The window between my wardrobe and James’s bed—narrow, like an arrow slit—squints down at the lake. If I crane my neck I can see the end of the dock, jutting into the summer’s emerald water. I wonder (for the first time, oddly) if I would have watched it happen from here, had I not spent the night of the Caesar party one floor down in Meredith’s room. Too dark, I tell myself. I wouldn’t have seen a thing.
“This was your room?” Behind me, Colborne is looking up at the ceiling, the faraway central point where all the beams converge, like spokes on a wheel. “You and Farrow.”
“Yes, James and I.”
Colborne’s eyes slowly descend and find my face. He shakes his head. “The two of you. I never understood it.”
“Neither did we. It was easier not to.”
He struggles, for a moment, to find words. “What were you?” he asks, finally. It sounds rude, but it’s just exasperation at his own inability to better craft the question.
“We were a lot of things. Friends, brothers, partners in crime.” His expression darkens, but I ignore it and continue. “James was everything I desperately wanted to be and never could: talented, intelligent, worldly. The only child of a family that prized art over logic and passion over peace and quiet. I stuck to him like a burr from the day we met, hoping some of his brilliance might rub off on me.”
“And him?” Colborne asks. “What was his interest in you?”
“Is it so hard to believe that someone might just like me, Joe?”
“Not at all. I’ve told you more than once that I like you, completely in spite of myself.”
“Yes,” I say, dryly, “and it never fails to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.”
He smirks. “You don’t have to answer the question, but I won’t withdraw it.”
“Very well. This is guesswork, of course, but I think James liked me for the opposite reasons that I liked him. Everyone called me ‘nice,’ but what they really meant was ‘na?ve.’ I was na?ve and impressionable and shockingly ordinary. But I was just clever enough to keep up with him, so he let me.”
Colborne gives me a queer, evaluative look. “That’s all there was to it?”
“Of course not,” I tell him. “We were inseparable for four years. It’s not something you can explain in a few minutes.”
He frowns, pushes his hands into his pockets. My eyes automatically flick to his hip, searching for the gold glint of a police badge, before I remember he’s changed jobs. I glance up at his face again. He hasn’t aged so much as discolored, the way old dogs do.
“You know what I think it was?” he asks.
I raise my eyebrows, intrigued. People often wanted my explanation of my relationship with James—which seemed inherently unfair, expecting one half of an equation to account for the whole—but no one has ever offered their own diagnosis.
“I think he was enamored with you because you were so enamored with him.”
(“Enamored.” I note that this is the word he chooses to use. It doesn’t feel quite right to me, but it’s not entirely wrong either.)
“It’s possible,” I say. “I never asked. He was my friend—much more than that, truthfully—and that was enough. I didn’t need to know why.”
We stand facing each other in a silence that is awkward only for him. There’s another question he’s itching to ask, but he won’t. He gets as close as he can, starts slowly, perhaps hoping I’ll leap in and finish the thought for him. “When you say ‘more than friends’ …”
I wait. “Yes?”
He abandons the attempt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I can’t help wondering.”
I give him a smile nondescript enough that he will probably go on wondering—about this much, at least—for a good long while. If he’d had enough nerve to ask, I would have told him. My infatuation with James (there’s the word, never mind “enamored”) transcended any notion of gender. Colborne—regular Joe, happily married, father of two, not unlike my own father in some respects—does not strike me as the sort of man who would understand this. No man is, perhaps, until he experiences it himself and deniability is no longer plausible.
What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.
SCENE 1
As soon as the third-years finished Two Gentlemen of Verona, the set was ripped down with unceremonious haste. Three days later, the set for Lear had overtaken the stage, and we walked through the transformed space for the first time. During what normally would have been combat class, we shuffled in through the wings, one by one, numb to the usually exciting prospect of a new set. (Alexander was back from the clinic by then. He brought up the rear—hollow-eyed, stiff and lifeless, a walking cadaver. He looked so utterly broken that I hadn’t yet had the heart—or perhaps the nerve—to confront him, about anything.)
“Here it is,” Camilo said, as he flicked the work lights on. “They’ve really outdone themselves this time.”
For one precious moment, I forgot my tiredness, the weight of constant worry that had settled on my shoulders. It was like wandering into a dreamland.
Taped out on the floor, the set was deceptively simple: a bare stage and the narrow Bridge stretching down the center aisle like a runway. But the artistic design seized the imagination like a drug. An enormous mirror covered every inch of the floor, reflecting the deep shadows beyond the border curtains. Another mirror rose at the upstage wall where the backdrop should have been, tilted just enough that it, too, only reflected black and emptiness—not the audience. Meredith was the first to venture out onto the stage, and I fought a ridiculous urge to grab her arm and pull her back. Her identical twin appeared upside down, reflected in the floor. “God,” she said. “How did they do it?”
“It’s mirrored plexiglass,” Camilo explained, “so it won’t crack and it’s perfectly safe to walk on. The costume crew is fitting special grips to the bottoms of our shoes so we don’t slip.”
She nodded, gazing down a sheer vertical drop to—what? Cautiously, Filippa stepped out to join her. Then Alexander, then Wren, then James. I waited in the wings, uncertain.
“Wow,” Wren said, in a small, awed voice. “What does it look like with the stage lights on?”