Illyria (10 page)

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things and you build a house. You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

Olivia wasn't in love with Viola. She was in love with a make-believe boy that the grief-stricken Viola had created from the memory of her drowned twin.

"Well, I'll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in't,"
Feste says as he disguises himself to torment poor Malvolio.
would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown ... The competitors enter."

I might not possess glamour; I might not be a magician.

But I could learn to be a good carpenter.

And I could learn to be a thief. I reached for my copy of the script, turned the light back on, and began once more to read.
The competitors enter.

***

IT WAS LESS LIKE BUILDING A HOUSE THAN COLO
nizing an island, this freakish, lovely, marvelous atoll that rose from the gray wasteland of St. Brendan's High School like some extravagant Atlantis we'd willed into being. All of our previous alliances and identities were tossed aside--jock, freak, egghead, cheerleader, anonymous.

But who or what we became wasn't necessarily reflected by the parts we played in
Twelfth Night.
It really was as if we were castaways, our place in Illyria determined as much by luck and skill--and not necessarily acting ability--as by a shared determination to make the

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play a success. It was my first full-bore exposure to the virus that is theater, not just watching a show but becoming part of its chemistry, the intricate helices of desire and ambition and love and unrelenting effort involved in producing even a bad play. And we all realized, almost from the very beginning, that our
Twelfth Night
was going to be remarkable.

For one thing, everyone knew their lines in record time. This in itself was unusual--apart from Rogan and myself, the cast had only the most rudimentary prior knowledge of Shakespeare. It really
was
like a virus: the boy playing Sir Toby caught it from Olivia, and Sebastian caught it from me, and Sir Andrew caught it from Maria--you get the picture. In the middle of a rehearsal, an actor would stride onstage and abruptly, as though he or she had been pumped with speed, start riffing on the lines.

Sudden meaning tumbled out of seemingly banal or incomprehensible exchanges. Malvolio pulled double and triple entendres from his famous scene with the forged love letter. Olivia didn't just come on to my Viola disguised as Cesario: she began to look suggestively at Maria, too. Backstage, Sir Toby would grab on to one of the heavy ropes that controlled the curtain, twist it around as though he were a kid on a swing, then spin himself dizzy, letting go at the last moment to stagger onstage for his scene in such a convincing display of drunkenness that Mr. Sullivan once checked his breath to make sure he hadn't smuggled a bottle backstage. Sir Andrew and Sebastian engaged in such extended swordplay that by opening night both were covered with cuts and bruises.

As for Feste--well, if there was a Patient Zero in this epidemic,

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it was Rogan. He didn't just learn his lines with a facility that was unnerving. As with the audition, he somehow intuited what they meant and made the meaning clear to everyone who heard him.

And then there were his songs. At rehearsal a few days after Mr. Sullivan had given him the album of Shakespeare's music, Rogan returned it to him.

Mr. Sullivan frowned. "Did you listen to it?"

"Yeah, I listened to it."

"And?"

Rogan gave him an odd half smile. "It was interesting." Mr. Sullivan's mouth was tight as he slid the album back into his briefcase. "Places, everyone," he called.

The opening scenes went well, though not spectacularly so. And then Feste made his first entrance, with Maria.
"O mistress mine, where are you roaming?"

The line was from later in the play--a song, according to the script, though Rogan had only ever spoken the lines in rehearsal. Now he sang them.

We heard him before we saw him, that soaring voice like something you'd hear in a dream or a church or a movie, so high and clear and utterly unexpected that there was muffled laughter, followed by surprised gasps as Rogan walked onstage.

Because of course we'd all heard him sing before, in church or just goofing around at school. But no one, not even me, had ever heard anything like this. He only sang two lines, the sweet falsetto at odds with the feline way he walked, and with his expression as he looked past Maria to where I stood offstage.

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"O stay and hear, your true love's coming..."

I tore my gaze from him to look at Mr. Sullivan, seated as usual in the first row. He stared at Rogan blissfully, almost stoned with delight. So, by the end of rehearsal, did everyone else.

I've seen spectacular performances since then--Anthony Hopkins's Broadway debut in
Equus,
Kevin Kline in
On the Twentieth Century,
John Wood in
The Invention of Love.
Rogan's turn as the Clown rivaled all of them.

Everyone in that auditorium felt it: everyone was bewitched. I felt drugged, light-headed with desire and raw adrenaline. Whatever envy I had burned away at the expectation of sharing the stage with him. It was like sex--it
was
sex, magnified somehow and transformed into a vision we could all see, all share in; and there was Rogan, grinning and looking as happy as I'd ever seen him outside of the hidden space in his room.

From that moment on, the production was charmed. Malvolio, who was wonderful to begin with, became a miracle of cunning and pathos and self-love. The pallid, flaxen-haired Olivia was a bombshell. Duncan Moss as Sebastian grew dashing and began to flirt with me. Even the members of the tech club, the usually dour collective of outcasts who toiled at sound and lights and props and costumes, rose to the occasion with uncharacteristic displays of exuberance, going so far as to applaud scenes they'd watched a hundred times.

We all were good. But we took our cues from Rogan. There was a subtle undercurrent to everything Feste said, everything he sang; as if he knew some other, deeper, secret meaning attached to the

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play, something strange, even supernatural; something the rest of us could never hope to understand, although we drove ourselves crazy trying to.

Especially me.

"Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?"
Rogan held up a quarter, the payment I'd given Feste so that he'd let Viola pass Olivia's gates.

"Yes, being kept together and put to use,"
I retorted.

But before I could push my way past him, he sidled up beside me and kissed me, his mouth lingering so that I felt his tongue between my lips.

I stumbled backward, mortified. Offstage someone laughed.

"I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir,"
Rogan went on,
"to bring a Cressida to this Troilus."

"That's great, Maddy!" Mr. Sullivan called from his seat in the audience. "Brilliant, Rogan!"

Several of Malvolio's big scenes came soon after this, and neither Rogan nor I was on for a while. I found him backstage and dragged him behind the fire curtain.

"Are you nuts?" I hissed.

"Yes," he whispered. He drew me to him and kissed me again, harder, pulling me so close I could feel his heart pound. "Maddy ..."

I trembled so much it hurt to speak. "Rogan--stop. I have to go on."

"My parents are gone tonight. Michael's going to Derek's. Come over afterward."

I nodded, turned, and stumbled off to make my entrance.

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That night, lying with Rogan in the attic, I felt nearly delirious with arousal, and what I now know was pure, unchecked joy. I knew it then, too; knew that whatever happiness lay in store for me--vast continents of happiness, I was certain, of which this was only the first glimpse of shore--this would always be what I remembered. My cousin beside me, the toy theater's radiance lapping our bodies in waves of gold and green while phantom lightning flickered in Rogan's eyes and phantom vapor roiled across the tiny stage, all those rustlings and whispers silenced by Rogan's voice, singing softly beside me in the dark.

"When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day."

He turned to me and stroked my cheek. "I love you, Maddy."

"I love you, too," I whispered.

It was the first time we had ever spoken it aloud.

It was now the week before Christmas. The show was scheduled to open on January 6, the real Twelfth Night. Everyone connected with the play was practically incandescent with excitement and expectation. The corridors at St. Brendan smelled of roses and burned sugar; the overhead lights hummed with a scintillant, cracked-ice glow. I felt as though I were walking around inside the toy theater; as though it had grown, like the magical stage tree in
The Nutcracker,
to encompass everyone I knew, everything I touched.

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On Christmas Eve, the last day of school before Christmas break, and after a rehearsal that went on into the night, we exchanged gifts backstage.

Funny gifts, mostly. Duncan Moss gave me an athletic supporter. Maria furtively slipped Sir Toby a pint of rum. Sir Andrew and I exchanged plastic swords. Mr. Sullivan told us we were all exempted from taking the English exam scheduled for when classes resumed.

"Where's Rogan?" he asked.

I looked around. "He was just here--"

Rogan suddenly materialized, stepping from the shadows onto the stage. "Maddy," he called. "Catch!"

I turned and got hit in the face by a snowball. "Hey!"

"Oops," said Rogan. His face was flushed as he pointed to the fire door. "Everyone! Come here, look--"

We ran to the door, then streamed outside, laughing and shouting in amazement.

"It's snowing!"

None of us had ventured from the auditorium for hours. When school ended, the sky had been gray and the ground barren.

Now a good six inches covered Mr. Sullivan's car and drifted up against the sides of the building and into the unplowed streets beyond. The air was so thick with snow I couldn't tell who stood beside me, Olivia or Sebastian or one of the guys from the tech club.

"Maddy," came a voice at my ear. It was Rogan. He made a slow backward pratfall, until he lay on his back in a snowdrift, grinning like a lunatic. "Merry Christmas."

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***

THAT YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME, CHRISTMAS

seemed anticlimactic. The usual buzz around the Arden Terrace hive was muted. A lot of the older cousins didn't come home or made only fleeting visits. There was no one younger than Rogan or myself to spur parents to keep up the pretenses of the season, and all the adults seemed more tired, less interested in the holiday than usual: exhausted but also relieved that they didn't have to make the long slog through the Valley of the Shadow of Santa Claus. Mr. Sullivan hadn't called any rehearsals until a few days after Christmas, but the break didn't feel like a treat. It felt like an exile. Not even the modest, but still impressive, pile of presents with my name on them cheered me up, until I got to the large box from Aunt Kate.

"This isn't a new present, Maddy." She sat in the wing chair in our living room, having made the rounds of the other families since early that morning. As usual, we were last on her roster; as usual, she took the whiskey sour my father gave her and sipped it as my sisters and I opened our gifts. "But at least this time I know that it fits."

I opened it, suspicious of the Gimbels logo on the box, then gasped.

"Oh, Aunt Kate." I drew it out, the midnight folds falling about me and exhaling a faint fragrance of camphor and Chanel No. 5 and roses. "Thank you, thank you so much ..."

My mother asked, "Is that Madeline's old cape?"

"It is." Aunt Kate sipped her whiskey and watched me. "I took it

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out of storage a while ago and had it cleaned. I knew it fit--Maddy's worn it before--but I wanted to be sure she'd take good care of it."

"I will," I said as my sisters looked on, unsure whether they should be jealous or not. "You know I will."

Aunt Kate nodded. Her blue agate eyes narrowed.

"You'd better," she said.

A few days later we went back to rehearsing; a few days after that school began once more. I hadn't seen Aunt Kate and Mr. Sullivan together for some time, not since we'd all gone down to the city to see
Jumpers.

During that last week of rehearsals, she showed up every afternoon. She sat in the very back of the auditorium, where the Tech Club guys hung out when they weren't needed. They had started out as a nerdy bunch, but as the weeks passed a sea change had overtaken them, as well. They started getting high with Rogan in the parking lot before school; they let their hair grow long and began listening to different music.
Tales from Topographic Oceans
gave way to
Transformer
and
Electric Warrior.
The first time I saw Aunt Kate in their midst I felt a stab of panic--embarrassment at having an adult family member intrude upon our hidden world; fear that from this vantage point she'd see the indelible path charting my fall from grace, from earnest, slightly anonymous niece to pot-smoking infidel and incestuous wanton.

But she said nothing. And the tech guys seemed to like her.

Sometimes she'd slip from her row to join Mr. Sullivan, her high heels ticking softly until she sank into the seat beside him. If I were onstage, I'd try not to get flustered, seeing them with their heads