“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.
SCENE 2
Second-semester auditions were posted on the call-board first thing Wednesday morning.
All fourth-years, second-years, and invited third-years, please prepare a two-minute monologue for
KING LEAR
The audition and rehearsal schedules were posted below. Alexander would audition first, unobserved. Then he’d watch Wren’s audition, she’d watch mine, I’d watch Filippa’s, she’d watch James’s, and he’d watch Meredith’s.
We spent the next week scrambling to prepare new audition pieces, universally surprised by the choice of production. Lear had never in fifty years been attempted at Dellecher, likely because (as Alexander pointed out) having a tender twenty-something in the title role would be entirely absurd. How Frederick and Gwendolyn intended to address this problem, we couldn’t guess.
At eight on the evening of the auditions, I sat alone in our usual booth at the Bore’s Head, attracting dirty looks from larger parties waiting for a table. Meredith had just left me to prepare for her own reading, and Filippa, I guessed, would be arriving shortly. I’d watched her audition—an excellent take on Tamora—and was eager to discuss casting with somebody else who had already read. (Alexander and Wren were nowhere to be found.) I finished my beer, but I didn’t leave the table, certain it would be stolen if I got up to go to the bar.
Fortunately, Filippa breezed in from outside after only five minutes or so. Her hair was windswept and tangled, cheeks glowing pink from the sting of the cold gusts blowing snow down the street. As she sat down I said, “Drink?”
“God, yes. Something warm.”
I slid out of the booth as she piled her outer layers—scarf, hat, gloves, coat—in the corner. I returned from the bar with two mugs of hot cider, and Filippa raised hers in a silent toast before gulping down a mouthful.
“I think hell may have frozen over,” I said, brushing bits of snow that had fallen from her hat and scarf off the bench beside me.
“I’ll believe that when I see the cast list.” She wiped a sticky drop of cider from her lips. “What do you think they’ll do?”
“If I had to guess? No clue about Lear, but obviously Wren will be Cordelia. You and Meredith will be Regan and Goneril. I’ll probably be Albany, James’ll be Edgar, and Alexander’ll be Edmund.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that last bit.”
“Why not?”
She shifted in her seat and glanced at the next booth, where a trio of dancers sat sipping long-stemmed glasses of white wine. When she leaned low over the table I instinctively mimicked her. We were so close that a strand of her hair tickled my forehead.
“So, I just watched James’s audition,” she said.
“What did he read?” I asked. “He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Richard Plantagenet, Two Henry Six. And force perforce I’ll make him yield the crown / Whose bookish rule hath pulled fair England down.”
“Really? That speech is so … I don’t know, aggressive. Doesn’t really seem his style.”
“Yeah. As soon as he got to A day will come when York shall claim his own, it was like he was a different person all of a sudden.” She shook her head slowly. “You should have seen it, Oliver. He scared me, honestly.”
I was mute for a moment, then shrugged. “Good for him.”
She gave me a look so deeply skeptical that I almost laughed.
“Pip, I mean it,” I said. “Good for him. He said at the beginning of the year he was tired of playing a type, and he’s always had that kind of range, he’s just never had a chance to show it because those sorts of roles were always going to go to Richard. Why bother? He’s got a chance now to do something new.”
She sighed. “You’re probably right. God knows I’d like a chance to do something new.”
“Maybe they’ll change it up this time around. It’s a different dynamic.” I nodded vaguely toward the end of the table, where, six weeks before, Richard might have been sitting. He had become a perpetual blind spot in my—and, I suspected, the others’—peripheral vision.