Little Disquietude Read online

  "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 t
elling 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.

  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 a
nd 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."