Illyria (8 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Hand
Tags: #Fiction, #Juvenile Fiction, #Children: Young Adult (Gr. 10-12), #Children's Books - Young Adult Fiction, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #Social Issues - Adolescence, #Adolescence, #Cousins, #Performing Arts, #Interpersonal Relations, #Theater, #Incest, #Performing Arts - Theater
"Twelfth Night?
I felt a swell of excitement, despite Rogan's disappointment. "That's the one about the twins."
"Shakespeare," said Rogan in disgust. "Who the hell does Shakespeare in high school?"
"But you
like
Shakespeare." I looked at him as though he'd forgotten my name. "That's why you stole my book!"
"Romeo and Juliet.
I fucking hate that play."
"This isn't
Romeo and Juliet.
This is the one with the twins--"
"They all have twins," said Rogan. But he sounded less dismissive.
"Twelfth Night
is the shipwreck, right?"
I nodded, and his expression softened. He glanced around to make sure no one saw, then touched my hand. "Yeah, I remember. I always liked that one."
"Twins." My excitement deepened. "Rogan, we could be the main
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parts! Because we really could
be
twins, they wouldn't have to make us up, we already look alike--"
"Yeah, yeah, you're right." He nodded thoughtfully. "That could be cool. You'd have to get your hair cut. And do something about the color..."
The bell rang. The corridor filled with students rushing to class.
"We should practice," I said. "For the audition. I'll find a copy at my house or your place. There has to be one somewhere."
"Yeah, well, good luck finding anything in that shithole," he said. "I gotta go."
That afternoon I ransacked my house for a copy of the play. We only knew the story from Madeline's old edition of
Tales from Shakespeare,
with Arthur Rackham's pretty, fairy-tale evocations of winsome lovers and thwarted rulers.
The copy I eventually found seemed a relic from another world entirely: a once-sturdy, extremely ugly high school edition that had once belonged to my father, with cursory annotations to the text explaining the action though not the more unsavory jokes. The book had a pukey green cover and no illustrations, save a black-and-white frontispiece of a mincing, Mephistophelean figure in a stiff ruff and pointy shoes. Malvolio, I guessed, the vain Puritanical steward who becomes the victim of a cruel practical joke. Someone--my father?-- had defaced the picture, adding glasses, a Hitler mustache, and buck-teeth.
But the text seemed complete, as far as I could tell. At least there was no mention of it having been abridged or modified for a young audience. I skipped through the opening pages to Viola's first lines.
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Act 1, Scene 2
Enter Viola, a Captain, and Sailors
Viola
:
What country, friends, is this?
Captain
:
This is Illyria, lady.
Viola
:
And what should I do in Illyria? My brother, he is in Elysium.
'"My brother, he is in Elysium ...'"
I read the lines aloud; then went back to the beginning and read it all through, straight to the end. When I was finished, I went across the street to Fairview. Michael was downstairs, his lanky form folded into an armchair, eating a bowl of cereal and watching TV.
"Hey, Maddy," he said without glancing at me. "If you're looking for Rogan, he's not here. He went over to Derek's to practice."
"He did?"
Something in my tone made him look up. "He'll be back. Pretty soon, probably. Derek said he had to do something at five. You want me to tell him you came by?"
"No. I guess I'll just wait. If you think he'll be here." I held up the book. "We were going to practice for the play tryouts. The auditions are Friday."
Michael dug into his Cap'n Crunch. "Oh, yeah. I heard everyone's bummed it's not a musical. That new guy, Sullivan. Breaking with tradition. I didn't think Rogan was going to try out; I felt kinda bad for him. Since they weren't doing a musical. I know he really wanted to
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sing. He would've gotten the lead, too, whatever they did. He's got such a fucking amazing voice."
A sort of darkness swept over me. I felt cold and dizzy, as though I'd arrived someplace for a big party, only to find I'd gotten the date wrong and missed it, everything had happened weeks before, and I'd never even known.
"You want something to eat?" Michael held out the box of Cap'n Crunch. "You look kinda weird."
"I'm okay."
Rogan arrived half an hour later. He looked happy and windblown, sweeping into the house in a flurry of dead leaves.
"Hey, Mad-girl." He grinned when he saw me. I could smell smoke on him, cigarettes and marijuana. The uncanny blue-green eyes were bloodshot. "Whatcha doing?'
I gave him a wan smile and held up the book. "I thought maybe we could rehearse?"
"Oh, yeah. Right. I meant to tell you, the guys wanted to practice, we're doing some new stuff. But we can do it now if you want. That okay?"
He tipped his head to make sure Michael wasn't paying attention, then rubbed my arm. "Come on, let's go to my room."
Upstairs we read the entire play. Rogan took all the male parts. I took the female ones, and gave perfunctory readings to everyone save Viola. I was surprised at how easily Rogan handled all the lines, not just Sebastian's.
"I thought you hated Shakespeare," I said.
"Just
Romeo and Juliet.
This one's pretty funny."
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We stopped often, to peruse the facile annotations and try to imagine what the stage directions would be.
"This is, like, a dirty joke." Rogan tapped the page where Malvolio read aloud from a forged love letter, supposedly penned by his employer, Olivia. "
'These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's.'
He's talking about a cunt."
I whacked him with the book.
"Hey, I didn't say it! Shakespeare did."
We reached the end. For a minute, neither of us spoke.
"The girl has the bigger part," Rogan said at last. He didn't look at me. "Viola. The play's really about her. Not Sebastian. The boy twin's hardly onstage at all."
"He's on at the end," I said quickly. "He has that great swordfight where Sebastian wins, where he duels Andrew Aguecheek. All his scenes are just toward the end of the play, that's all."
"I guess," said Rogan.
But we both knew he was right. It was Viola's show, at least the way the words read on the page.
"Come on," I said. "It'd be so great, Rogan, we'd be up there together, it would be like--"
I wanted to say,
It would be like when we're alone.
Like when Rogan murmured,
You can't breathe,
and I couldn't breathe, because desire and arousal choked me, because I breathed nothing but him; he was my air, my element; everything.
But being onstage together wouldn't be like that. How could it? Nothing would ever be like that.
The bleak horror I'd felt earlier returned; the sense that I had
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somehow missed the real meaning of the world, which everyone but me had always known.
"It would be okay, I guess." Rogan shrugged. He ran his hand along the back of my neck and gave me a sweet, stoned smile. "Hey, don't look like that! I'll do it--we'll do it. You're right, it'll be fun ..."
He leaned down to kiss me. I shut my eyes and imagined us in the close darkness of the attic, the toy theater tossing its phantom starlight on our bodies as we moved together, like some strange articulated toy.
"What's going on?"
We sat up so violently our jaws cracked. The copy of
Twelfth Night
spun across the floor, to where Rogan's mother stood in the doorway. She stared at us, mouth pursed between uncertainty and angry disapproval.
"Why is this door closed?" she demanded.
"We're rehearsing." I scrambled to pick up the book and showed it to her. "This play by Shakespeare, the auditions are Friday. We're going to try out for it."
Aunt Pat barely glanced at the book.
"Leave this door open," she said. "Rogan, you need to get ready for dinner."
She stood and waited for me to leave.
"I'll see you tomorrow," I said to Rogan, without meeting his eyes. "Yeah, see you."
At the bottom of the steps, Aunt Pat stopped. She gave me an icy look.
"You need to find other things to do with yourself, Madeline. You're too old for this. You're both too old for this."
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She stared at me until I left.
At dinner I showed the battered copy of
Twelfth Night
to my parents and my sister.
"Do you remember doing that?" I pointed to poor Malvolio's scribbled face.
My father took the book and frowned, riffled the pages, then gave it back to me.
"I'm afraid I don't remember it, dear," he said, in the tone he might use if a small child attempted and failed to tell a joke. "It's got your name in it."
"Mmm."
While we ate dessert I asked, "Is it okay if I dye my hair?"
"No," said my mother. "Are you out of your mind?"
"Nice try." My sister smirked.
I glared at her and went on. "It's for the play at school. The main parts are twins. Rogan and I are trying out together. If we get it I'll need to look like him."
"Then make him get his hair cut," said my father tersely.
"I won't even do it unless I get the part," I pleaded.
"No," my mother repeated. "Don't ask again."
The auditions were held right after school on Friday. Rogan and I made a few halfhearted attempts to practice lines during the week.
But there was only one afternoon when we had several hours to ourselves, and we spent those hours in the attic.
"That's really stupid," I said when we first crawled in and Rogan lit a cigarette. "Someone could smell it."
"My parents smoke. And no one's home now."
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I looked at the overflowing ashtray. "It could start a fire."
Rogan stubbed it out and pulled me to him. "I don't need a cigarette to do that. Come on, they'll be home soon--"
Fear of discovery made the time feel urgent, almost frantic. Even the toy theater seemed irradiated by our anxiety. Its footlights dimmed to a glowering dull red, and indistinct shadows cloaked the topiary trees and faraway shipwreck, as though they had been cursorily sketched onto the backdrop. Rogan lay beside me, his face suspended above mine; but I couldn't see him, only smell him, his breath resinous with marijuana, and hear the broken rhythm of his breathing: silence, then a sound like a sigh, then silence once more.
"Rogan." I pressed my hand to his face and he kissed my palm. "I can hardly see you."
"That's because I'm not really here," he said.
On Friday, I was surprised by how many people showed up for the auditions. There were students scattered all over the auditorium, the usual drama crowd but other people, too. A bunch of girls from different English classes, and quite a few upper-class guys. Everyone I knew liked Mr. Sullivan, but I hadn't realized his popularity extended this far--there was a small cohort of cheerleaders, and two seniors from the football team. I sat near Rogan and several of our friends in the third row. Mr. Sullivan sat in the very front, by himself, with a notebook, a script, and several mimeographed sheets of dialogue.
I assumed Rogan and I would be permitted to audition together. Instead, Mr. Sullivan had all the girls read, one at a time, and then all the boys. The girls were given the same two speeches of Olivia's. In the
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first, Olivia declared her love for the boy Cesario--actually Viola in disguise--while in the second Olivia berated her drunken uncle Toby, and then fawned over Sebastian, Viola's twin brother, thinking he was Cesario. I listened, and secretly gloated, as the cheerleaders stumbled over the strange words and meanings.
"Mr. Sullivan, this is confusing!" one of them wailed.
"Imagine how confusing it is to Lady Olivia," said Mr. Sullivan.
My turn came. A moonfaced girl with long flaxen hair walked off the stage and handed me a script. I glanced at Rogan.
"Break a leg," he said.
Onstage, a row of lights shone down blindingly. I shielded my eyes and stared out into the auditorium, but could see only vague smears and shadows. Was that Mr. Sullivan? Rogan? When I looked down, the white pages of my script glowed with a diabolical brilliance.
"Whenever you're ready, Madeline."
I nodded and smiled nervously.
"O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful
In the contempt and anger of his lip!"
"Louder," said Mr. Sullivan.
I cleared my throat and began again.
"O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful
In the contempt and anger of his lip!
A murd'rous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid. Love's night is noon."
