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Chapter Twenty-Three 1 page

New York City native Leah Fisher, an actress you probably haven’t heard of, is getting her big break in the premiere of a brand new musical... All the way down in North Carolina. Leah falls in love with Sophia Medina, an understudy, but trying to balance lust and drama isn’t easy, especially when her director, her leading man, and the entire South might be conspiring to ruin her.

Prologue

Leah went to Adam's apartment because he had a piano and because he had invited her. He had invited her because she had what he wanted...the high cheekbones and gaunt figure and a smoky alto voice that let her land semi-leading roles as mysterious femme fatales Off-Broadway, even though it never got her anything in Beauty and the Beast.

Especially not since she'd turned thirty.

At the apartment, all he had was the piano. A full grand sat magnificently in the center of the room. A twin mattress lay in the dining nook. Leah settled herself in the lawn chair and waited for Adam's cat to leap into her lap, but Adam took her hand and pulled her to her feet. He thrust sheet music at her. He peered intently, as if he'd never seen her dark brown eyes and her limp, lighter brown hair pulled back in quite that way before. He tsked while examining the faint laugh lines that creased her pale skin around her eyes.

Like he was some prize, a barely-twenties choirboy with a shiny, bald head and a quintessentially angelic, narrow face that said, "I am a young, black, gay composer. Envy my beauty and talent."

He was some prize.

Despite the career-stalling tragedy of Leah turning thirty, he still considered her his favorite muse. He insisted he would compose the musical that would win her a Tony. She always thought that would happen in her fifties, when she outgrew her gangly stage and became the next Patti LuPone. But maybe, considering his scrutiny and the unnaturally crazed look in his eyes, a star would be born right now.

"Sing this," he said.

"What is it?" she asked, annoyed he'd made her stand up but already reading the notes, licking her lips and humming along, trying to find the tempo.

"You'll know when you sing it."

"Adam."

He promised her lunch in exchange for her voice and since Care Bears in the Park ended last week and she was out of work she couldn't quite turn down turning tricks for food.

"We'll go someplace with waiters," he said.

She glanced at the lawn chair, now occupied by cat, and did her breathing exercises, ignoring the delight in his eyes as her diaphragm tightened. He began to play the piano and she watched him, letting the melody, a bit haunting but with a little flourish in the upper register, seep into her. When he nodded, she sang. She missed the timing on the first note. Then it was a scramble to get each word out on each beat, without knowing the words or the beats. He urged her on, his notes carrying her upward, until she found the song.

Or the song found her.

"Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers of sculptured ivy and stone flowers... Up many and many a marvelous shrine..." The words were archaic to the point of tacky. They stumbled out of her mouth to fill the apartment. Adam smiled. "The viol, the violet, and the vine," she sang to him.



Despite the corniness, so far from Adam's usual soulful, light compositions, the imagery evoked was immediate and tangible. She could feel the light and the turned earth of a garden around her. And something more elusive that she wanted to discover.

She reached the end of her sheet and Adam stopped playing. "Not bad."

"What is this?"

"I've only sung it for myself. A woman singing this instead of a man...yes, I think that works better." He hadn't really answered her question, but he prompted another one.

"I'm the first person to sing it?"

"Yes."

"Adam, tell me."

"You like it enough to want to know?"

She loved it. She traced the names of the flowers with her thumb and turned the sheet music sideways. And then, with a sinking sadness, realized, "You didn't write this."

"No."

"But it's lovely."

He smiled. "Edgar Allen Poe did. I'm setting his poetry to music."

Dark, gothic images came to her from school English classes and movies she'd seen. She considered them, and then asked, "Like 'The Raven'?"

"Yes."

"Like, a concept album?"

"Yeah, maybe." He folded his arms and leaned on the piano.

"Adam," she said. "I want to sing them. All the songs."

He smiled, closed his eyes, and looked for a moment like a bashful little boy. "Let's talk about it over lunch."

 

Chapter One

Three Years Later

Adam's phone call woke Leah up well before noon. "Meet me at Zarth's."

"Garth's?" Leah, eyes still closed, sprawled on her back with the phone somewhat near her ear, tried to remember the Garths she knew. Garth Brooks? He didn't live in New York City. Unless he’d moved recently and she'd just forgotten to read the right tabloid. Who was he seeing? Was he...

"Zarth's," Adam said impatiently, stressing the Z, bringing to her mind the tiny, indistinctly European restaurant that required reservations weeks in advance, even for lunch.

"Now?" She rubbed her eyes. Her bedroom came into view. Theater posters, wood paneling, and boring cotton sheets. She'd bought the second floor one bedroom condo six years ago, earning the down payment via a series of six corporate training videos where she played a clumsy secretary. She loved her bedroom. But it was not Zarth's material, and neither was she.

"Tonight at eight. Wear something fabulous," he said.

"So you can drool at me? How does that work?" Leah imagined reading in Time Out: Unknown stage actress and freelance songwriter caught in tryst at a restaurant they couldn't afford. Maybe she was still dreaming. She was too sleepy to pinch herself.

"Because they have a dress code," he said.

"Oh."

"See you then."

"Wait..."

The phone clicked off. She listened to the silence until her bladder, her hunger, and her hangover told her she wasn't going to fall back asleep. The phone's clock read 11:06. She had nine hours to figure out what Adam meant by fabulous. Maybe she should buy a new dress. A dress would cost less than a meal at Zarth's and she knew Adam, who lived in an efficiency basement with a piano and lawn furniture in the Lower East Side, would only be paying if it were worthy.

New dress worthy.

She did have that thing she wore to the Off-Off-Broadway benefit luncheon last month, but Adam had been there. He would complain. Nothing like trying to dress to please a gay composer.

 

"What?" Leah asked over the amuse bouche.

Adam obnoxiously crunched what she'd tentatively identified as squid. She ate her own with more grace. Zarth's décor seemed too kitschy for the elegant, expensive food. She stared at a caricature of Ronald Reagan on the far wall, to keep from staring at the red and white checkered table. No tablecloth. Just squid.

"Why are you wearing a suit?” he asked. "Didn't we discuss a dress?"

"I looked at my bank account." The black suit she wore was ill-fitting. To match it, she'd pinned up her dyed driftwood-blonde hair back. She had been hoping for a severe corporate shark style. Adam, though, was mismatched. He wore a sports coat and a dress shirt with the top three buttons unbuttoned. He actually looked stylish.

"And you traded up?"

"And I couldn't afford a new dress. Even for you."

He pouted and examined his fingernails.

"So, this." She gestured at herself.

"Is that your interview suit, Leah?"

"Yes."

"How long have you had it?"

"My father brought it for me."

"Of course."

She kicked him under the table.

He grinned. "Well this is an interview, so I suppose it's fashion-appropriate."

She put down her napkin.

The waiter appeared. "Drinks, ladies?"

Adam giggled. Leah kicked him again.

"Champagne," Adam said.

Leah shrugged when the waiter looked in her direction, so he left. Adam's drink order didn't necessarily mean anything; the man loved champagne. She leaned across the table. "Adam, please don't tell me you got a television deal and you're abandoning me for Los Angeles."

"No, but close."

Her stomach sank.

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. "North Carolina."

"What's in North Carolina? Are you writing the sequel to Shag?"

"That was South Carolina, darling, and no." He squirmed giddily in his seat and said, "They're producing Poe."

"What?"

"They're producing Poe. Our baby, Leah. At the Durham Playhouse. We're the token premiering musical and the token modern piece, between South Pacific, Macbeth, and Side Show.

"Side Show? Really?"

"No, darling Leah. You cannot be in Side Show."

"Because that would require me going to North Carolina. I don't even know where that is, Adam. Is that near Virginia? Or like, down by Alabama?"

She'd wanted Poe ever since singing the first song in his apartment with just him and the piano and no furniture and no food. He'd let her read the drafts of scripts and short stories and record two songs on the demo that went nowhere, and made her read biographies of everyone in Edgar Allen Poe's life until she'd wanted to live in his world.

Adam released her hand. "Darling, you're not going to be in Side Show because you're my leading lady for Poe."

"Me?"

"You."

Ronald Reagan's eyes followed her as she studied the far wall, trying to process. She hadn't realized that his world was out-of-state. He was asking her to pay up for the dream he'd given her and it seemed, as her hopes of the drafty Hilton or the intimate Roundabout burned in her mind, completely unfair to go away from New York. She wanted to beg him to hold out. She wanted to tell him that his dreams should not become such a small reality. That she liked the story better when it was just a story.

Adam just frowned at her.

Leah shrugged.

"Champagne?" The waiter asked, appearing with a bottle and two glasses. He uncorked the bottle and Adam demurred to let Leah taste. The bubbles fizzed up her nose. She coughed. The waiter remained impassive. Adam smiled. She took another little sip, and let the dry tingling invade her tongue.

To the waiter she said, "Whatever he's paying for this, it's not enough."

"Perhaps you would like a case," the waiter said.

Leah grinned and glanced at Adam.

"I can't take you anywhere," he said.

When the waiter was gone, Leah leaned forward. "Adam, don't I have to audition?"

"No."

The word thrilled her. She was chosen. She took another sip of champagne and let the alcohol fall into where the joy pooled in her stomach. "North Carolina?"

"Leah."

"I can't. I can't leave. I have a schedule, and commitments."

"You're an actress."

Her commitments were fleeting. She had a two week gig to dub secondary voices for an anime series...36 episodes...and after Care Bears, she'd finished a three day Off-Broadway play where she sang in the chorus. She had two readings lined up next month, one workshop, and in April she would be doing backup singing for a friend of Adam's first album at an independent label in the Bronx.

She sighed. "I have readings, Adam. They might turn into something."

"You had this reading. It turned into something."

She studied her fingers curled around the champagne glass. Poe had been a crazy idea, a public reading that no one attended at a non-profit theater in New Jersey. Poems set to music hadn't been that crazy an idea, but Adam's orchestrations were wild...Electric guitar to mimic gothic melody, and then moments of light that made her cry when she sang for him.

"Who's going to be Poe?" she asked.

"I cut Poe."

"You cut Poe?"

"There is no Poe. He's the vacuum, the void, the nothingness of the soul, and you, Mrs. Poe, and the other characters, are the reactions, the vestiges, the being born and the dying. I took out what was in between."

The problem with being friends with a playwright was the concept stage. There were not enough drugs in the world for actors at times like this. She took another sip of champagne and set the glass on the checkered table and asked a more practical question. "So, how big's the cast?"

"Two."

"What?"

"We need to find you a man."

Leah quirked an eyebrow.

"Someone local. That's part of the contract with Durham. A good ol' Carolina boy. Remember, Poe grew up in Richmond."

"Where's that again?"

"Virginia. See, it's good you're coming. You need to expand your horizons."

"I didn't say I was coming"

"Leah, you'll be the lead. The star. And it's paid for."

"Fine. I'm coming, I'm coming." As soon as she called her agent.

Adam took her hand and smiled.

"When is it?"

"We leave May 15th. Opening night is the end of June."

Zarth's windows were trimmed with tiny white lights, shining against the cold darkness outside. She exhaled. Summer was too far away to imagine. "Summer. Three months?" she asked.

"The best three months of your life."

"Oh, really."

"Look at where this expense account has gotten us already, darling. So it'll certainly be the best three months of mine," he said. "I'm willing to share."

She raised her champagne glass. "To the theater."

He clinked glasses. "To living dangerously." And then he quoted, "But lo, a stir is in the air! The wave- there is a movement there! As if the towers had thrust aside..."

She covered his mouth, spilling champagne on the table in her effort to reach him.

 

Chapter Two

"Mrs. Thero is looking for someone to give her son tap-dancing lessons," Margaret said.

Leah contemplated an appropriate response as she regarded her mother. For the three decades Leah had stood in this kitchen, Margaret Fisher had looked largely the same...brown hair turning to grey pulled back into a bun, a worn but warm expression, her hands constantly moving. She'd been a smoker before getting pregnant with Leah, and thirty years later the ghosts of cigarettes lingered. The only thing that had changed was height. A monolith when Leah was a child, Margaret was now her own height and, slightly stooping, seemed smaller. Leah hoped for her father's carriage. She sensed though that she was looking at future self.

"I don't dance, Mom."

"Well, you dance well enough. We saw you in that...what was it?"

"Company? When I played Kathy? And that's not the same as actually dancing, you know. And it was the recital for acting class."

"I just thought if you weren't doing anything..."

Leah put her hand to her face. She knew she shouldn't have this argument for the four-hundred-thousandth time, but she said, anyway, "I have a busy schedule, Mom. I just don't work the same hours as most people."

Margaret brought plates to the table. They may have lived in a Manhattan apartment, but at least they had a full-sized kitchen. Linoleum floor and white pine cabinets and all. "Honey, you're turning thirty-four in a few weeks. Don't you think it's time to..."

"Give up?"

"Honey, I want to see your name in lights as much as you do, but..."

"Mom, I work all the time." Leah leaned against a kitchen chair. Her sister and father were in the next room watching Jeopardy!, and she envied them. She'd wanted to tell them about Adam, but she'd opened with the anime job instead, and that had led to too much explanation.

"I know, but it's not well-paying, is it?"

"It's a little too late to become an accountant now," Leah said.

"You've got your degree in Psychology. You could do all sorts of things."

"I am doing all sorts of things."

"I just didn't expect, when you started singing, that your work would be so...grungy."

"It's fine, Mom."

"How are you going to land a man?"

"Wow, when did we go back to the thirties?"

"When you turned thirty," Margaret said. "Several years ago."

"There are plenty of...people...around, Mom. I meet more people than you do." Leah chastised herself for playing the pronoun game. At her age. In the 21st century, even. But when it came to her mother, she couldn't bring herself to face the inevitable disappointment.

"Someone who's not in theater," Margaret finally said.

Leah sighed.

Margaret went to the doorway and yelled, "Harry! Jessica! Dinner!" Shuffling sounds came from the other room.

"Mom, I got the lead in something," Leah said.

"What, dear?"

"Poe is being produced. Budget for costumes, lighting, music, everything."

Harry walked in and asked, "Poe? The musical your friend wrote?"

"Yes, Adam wrote it," Leah said.

"He came to Thanksgiving?" Harry asked. He was a full head taller than his eldest daughter and had a swarthy complexion that matched no one in the family. He'd once had thick black hair, but was now completely bald. He was, Leah would admit openly, her favorite parent.

"And Hanukkah," she said.

Jessica giggled.

Leah scoffed at her sister, who she was perpetually jealous of. Born when Leah was fifteen, Jessica was the true baby of the family, spoiled rotten by everyone rather than being the mostly-ignored accidental love child of two young, overworked parents. Jessica had gotten her father's dark hair, but her mother's height. Still, she was more beautiful than Leah, even at nineteen.

"That's a relief," Harry said. "I thought Adam was homeless, and Poe was just part of his wild imaginings."

"I sang a song from it at your office's Christmas party," Leah said.

Harry cringed. "Oh. So you did."

Jessica's giggling increased.

"Dinner is served," Margaret said

They settled in at the kitchen table that had been a wedding present. Leah looked at her plate. She tried to guess the meat.

Margaret asked, "So, which theater, dear? Roundabout? Little Theater? Stage One?"

"It's in North Carolina."

Margaret dropped her fork.

"Where's that?" Jessica asked.

"Well, honey, do you know the Mason-Dixon line?" Harry asked.

"You are not crossing that," Margaret said.

"Mom."

"That's where the Germans settled."

"Mom."

 

"Happy birthday," Adam sang, wrapping his arms around Leah and dragging her from side to side. The tavern owner brought over a birthday cake with thirty-four candles arranged along the edges. She blew them out, not looking at her mother.

"Did you make a wish?" Jessica asked. Her sister wore a black dress that complimented her hair and made her look Goth and college-y, but no young men had approached yet. Leah was eyeing the edges of the crowd.

"Yes," Leah said.

"And?"

"I want it to come true."

"Why change things now?" Jessica asked.

Jessica stood on the other side of the low, rich wood table, free from her parents, who surrounded Leah instead.

"You're not getting any cake," Leah said

Jessica stuck out her tongue. Her mother went to cut the cake, urging Leah out of the way like she might mess up something. Leah wandered to the restaurant's front window. The night sky glowed. City lights reflected the blanket of clouds hovering over Manhattan, making everything feel warmer and closer, but also bringing snow. The first snowflakes were supposed to fall by morning.

Her next reading with Mark and Naomi was for a new Pixar musical early in development. She would play a singing animal. She hadn't told her mother. The check would barely cover her cell phone bill. Her dating status would be the topic of conversation after her next acting class.

She was tired of the same old people and the same old gossip.

Adam looked happier lately than he had in months. He beamed. He smiled. Derrick leaving him must have taken a harder toll than she realized. The depression had changed him only minimally, but the elation was so drastic that she agonized for the man he had apparently been before. He came to her side, at the window.

"Adam, I'm sick of everybody."

She could see her family in the window's reflection, and the small crowd of friends, the people who came to all her shows. She envied them their belief in her success.

"You had dinner with your mom, again, didn't you?" Adam said. "I mean, alone."

"It's not just that. It's Pixar and my birthday and wanting to do something important with my life. Something important that has my stamp on it as much as anyone else's."

"I wrote Poe for you," he said.

"Oh, Adam."

He tucked himself around her elbow and said, "Happy birthday."

"We should probably get married. My mother loves you."

"But your father doesn't approve," he said. "Is it because I'm gay, or is it because I'm black?"

"It's because he believes in passion."

"Don't we all?"

"Not my mother. Maybe I..."

Leah thought of her passionate, wounding affair with Grace, who had managed to work as an actress in New York ever since without running into her. Grace was playing Mel in Fotosynthesis down the street and Leah could walk by the marquee and feel bitter. She hadn't gone to see the show.

"You're thinking about Grace, aren't you?"

She glanced around to see where her family was before answering, and hated herself for doing it. "It's been five years. I think that part of my life is over. It's time for the settling down and having puppies phase."

"Honey."

"Being in love is kind of like being crazy, you know? And now that they've traced it to a specific biological process, maybe they can cure it."

"Or bottle it," Adam said. "That phase of your life is only over when you die. Think of Poe. He ached and loved deeply."

"He died at forty."

"Then you'd better get started," Adam said.

"I started years ago."

"Then maybe you'll get somewhere."

Her mother called her back, holding out a piece of cake.

 

Chapter Three

Sophia Medina stood as still as possible. At least a hundred people rushed past her. Someone came up to her with a tape measure, measured her, touched her waist, her breast, her calf. Told her how tall she was, derisively. She already knew 5'8" was too tall to play Lady Macbeth. And with her Haitian mother, and at twenty-five, she was too ethnic and too young. The director had actually listed these characteristics as he bumped her up from Lady Macduff.

There'd been no one else available. Just Sophia from the "also starring" section of the playbill. Her own understudy had taken over Lady Macduff. A forty-something actress, a local like herself, who could probably play Lady Macbeth in her sleep.

Creating an entirely new wardrobe for her at the last minute had already become part of the Scottish curse as far as the crew was concerned. That the dressers were late was only the tenth thing that had gone wrong today. She was terrified of moving. Terrified of breaking the spell that had gotten her to center stage in the central role.

"Stage left, Sophie," the director called. He sat an impossible twenty feet away in the fourth row of seats. She moved to the left.

Grey-haired and manicured, with a distinguished face that graced every program's back fold, the director had been the Shakepeare director at Durham Playhouse for over twenty years. She was nothing to him. Just a problem on a sheet of paper.

"Okay, Sophie. First monologue. Lady Macbeth. Boom."

"Now?" She glanced at a crew member carrying a castle turret past her.

"You do know your lines, don't you?" he asked, glancing at his watch.

Her face burned. She'd been the understudy for months and being bumped up to lead didn't automatically make her an idiot. And yet, she started badly, stumbling over the first line, distracted by the noise around her. "They met me in the day of success..."

The director waved his hand. "Try to sound excited, Sophia. This man is telling you about witches, not that he got a raise at work."

Her eyes stung. She started again, reciting her lines in front of those hundred people, most of whom probably thought they could do a better job than she could as Lady Macbeth. Even the men. The rest just wished she'd get out of the way so they could set up the lighting effects.

"Art not without ambition..."

She closed her eyes as she went on, pretending she'd been on stage for twenty years like her predecessor, the one everyone still thought of as the real Lady Macbeth. She lifted her chin, and tried to show everyone that she belonged.

"Better," the director said.

 

The auditorium sat over five hundred people and had no balcony, so Leah could sit on the edge of the stage and look into the back and the chairs would disappear into the darkness when the house lights were off. She was exhausted. The bus ride from New York to Durham had taken ten hours. Plenty of time to ask Adam, repeatedly, what the hell they were doing here.

He'd only taken one ear bud out and turned down half the volume of his iPod before answering for the tenth time.

"It's Poe."

"Who's going to see it?"

"Half the seats are season ticket holders. They'll see anything. And probably complain. Another twenty-five percent, according to the director, who's like one of those local demigods, are students and senior centers. Poe is educational."

She scoffed.

"Come on, all these kids had to learn about it in high school. Anyway, as soon as the reviews come out, we'll sell the rest of the tickets."

"We're getting reviewed? Like, Ben Brantley reviewed?"

"By someone local whose job is to be both the movie and theater critic."

"I don't actually believe you," Leah said.

He showed her the Raleigh City Press and the Greensboro Inquirer. Not only could people read in North Carolina, some of them were kind of artsy. There was an independent summer film festival and some kind of naked Shakespeare at the beach. That prompted her to ask why they weren't at the beach.

"Well, the middle is where you'd want to be in North Carolina," he said.

"Oh, really."

"David Sedaris is from here," Adam said. "Alan Gurganus?"

"Are they actual local gay people, Adam?"

"Only in a sexual sense."

She smacked him with a newspaper.

The bus had gotten into the Durham bus terminal at six a.m. Filled with homeless people and early-morning quiet, the terminal didn't seem that much different than New York, except that it was outside, and she could see buildings between the buildings. She felt exposed and let herself be bundled into the rented car. Then, unwilling to see the Best Western just yet, Leah opted for being dropped off at the theater. She wanted to see if it was an actual theater, or if Adam had found some amphitheater without bathrooms or stage lights where they would prance around like forest nymphs reading poetry.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 580


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