“Coming to bed?” Richard asked.
“Yes. Alexander’s made all this work seem rather pointless.” She left her books scattered on the low table in front of the fire, her empty wineglass with them, a crescent of lipstick clinging to the rim. “Goodnight,” she said, to the room at large. “Godspeed.” They disappeared down the hall together.
I rubbed my eyes, which were beginning to burn from the effort of reading for hours on end. Wren tossed her book backward over her head, and I started as it landed beside me on the couch.
Wren: “To hell with it.”
Alexander: “That’s the spirit.”
Wren: “I’ll just do Isabella.”
Filippa: “Just go to bed.”
Wren stood slowly, blinking the vestigial light of the fire out of her eyes. “I’ll probably lie awake all night reciting lines,” she said.
“Want to come out for a smoke?” Alexander had finished his whiskey (again) and was rolling a spliff on the table. “Might help you relax.”
“No, thank you,” she said, drifting out into the hall. “Goodnight.”
“Suit yourself.” Alexander pushed his chair back, spliff poking out of one corner of his mouth. “Oliver?”
“If I help you smoke that I’ll wake up with no voice tomorrow.”
“Pip?”
She nudged her glasses up into her hair and coughed softly, testing her throat. “God, you’re a terrible influence,” she said. “Fine.”
He nodded, already halfway out of the room, hands buried deep in his pockets. I watched them go, a little jealously, then slumped down against the arm of the couch. I struggled to focus on my text, which was so aggressively annotated that it was barely legible anymore.
PERICLES: Antioch, farewell! for wisdom sees those men
Blush not in actions blacker than the night
Will ’schew no course to keep them from the light.
One sin, I know, another doth provoke;
Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.
I murmured the last two lines under my breath. I knew them by heart, had known them for months, but the fear that I would forget a word or phrase halfway through my audition gnawed at me anyway. I glanced across the room at James and said, “Do you ever wonder if Shakespeare knew these speeches half as well as we do?”
He withdrew from whatever verse he was reading, looked up, and said, “Constantly.”
I cracked a smile, vindicated just enough. “Well, I give up. I’m not actually getting anything done.”
He checked his watch. “No, I don’t think I am either.”
I heaved myself off the sofa and followed James up the spiral stairs to the bedroom we shared—which was directly over the library, the highest of three rooms in a little stone column commonly referred to as the Tower. It had once been used only as an attic, but the cobwebs and clutter had been cleared away to make room for more students in the late seventies. Twenty years later it housed James and me, two beds with blue Dellecher bedspreads, two monstrous old wardrobes, and a pair of mismatched bookshelves too ugly for the library.
“Do you think it’ll fall out how Alexander says?” I asked.
James pulled his shirt off, mussing his hair in the process. “If you ask me, it’s too predictable.”
“When have they ever surprised us?”
“Frederick surprises me all the time,” he said. “But Gwendolyn will have the final say, she always does.”
“If it were up to her, Richard would play all of the men and half the women.”
“Which would leave Meredith playing the other half.” He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “When do you read tomorrow?”
“Right after Richard. Filippa’s after me.”
“And I’m after her. God, I feel bad for her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a wonder she hasn’t dropped out.”
James frowned thoughtfully as he wriggled out of his jeans. “Well, she’s a bit more resilient than the rest of us. Maybe that’s why Gwendolyn torments her.”
“Just because she can take it?” I said, discarding my own clothes in a pile on the floor. “That’s cruel.”
He shrugged. “That’s Gwendolyn.”
“If I had my way, I’d turn it all upside down,” I said. “Make Alexander Caesar and have Richard play Cassius instead.”
He folded his comforter back and asked, “Am I still Brutus?”
“No.” I tossed a sock at him. “You’re Antony. For once I get to be the lead.”
“Your time will come to be the tragic hero. Just wait for spring.”
I glanced up from the drawer I was pawing through. “Has Frederick been telling you secrets again?”
He lay down and folded his hands behind his head. “He may have mentioned Troilus and Cressida. He has this fantastic idea to do it as a battle of the sexes. All the Trojans men, all the Greeks women.”
“That’s insane.”
“Why? That play is as much about sex as it is about war,” he said. “Gwendolyn will want Richard to be Hector, of course, but that makes you Troilus.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t you be Troilus?”
He shifted, arched his back. “I may have mentioned that I’d like to have a little more variety on my résumé.”
I stared at him, unsure if I should be insulted.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, a low note of reproach in his voice. “He agreed we all need to break out of our boxes. I’m tired of playing fools in love like Troilus, and I’m sure you’re tired of always playing the sidekick.”
I flopped on my bed on my back. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” For a moment I let my thoughts wander, and then I breathed out a laugh.
“Something funny?” James asked, as he reached over to turn out the light.
“You’ll have to be Cressida,” I told him. “You’re the only one of us pretty enough.”
We lay there laughing in the dark until we dropped off to sleep, and slept deeply, with no way of knowing that the curtain was about to rise on a drama of our own invention.