If We Were Villains: A Novel

Our first performance of Lear went smoothly enough. Posters done in white and midnight blue had appeared on every blank wall on campus and in town. One version showed a white-robed Frederick, Wren limp and unmoving at his feet. Beneath that:

COME NOT BETWEEN THE DRAGON AND HIS WRATH

On the other, James stood alone on the Bridge, sword at his side, a bright spot in the darkness. A few of the Fool’s wise words were scattered among the stars reflected under him:

TRUST NOT IN THE TAMENESS OF THE WOLF

The house was full on opening night. When we all appeared onstage for curtain call, the audience rose to their feet in one oceanic surge, but the clapping didn’t drown out the small sounds of grief that had persisted from the final tragic scene. Gwendolyn sat in the front row beside Dean Holinshed, tears shining on her cheeks, a tissue pinched beneath her nose. We returned to the dressing rooms in suffocating silence.

We’d planned to have the cast party as usual on Friday night, though none of us, I was certain, really felt like having a party at all. At the same time, we were desperate to pretend that everything was all right—or something like it—and to prove as much to everyone else. Colin, who died at the end of Act III, had taken it upon himself to hurry back to the Castle before curtain call and have everything ready for us when we arrived. In a halfhearted show of respect for the school’s recent crackdown on reckless drinking, we’d only bought half the booze we normally did, and Filippa and Colin made it clear to prospective guests that if any illegal substance came within a mile of the Castle—or Alexander—there would be hell to pay.

We took our time undressing after the show, partly because our costumes were complicated (we’d been dressed in a neoclassical Empire style, in shades of blue and gray and lilac), and partly because we, poor sleepers all, were too tired to move any faster. James changed more quickly than I or Alexander, hung his costume on the rack, and left the room without a word. When we emerged into the crossover, there was no sign of him.

“He must have already left for the Castle.”

“You think?”

“Where else would he go?”

“Who knows. I’ve stopped wondering.”

The night was cold, a gusty, merciless wind blowing down out of the sky. We pulled our coats close around us and walked briskly, heads down. The wind was so loud that we were nearly at the front door before we heard the music. Unlike our last party, there were no lights outside—only a dim yellowish glow seeping out from the kitchen. Upstairs, a candle guttered in one of the library windows.

We let ourselves in and found the kitchen sparsely populated. Only two handles had been cracked, and most of the food was untouched.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Late enough,” Alexander said. “There should be more people here.”

We accepted a few soft congratulations from the small crowd gathered at the counter before Wren and Filippa came in from the dining room. They’d changed into their party clothes, but they looked strangely colorless—Filippa in sleek silvery gray, Wren in pale ice pink.

“Hey,” Filippa said, voice raised just enough to be heard over the bounce and thud of music from the next room, which felt incongruously upbeat. “Feel like a drink?”

Alexander: “Might as well. What have we got?”

Wren: “Not much. There’s some Stoli stashed upstairs.”

Me: “Fine by me. Have either of you seen James?”

They shook their heads in unison.

Filippa: “We thought he’d come back with you.”

Me: “Yeah. We did, too.”

“He might just be taking one of his walks,” Wren suggested. “I think he needs a few minutes to come down from being Edmund, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said again. “I guess.”

Alexander surveyed the room, neck craned to see over everyone’s heads, and asked, “Where’s Colin?”

“In the dining room,” Wren said. “He’s hosting more than we are.”

Filippa touched Alexander’s elbow. “C’mon,” she said, “he’s been waiting for you,” and they disappeared into the dining room together.

Wren offered me a weak smile. I mimicked it without conviction and said, “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Meredith.”

“In the garden, I think.”

“Will you be all right if I leave you?”

She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

I left her, a little reluctantly, and slipped outside.

Meredith was sitting on the table again. It would have been a familiar sight, reminiscent of that now infamous November night, if not for the empty, barren feeling of the yard. The wind whirled around me, darted under my shirt and jacket, and sent goose bumps skating across my skin. Meredith huddled on the table, elbows folded close to her body, knees pressed tightly together. She was wearing black again, but she looked more like she was ready for a wake than a party. Her hair blew in a wild auburn gust around her face.

As I walked across the yard, the tree branches rustled and swept together, a soft hiss and clatter in the shadows. Music limped and lilted from the Castle, drowned out by the wind one moment, carried through the trees like the smoky-sweet scent of incense the next. I sat beside Meredith on the table, and her hair tangled around her fingers as she pushed it out of her face. At first it was hard to see in the gloom, but the tender skin under her eyes glistened, and little black smudges had rubbed off beneath her lashes. Raggedy Ann. She breathed in short little bursts through her nose, but was otherwise silent. She hadn’t looked at me since I set foot outside, and I didn’t know if a touch would be comforting or unwelcome, so I did nothing.

“Are you okay?” I asked, when the wind settled for a moment. The same question I’d asked James in the Tower a month before—the same because I already knew the answer.

“Not even a little bit.”

“Can I help?” I glanced down at my hands, lying limp and useless in my lap. “I still—I want to help.”

The breeze kicked up again, tossed a few locks of her hair into my face. It brushed my lips, tickled my nose. Her perfume was familiar by then, amber and jasmine. Something ached deep in my chest. The squall passed, and her hair fell down around her shoulders again. She picked at the rim of her cup with short, bitten-down fingernails she’d tried to hide with wine-red polish.

“Oliver,” she said, her voice strained and plaintive, “I have to tell you something.”

The ache in my chest sharpened, the scab on my soul threatening to split wide open. “Okay,” I said. A single loose tear dragged a line of watercolor black down her cheek. I wanted to brush it away, kiss both her eyelids, take her hands and rub some warmth into them. Instead, I waited.

She lifted her head suddenly, wiped underneath her eyes, and looked sideways at me. “You know, let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“Really?” I said. “I don’t—”

I felt her hand on the inside of my knee. “Tomorrow.”

“All right. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Let’s try to have some fun tonight.”

The ache faded to a sick, sad feeling and sank down into my stomach. “Sure.” I pointed at the corner of my own eye. “Do you want to—?”

“Yeah. Let me put myself back together and then I’ll come find you.” She handed me her mostly empty cup. “You want to get me a drink?”

“Will it help?”

“It won’t hurt.”

She slid off the table, her hand trailing down off my knee. I watched her silhouette as she crossed the yard, the wind rising again and lifting her hair, dragging it behind her. When she disappeared inside, the wheels and cogs of my brain began to turn, slowly at first. What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?

I had tortured myself asking whether my own selfish desire to pursue her with impunity was a stronger factor than fear of Richard when I agreed to let him die. But I had never considered the possibility that Meredith might be guilty of something just as bad—or something worse. The past six months splintered into sharp little fragments of memory: the firelight flashing on Meredith’s teeth as she laughed, sand and water and a wet sheet clinging to her body on the beach. Her, falling on the stage, blood creeping down out of her sleeve. Arms rigid at her sides as she shouted at Richard in the kitchen. His fingers clenched in her hair. A scrap of bloody fabric in the fireplace. Could she have done it? Left me sleeping in her room, crept out of the Castle and down to the dock and killed him, then stripped her clothes off and crawled back into bed with me? I felt light-headed just thinking about it. But it was absurd, almost impossible. I would have woken, surely.

Another image, another flash, half dream and half recollection, came unbidden into my brain. Studio Five. Her. James. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and shook my head to dissolve the picture, disarrange it, like a drawing in dry sand. In an effort to distract myself, I tipped her cup to my lips to taste the drops on the bottom. Vodka. I climbed down off the table and stepped through the back door just as the wind began howling again.

Voices and music swelled in the Castle, trapped there by the gales sweeping past outside. In the kitchen, Wren and Colin talked with the second-years from Lear. Filippa and Alexander were nowhere to be seen, and Meredith, too, had disappeared by then. I slid between a few first-years discussing their summer plans with little enthusiasm and made my way toward the stairs. Wren had said the Stoli was stashed upstairs, but never specified where. Not Alexander’s room, which had been declared a substance-free zone. The library seemed most likely. I ducked in from the stairwell and stopped, surprised not to find it empty.

“James.”

He was standing on the table with his back to me, hands in his pockets. He’d opened the window and the wind rolled into the room, ruffling the tails of his shirt, which he hadn’t bothered to button. An open fifth of vodka stood on the table beside him, but I didn’t see a glass.

“What are you doing?” I asked. All of the candles—which normally we never lit, considering the number of books in the room—burned and flickered at the caprice of the breeze and sent shadows chasing one another across the shelves and floor and ceiling. It looked like he was having some kind of séance.

“You know you can see the boathouse if you stand up here.”

“Great,” I said. “Will you get down? You’re making me nervous.”

He turned around and stepped off the edge of the table, hands still in his pockets. He landed with surprising ease for someone who’d drunk a pint of vodka in less than an hour, then wandered across the room until he was standing right in front of me. He hadn’t washed his face since the show—his pale powder makeup and the pencil smudged along his lower lash line gave the impression that his eyes were retreating deep into his skull.

“Brother, a word,” he said, with an odd lopsided leer.

“Okay, but can we close the window first?”

“Shut up your doors, my lord: ’tis a wild night.”

I stepped around him, went to the window, and pulled it shut. “You’re in a weird mood.”

“This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”

“Stop that. I can’t understand you.”

He sighed and said, “They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace.”

“What is the matter with you?”

“Sick, O, sick!”

“Drunk, more like.”

“By an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence!” he said, insistently. “And pat! He comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy.” He climbed up on the table again and sat with his legs dangling off the side. He was drunker than I’d ever seen him, and unsure of what else to do, I decided to play along.

“How now, brother Edmund?” I asked. “What serious contemplation are you in?”

“I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day,” he said. “Death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities, menaces and maledictions, banishment of friends, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.”

“Do you busy yourself with that?”

He jumped several lines ahead. “If you do stir abroad, go arm’d.”

“Arm’d, brother?”

“I advise you to the best. Go arm’d. I am no honest man.”

I waited for the “if” that should have followed, but it never came. He skipped ahead again, nonsensically.

“I have told you what I have seen and heard; but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it.” He leapt off the table and ran to the window, thrust it open again. “He’s coming hither; now, i’ th’ night, i’ th’ haste!” He gripped the windowsill with white-knuckled fingers, leaning as far out as he could, eyes flicking back and forth through the bone-bare branches of the trees. “Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out.”

I laid a hand on his shoulder, afraid he might fall if he leaned too much farther, and said, “But where is he?” Who did he mean? Richard? He wasn’t just playing—I could tell that much by the way he was breathing, staring, not blinking.

He dragged one hand across his face and gasped, “Look, sir, I bleed!” He brandished his naked palm, pushed it into my face. I swatted it down, patience rapidly running out.

“Where is the villain, Edmund?” I asked.

He smiled crazily at me and echoed, “Where is the villain, Edmund? A pause, for punctuation, yes? But not the playwright’s—commas belong to the compositors. Where is the villain Edmund? Here, sir, but trouble him not—his wits are gone.”

“You’re scaring me,” I said. “Snap out of it.”

He shook his head, his grin shrinking until it disappeared. “Pray ye, go,” he said.

“James, just talk to me!”

He pushed me back a step. “Pray you, away! I do serve you in this business.”

He shouldered past me, moved rapidly toward the door. I ran after him, caught his arm, and yanked him around. “James! Stop!”

“Stop, stop! No help? The enemy’s in view!” He was shouting by then, and he beat one hand hard against his bare chest, where it left an angry red mark. I struggled to keep hold of his other wrist. “The wheel is come full circle; I am here!”

“James!” I jerked on his arm. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”

“No less than all—and more, much more. The time will bring it out!” He wrenched his arm away and smoothed the front of his shirt, as if he were trying to wipe his hands clean. “Some blood drawn on me would beget opinion / Of my more fierce endeavor.”

“You’re drunk. You’re not making sense,” I decided, unwilling to believe the opposite. “Just calm down and we’ll—”

He shook his head grimly. “I have seen drunkards / Do more than this in sport.” He took a step back toward the stairs.

“James!” I reached for his arm again, but he moved more quickly, one hand darting out to knock a pair of candles off the nearest shelf. I swore and leapt out of the way.

“Torches, torches!” he cried. “So farewell!”

He dashed into the stairwell and disappeared. I swore again and stamped the candles out. The corner of a folio facsimile on the bottom shelf had caught fire. I ripped it out from underneath the others and smothered the flames with the corner of the carpet. When it was out I sat back on my heels and wiped one sleeve across my forehead, which by then was spotted with sweat, despite the cold March air blowing in from the window.

“What the fuck. What the fuck,” I muttered, and climbed shakily to my feet again. I crossed the room and shut the window, locked it, then turned and eyed the vodka bottle on the table. It was two-thirds empty. Meredith and Wren and Filippa had had some, certainly, but they were mostly sober. James had never been a drinker. He’d made himself sick at the Caesar party, but—but what? He hadn’t had half so much then.

His disjointed words echoed in the empty room. An actor’s rambling, I told myself. Method touched with madness. No meaning in it. I put the bottle to my lips. The vodka burned my tongue, but I swallowed it in one ugly gulp. Watery saliva gathered at the back of my throat like I myself might be sick.

I hastily blew the candles out, then started down the stairs, clutching the bottle, determined to find James. I’d march him out into the bracing air and keep him there until he sobered up enough to make some kind of sense.

I nearly crashed into Filippa at the bottom of the stairs.

“I was just coming up for the vodka,” she said. “Jesus, did you drink all that yourself?”

I shook my head. “James. Where is he?”

“God, I don’t know. He came through the kitchen a minute ago.”

“Right,” I said.

She caught my sleeve as I tried to brush past her. “Oliver, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. James is just about unhinged. I’m going to see if I can find him and figure out what the hell’s going on. You keep an eye on the others.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, of course.”

I pushed the Stoli into her hand. “Hide that,” I said. “It’s definitely too late for James and it might be too late for Meredith, but keep Wren and Alexander sober if you can. I’ve got a weird feeling about this night.”

“All right,” she said. “Hey. Be careful.”

“Of what?”

“Of James.” She shrugged. “You said, he’s not himself. Just … remember what happened last time.”

I stared at her until I realized she was talking about my broken nose. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, Pip.”

I slid past her, out through the hall and into the kitchen. The only people there were third-years, mostly from the theatre class. They stopped talking, looked my way when I came in. Colin wasn’t among them, so I addressed the group at large, raising my voice just enough to be heard over the music from the next room. “Any of you seen James?”

Nine of the ten of them shook their heads, but the last one pointed toward the front door and said, “That way. Bathroom, by the look it.”

“Thanks.” I nodded at her and went the way she’d indicated. The foyer was dark and empty. Wind rushed against the front door, rattled the panes in the transom window. The bathroom door was closed, but a light peeked out underneath and I opened it without knocking.

The scene there was even stranger, more unsettling than the one in the library. James leaned over the sink, his weight on his fists, the knuckles of his right hand split and bleeding. A huge fractal crack in the mirror stretched in jagged lines from corner to corner, and a long black streak on the counter led to the tip of an uncapped mascara wand. The tube had rolled onto the floor and gleamed against the baseboard, a flash of metallic purple. Meredith’s.

“James, what the hell,” I said, pins and needles prickling down my spine. His head jerked up as if he hadn’t heard the door, didn’t know I’d come in. “Did you break the mirror?”

He glanced at it, then back at me. “Bad luck.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve got to talk to me,” I said, distracted by the drumming of my pulse in my ears and the mismatched thud of music through the wall—persisting, unimpeded. “I just want to help. Let me help, okay?”

His lip was trembling and he tucked it behind his teeth, but his arms were quivering, too, like they couldn’t support his weight. A crack split his face into four different pieces in the mirror. He shook his head. “No.”

“C’mon. You can tell me. Even if it’s bad, even if it’s really bad. We’ll find a way to fix it.” I realized I was begging and swallowed hard. “James, please.”

“No.” He tried to push past me, but I blocked him in. “Let me go!”

“James! Wait—”

He threw his weight against me, drunkenly, heavily. I braced myself against the door with one arm, caught him around the shoulders with the other. He shoved harder when he felt my hand on him and I crushed him against me, fighting to keep him from knocking me aside or toppling both of us to the floor.

“Let me go!” he said, voice muffled where his face was caught in the crook of my arm. He strained against me for a moment longer, but I had him in a strangely solid grip, his arms trapped between us, hands pushing futilely against my chest. He seemed so small all of a sudden. How easy it should have been for me to overpower him.

“Not until you talk to me.” My throat tightened, and I was afraid I would cry until I realized James was crying already, sobbing even, huge clumsy breaths making his shoulders shudder and jerk in my grip. We wavered in what had somehow become an embrace until he lifted his head, found his face too close to mine. He writhed away from me, then stumbled out into the foyer and said, with a child’s petulant anger, “Don’t follow me, Oliver.”

But I pursued him blindly, idiotically, like a man in a dream compelled by some great mysterious force to move forward. I lost him in the press of people dancing in the dining room, the lights hazy and indistinct, blue and purple, electric shadows moving dizzily from wall to wall. I pawed my way between dancers, searching for James’s face in the blur of people. I caught a glimpse as he slipped into the kitchen and followed close on his heels, almost falling in my haste to catch up with him.

Wren, Colin, Alexander, and Filippa had joined the third-years. James looked over his shoulder, saw me, then grabbed Wren’s arm and pulled her away from the others.

“James!” she squeaked, tripping after him. “What are you—”

He was already dragging her out of the kitchen, toward the stairwell tower.

“Don’t—!” I said, but he talked over me.

“Wren, come up to bed with me, please.”

She stopped dead, and we all froze around her, watching. But all she could see was James. Her lips moved soundlessly and then she stammered, “Yes.”

He looked over her head at me, something strange and bitter and vindictive in his expression, but for only a split second. Then he was gone, pulling her out of the room behind him. In disbelief I tried to follow them, but Alexander caught me by the shoulder. “Oliver, no,” he said. “Not this time.”

He and Filippa and I all stood staring at one another, while the silent third-years stared at us. Music surged on obliviously behind us, and the wind roared outside. I stood paralyzed in the middle of the room, too dismayed to speak or move. To notice, at first, that Meredith was missing.