Finding Juliet Read online

  Finding Juliet

  A novel

  by

  Frank Sennett

  For my Juliet

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is coincidental. Any real places and events are employed fictitiously.

  Sweet love! Sweet lines! Sweet life!

  Here is her hand, the agent of her heart;

  Here is her oath for love, her honor’s pawn.

  O, that our fathers would applaud our loves,

  To seal our happiness with their consents!

  O heavenly Julia!

  —Two Gentlemen of Verona

  Chapter One

  Even from Nick Moore’s self-imposed exile at the back of the auditorium, Professor Grant Ricks appeared to be more cartoon than man. It didn’t help that Ricks dressed like he’d lost a bet. Boot-cut jeans flapped against cracked penny loafers as he stalked the stage, bony forearms waving in the sleeves of a golf shirt entirely inappropriate for the chilly spring still holding the blooms at bay on the steep mountainsides surrounding Ashland, Oregon.

  Nick’s ex-girlfriend Allison sat in the front row, her head bobbing along to the lecture. She was as enthusiastic about Studies in Shakespeare (or as Ricks called his latest version of the lit survey course, Juliet & Julia: Two Plays of Verona) as she had been to uproot their lives in Seattle two years ago for a chance to get her elementary-ed certificate at Southern Oregon University and try out for productions in the city’s internationally respected Shakespeare Festival.

  “You can finally finish your lit MA,” she’d said while they shared their last generic menthol behind the chain bookstore where Nick guided self-help seekers to life-changing novels and Allison hopped them up on caramel lattes. “That way, you can put off deciding what to do with your life until you’re 30.”

  As she’d punctuated her plan with a long drag on the cigarette, Nick had nodded. Their apartment lease was nearly up, after all. Besides, their jobs didn’t exactly qualify as careers, and their Siberian husky, Bruce, had been run over the week before after breaking off-leash to chase a rabbit out of his favorite dog park.

  The move seemed like a good idea at the time. Good enough, at least. But now that Allison had left him for her Ashland acting coach—expensive hobby indeed—Nick wished he’d escaped like that rabbit while his old life disappeared under the wheels of time. At least he was halfway through his final semester. Fewer than a dozen meetings left of the last class they’d signed up for together, six more weeks of showing up five minutes late so his ever-cheerful ex couldn’t share a kind and condescending word before he found a seat as far away from her as possible. Less than two months to freedom. Time to figure out what to do with it.

  “What’s the point?”

  Nick looked up, startled to hear someone voicing his next thought. But it was only the mouthy kid he’d had in his freshman comp class last fall, challenging the professor’s latest assignment. Despite the kid, Nick had enjoyed being a TA enough to consider a teaching career. That’s why he was auditing this undergrad course: Ricks was a campus rock star and Nick hoped he could pick up a few winning techniques. Ironic that he’d picked up Allison’s passion for education while she picked up a theater bum. He hoped he’d cut a finer figure in the classroom than Ricks did. But the doc had charisma, along with a playful lecturing style.

  “What’s the point?” Ricks thundered back to the class. “Why would I have you write to a young woman who existed only in the mind of the world’s most celebrated playwright? I bade you do this during the first meeting of this course because, to Shakespeare, Juliet really did exist, the same way she exists for the members of Juliet’s Club in Verona, and to the thousands of love-hungry souls who seek her guidance there every year. I want you to think of Juliet as a young woman you might know, someone with problems and desires similar to your own. Through your letters to her, you bring Juliet to life.”

  Allison’s head bobbed more furiously than usual, but the student in the row behind her wasn’t convinced. Nick anticipated a crack about busy work, but the kid posed a question instead: “How can you expect us to know Juliet when it’s so hard to keep real people alive in our hearts? Even if you see them every day for years, they still start to fade when the physical connection breaks. Pretty soon, they’re gone for good.”

  Professor Ricks rested an elbow on his lectern. Like everyone else in the auditorium, Nick couldn’t help thinking the young man had probably lost someone important, perhaps even a parent or sibling. Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow. We would as willingly give cure as know… Or maybe he was just a homesick freshman who liked to get philosophical in his dorm room on Humboldt County bud. Ricks smiled down at him, and then turned his calm gaze on the entire class.

  “He’s getting at something really essential here, isn’t he?” the professor began. “I believe it’s what the great modern poet Dave Matthews calls ‘The Space Between.’” Ricks continued through the chuckles, warming up. “Making and maintaining connections to others is one of our most basic human struggles. That struggle is as much at the heart of Shakespeare as it is in our hearts today. That’s the beauty of great art. It illuminates our condition and gives us the comfort—and sometimes the pain—of knowing it is universally felt. By giving us characters so moving that we are forced to make a place for them in our souls, literature teaches us how to connect with the real people in our lives. The more practice you get in opening your heart, the easier it becomes.”

  Such a deep thinker behind the oddball façade, Nick mused as the professor stepped behind the lectern and put on his glasses. Ricks looked up at the back row and studied its single occupant as he unfolded a piece of paper.

  “I’d like to share something with you,” he said. “Every year when I make this assignment, I send the most moving letter all the way to Juliet’s Club in Italy so that the writer might receive a response from one of Ms. Capulet’s secretaries in addition to a meaningless grade from me. I mailed the following letter from one of your classmates last week:

  Dearest Juliet,

  Rather than kill myself, I have decided to pour my grief into a letter this night. Would only that you had done the same upon finding your lover dead with lips still warm and touched with poison. As it is, you are not only fictional, but extinguished. I hope your spirit paid no heed to these cruel tricks of paper fate, so that you might yet provide the comfort I seek.

  I spill ink instead of blood because, although my true love lives, her love for me has died. I do not wish to compound my tragedy with desperate measures that would stir contempt within her breast. As the target of my rejection has rejected me, any harm I do myself, I do only to myself. It is a lesson well learned before the act is done.

  “A message of hope through pain,” Ricks concluded as the bell tower chimed. “Speaking of pain, please remember to bring blue books for your midterm exam next week.”

  Allison rose to leave with the rest of the class, but she stopped to squint up at Nick, as if trying to solve a puzzle, before heading out into the crisp morning. Watching her leave, he hoped the kid had been right, and she soon would disappear from his heart.

  Chapter Two

  Love was Salvatore Cattaneo’s only philosophy. Love was all he had to give, and all he hoped for from the world. As he saw Lia’s reflection in the chrome of the espresso machine that dominated one of the kitchen’s narrow counters, Salvatore’s breath caught. The furrowed concentration of his daughter’s face, the dark curls falling across her pale forehead, brought Viola back to him for a moment.

  She had come to him late in life and left far too early. But after so many years, reminders of Lia’s mother lightened the old man’s mood, the memories rising more sweet than
bitter. Crossing the room without a word, he squeezed Lia’s arms and kissed her left cheek. She laughed with surprise, sloshing coffee into the overflow pan.

  “That one’s yours now, papa,” she said, pointing to the half-empty cup.

  “Small price to pay for seeing you smile,” Salvatore replied. He immediately regretted the words. What he expressed from his heart, she so often took as a rebuke.

  It had been like this between them ever since she’d moved into his widower’s apartment, after leaving her husband Antonio. In those months, neither Lia nor Antonio had made a move toward dissolving their marriage of three years. But he had not once called her or visited, that Salvatore knew of, and she only cursed Antonio’s name and recited his adulterous crimes whenever he attempted to discuss what her next step might be.

  Glad for her presence whatever the circumstances, her father now simply watched for signs that the storm clouds were clearing. He knew Lia would announce her intentions in her own time, and begin acting on them before drawing the next breath. Just like her mother had always done.

  Avoiding the chipped side of the cup, Salvatore drank the espresso and savored its rich burnt smell. Lia, frowning now, pulled the unruly mass of hair off her shoulders and strangled it with an elastic band, as if daring the world to find her beauty. The thought made him smile. Such things are impossible to hide; that much he understood. She could briefly disguise her sharp mind with a sharper tongue, or mar her radiant face with a scowl, but her loveliness was irrepressible. Even though it would mean losing her again, he could not wait for the day happiness found her.

  Lia turned to her father. “Are you going to stand there dreaming all day, or will you finally leave me in peace to get some cleaning done?”

  “Why not get out and enjoy yourself?” Salvatore asked. “See what the festival committee is up to.”

  “I’m not getting rid of one silly romantic just to fall in with a dozen more,” she said with a wicked smile. “It’s not bad enough you feed the fantasies of every love-struck idiot with a pen, now it’s medieval pageantry for the tourists. Club di Giulietta will have Verona drowning in candy hearts before it’s through.”

  “We’re as harmless as our correspondents,” he replied. “Besides, if it helps keep an old man out from under foot, how bad could it be?”

  “You just like being the rooster in among all those laying hens.”

  Feeling his face flush, Salvatore bowed his head in defeat. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, pointing his thumb toward the ceiling as he snatched his windbreaker from its wooden peg.

  “Oh, that’s all we talk about,” Lia said. Before she closed the front door after him, she shook her head and smiled.

  “It’s a start,” Salvatore said, turning to the orange cat sunning his fat belly on the landing. The cat shifted in response, and tugged on a nightgown drooping from the clothesline strung between the building’s open stairwells. But the old man was already half a flight down, hurrying to start another day as personal secretary to Giulietta.

  Chapter Three

  After walking in on Allison and her acting coach giving their all to a scene he didn’t remember from A Streetcar Named Desire, Nick had thrown himself into his studies, driving steadily toward graduation and escape. It was his ABA plan: Anywhere But Ashland.

  Yet rather than doping out where he wanted to end up and how he might get there, Nick spent his non-study hours surfing the Web to fill out what he called his alternate reality collection. It amounted to searching out tickets and memorabilia from games and concerts that were played only in the minds of disappointed, often despondent, fans.

  The idea had come to him nearly six years ago, toward the end of 2001, when just about everyone seemed to be asking themselves what-if questions about the fall of the twin towers. While the rubble still smoldered in Manhattan’s financial district, the New York Yankees had taken out their frustrations on the Seattle Mariners all the way from Puget Sound to the Bronx, seizing the best-of-seven league championship series four games to one en route to yet another World Series thriller. Before September 11, Nick had rooted hard for the Mariners as they made a strong run to the playoffs, winning a record 116 games. He didn’t exactly start pulling for the Yankees that October, but he no longer begrudged them a series victory in the face of the terrible attack on their city.

  After winning the first two games at Safeco Field, the Yankees made it their mission to close out the series during the middle three games at home. Before getting on the charter to New York, Mariners manager Lou Piniella—himself a Yankees star back in the Reggie Jackson era—barked at reporters, “I want to say it so you all can hear it: We’re going to be back here for a game six. Just print it. You don’t have to ask any questions. Just print it.”

  It appeared Sweet Lou might be right when the M’s clobbered the Yanks 14-3 the next night. But then, feeding on the prayers of baseball fans desperate for a victory that would give them a small window back into their normal lives, the Yankees took games four and five by a combined score of 15-4. It felt right to Nick, even though he’d won tickets for game six in an employee incentive contest at the bookstore.

  He and Allison had watched the decisive game on the fuzzy TV hanging behind the bar at their regular Lake Union hangout. Only a couple of college kids in new Mariners caps seemed upset by the defeat. A few of the patrons had even raised somber toasts to the Yankees, and undoubtedly took no joy in their seven-game World Series loss to the Diamondbacks a week later. That night, over a nightcap of bourbon and cigarettes in their tiny bedroom, Nick and Allison examined the game six tickets as if they held the key to an alternate existence.

  “In some other dimension right now, a different Nick and Allison have these same tickets,” he said, pulling her close on the lumpy futon. “The Mariners are up three games to two, and they’re getting set to close out the series at home. Because Al Gore is president, the national security staff was kept up to speed on Osama bin Laden, and Predator missiles took out his base camp sometime in the spring.” She nodded as he drained his glass.

  “After interrogating the survivors, the CIA worked with the FBI to disrupt the American sleeper cells before they could hijack a single plane,” Nick continued. “And now it’s late October and some guy from Cantor Fitzgerald thinks life is tough because his team’s about to be eliminated by latte-drinking amateurs from Seattle. He doesn’t have a clue how bad things could really be, and we don’t have to feel guilty about cheering the Mariners on to their first World Series appearance.”

  Allison held up her ticket and blew a smoke ring that folded over the top of it. “This other Nick and Allison,” she said. “Maybe they’re rich, too?”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “Why not? Everybody lives, everybody’s rich. Mariners win.” He laughed.

  “I like that.” She reached across him to stub out her cigarette in the bedside ashtray. Her long blonde hair swished across his bare chest on the way there, and she stopped on the way back to kiss him, breath hot with whiskey and smoke. Then she flopped back on her oversized pillow, grabbed a lighter, and touched its flame to the end of her ticket. The waxy paper gave off red and green flames as it curled into itself.

  “A sacrifice,” she said. “If we had the right incantation, we might be able to change it all for the good.”

  “With our magic tickets?”

  “Yeah. Let’s burn yours, too.”

  He took the scorched stub from her fingers and extinguished it in the ashtray. He looked at his ticket on the nightstand, but decided to leave it there.

  “There’s no spell that can save us now,” he said. “I’d rather hang onto my ticket and look at it whenever I need to be inspired by the other Nick and Allison’s perfect life.”

  Sitting in the kitchen of his Ashland efficiency and noodling around on his laptop, he wished he could reach out to that other Nick now and tell him to leave Allison before she got a chance to screw up their perfect existence. He could take the playoff ticket out
of its plastic sleeve and try to warn his other-dimensional self. Then again, perhaps that Allison was a less-treacherous version of the one he’d fallen for. And at least she’d given him the idea for an engrossing hobby, he thought as he checked his eBay bids.

  He’d added a game seven Mariners-Yankees ticket to his collection that fall, and then scored a ticket from the other unplayed Mariners-Yankees game seven, when the M’s lost the championship series four games to two in 2000. From there, it was easy to add a game five ticket from the 1997 Baltimore-Seattle division series the Orioles had taken in four, and one from game seven of the six-game championship series the Mariners dropped against the Cleveland Indians. After completing a full record of Seattle playoff futility, Nick began branching out, first to other baseball teams, then to other sports, and finally into unplayed rock concerts.

  Every year saw its share of missed cultural milestones. The season before they erased the Curse of the Bambino with an improbable world championship, for instance, the Boston Red Sox sold tickets to four 2003 World Series games that would never take place at Fenway Park. After the Chicago Cubs were eliminated in game seven of their playoffs that same fall, fans trudged out of Wrigley Field to find vendors unloading “National League Champions” t-shirts at five bucks a pop.

  Any number of tickets, hats, posters and shirts told similar stories of playoff heartbreak in basketball, football and hockey—although Nick stayed away from the latter sport, feeling no affinity for groups of overpaid thugs beating each other up and down slabs of blood-spattered ice.

  But blood played an all-too-large part in the other side of his collection: tickets and posters from concerts canceled after musicians died in plane crashes, overdoses and suicides. Sometimes, the shows had gone on in the wake of these tragedies. When The Who’s bass player, John Entwistle, had a fatal heart attack at the Las Vegas Hard Rock in 2002, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend nixed only that night’s gig before soldiering on to the Hollywood Bowl. Nick was so disgusted by the victory of commerce over decency that he’d turned down at least three opportunities to buy tickets to the canceled Vegas date, when Rog and Pete apparently couldn’t find a suitable bass replacement on the streets of Sin City.