The Juliet Club

by Suzanne Harper

  “Well . . . no, not really,” Tom said. “I mean, his clothes always look just like, you know . . . clothes.”

  Benno snorted. “Extremely expensive clothes, believe me. And his sense of humor . . . well, sometimes he enjoys mocking people.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Tom said thoughtfully.

  “He’s always at least fifteen minutes late. He’s very forgetful.” Benno sounded as if he were ticking the points off on his fingers. “And he sometimes borrows people’s CDs and then forgets to return them. Actually, he does that pretty often. Once a month, at least.”

  And you are such a paragon of virtue, Giacomo thought, fuming. He had only forgotten to return Benno’s precious CDs twice. Three times at most.

  “And then, when it comes to girls, he is incostante,” Benno said. “I think the word in English is fickle? It is shameful, everyone says so.”

  Benno’s tone sounded quite severe, Giacomo thought, even condemning. And what did he mean, everyone said so? What had he ever done that was so bad? Of course, he flirted with girls, but, to be fair, he also flirted with the perpetually tired waitress at his favorite café, who often slipped him extra biscotti. And the sour-faced secretary in the school office, who usually unbent enough to give him a late pass and a small smile. And even his second cousin’s four-year-old niece, who now shyly offered him a small bouquet of wilted flowers at every Sunday dinner as a token of her love. And where was the harm in any of that?

  “If she won’t tell him how she feels, maybe we should,” Tom suggested.

  Giacomo could hear the shrug in Benno’s voice. “What good would that do? He would just lead her on, break her heart, make her miserable, ruin her life.” He sighed heavily. “It’s a shame that someone like Kate who is, as you said, molto gentile, should fall for someone who will never return her affection.”

  Tom sighed heavily as well. “You’re right. He’s crazy not to like Kate, though. She’s so nice and pretty and smart—”

  “Yes, very smart,” Benno agreed. “Except, of course, for loving Giacomo.”

  Act II

  Scene III

  “I can’t believe it!” Giacomo was storming around the seminar room, running his hands through his hair in an agitated manner and glaring at anything that stood in his path. “I simply can’t believe it! I cannot believe what Benno said about me!”

  “Yes, that’s what you’ve been saying for the last ten minutes,” Kate said. She was seated at the table, flipping through the pile of letters to Juliet. She gave him a wicked glance and quoted his own words back to him. “You know, eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.”

  “Yes, I believe I’ve heard that somewhere before,” he snapped. “But still, I can’t believe—”

  “Calm down. The others will be here any minute.”

  He stopped and whirled to face her. “Calm down!” he shouted. “Why should I calm down? I have been most foully perjured!”

  She stopped rifling through the letters and tilted her head to one side. “‘Foully perjured’? Who said that?”

  “I said it! Just now!” He looked at her as if she were mad. “Weren’t you even listening?”

  “I could hardly help listening, the way you’ve been shouting!” Kate said, her voice tart. “I thought you were quoting Shakespeare, and I didn’t recognize the line, that’s all.“

  “Oh, of course.” He threw himself into the chair opposite her, crossed his arms, and slid down until his neck was resting on the back of the chair. “I should have guessed. My best friend has slandered me behind my back and all you can think about is whether I’m quoting Shakespeare!”

  “It’s not slander,” she pointed out, “if it’s true.”

  He glared at her. “Betrayed at every turn,” he muttered.

  Before she could respond to that, she heard the sound of the others approaching. “Never mind,” she said quickly. “They’re coming. Just remember to play your part.”

  They began their second day by answering Juliet’s mail. “Read each letter carefully,” Professoressa Marchese advised. “And as you write your reply, remember to answer in the spirit of Juliet!” She opened the box of letters and tipped it onto the table. Letters with stamps and postmarks from dozens of countries spilled out.

  “Wow.” Tom looked daunted. “That’s a lot of letters.”

  “It’s hard to believe so many people need help with their love lives,” Benno said with a sly glance at Giacomo.

  “Yes,” Giacomo said, giving him a burning stare in return. “How fortunate that you are here to offer counsel. Given how perceptive you are about other people.”

  Lucy plucked a letter from the pile. “This is going to be such fun.”

  Professoressa Marchese left them again, saying she had to meet with the German translator of her books and have lunch with the president of the university. Once the door closed behind her, everyone except Lucy looked at one another, then at the stack of letters. Lucy was busily reading the letter she had picked up.

  “Oh, listen to this one,” she said. Then she read it out loud.

  Dear Juliet,

  I really like a girl in my school. How can I tell if she likes me? I’ve already asked my friends, but they don’t have a clue.

  Sincerely,

  Joel P.

  “Dibs on this one,” she said. “It’ll be a breeze to answer.”

  Silvia frowned at her. This was something else that annoyed her about Americans. They acted as if everything in life was so clear-cut and straightforward, whereas Silvia knew to the depths of her being that life was murky, unpredictable, and extremely complicated.

  “Fine,” she snapped. “Then you answer it.”

  Kate leaned forward to pull another letter from the pile.

  Dear Juliet,

  I like a boy in my math class, but I can’t tell if he likes me. He doesn’t ever talk to me unless I say something to him first. And every time I do, he asks me what my name is, even though I’ve told him five times now. But my friends think I should ask him to the school dance. What do you think? I will follow any advice you give me!

  Sincerely,

  Samantha B.

  She looked at Tom. “You want to take this one?”

  “I guess so,” he said reluctantly. “But I don’t know what to write. I mean, I don’t know anything about this guy she likes.”

  “Well, obviously,” Lucy began, “he does like her, so you just have to reassure her a little bit.”

  “Uffa!” Silvia said in disgust. “You must be joking!”

  Lucy looked puzzled. “What?” She looked around the table and saw a ring of skeptical faces. “What?”

  “I hate to say it, but I think we should write back and suggest that she start thinking about someone else,” Giacomo said, sounding truly regretful.

  Benno nodded, but added brightly, “Maybe we should give her advice on how to meet other guys, though! That would probably cheer her up!”

  “Nothing will cheer her up.” Silvia pronounced in a hollow tone, sounding like an oracle of doom. “She loves him, he does not love her. Nothing could be worse.”

  Kate clucked her tongue with annoyance. “Really? How about failing a class, breaking an arm, losing a wallet—”

  “Those are only problems.” Silvia waved a hand dismissively. “Problems can be fixed. But unrequited love is a tragedy.”

  “I don’t know why you insist that it’s unrequited!” Lucy said indignantly. “I think we should encourage her to at least try to find out his true feelings! Tom, you agree with me, don’t you?”

  She gave him an imploring look, as if she were being led to the stake and he offered her only hope of rescue. “Um, well . . .” As Tom tried to gather his thoughts, Benno found himself gazing at Lucy as if hypnotized. A beam of sunlight shone through the window, casting a golden halo around her blond hair. Her blue eyes—no, he thought, the mere word blue was not enough. Her eyes were the deep, dark blue of the ocean or the midnight sky, filled with
unfathomable depth and mystery—

  “Benno!” Tom almost shouted.

  Benno came to with a start and saw that Tom was giving him a desperate look. “What do you think?”

  Benno hated to disappoint Lucy, who had now shifted her imploring look to him. “Well, I guess he could just be pretending to not notice her,” he suggested shiftily, ignoring Giacomo’s doubtful expression.

  “Exactly!” Lucy beamed. “That’s exactly right! I think this could be a situation like the one you see in the movies, where someone acts like he doesn’t like someone because he wants to hide the true nature of his feelings! But secretly, way deep down inside, he really does like that person! So actually the more someone doesn’t pay attention to someone the more he probably likes her!” She paused for breath, then added, “Now if you look at it that way, the fact that he keeps forgetting her name is actually a very good sign! No one who didn’t like somebody a little bit could ignore someone that completely!”

  There was a brief silence as everyone took that in.

  Then Giacomo said, “You’ve obviously given this more thought than the rest of us. Maybe you should answer this letter as well?”

  Lucy smiled and, quite contented, wrote two letters filled with impassioned advice to send out in the next day’s mail.

  By the end of the class, each member of the Shakespeare Seminar had managed to meet their quota of answering two letters a day. After an hour, they had agreed to stop discussing every letter, since it was clear that otherwise they would still be in the seminar room at midnight.

  Occasionally, they would pass a letter around the table for comments. Kate noticed that not only was each person’s handwriting as individual as their personalities (Lucy’s looping and carefree, Silvia’s a black scrawl, Benno’s almost indecipherable, Giacomo’s spiky and angular), but the tone of their advice ranged from blithely optimistic to doom-laden gloom. They didn’t seem to be learning anything about Shakespeare and, moreover, they were probably actively damaging relationships around the world. Kate shook her head at the wisdom of this exercise, but she dutifully kept working until the church bells chimed three o’clock.

  Giacomo threw down his pen with relief and flexed his fingers. “Basta,” he said. “Enough.”

  The others followed suit, yawning and stretching.

  “What’s everyone going to do this afternoon?” Lucy asked. “Does anyone want to go shopping?”

  Kate made a point of looking at Giacomo, then hurriedly glancing away before answering. “Sounds like fun,” she said in an elaborately casual voice. “But I think I need to take a nap.”

  “I have some other things I promised to do,” Giacomo said.

  “Oh, too bad.” Lucy’s voice was innocent, but Kate saw the knowing look she gave Silvia and smiled to herself.

  Tom said he wanted to check out the city’s soccer pitches, which clearly didn’t interest Silvia or Lucy, so they all went their separate ways.

  Only Benno lingered in the seminar room, saying that he had to write one last paragraph to finish his letter and that he felt duty-bound to mail it as soon as possible.

  “It is a very sad case,” he had explained dramatically. “Adrian from Birmingham, England, suffers from unrequited passion for his older sister’s best friend, who does not know he exists! In fact, she loves another! I really think I should send an answer today.”

  Giacomo had given him a suspicious glance at this unexpected devotion to duty, but Lucy had beamed at him. “I’m sure your advice will help that boy so much,” she had said. Benno had tried to look modest.

  As soon as he was alone, he had begun rooting through the trash can until he found what he wanted: Lucy’s rough drafts. She had a habit, he had noticed, of writing pages and pages of advice, filled with numerous cross-outs and scribbled margin notes. She would chew thoughtfully on the end of her pen as she wrote (he found this habit delightful). Sometimes she would forget which end of the pen was which, resulting in an ink stain at the corner of her mouth (he thought the smear of dark blue was charming). She would furrow her brow, and sigh, and gaze absently out the window as she considered what advice Juliet would give (he found this seriousness of purpose quite admirable).

  He kept searching until he had snatched all of Lucy’s discarded letters from the trash, then turned to go. But as he was about to leave the room, he glanced back at the table where his letter—with, in truth, only one sentence written—lay half hidden under his notebook.

  I only said I should reply today, he thought. I didn’t say I would.

  Then he thought of how Lucy had smiled at him so warmly. She seemed to think he was a kind person. Moreover, she seemed to like the idea that he was a kind person. He sighed, sat down at the table, and began to write.

  His advice to Adrian had been succinct and realistic. Whether it would be helpful or not was another matter, and not one that he had time to think much about.

  “Dear Adrian,” he had written, “it is indeed painful to love someone who does not love you in return. I suggest you find out what she wants in a guy, then demonstrate that you are exactly what she’s looking for. For example, most girls like—”

  Here he had stopped, his pen hovering over the paper as he tried to figure out how to finish that sentence. Benno had the advantage, if one could call it that, of having grown up with three opinionated older sisters. Over the years, he had often heard them dissecting various boys’ looks, personalities, and intelligence in a matter-of-fact way that had made him shudder. Angie had always claimed she wanted someone who made her laugh, while Gisella said she would only go out with athletes, and Rosaria’s constant quest was for a boy with a devilish smile. “Especially,” she would say meaningfully, “if he looks like he can back it up with action.”

  But then Angie married a very serious lawyer, Gisella started dating a video-game designer who spent ten hours a day at his computer, and Rosaria—well, Rosaria hadn’t yet found a smile that lived up to her expectations.

  Benno had to face facts. He had no idea what girls wanted. And, now that he thought about it, he suspected they didn’t know, either.

  He crumpled up the letter and started over with a fresh piece of paper. Perhaps a more imaginative approach was called for. “Dear Adrian, I’ve heard that women often fall in love with men who have rescued them from danger. Perhaps you could arrange for this girl to encounter some small peril which would then give you the opportunity to save her.”

  Not a bad suggestion, actually. His black eyes narrowed with thought. Perhaps Adrian could lure this girl into a field where a mad bull resided? And then save her when the mad bull (inevitably) charged her?

  But then there was the question of speed. Benno had no idea how fast Adrian could run.

  No. This plan was too fraught with difficulties. He stared balefully at the blank paper for several minutes, then began writing once more.

  “Dear Adrian,” he wrote, “All I can tell you is to be yourself. If it’s meant to happen, it will.”

  Then he tossed the envelope in the mail bin and headed off with Lucy’s letters in a pocket close to his heart.

  Act II

  Scene IV

  “Silvia and Lucy have taken up a position across the piazza.” Giacomo stretched out his legs in a leisurely manner that almost tripped a waiter who was rushing by. “Don’t look.”

  “I didn’t intend to,” Kate said crisply. “And anyway, I saw them, too.”

  They were sitting at an outdoor cafe in the late afternoon sun. Conversations in a half-dozen languages swirled around them, punctuated by occasional bursts of laughter. It was Giacomo’s favorite time of day, when people decided that they had done enough work or enough sightseeing and were ready to relax into the evening.

  Kate, however, looked anything but relaxed. She was perched on the edge of her chair, her back perfectly straight, studying the menu as intensely as if it were written in Croatian. Watching her from the corner of his eye, Giacomo thought that their little plan, whi
ch had seemed so delightfully entertaining yesterday, might turn out to be more work than he had thought.

  “You seem nervous,” he said.

  She glanced up just long enough to say, “Not at all. Why would I be nervous?” before turning back to the menu.

  Giacomo closed his eyes briefly. Saint Rosaline, help me out here.

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw the waiter standing behind Kate and surveying them with a knowing look. First date, his expression said. Not going well at all, what a pity.

  Waiters never gave him that kind of look. On the contrary, he was used to getting looks of admiration and good fellowship, something along the lines of “Well done, our side!”

  He gave their drink order in a distant tone—“Acqua minerale, per favore”—and turned his attention back to Kate, who was holding the menu so that she could glance over at Silvia and Lucy. “May I make a suggestion?”

  She eyed him cautiously but nodded. “All right.”

  “You want to deceive our friends into thinking that we are beginning a romance, yes?” he said. “Then you need to look relaxed, as if you’re having fun. Not like . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone who is being held hostage.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’m perfectly relaxed.”

  “Well.” He chose not to comment on that. “Perhaps if you sat back in your chair.”

  Kate glanced down and seemed to realize for the first time that she was perched uncomfortably on the edge of her seat. She slid back.

  “Excellent. Now uncross your arms,” he added. “Good. Now, smile at me as if you think I’m incredibly charming.”

  She glared at him.

  “Okay.” He sighed. “We’ll work our way up to that.”

  “What’s she doing now?” Lucy hissed to Silvia. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and a straw hat to disguise her identity. “Can you tell what’s going on? I can’t see a single blessed thing!”

  “No wonder,” Silvia said tartly. “It would be easier to watch them if you weren’t holding your menu up in front of your face.”