He stood swiftly and took two steps forward. “Oliver—”
I raised one hand, palm out, like a crossing guard. “No—just stay over there, for a minute.”
He stopped in the middle of the room. “Okay. Whatever you want.”
My feet were unsteady on the floorboards. I swallowed, choked down a surge of strange, despondent affection. “I want to forgive you,” I blurted. “But James, I could kill you right now, honestly.” I reached toward him, clenched my fist on empty air. “I want to—God, I can’t even explain it. You’re like a bird, you know that?” He opened his mouth—a question, some expression of confusion caught on the tip of his tongue. I made a harsh, inelegant gesture, a chop of the hand, to keep him from speaking. My thoughts tumbled out manic and disorganized. “Alexander was right, Richard’s not the sparrow, it’s you. You’re—I don’t know, this fragile, elusive thing, and I feel like if I could just catch you, I could crush you.”
He had this terrible, wounded look on his face, and he had no right to it, not in that moment. Half a dozen conflicting feelings roared up in me at once, and I took a huge, ungainly step toward him.
“I want so badly to be so mad at you that I could do that, but I can’t, so I’m mad at myself instead. Do you even understand how unfair that is?” My voice was high and stringent, like a little boy’s. I hated it, so I swore, loudly. “Fuck! Fuck this, fuck me, fuck you— God damn it, James!” I wanted to throw him to the floor, fight him down—and do what? The violence of the thought alarmed me, and with a strangled noise of outrage, I seized a book off the trunk at the end of his bed and flung it at him, threw it at his knees. It was a paperback copy of Lear, limp and harmless, but he winced as it hit him. It fluttered to the floor at his feet, one page hanging crookedly out from the binding. When he looked up at me I averted my eyes immediately.
“Oliver, I—”
“Don’t!” I jabbed a finger at him for silence. “Don’t. Just let me—just—for a minute.” I dragged my fingers through my hair. A hard ball of pain had lodged behind the bridge of my nose, and my eyes were beginning to water. “What is it about you?” I asked, my words thick from the effort of keeping my voice steady. I glared at him, waiting for an answer I knew I wouldn’t get. “I should hate you right now. And I want to—God, I want to—but that’s not enough.”
I shook my head, utterly at a loss. What on earth was happening to us? I searched his face for a hint of it, some clue to seize on, but for a long time all he did was breathe, with his face twisted up like breathing hurt.
“My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,” he said. “Because it is an enemy to thee.”
The balcony scene. Too mistrustful to guess at the meaning, I said, “Don’t do that, James, please—right now can we just be ourselves?”
He crouched down, lifted the mangled script from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s easier now to be Romeo, or Macbeth, or Brutus, or Edmund. Someone else.”
“James,” I said again, more gently. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head, eyes downcast. His voice crept out of his mouth with fearful, cautious steps. “No. I’m not.”
“Okay.” I shifted my weight, foot to foot. The floor still didn’t feel firm enough. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Oh,” he said, with a strange, watery smile. “No. Everything.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it sounded like a question.
He moved forward, one step, closed the small space between us, and lifted his hand, touched the bruise that had spread beneath my left eye. A sliver of pain. I twitched.
“I should be the sorry one,” he said. My eyes flicked from one of his to the other. Gray like steel, gold like honey. “I don’t know what made me do it. I’ve never wanted to hurt you before.”
His fingertips felt like ice. “But now?” I said. “Why?”
His arm fell lifelessly to his side. He looked away and said, “Oliver, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to hurt the whole world.”
“James.” I took his arm, turned him back toward me. Before I could decide what to do next, I felt his hand on my chest and glanced down. His palm was pressed against my shirt, his fingers splayed across my collarbone. I waited for him to pull me closer or push me away. But he only stared at his hand, like it was something strange he’d never seen before.
SCENE 8
February didn’t linger long. The middle of the month had come and gone before I’d even stopped writing January on all my papers by mistake. Our midterm performance exams were approaching fast—and though Frederick and Gwendolyn had been unusually kind in their scene assignments, we were fighting to stay afloat in a sea of lines to learn, reading to do, text to scan, and papers to hand in. Early one Sunday evening, James and I and the girls huddled in the library, running lines for the scenes we were scheduled to perform in class the following week. James and Filippa had Hamlet and Gertrude; Meredith and Wren were reading Emilia and Desdemona; I was waiting for Alexander to show up and read Arcite to my Palamon.
“Honestly,” Filippa said, as she tripped over the same line for the fourth time, “would it have killed them to make me Ophelia? I am not by any stretch of the imagination old enough to be your mother.”
“Would it were not so!” James said.
She sighed enormously. “What have I done that thou dar’st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?”
“Such an act / That blurs the grace and blush of modesty.”
They continued to argue quietly. I leaned back on the couch, watched Meredith brush Wren’s hair for a moment. They made a pretty picture, the firelight playing softly on their faces, gleaming on the curves of lips and eyelashes.
Wren: “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?”
Meredith: “The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price,
For a small vice.”