"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.
"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.
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.