Juliet's Answer Read online

  “We will see you tomorrow?” she asked, looking up at me just before I left.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  Teach me how I should forget to think

  I taught Shakespeare to (mostly) compliant teenagers for more than twenty years. They had a let’s-just-get-this-over-with attitude when we started, but almost always, within just a few lines, they were hooked—especially with the play Romeo and Juliet—and that’s because I told them right at the beginning, even before the first fight scene, there were some very dirty jokes.

  I wouldn’t tell them what they were, though I would slow my voice at line 26, raise my eyebrows a little, and one or two of the students would catch on. I’d hear strangely chaste giggles—caught before they could get too loud—and watch the other grade tens students swivel, trying to understand what they had missed. After that, they were all sitting up straight, listening intently.

  I used to tell my students that Shakespeare planted these hooks on purpose—just as I was now doing. In London in the late sixteenth century, everything south of the River Thames was questionable territory. The taverns were there, and the bearbaiting pits, and—don’t make me say this, kids—women of the night. Prostitutes. Many of the students would look at me in horror. Funny, you’d expect teenagers to be more rebellious or at least coolly nonchalant, but my experience was never that. They were strict moralists, almost all of them.

  The boys were the hardest to engage. But I had my ways. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, there’s a street brawl between the Montagues and the Capulets. “Devin,” I called out. Devin was a loud kid who sat midway back in the row nearest the door. In class discussions he often took over, debating like a politician, though he looked like Woody the cowboy from Toy Story.

  “Devin,” I said again, “come on up here.”

  Devin looked at me as if it were some sort of trick. His face was a sea of freckles, but he was at that stage of adolescence when he thought he was much more grown-up than he really was. He eyed me like a gunslinger. In a traditional classroom, as he well knew, the front of the class was the teacher’s stage. The students were the audience, sitting passively at their desks. I grabbed a wooden yardstick from the chalk gutter under the blackboard. I hoisted it up and gave it a few swooshes through the air like a sword. “C’mon,” I said again.

  Devin approached warily. “Let’s do the fight scene,” I said, leveling the yardstick at him.

  His eyes brightened. “Really?”

  “Yeah, c’mon.”

  I handed him my yardstick while a few sedate cheers rose from the other boys in class. Then I hurled the insult that provokes the fight. “Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?”

  “What?” Devin asked.

  I picked up a ruler from my desk, considerably shorter than Devin’s yardstick. “I said, do you bite your thumb at me, sir?”

  Devin stood there, the yardstick hanging at his side.

  “Say yes,” I stage-whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Then have at ’er.” I rushed forward with a thrust and the students broke into cheers and laughter. We parried back and forth a few times, the wood of the rulers clicking and clacking. Then I called out to Sadia.

  Sadia sat in the front row. She wore a hijab, a headscarf. Her family had immigrated to Canada when she was only a little girl. She was one of the brightest—and most unorthodox—students in the class.

  “Sadia, you’re the prince,” I said. “Prince Escalus.”

  “The prince is a boy,” someone called out.

  “Says who?” I barked back, holding up my ruler to deflect a blow from Devin. “Prince Sadia, get up here and stop this fight. Quick!”

  Sadia stood. She held her copy of Romeo and Juliet book in front of her with both hands and in a faltering voice said, “Halt.”

  Devin and I stopped.

  “Um,” said Sadia, searching for the right lines. “Rebellious subjects,” she said, “Enemies to peace . . . throw your mistempered weapons to the ground.”

  “Mistempered,” someone snickered.

  Devin dropped the yardstick. It clattered to the floor.

  “Good,” I said. “Good.” I glanced up at the clock. “That’s about all the time we have today,” I said.

  “But what happens next?” asked Devin.

  “Well, the bell’s about to go,” I said.

  “Aw, c’mon, Mr. Dixon. Just give us a hint. What happens next?”

  And that’s when I knew that I had them.

  * * *

  I first learned about Verona and the letters to Juliet from the back of the Romeo and Juliet edition I used for years with my students. Like a lot of Shakespeare texts, this one had the difficult words and passages explained in the margins. It had illustrations of things like partisans (nasty-looking medieval weapons), rosemary (whose tiny blue flowers signify remembrance), and Cupid, the cherub, shooting his arrows of love. At the front of the book was a drawing of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and at the back, a short selection of poems and essays about the star-crossed lovers. One of the excerpted essays was titled “A New Career for Juliet: Advice to the Lovelorn,” from Smithsonian magazine in 1979.

  That essay caught my attention. The article quoted a couple of sugary letters and I toyed, momentarily, with the idea of having my students write letters to Juliet. I never did, though. I thought there would be privacy issues, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with that. And now that I’d actually been to Verona, I didn’t want to add to the secretaries’ workload. I thought that sometime later, I’d just tell my students about the office there and the letters that pour in every year. In fact, I was looking forward to describing the real Verona to my students—the cobblestone squares and the medieval fortifications of the old town, the red-tiled roofs and the sunbaked bricks under a bright Italian sky. I thought they’d like that.

  * * *

  The sun was cantankerously hot, though it was barely ten o’clock in the morning. I thought I knew my way to the offices of the Club di Giulietta. I’d made it there the day before without any trouble, but today when I crossed the bridge, I zigged when I should have zagged, and found myself lost in the city cemetery.

  I blame Napoléon. He decreed that all the cemeteries under his domain were to be built outside the city walls on account of the plague. This cemetery was massive. I stumbled through the tombstones, scampering beneath columns of cypress trees that offered patches of shade. The sun glared so sharply off the white-hot marble of the tombs that the names and dates were impossible to read. I kept moving east and eventually I came out on the other side. I hadn’t gone very far down the road when I heard the meep meep of a car horn, a small car, a European car, sidling up behind me.

  “Are you lost?” Giovanna reached over and opened the passenger door for me.

  “No, I—”

  “You are mistaken with your direction. Our office is over there.”

  “I know. I . . .” Runnels of sweat were trickling down my forehead. My shirt was plastered to my back and it wasn’t anywhere near the hottest part of the day.

  Giovanna looked at me hard. “I’ll take you to the office,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I clambered into her car.

  From the back seat came a muffled giggle.

  I turned and saw a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve. She balanced a wrapped present on her lap.

  “I am taking my daughter to a birthday party. This is Margherita,” Giovanna said, glancing up into the rearview mirror before inching the car out onto the road.

  “Hi,” I blurted. Margherita toyed with the bow on the present and allowed herself a shy smile.

  “I must take something from the office,” Giovanna continued, “but I will not stay. Anna will be there, though.”

  “Okay.” I had no idea who Anna was.

  When we pulled into the parking lot, the same blue bike from yesterday was leaning against the brick wall and the front doors were propped open. Margherita waited
in the car, but I followed Giovanna in and down the hall to the office at the back. Across from it was another office, where a younger woman sat. Anna, I presumed. She was on her cell phone but she held up a hand. She said a few more words, then cupped her hand over the phone for a moment. “Hello,” she said. “I must take this call. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” said Giovanna, steering me into my own office. “You can meet Anna later. Now,” she said, “you know what to do?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I will return shortly. You will be here?”

  “Yes. I’ll be here.” I saw the cardboard box of English letters leering at me. “I’ll be here all day.”

  Giovanna frowned. I still don’t think she knew what to make of me, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of her either.

  “Ciao,” she said, then whisked back down the hallway.

  It was quiet after that.

  I wiped my forehead with my sleeve and lifted a layer of letters from the box, fanning them out on the counter. They really were from all over the world—Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Argentina. And these were just the ones written in English.

  “Dear Juliet,” read the first one of the day, from Australia, “I’m in love with someone and he doesn’t love me back. It rips my heart apart and I don’t know how to move on. He’s the first person I think of in the morning and the last person I think of at night. Please help me.”

  I wrote back some fluff about “this too shall pass.” Easily said, but this girl was really suffering and I didn’t think those words would help much. I twirled the pen between my fingers. I was trying to do what Giovanna had said—offer an empathetic ear—but I felt like it wasn’t enough. For the last two days, I’d been offering clichés as answers, and every time I did, I felt like a fake. Wasn’t there something more I could tell all these people?

  I’d done some research on love before I’d come to Italy, and I turned my mind to it now. In the last few years, some really interesting studies have emerged on love, explaining how it slams into us, how it grabs ahold of us, and will not let us go. According to the research, love is hardwired into the reward center of our brains, says Dr. Helen Fisher, one of the leading experts in the field. Much of the research now focuses on evolutionary psychology, on the ways in which our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and on the subtle behaviors that ensure our genes will be passed on to succeeding generations. Love is related to the powerful urge to mate, of course, but more exactly, it is the yearning for someone who will be around long enough to help raise a child. And that, as utilitarian as it may sound, is at the root of love. Love is, in that sense, our biological destiny.

  This sort of love is fueled by dopamine. In the presence of the one we love, dopamine gushes into our caudate nucleus, exactly the same center in the brain that lights up in those addicted to crack or alcohol or gambling. Love, then, is an addiction—as anyone who has ever truly been in love can affirm. It takes us over, wholeheartedly, and makes us do some pretty foolish things. The letters I’d been reading were a testament to that, as was my own experience.

  I’d fallen for women and literally waited for years for the relationship to evolve into what I really needed. It was all so stupid. It was such a waste. But enough with the remembering. I pushed my chair back from the desk. What to say to this heartbroken Aussie? She deserved something more than what my poor experience could tell her. In the end, I hunched over the letter and wrote: “I know what that’s like. It hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  I heard Giovanna’s footsteps coming down the hall. She hadn’t really been gone long at all. She bustled into Anna’s office and when I leaned out a little, I could see them. They were bent over a book on Anna’s desk. Giovanna glanced up and caught me watching them. “Glenn,” she called. “You have told me you know the Shakespeare.”

  “Um, yes. I know it.”

  “Can you help us?”

  I pushed some letters aside and heaved myself up.

  Anna’s office was much nicer than mine. She sat behind a sturdy oak desk set on a royal-blue carpet. Everything was orderly and neat in contrast to the hurricane of papers scattered around my little cell. Anna peered up at me through green-framed glasses. She wore her hair in a stylish bob, and I guessed that she might be in her late twenties.

  “Probably you will know this line,” she said: “Any man that can write may answer a letter.”

  “From Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Yes!” Her eyes sparkled. Anna had a perky sort of earnestness and her voice was sonorous, reedy almost, like a clarinet. “Of course it is from Romeo and Juliet.”

  “We have used this line in our e-mail,” Giovanna explained, “but we are not certain we know exactly what it means.” They both studied the book again and I could see now that it was the text of the play. One side was in English. The facing page was in Italian.

  “Ah,” I said, stepping closer. “That might be the scene where Capulet’s servant is inviting people to the party, only he can’t read the guest list.”

  Anna squinted down at the book. “Where is that?”

  “Here, can I . . .”

  The three of us searched the text. “Here’s Benvolio,” I said. “No, wait, it’s later. It’s Mercutio. It’s the bit where he’s making fun of his enemy, Tybalt. It’s right before the big fight scene.”

  “Fight scene?” said Giovanna. She didn’t look pleased.

  “Here,” I said. “Yes, Mercutio says it.”

  “Ah,” said Anna. She penciled down the act and scene number.

  “That line is in your e-mails?” I asked.

  “It is,” Anna said.

  “You’re answering letters by e-mail now?”

  “Sure. At the House of Juliet. There are computers, and from there the people can send us an e-mail letter, instead of a real one.” Anna shrugged. “We don’t like it so much.”

  Giovanna pursed her lips in distaste.

  “Probably I will say that writing a love e-mail is cheating,” said Anna. “But it is the twenty-first century. We must allow it.”

  “We have many problems these days,” Giovanna broke in. “At the house there are problems with chewing gum.”

  “Chewing gum?”

  “On the walls,” Giovanna said. “The people have attached their notes on the stone walls with chewing gum.”

  “Probably,” reasoned Anna, “the chewing gum is good for thinking. They chew and chew and think what they will write.”

  “Yes, but it is disgusting,” said Giovanna. “Now the city has made a new law and they have carabinieri in the courtyard. Policemen.”

  “The gum police,” I said.

  Anna stifled a smile.

  “Now we have not so much gum at the House of Juliet,” Giovanna said. “But we have another problem, have you seen?”

  I had, in fact. I’d noticed it yesterday. On the walls under the archway leading into the courtyard were hundreds and hundreds of Band-Aids, small strips with short messages—like tweets on Twitter—felt-penned onto them.

  “But what about the policemen?” I asked. “Can’t they do something?”

  “They cannot stop it. There are too many people. People always find a way.” Giovanna stood up straight.

  “It’s better than gum, I guess,” I said.

  “Band-Aids are for flesh wounds,” said Giovanna.

  “Flesh wounds,” I repeated.

  “Yes,” said Anna. “But in the case of our work, we treat wounds of the heart. It is not the same.”

  * * *

  It was only our second day studying Romeo and Juliet when Sadia shuffled in her seat and said, “I don’t know about this.” We were still in act 1, scene 1, when the Montagues and the Capulets are first introduced. We’d not even seen Romeo yet.

  I frowned at Sadia, wondering what was coming.

  “Sir, how are we supposed to know this play is really about true love?” She tugged a bit at her hijab, pulling it a quarter inch down lo
wer over her forehead. I’d noticed she did that when she was thinking.

  There were gasps around the room.

  “What are you getting at, Sadia?” I asked.

  “They’re young, right, Romeo and Juliet? Didn’t you say Juliet was, like, thirteen?”

  She has not seen the change of fourteen years, Juliet’s nurse declares early on in the play. I’d told them that already. Juliet’s age, in fact, was going to be a question on the quiz they’d get at the end of act 1.

  “So, like, how do you know it’s not just infatuation or something?”

  A boy at the back of the class spoke up. “God, Sadia, because they die for each other, okay?”

  “Any idiot can die,” said Sadia. “And thanks for wrecking the ending.”

  “We already know the ending,” I corrected. “It says so right in the prologue.”

  Sadia, stone-faced, glanced down at her book and flipped back a few pages.

  “A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,” I read from the prologue. “It’s right there—barely six lines into the whole play.”

  There were nods of agreement.

  “They were so young,” said Sadia, wistfully.

  “How old was Romeo?” another student asked.

  “It doesn’t say in the text—but probably fifteen, sixteen, something like that,” I answered.

  “Like us, grade tens.”

  “Yes,” I said pointedly. “Exactly like you.”

  * * *

  The envelope had Winnie the Pooh on it. I withdrew the pink letter. “My name is Audrey and I am fourteen years old,” it began. “I have a real tragedy. I lost my best friend because I thought I loved him. And now I’ve lost the courage to ever love again. Because if I try to love somebody, it just makes me hurt and I do not understand. Dear Juliet: Tell me why love hurts so much.”

  Yet another question, the same question I’d been asked over and over again. What was I to tell all these young girls? The truth? Yes, love hurts and there’s probably a lot more in store for you. I couldn’t say that, though. I tapped my pen to my lips. This girl was only fourteen—about the same age as Juliet. She deserved a genuine answer as much as anyone else. I was also sure that Giovanna would kick me out if I started to get snarky at people.