Little Disquietude (4 page)

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.

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."