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Chapter Twenty-Three 2 page

The set designers for South Pacific let her in when they arrived at seven and then they went back hammering underneath the stage and painting and playing with electronics up in the sound booth, so aside from a few flickering lights, she was left relatively alone.

She had plenty of time and space to reflect on her inadequacy. Singing Poe was daunting. The process had seemed less intimidating back when she'd been in the bare room and Adam was at the piano; when it was just a cool idea that might one day be a concept album. But now the theater was nearly sold out and she wished she weren't the leading lady.

If the music was good and she couldn't sing it, she could ruin Adam.

Her hands felt cold. She hummed a few bars. The theater remained unimpressed by her. She kicked her feet, dangling off the lip of the stage. She was pretty sure her butt was asleep, and the stage, though swept and mopped, had the imprint of a thousand shoes. She cleared her throat and there was no answering echo, no haunting accompaniment from the grand piano behind her, no crash from down below.

"And thus thy memory is to me," she said in a hoarse half-whisper, and forced the next line to be more melodic, "Like some enchanted far-off isle..."

Footsteps sounded in the wings. "In some tumultuous sea," Leah mumbled as a woman approached.

"I didn't mean to interrupt," the woman said. "I didn't know you were here."

Leah got to her feet. The woman before her was younger than she was, taller, weighed maybe twenty pounds more. Her black hair shined in a spotlight and her dark brown eyes caught Leah's reflection. The woman carried herself with grace across the stage but the voice she projected seemed hesitant, apologetic.

Leah felt like an old and tiny stick figure by comparison, and her knee hadn't done her any favors by creaking as she straightened up. "I just got here," she said.

"Where did you come from?"

"New York," Leah said, and then added, "Manhattan."

"Oh. I've always wanted to go." The woman's voice, still quiet, echoed her distant expression, even though she was looking right at Leah.

"You haven't?"

"I don't have my Equity card yet."

"Oh, so you're an actress?"

The woman nodded. "I'm playing Lady M. In, you know..."

"I know." Leah looked furtively at the ceiling. She didn't believe in the Scottish Play curse, but who ever knew in the South. "Aren't you a little young?" she asked, then bit her tongue.

In New York, she never would have asked such a rude question. But then, in New York, she would have known already who was playing Lady Macbeth. She tilted her head, but the woman didn't look too angry.

"It's..." the woman paused. "A long story."

Leah nodded.

"I was coming to work on my monologues...without the crew. It's been so incredibly loud. I'll leave you to your song," the woman said, and turned to go back into the wings.



"No, wait, I'll go," Leah said.

"It's fine. I'm sure you're here for the same reason I am."

"I am," Leah said. "But there can only be one Lady M."

The woman smiled, just as Leah's cell phone rang, a recording of her own voice singing "Memory." Adam's ring. He had programmed it himself. Leah blushed.

The woman stepped back, closer to the wings.

"See?" Leah said. "I'm late for my breakfast date. I'll go."

The woman smiled and gave a wave goodbye. Leah went down the stairs at the side of the stage. She headed for the back of the theater and then turned around to watch. The woman took center stage, and said, in a voice suddenly loud and bold, that didn't seem to match the quiet words from five seconds ago, "The raven itself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance..."

Leah tried not to be foolish enough to take that as some sort of portent.

 

Chapter Four

"So, I want to tell you..." Leah said, and then looked around. "Are we really, actually at a Waffle House?"

The overall motif of the diner was yellow, with pale tiles along the walls and lots of windows. She liked the natural light. She didn't like the smell. Yeast and syrup and sausage. Though her mouth watered. Maybe she did like the smell. Adam had pushed her into a yellow booth and her back didn't quite curve properly against the vinyl.

"Leah, don't stare, you look like a tourist."

"Instead of?"

"An actress. Besides, if someone says, 'Ya'll ain't from around here,' I'm likely to spit orange juice out of my nose and it'll hurt." He shook his pinkie prissily at her.

"Oh, like New York is so cosmopolitan."

Adam giggled.

"Don't do that. They might beat you up, or something."

"Leah, darling, half the people in this Waffle House are gay."

"What?"

"Look around."

She looked around. There were two middle-aged women sitting with a little girl, watching indulgently as the girl drank a milkshake. They had mirrored expressions of motherly love on their faces. Across the room, a man writing in a leather-bound notebook sat alone at the counter, looking ordinary, but Leah heard him order steak and eggs and really, like Adam she could sometimes sense things.

She looked back at Adam. "I'm so disappointed."

"Why?"

"Gay people at Waffle House? Is there no place to get a champagne brunch?"

"Obviously not. Here we are."

"Adam."

Adam leaned across the table and took her hand, and she rolled her eyes and prepared to listen to his speech yet again.

"If you'd just come out when you were with Grace we'd be so over this by now. Your mother keeps leaving me voice mail. I think she suspects something."

"About us?"

"About you."

Leah sighed. "Name one publicly out lesbian actress in New York."

"Rosie O'Donnell?"

"One that works for a living."

He shrugged. "I could name a dozen and so could you. But I'm not even saying you're wrong. I'm just saying it's a pain in the ass."

She was hurt by that and concentrated on her strawberry pancakes.

"What were you going to tell me?" he asked.

"What?"

"Just now, before the shocking gay people at Waffle House expose."

"Oh, that I met Lady Macbeth."

"Sophia Medina? What's she like?"

"Young," Leah said. She took a sip of her coffee. "Isn't Lady Macbeth supposed to be played by some well-regarded actress in her forties or fifties? Usually a ringer or someone of local fame? Like me in 20 years? Not...a kid?"

"They brought someone big up from Charlotte to do it, from what I read in the paper, and four weeks into rehearsal they found out she had breast cancer. Sophia was Lady Macduff. They bumped her up."

"Why not just bring in another ringer?"

"I'm sure they tried. People have schedules, Leah," Adam said. "Remember how hard it was for me to drag you down here? What do you have against Medina?"

"Nothing. She's just... young."

"And beautiful, I hear. Maybe she was actually good enough for the part."

"Young, beautiful actresses often are," Leah said.

"I wonder if she can sing."

"Adam."

"Don't worry, I'm not recasting you."

Leah smiled. "Ironic, isn't it? I'm far too old to be playing a thirteen year old love interest... metaphor or not... and she's far too young to be Macbeth. We should switch."

"I'm crushed," Adam said.

Leah felt a twinge of satisfaction. "It's just business, Adam."

"Honey, it's art."

 

The theater was teeming with life when Leah and Adam got back. South Pacific and Macbeth were to rotate for a month in the space, followed by one week of Poe, and then the big finale of three weeks of Side Show. Leah avoided the stage and the dressing rooms and followed Adam around. He explained that they would get stage time later in the week, but that he was joining the casting auditions for Side Show in order to find her Poe. He had dropped the idea that Poe didn't exist. Somewhere in a grave, Edgar was thanking him.

"I want to pick him," Leah said.

"Your feelings will be under consideration. Chemistry is important."

"Will I get to do lines with him?"

"When we do callbacks," he said.

"Adam."

"What? It isn't fun from this side, either?"

"It's never fun until rehearsal."

He shooed her into a chair. Plush red velvet, but very uncomfortable. She squirmed. "Our poor audience," she said.

"Leah, please."

"I mean the chairs, Adam."

He settled in next to her. "Oh."

"See?"

"Well, we'll just have to bring them to their feet, then."

"How, with our action sequences? Our amazing pyrotechnics?"

"We do have a lot of corpses," Adam said.

"That we do."

 

Adam chose Edward Whitfield for Poe. Edward preferred to be called Ward and was indistinctly Asian, with deep, luminous eyes and peroxide-blonde hair and a lilting Southern accent that belied his appearance and all the brooding he carried within him.

He'd spoken "The Raven," for his callback, of course, and there was nothing special about his oration compared to the four times they'd heard it already, but his accent and his youth added a sweetness that appealed to Adam.

"It's changing the musical," Leah said. "It's supposed to be old and dark."

"Poe died at 40," Adam reminded her.

"But not his words."

Ward's voice already whispered in her head, "Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow..." as she went to the deli down the street from the theater.

A rainbow flag hung from a flagpole on the roof, swaying in a breeze under the oak trees. Inside, it just looked like a deli, with a long counter from front to back and a few tables by the windows, mostly empty at seven o'clock, except for Lady Macbeth sitting at the window, looking out at the sunny street.

"Join you?" Leah asked.

A flash of terror crossed Sophia's expression, and then she recognized Leah. She shrugged. "I'm leaving soon, but go ahead."

Leah settled down and put her food on the table, careful not to invade the woman's personal space, and looked out the window. No one passed by. There were old houses across the street, stately, with yards overgrown and bricks spilling from their retaining walls. "I'm Leah," she said, and took a bite of her salad.

"Sophia. Well...most people call me Sophie."

"I've been calling you Lady Macbeth," Leah said.

Sophia nodded.

Leah ate.

"So, is this different from Manhattan?" Sophia asked.

"Oh, yeah."

Sophia took a sip of her soda. There was mostly ice in the glass, and she captured a piece and chewed on it.

Leah looked out the window, and asked, "Is it different from where you're from?"

"Yes, but...not really. It's just another town." Sophia exhaled. "It just doesn't feel like home. You know? So it feels empty."

"How'd you get the part?"

"Elaine...I knew her in Charlotte, before we joined the cast. She recommended me."

"And now she's..."

"Sick, yeah."

"Is she going to be all right?"

"No."

Leah tried to say, "I'm sorry," but her throat dried up. She swallowed instead and reached for her green tea. But there wasn't anything else to talk about. She didn't know this girl sitting next to her, looking sadly out the window. "So, what's your favorite movie?" wasn't going to break the ice. Leah hadn't read Macbeth since college, and she hadn't been in college in ten years.

Ten years.

"Oh, God," she said.

"It's okay..." Sophia said.

"Oh, no, I was thinking of something else." Leah looked sideways at her. "I'm sorry."

Sophia's face seemed to close. Her expression became impenetrable.

Leah asked, "Will she get to see you as Lady Macbeth?"

"Yes." Sophia relaxed and smiled. "Yes."

Leah smiled, too. Sophia carried an intensity that made Leah's skin tingle slightly whenever she encountered her...both times...and Sophia's smile just intensified it. No wonder she was on stage. The woman had presence. Sophia balled up her napkin and tossed it on her food wrapper, but made no move to get up.

"Where is everyone?" Leah asked.

"There's pizza at the theater for the lighting crew. But I have to go back at eight. They're doing a props rehearsal for Lady Macduff's murder."

"How's she going to die?"

"Come see the play."

"Shakespeare? I don't know. I'd have to read a review first. How do I know the book is any good?"

Sophia chuckled and went back to looking out the window.

Leah finished her salad and said, "We should get ice cream."

"Okay," Sophia said.

"Is there ice cream?"

"I don't know." Sophia furrowed her brow. "But there are donuts."

"We could take some back to your props master."

"He'd like that."

 

The Krispy Kreme was a little white and green neon shack in the middle of a run-down industrial strip. Inside it was clean and bright, and smelled like sugar and coffee.

Leah inhaled. "I love coffee."

"It won't keep you up?"

"It's sunny."

Sophia raised her eyebrows.

Leah laughed. "No, I'll be fine." She took her coffee and surveyed the donuts behind the counter. "These aren't New York donuts."

Sophia touched her arm, and then let her hand drop. "You've never had a donut from here?"

"I've only been in Durham two days."

"Krispy Kreme is right here, though. We walked."

Leah looked helplessly at the cashier. He pulled a donut from the rack, tore it in half, and offered a piece to each of them.

"Do I dunk it in my coffee?" Leah asked.

"If you do, they'll throw you out," Sophia said, around the donut piece she'd already shoved in her mouth. She ordered two dozen more.

Leah put the sticky dough into her mouth and chewed. Sweetness filled her mouth. The dough was warm and fluffy. The glaze stuck to her gums and her teeth. She licked her lips after she swallowed, mourning the passage of food from her mouth, and said, "Oh, my God," to keep herself from moaning.

Sophia smirked.

The cashier handed her another donut. She took a bite and chewed. "These are so soft."

"You should try them with the chocolate glaze," Sophia said.

"We have to leave."

Leah bolted for the door. She stood outside, eating her donut and watching the empty street, while Sophia paid and followed her out. "Where are all the people?" she asked.

"People?"

"In New York, you're never alone unless you're inside your apartment, and usually, you have roommates. So you have to lock yourself in your bedroom. But here, it's so... expansive."

"Are you lonely?"

"No." Leah swallowed the last of her donut. "Well. Not because of that."

Sophia smiled.

Leah licked her lips. "Are you a crack dealer? Why did you take me in there?"

"I own stock in Krispy Kreme. How's the coffee?"

Leah took a sip and considered. "It's merely okay."

"You'll have to introduce me to what qualifies as good coffee, then."

"Adam rented a house," Leah said as they walked back toward the theater, thinking of the coffee grinder and the percolator he'd brought from New York and the beans she had shipped from fair trade, supple and dark and staining her fingers in the mornings. No more Best Western, but that didn't make it home.

"What?"

"For the duration. Me and him. And real coffee. A couple of the out-of-towners who came with us got another one down the block. Ours has a piano, so we can do rehearsals. We're going to have a party at some point. For everyone at the theater."

"Okay," Sophia said. She hefted her bag of donut boxes, and gave Leah a wave as she went toward the theater.

Leah looked down the street. The house was two blocks away, just another old, stately empty house rented to theater people in the summer and Duke graduate students in the winter. She set off walking, looking around cautiously. In New York, the bigger the crowds, the safer the woman walking alone. She missed tourists.

Thinking of herself as being one made her feel better.

 

"It's so quiet here," Leah said, as she and Adam sat upstairs in her bedroom. He was lying on her bed with his laptop, and she was at her vanity, arranging photographs around the mirror.

"We could put on some music," Adam said.

"That's not what I mean. I mean...I can't sleep without sirens. It's like we're in the middle of nowhere and aliens are going to come to our cow field and probe us."

A car drove by outside. Leah jumped.

"There's a million and a half people around us," Adam said.

"How do you know?"

He turned the computer around. "I looked it up."

Leah leaned her forehead against the mirror. "Where are they?"

"Leah, darling."

She tapped her forehead.

Adam said, "I don't know how it managed to get there, but you have icing on your chin."

 

Leah opened one eye. Sunlight streamed through the window. She sighed. Adam was gone and so was his laptop, though he'd draped a blanket over her. She still had her shoes on. Adam knew nothing about comfort.

She went downstairs after her shower and Adam, shirtless, was making eggs in the kitchen.

"Hungry?" He asked.

"Can we have donuts?"

He glanced at her and shook his head. "Do you want to check your email?"

"No." She looked at the coffee grinder. It seemed insurmountable.

"Your mother probably wrote," he said.

"She probably wrote six times. Five times to ask if I've found a man in North Carolina and once to ask if I've found 'someone.'" She made quote fingers.

"Parents," Adam said.

"I like your parents."

"They don't nag you about grandbabies."

"They don't want me to bear your children?"

"They want black babies. They suggest I become famous so I can meet Denzel Washington."

"Not if my mother meets him first."

Adam grinned and waved a spatula at her.

"Grind my beans?" she asked.

"Not in a million years, girl."

"I'll give you a dollar."

Adam flipped eggs onto a plate and set it on the counter next to the grinder. "Eat your eggs."

"What are we doing today?"

"Ward's coming over to do a reading. Then I'm going to go talk to the set guys."

"Great."

"We're finally doing it, Leah," he said.

Maybe when she had some coffee it would sink in.

 

Chapter Five

Leah realized by their second rehearsal that she hated Ward. She stood with him in the living room, with the oak coffee table and the fading flower print wallpaper. The room was almost time-period appropriate. Ward, however, was insufferable, arrogant, demanding, and young. He touched her too much. He said, "Quoth the raven," like it was his mantra, and his hair... she just hated his hair. He ran his fingers across the blond spikes and smirked.

She wished she were at the theater, or at the deli with Sophia, her only other friendly acquaintance in all of North Carolina. Ward didn't count. They'd done a dry reading at the kitchen table the day before, over Leah's precious Honduras coffee and tiny pancakes with marmalade Adam made. Ward's gentle lilt did make the words come alive. His pace clashed with hers, making her feel guttural and sharp, too Jewish New York for singing love poems.

Adam reminded her that Poe wrote in Boston as they did a second run-through with him at the piano and Leah and Ward standing in the living room. Ward would seize her arms and shake her and sing to her and she'd forget her lines, distracted by the intimacy of a man touching her after months of recording studios and singing alone on stage, or sitting at a computer, repeating words into a microphone over and over.

She'd forgotten what acting was.

"I need you both to know your stuff by the time we start tech rehearsals," Adam said.

"Because it'll all change again?"

"It has to change from something to something. Not from nothing to something."

Leah plunked a key at the piano.

"Just, start from the top," Adam said as he left for another set design meeting.

Ward folded his arms and grinned.

"What?"

"My big number is a Joan Baez song. A song that someone else set to Poe's words that Adam's recycling," he said. "Does Adam do anything original?"

"He's gone two seconds and you badmouth him? Fabulous. At least he didn't use any material from the last Poe musical."

"No one wants to remember that one," Ward said. "I think he's great. But I'm not saying his words."

"It's his narrative. You're singing his notes. Why didn't you try out for Macbeth? I hear that's exciting and fresh."

"I did," Ward said. "I got picked up by the experimental thing instead. It's my first lead, but come on. I've been on stage with..."

"Bigger names than me? If you're such a hot shot, why aren't you in New York?"

"I don't want to go to New York. It's big and dirty and overcrowded and fast and you can't see the sky. I don't want to work on a soap opera or some cop show. I want to stay here. This is my home." His accent was stronger with his passion. He'd have to trim it for the stage. There was lilt, and then there was hick. She looked sadly at him when he said, "I want the leads in North Carolina."

"Well, here you are," Leah said.

He sat down at the piano. "Here I am. Good point, I guess."

"Can we please just sing?"

"Let's start at the finale and work back."

"Won't that fuck everything up?"

"It's time to experiment. To explore each other." He put his hand on her forearm. She shuddered with repulsion and looked forward to the House of Usher sequence.

 

Leah went to the deli a few times for dinner but Sophia didn't show up. She wondered, paranoid, if she were being avoided. Maybe Sophia just hadn't liked the sandwiches. Time to stop wondering about total strangers. After all, Macbeth was going into dress rehearsal.

Each night Leah sang by the piano with Ward and Adam. One evening they piled into Adam's car, between dinner and getting drunk on the porch, and gone into downtown. There wasn't much to see. Adam promised her pizza in Raleigh in the near future and Ward tried to explain college basketball. She tried to explain the Yankees, but Adam started in on the Mets, and Ward had to break up their yelling. After that they stuck to seemingly safer topics, like Webber and Sondheim, and then tried to avoid all being in the car together. Leah was used to walking to work anyway. But the summer heat made her sweat and drained her of energy. She drank more water and justified more donuts.

 

The rented house had books on the living room bookshelves and Leah perused them, marveling at the eclectic collection developed from a decade of students and theater nuts passing through. There were texts on economics, war, and poetry, along with romances and thrillers and a collection of Garfield comic strips. She had read the Garfield already, using each strip as a reward for remembering her lines or working through a tricky section of the score.

"Coming, Leah?" Adam called from the front door.

She scooped up a Harlequin romance called The Prince of Patagonia and followed him out.

Ward met them at the theater.

Adam sat at the piano stage left, clipboard by his side on the bench. "From the top, all the way. Can we do it?"

Leah gave him the middle finger.

Ward shrugged.

Adam began to play.

Leah got the first four lines of melody. Her voice cracked as she sang.

"Keep going," Adam said.

Ward stepped in and took over the main opening song.

I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea;

But we loved with a love that was more than love-

I and my Annabel Lee;

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven

Coveted her and me.

Adam had known to open the musical with something the audience would recognize, but not the big number, not "The Raven." Let the audience live in anticipation all night. Leah had moved to the wings, but she had been there, had been, for four brief lines, Annabel Lee herself. Hopefully the audience would remember.

Hopefully the audience would care.

 

Ward threw down his sheet music. Paper scattered across the stage.

Adam pinched the bridge of his nose without saying anything.

Leah took it upon herself to react. "Fuck you, Ward."

Ward folded his arms.

"You prima donna. Can't you sing once through? Really? I don't seem to have a problem."

Ward said, "Adam wasn't interrupting you every five seconds."

"I wasn't making mistakes."

"Or maybe you were just too hopeless to deal with."

"I'm not..." The onslaught of fury brought tears. Some deep part of Leah echoed Ward's dismissal and by extension, Adam's. She turned to the piano.

Ward did, also.

Adam frowned and glanced at the sheet music on the stage. "Let's skip to the next song. I want to be out of here by lunch."

Leah stepped to center stage. She ignored Ward and listened to the piano. However poor Ward might think her talent, the song belonged to her.

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring…

 

Theater volunteers had brought potluck for South Pacific's final dress rehearsal. Leah helped herself to fried chicken and then went outside to guiltily eat it in the heat of the sun. Maybe if she melted Adam could find a new Virginia for his project, instead of one he had to keep yelling to, "Sweeter. Why can't you look sweeter?"

Reading and eating fried chicken simultaneously proved impossible, so she ate, wiped at her hands as best she could, and then picked up the book. If she got grease on the pages, no one would miss it.

"What are you reading?"

"The Prince of Patagonia," Leah said with flourish. Then she looked up to see who had asked, shading her eyes with the book.

Sophia stood on the top step of the theater, smiling. "Is it hot?"

"I don't know. I promised myself this time I wouldn't just skip to the juicy bits," Leah said. "Maybe they'll be better if they have build-up, or something."

Sophia nodded." I'm late for rehearsal, so..."

"Break a leg."

"Thanks."

Leah put down her book, wrapped her arms around her knees, and tried to guess which house across the street might be a crack house, from the amount of traffic going in and out on a Thursday afternoon.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 603


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