Chapel of Ease (3 page)

And they were.

The next song was clearly meant for a woman, and was almost out of my range. Was this one running around Emily's head even as I sang?

Too many sorrows

Too many lies

Too many failures

Too few tries

His love left me hopeless

His touch left me cold

And I, I run to him

Whenever he calls.

We sang the whole score. A few of the other songs intended for female characters really strained my voice, but I never cracked and we all laughed when I couldn't quite hit the high notes. The story that emerged from the score was simple yet moving, a symphony of emotion rather than plot. If it could be effectively translated to the stage, it would be incredible, of that I was absolutely sure.

When we finished the last song, Neil said, “That was great, Matt. Except for that one high note.” He teased.

“I think I have the wrong anatomy for that one.”

Ray stood, shook my hand, then impulsively hugged me. “Thank you, Matt. Sorry for taking up so much of your time. This was supposed to be a quick meet and greet.”

He glanced at Neil. If they had a predetermined signal, I didn't catch it. “We'll be in touch,” Neil said.

Ah, the old “we'll be in touch” line. Well, it had been a fun couple of hours. “Thanks.”

“I know what you're thinking,” Neil said as he walked me to the door. “But we
will
be in touch. This was extraordinary.”

I still didn't get my hopes up. “Thank you, Neil. Great to see you again. Ray, nice to meet you.”

Ray looked up from straightening his sheet music. “Hey, you got any plans for right now?”

That caught me off guard. “Well … no.”

“I'm starving. If I don't eat, I get cranky. Want to go grab a sandwich?”

“Uh … sure.”

I looked at Neil, wondering if he'd invite himself along, wishing like hell that he wouldn't. He shook his head. “I have at least one agent to call,” he said with a knowing little smile. He handed Ray some money. “Can you bring me back a pastrami on wheat?”

“Sure.” Ray put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on.”

We left the theater and walked three blocks down to Yancy's, a sandwich shop I'd never been to. It smelled great, though, and it wasn't crowded. We ordered at the counter and waited for our sandwiches at a table in the front window.

I watched Ray for any clues that this was meant as a date. Sure, he'd dated Emily, but this was New York, and lines were so blurry here that you had to be in New Jersey to see them, and then only if you squinted. I didn't know what their couple status was, or even if they had one. But I did know that it probably wasn't a good idea to get into even a flirting relationship with the composer of the show my agent might, at this very moment, be making the deal for. Yet he was so cute, in an irresistible floppy-dog sort of way. I wanted to fix his ponytail and turn down his askew collar, using it as an excuse to touch him.

He straightened (no pun intended) me out right away. “Just to be clear, man, I'm not gay, so I'm not hitting on you. I was just really, really impressed with your singing. You have the voice I've always heard in my head for Colton.”

“Wow, thanks,” I said, and swallowed my disappointment. This was work, after all.

“Neil better be signing you up right now. You mind dyeing your hair black like mine?”

“No. So Colton is based on you?”

“No, not at all. But all the Tufa have the same black hair.”

“What's a ‘Tufa'? Is that your tribe?”

He laughed. “Yeah, sort of. We're not Indians, though. We're—”

The server arrived with our sandwiches, and since the shop's delicious smell had made me just as ravenous, we tore into them before he could tell me more. When we came up for air, I said, “You were telling me about your people?”

“Oh yeah. Well, according to legend, the Tufa were already in Appalachia before the ancestors of the Native Americans came over from Asia. Nobody knows where we came from, or what race we descended from. And with this hair and skin”—his skin was a dusky olive, like a swarthy Mediterranean—“a lot of people thought we were part black, which you definitely didn't want to be in Tennessee back in the day. So we just kept to ourselves up in the mountains, and still pretty much do.”

I'd never heard of them before. “Interesting.”

“So most of the characters in the story will have this same black hair.” He grabbed a stray strand and held it out as an example.

I briefly wondered if that would make it hard to tell us apart onstage, but then remembered that would be Neil's problem, not mine. And only if I got the job.

“So I gotta ask,” he inquired between sloppy bites. “What did you think of the songs?”

“They were great. Seriously.”

“I've been working on them a long time. A really long time,” he added with personal irony that I didn't get.

“So was Neil serious? That this was a true story?”

He wiped his chin as he thought. “Some parts are true, some are made up. The stuff set in the Civil War is all true, or at least it was told to me as true. But there are rules about … Well, a lot of the Tufa back home don't believe any of us should ever do anything to draw attention to ourselves. Sure shouldn't tell our own stories out of school, if you know that expression.”

I didn't, but the context made it clear. “Will you get in trouble?”

“Naw. It's not like anyone in Needsville follows the New York theater scene. Besides, the songs are all mine, and ultimately so is the story. Ain't nobody's business who I tell it to, right?”

“Right,” I agreed, wishing his Southern accent wasn't so damn hot.

*   *   *

When I got home, I got online and looked up the people he'd mentioned. At first I tried spelling the word in overly complicated ways: “Toupha,” “Tewpha,” and so forth. It wasn't until I tried the simple
T-U-F-A
that I got a ton of relevant hits.

Well, as “relevant” as this sort of thing could be. At the time, I was more amused than anything else. As he said, they weren't a Native American tribe. They also weren't Scotch-Irish, like most of the other original white settlers of Appalachia. If you believed the Web sites, the Tufa
did
predate both of those.

But the anthropological mystery paled beside the paranormal ones. Supposedly the Tufa had secret magical powers, could seduce anyone, and used their musical skills to get their way. They lived in a tiny, isolated community and had very little to do with the outside world, even today. Their most notable citizen was Bronwyn Hyatt, a soldier who'd been captured and then rescued on live TV during the Iraq War.

I poured a glass of wine and settled in to read these stories in detail. After all, if I got the part, I'd be tasked with bringing a member of this subculture to life. I glanced in the mirror and wondered what I'd look like with black hair; my own was light brown, almost blond if I spent any time in the sun.

As the wine took hold, I realized two important things: I
really
wanted to sing those songs again, for an audience. It had very little to do with being the star, or even being onstage. I just wanted to share them with other people, to watch them have the same effect on strangers that they had on me. They were that good, and that original.

And second … I had a totally hopeless crush on Ray Parrish.

 

3

“Yeah, I know him,” Thad Kilby said. “I was in a show he did a couple of years ago. The songs were great. The rest of the show, not so much. But he only wrote the music.”

Thad was an old boyfriend of mine, one I was still on speaking terms with. I didn't consider myself high maintenance, but for whatever reason, almost every relationship ended in screaming and burned bridges. Thad, though, was different; we'd realized we worked better as friends, and although we occasionally hooked up again when we were both free, we knew it for what it was.

Now we sat at the counter, eating over-easy eggs and drinking coffee at Cafe Edison while I pried him for information about Ray.

He saw right through me, too. “You do realize he's straight, right?”

“Yes, of course, I could tell that in the first five minutes.”

“Uh-huh. Sure you could. You weren't even sure
I
was gay until our second kiss.”

Earlier that morning, I'd dug even harder online, trying to find out more about Ray, checking the social media accounts of the actors, singers, and dancers in his earlier shows. He was mentioned a few times, and there were pictures of him in various people's Instagrams, but he had nothing on his own. It was almost like he was a ghost, popping up and then vanishing. A big, adorable, always-grinning ghost.

And that brought me back to the stories of his people, the Tufa. Talk about some full-bore insanity. The same sort of people who believed in Bigfoot, UFOs, and conspiracy theories put forth elaborate claims about the Tufa, none of which matched up with the photographs of normal people that illustrated their claims. How could you believe a tale of an ancient tribe of Israel when the pictures showed people sitting around drinking beer or driving old pickups? Even the Google Maps photos of Needsville, which Ray said was his home, just showed a typically fading small town.

The only photo that actually supported any of these wilder claims was on a site called
Fred, White and Blue,
which was mostly a right-wing political hub run by one of those overweight white men who writes as if he's screaming at you. He had a zoomed satellite photo that seemed to show the night-vision outline of several flying people soaring over a forest. But the image was as blurry as any Sasquatch photo, and someone with even basic skills could've easily Photoshopped it. It didn't help his credibility that the author went to great rhetorical lengths to tie them into the liberal agenda.

“I hear he's got a new show, one he wrote all himself,” Thad said.

“Yeah. I had an audition yesterday. That's when I met him. We went out for lunch afterwards.”

Thad reached over and took my hand. “Straight,” he said seriously.

“I know,” I said with identical emphasis. “But he's just so fascinating. Did you know about his background?”

“I know he was a session musician for a while. Lenny Kravitz came by our rehearsal to talk to him about something once.”

“No, I mean, his ethnic background. He's a Tufa.”

Thad looked blank. “I don't know what that is.”

I gave him the quick rundown. He sat back in surprise. “Wow. I've never even heard of them before.”

“Me, neither.”

“And he told you all that?”

I nodded, not wanting to admit I'd spent half the night reading up on it. “That's what his new play's about, too.”

“Really? Mysterious people, mountains, star-crossed lovers … sounds really good. Put in a word for me?”

“Sure,” I said.

As I headed into the station to take the subway home, my phone rang, and it was the call I'd hoped for: my agent saying I'd gotten the job. I let out a huge whoop, which no one around me even noticed. Then I danced down the steps to the L train.

*   *   *

The first rehearsal was the following Monday morning. I'd gotten some calls from other people I knew who'd been cast, so I wouldn't be totally alone. Still, I'd be one of the three leads, with the supremely butch name “Colton,” and although I'd sung the score, I hadn't even read the script yet. So I wasn't totally sure what I was getting into.

The Armitage Theater—nicknamed “the Armpit”—did not inspire confidence, even if its reputation was better than its structure. Its most notorious quirk was that its only bathrooms were located at the front of the house, near the box office. If you needed to go during a show, you had to slip out the back door, brave the alley at night, and run around the building to the front. I'd heard that the cast of the last show to open here had, as a sort of initiation, made its members strip down to their underwear before making the run, like Michael Keaton in
Birdman.

Many classic shows had started here before moving to Broadway, and I'm sure every one that opened here had that same dream: certainly I did about
Chapel of Ease.
But it took a special mix of talent, luck, and hitting the public right in the gestalt for that to happen, and truthfully, a Southern Gothic ghost story set to what could only be called folk music didn't sound anything like a sure thing. Then again, neither did a raunchy show with puppets, and look at
Avenue Q.

As I started to open the door, a young woman touched my arm. She had dreadlocks and a dusky complexion, and dressed very Bohemian. “Excuse me, are you working on Neil Callow's new show?”

I was instantly on my guard. “And you are…?”

“I just wondered. I saw him walk in earlier. He hasn't done anything since
Festival Days and Nights.
Is this his new show?”

I didn't know if she was a stalker or a reporter, and either way, I didn't want to get involved. “I really can't say. Excuse me.”

“Who are you?”

“Terry Crewson.” Terry was an old asshole roommate who still owed me seven hundred dollars in back rent. I used his name whenever I found myself in situations where I needed a quick alias. Terry had had some interesting adventures over the years, thanks to me.

“Are you a dancer?”

“I'm a janitor. Excuse me.”

When I entered the lobby, its concrete floor bare in between bouts of carpeting, the first face I saw was a friendly one: Ellie Bayrens, who had been the stage manager of
Satin Highway,
the first show I'd done after moving to New York. She was bubbly and incredibly outgoing, but when it was showtime, a switch got thrown deep in her psyche and she became a martinet. Which, I now knew, is exactly what every show needs in a stage manager.