effect of manipulative theatre magic. But as I stood there in the Tower with his shadow in the room, I felt it come creeping slowly back again.

I went unsteadily down the stairs and spent one more night with Meredith—the only cure I could think of.