Chapter Twenty-Four

Leah studied her expression in the dressing room mirror. She looked younger and fresher than she usually saw herself. Her cheeks were rosy with rouge. Her outfit, from the late 1880s, itched and made her feel like something out of an Edith Wharton movie. She wriggled experimentally. Virginia wriggled back at her. Leah was gone, at least physically. She smiled. Virginia smiled back.

The mental part, she still had to work on.

Adam ducked into the dressing room. "You look beautiful," he said, and it was Sophia's voice that echoed in her mind. She shivered. He asked, "Do you need any last minute preparation?"

She shook her head. "I'm psyching myself up for the crying."

"Dare I ask?"

"I was watching Cold Case on TNT back at home and they had this one about a homeless woman and her daughter."

Adam looked pale.

"And the homeless woman won the lottery...a really small amount on a scratcher, like $25, and she used it to buy her daughter a birthday cake. It was all she could do right. B-plot." Leah's voice faltered as a lump rose in her throat. She inhaled sharply through her nose. "Anyway, her cake got destroyed. It was awful."

Adam frowned at her.

"What?" Leah asked through her choked throat.

"I need to stop asking actors questions."

"It was really sad!" she yelled as he left her dressing room.

She went back to looking at herself in the mirror. Under the scratchy clothes and the silkier underclothes and the layers of makeup to change her into someone else, were the bite marks and bruises and scratches and hickeys Sophia left on her. Under that, the soreness and the aches and the still-simmering arousal between her legs. And under that, her heartbeat, pounding, making her feel alive and desperate.

"Underneath, underneath," she murmured, and Virginia looked sadly back at her, blinking away the tears in her luminous blue eyes.

"Can you sing?" she asked Virginia.

"Like a songbird," Virginia said. "Like a warbler. Like a crow. Like a hawk."

Like a raven.

Virginia was eight years old when Poe fell in love with her, but Adam hadn't cast a child, wanting to gloss over that in favor of the other tragic figures in Poe's life as the specter of West Point loomed in his future. The widow, the invalid, his brother dying of consumption. Already Poe had seen too much death, too much upheaval, but the musical opened with the first sonnet of "The Bells" sung sweetly by Virginia, with hope and newness and youth between them.

"From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."

Ward was shaped by experience; charming, belligerent, more intelligent than his betters, witty and doomed. He blended easily with Poe, carrying the essence of a different place and time, and yet echoing the late 20th century commentators, too clever to be politically savvy, all quoting Poe themselves. Leah admitted that he had been well-cast.

Even her hatred of him seemed timely.

And Leah thought, with pleasure and clarity, that the critics would love the meta.

She cried, her back turned to Ward, her face presented to the stage, a full house, but she couldn't see any of them with the spotlight blinding her eyes, making them water. She thought of the birthday cake and a sob escaped her lips. She covered her mouth and ran from the stage.

Ward chased her, seduced her, sang prayers that made her ache with their beauty, fought with everyone else, in clumsy, choreographed duels.

She sat at the piano and bit into the capsule wedged between her back teeth. Fake blood poured from her mouth as she sang. Her voice trembled with the conductor's gestures.

Ward sat beside her, dabbed the blood from the corner of her mouth, and studied her as a detective might a crime scene. With interest and yet detachment.

He began to drink.

She took Adam's artistic license and died, two years too early.

Ward descended into madness.

Hear the loud alarum bells –

Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!

In the startled ear of night

How they scream out their affright!

Too much horrified to speak,

They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,

Leaping higher, higher, higher,

With a desperate desire.

She came back as a ghost, thought of Macbeth, and nearly laughed on stage. She sang alone, her face powdered white, her clothes wispy and pale suggestions. She wondered if Sophia was in the audience. She knew her mother was. She thought of them as she sang, and Adam, and Grace, and everyone she'd loved seeing her dead on stage, and singing, carrying or breaking the musical all by herself, all at once, all alone. She kept or lost their attention for three minutes and twelve seconds.

The applause at the end of her solo was loud. The language was beautiful, the words pouring out of her mouth set fluidly to the natural, organic music Adam pinned to them. The music was all his, neither apocryphal nor old-fashioned, and she had sung with relish, feeling attached to the past and present, and all of culture, by the connections he had drawn. If only the audience would feel that, too. The everyman condensed into poetry.

They would ache for the ending as Ward stepped into the spotlight, as Leah stood just off-stage as a ghost, as he began to recite the poem they had all learned as schoolchildren.

At first, it was just his voice, monotone, methodical, his drawl completely eradicated: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary..."

Leah would be the one to step on stage and say, "Nevermore." The music had started by then, as Ward's desperation and urgency increased. The instruments brought forth a swelling, a terror. No need to reinvent the wheel, the art here, better to dip into nostalgia, into the shared literacy.

Ward whimpered, shouted, paced the stage.

'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -

Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -

On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -

Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'

And then the stage changed back to the street where Ward had come to woo her, outside where the crowd milled around, ignoring his madness as he spoke of his memories, his aching love, and he fell onto the street. The music stopped to leave him screaming, wounded and dying, at the ceiling, "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor... shall be lifted nevermore."

He died, with a shuddering death rattle rising from his chest. Then silence, and the cry of a bird.

The lights went out, leaving the stage in darkness.

Leah dipped the cloth into cold cream and wiped her face. Her hand trembled as she removed the makeup and unmasked herself. She smiled, though she was starved and exhausted. She had no idea if the show had gone well; it was already a blur. A headache was forming at the base of her neck, traveling upward, radiating.

She left her hair pinned up, regal and exotic, and reapplied makeup, more subdued, just hiding the wrinkles and letting herself look younger. She changed into the velvet gown she'd worn to the last press party, already missing the period costumes. When had she become a little girl playing dress up? She opened the door.

Sophia flew in.

"Hi," Leah said, closing the door again, raising her eyebrows.

"Adam let me backstage," Sophia said. "Should I go?"

Leah shook her head.

"All right," Sophia said. She flung her arms around Leah and hugged her tightly, pressing her cheek against Leah's hair. Leah held her back, trying to keep them standing as Sophia swayed. She shook a little in Leah's arms.

"Are you crying?" Leah asked.

Sophia nodded. She kissed Leah's temple. "It was so powerful."

Leah didn't know what to say.

"You were," Sophia said. "The material was good. And the music. And you." Sophia pulled back and looked down at Leah's face. "I'd never seen you on stage, before. Except the first time we met."

Leah smiled. "Now you know."

"I guess the rumors are true."

Leah reached up and brushed tears off Sophia's face. Sophia kissed her, hard and hungry, turning her around and pressing her against the dressing room door. She lingered, robbing Leah of breath, smearing her makeup. Leah kissed her back, moaning as Sophia sucked on her lower lip, and wondering if she was making too much noise.

Sophia raised her head and sighed. "Another party?"

"It's our job," Leah said.

"My job is over. Even the party part."

"Come on. You might meet someone famous."

Sophia smiled. She kissed Leah again, firmly but briefly. Leah extended the kiss, and then said, "My parents will be there."

"Do you want me to meet your parents?"

"Kind of," Leah said.

"Really?" Sophia brightened.

Leah remembered that Sophia was impossibly young.

Leah made Sophia wait outside while she fixed her makeup, too afraid she'd succumb to kisses, or sex, or tears. Outside in the hall, with the stage hands and the prop master passing by, as exhausted as she was, she could be demure with Sophia. Calm. She took her hand and they walked side by side to the party. Poe was not Macbeth, and the party was just down the street.

The air outside was humid and enveloping. Leah inhaled, feeling the weight of it settle on her, feeling blanketed. Poe had been intense; the weather washed that from her, reminded her that the rest of the world wasn't as crazy as theater.

Sophia reluctantly let go of her hand as they climbed the steps to the restaurant. Leah took it again. A bouncer looked them over, glanced at the guest list, and waved them through without asking their names.

"Posh," Leah said.

"You're a star."

"Stop saying that."

Sophia grinned at her and nudged her hip. Leah poked her back.

"Ladies," Adam called, waving at them.

Leah let go of Sophia's hand to wave back. He was standing with her parents and her sister. They'd flown in from New York in the afternoon, and not seen Leah before the show. They wanted the purity of the experience.

"This is so quaint," her mother said as Leah hugged her.

"I know, mom."

Adam kissed Sophia's cheek and offered her his glass of champagne.

"We loved you," Leah's father said. He hugged her, and then her sister did.

"Really cool," her sister said.

"This is Sophia Medina," Leah said, and Sophia smiled shyly, looking at them but not quite making eye contact. "She played Lady Macbeth. At the theater. I mean, simultaneously."

Adam stepped in. "She's the fresh young talent in North Carolina."

"Is Macbeth still running?" Leah's mother asked.

Sophia shook her head. "We closed, two days ago."

"I'm sorry to have missed you. Leah, do you want to have lunch tomorrow? I assume you have people to meet, tonight."

Leah nodded. "I'll come to the hotel and pick you up."

"We're flying out tomorrow night," Leah's dad said to Sophia.

Someone called Sophia's name. She apologized and went toward the voice.

"That's the mayor's wife," Adam said, watching her go. Leah, too, watched Sophia glide across the room, her back bare in her low-cut dress, her skin flawless. "She looks so young," Adam said, vocalizing Leah's thoughts. Leah felt warm, thinking of all she and Sophia had done; how impossible it seemed.

She turned back to her parents, and asked the dreaded question, "What did you think?"

Her mother smiled. "I think you'll always be employed when you command a stage like that."

Adam put his arm around Leah and asked, "And me?"

"You, too," her mother said.

"Though," her father said, "I did think the entire thing was over-wrought, Adam. I mean, honestly, I needed a trip to Aruba after all that hand-wringing and grief."

"Point taken," Adam said.

"It's every mother's dream to hear her daughter sing like that," Margaret said. "Whether on stage or off. You have the voice of an angel."

Leah was sure she turned beet-red.

With that, her parents left her, though Jessica lingered, following her around, meeting the actors and the crew, wide-eyed. Then she met a state senator, a pinched, older woman in a flower print dress, decided she didn't care about North Carolina politics, and went to rejoin her parents.

The senator introduced herself as Ann Rickson and said, "You were striking. Amazing."

"Thank you. I owe a lot to Adam," Leah said.

"I'm sure. What are you doing, after the party?"

Leah raised her eyebrows. Surely a senator wasn't hitting on her, patron of the arts or not.

Ann continued, "I mean, do you have someone waiting for you at home? I so often wonder what the lives of true artists are like. To be able to call up such passion."

"I...yes," Leah said, forcing herself not to search the crowd for Sophia, wondering how she'd have answered that question a week ago, a month ago...or would a month from now.

"That's lovely. Oh, there's the season's artistic director. I'd better put in an appearance."

Leah nodded.

Ann smiled and shook her hand and strode away across the room.

Leah made the rounds of the room once with Adam, took pictures with everyone, and then found Sophia at the bar, talking to Glick.

"One more picture?" he asked.

Leah looped her arms around Sophia and smiled at him.

"Fabulous." He took the snapshot.

"Can we go now?" Leah asked.

Sophia nodded.

"To my place."

"Will your parents be there?"

Leah shook her head.

Sophia smiled.

On their way to the door they were stopped by well-wishers and friends. Leah's arms ached from the flowers she carried. She made Sophia carry some and, as they descended the steps of the restaurant, Leah turned around to smile one more time in the general direction of her parents. They were across the room, watching her, and both smiled when she waved her flowers. She turned back around, feeling like they were watching her go.

"My parents are staring," she said.

Sophia looked dumbly at her.

Leah shook her head. It would be too hard to explain.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 683