Opening Act Read online

  Text copyright © 2014 Dish Tillman. Design © 2014 Ulysses Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (including but not limited to photocopying, electronic devices, digital versions, and the Internet), without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Published in the United States by

  Ulysses Press

  P.O. Box 3440

  Berkeley, CA 94703

  www.ulyssespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-61243-341-7

  Library of Congress Control Number 2013957409

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acquisitions Editor: Katherine Furman

  Managing Editor: Claire Chun

  Copyeditor: Andrea Santoro

  Proofreader: Elyce Berrigan-Dunlop

  Cover design: what!design @ whatweb.com

  Cover photographs: man and woman © Coka/fotolia.com; title background © Dimec/shutterstock.com

  Part title illustration: © JelenaA/shutterstock.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  This novel is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance or similarity to any real person, living or deceased, or any real event is purely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Loni was having the loveliest dream. It was set sort of in the nineteenth century—except she drove her car to the café—and she was having tea with William Blake. (Well…she was having tea. He was drinking something green from a vial, which made him shudder after every sip. He offered some to Loni, but she said no thank you.) As they drank, the great poet instructed her on the trouble with her life. “There is no space left for the silences,” he warned her. “And in the boom and clangor of your waking world, madness stirs, and rises, and ventures forth to claim you. Listen,” he said, holding a finger aloft and looking outward. “It comes. It hungers.” And Loni listened, and she could hear it: thoom…thoom…thoom…

  Thoom-thoompa-thoom, tha-thoom, it continued, and Loni thought that was a little dancey for the tread of a doomsday beast. She rolled over, and a sharp blade of sunlight pried under her eyelids. She tried to shake it away, but it held fast. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She was awake, but the thoom-thoompa-thoom, tha-thoom, tha-thoom persisted.

  It was Zee’s freakin’ speakers. Right up against the wall their bedrooms shared. Now that she was up, she could even feel the wall vibrate.

  She got out of bed, pulled the oversize T-shirt she slept in down around her thighs from where it had ridden up during the night, stormed out into the corridor, and banged on Zee’s door.

  Zee opened it; she was fully dressed but only half made-up. One eye was lushly outlined, the other naked and pale. She held an eyeliner brush in her hand. “Morning,” she said brightly. “Whassup?”

  Loni could barely contain her anger. “Do you have to play your music so loud, and so early?” she said, gritting her teeth. “I mean, does it not occur to you that someone may be trying to sleep?”

  Zee looked perplexed. She gestured at the knob on her stereo receiver. “It’s only on four,” she said. “Plus, it’s, like, almost ten o’clock.”

  Loni felt the anger begin to wash out of her. “It is?”

  Zee nodded, cocked her head toward the digital clock on her wall, then went back to her mirror and resumed applying her eyeliner. “You really should get a job or something. As for me, I’ve got an interview at eleven.”

  Loni was reluctant to let go of her fury. “Well, fine. But for the record, the volume may only be on four, but four is too loud.”

  Zee looked at her and sighed, then reached over and dialed down the knob. The music receded into a kind of raucous whisper. “That’s one-and-a-half,” she said. “Work for you?”

  Loni folded her arms. “It’s like a hive of bees, but I’ll take it. I just don’t see why you have to fill every hour of every day with this…noise,” she said, snubbing her nose at the cradle holding Zee’s iPod.

  Zee laughed as she put away her eyeliner. “You knew I was a music lover before you moved in. I mean, you knew that. You used to give me crap about it, make fun of me. Told me I spent all my money on concerts and downloads. And now you move in with me, and you’re surprised I play music all the time?”

  “I wouldn’t mind music,” Loni said, still standing firm but watching jealously as Zee donned a crisp blue blouse and fastened its buttons. “It’d be nice to, I don’t know, wake up to a Debussy étude or a Bach invention. But this hard-rock garbage…”

  Zee laughed as she donned a trim suede jacket. “This isn’t hard rock,” she said, emphasizing the words as if she couldn’t believe someone had actually said them. “It’s indie folk rock, if it’s anything. Grief Bacon by Overlords of Loneliness.”

  And in fact, Loni was starting to recognize it now. It wasn’t difficult—it was the album Zee had been playing more or less nonstop for the past nine days.

  “And,” Zee added as she slung her bag over her shoulder, “you’ll remember, please, you promised to go with me to their farewell gig tomorrow night.”

  “I remember,” Loni said, annoyed with herself for having agreed to go. It had been a weak moment, one night after a few too many cocktails and too much soul-sharing. It was so easy to get too wrapped up in a roommate’s life.

  “And the after-party,” Zee said as she headed for the door.

  Loni moved aside to make way for her. “Surely you’re not going to hold me to that.”

  Zee whirled on her. “The after-party is the whole point. This is my last chance to meet Shay Dayton before he goes off on their big nationwide tour. By the time they come back home, they won’t be a local band anymore—they’ll be famous. I won’t be able to get anywhere near them.” She fetched her keys from her bag. “I’ve been their fan since day one. I deserve a little private time with them before they go mega.”

  Loni furrowed her brow. “But you already know the drummer. You went for coffee with him. You told me.”

  Zee flapped her bag shut again. “Right. But I haven’t met Shay Dayton.”

  “Shay Dayton. That’s the singer, right?”

  Zee rolled her eyes, incredulous that anyone wouldn’t know this. “Yes, Loni. He’s the front man. Welcome to our planet. I hope you enjoy your stay here.”

  “But wait.” Loni followed Zee to the door of the apartment. “You went for coffee with the drummer. That’s kind of a date.”

  “No, it’s not. It was purely platonic.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “How should I know?”

  Zee reached for the doorknob, but Loni put her hand on the door. “Let me get this straight. You threw yourself at this drummer guy—”

  “I did no
t throw myself at him. I—”

  “You told me how you met. You threw yourself. Then he invited you out for coffee, now he’s invited you to the after-party for this concert, and you’re telling me the whole point of this, all along, was to use him so you could meet another guy?”

  “Not ‘another guy,’ ” said Zee, gently removing Loni’s hand from the door. “Shay Dayton.” She looked Loni straight in the eye. “Shay. Effing. Dayton.”

  “You’re a menace,” Loni said with an appalled laugh. “This poor drummer. What a dupe.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Zee said with a dismissive wave. “He’s going on tour with the country’s hottest new band. He’ll have women falling all over him.” She opened the door. “Wish me luck on my interview.”

  “Who’s it with?”

  “Optometrist. Clerical support.”

  “Sounds…exciting.”

  Zee laughed. “God, you’re an awful liar!” She blew Loni a kiss and strode out of the apartment.

  Loni went and sat on her bed for a few minutes, wondering how she could fill her day. There was nothing on the agenda. She had no compelling reason to even get dressed. She could, if she wanted to, sit on the couch and stare at the TV all day.

  But she didn’t want that. Trouble was, she didn’t know what she did want.

  It had been a full month since she’d gotten her bachelor’s degree in Romantic Poetry, a degree that suited her for pretty much zero in the real world. Her only realistic option was to continue as an academic, get her master’s, and teach. She even had a patron who was willing to help her out: Byron Pennington, her first poetry professor, who had shepherded her through her degree and had now invited her to be his teaching assistant while she worked through a graduate program. It was a very attractive offer; she was lucky to have it. Most people in her position would jump at it. And she might never find anyone else in her life who was as supportive and encouraging as Byron. She’d be a fool to turn him down.

  Plus, she couldn’t live with Zee forever. She’d intended to move in for only a few weeks, till she figured out what to do about her future. But she was no closer to a solution now than she had been when she first got there. And though Zee was being very patient and generous—Loni could only afford a pittance for rent—it was tough on them both. They’d been best friends in high school, but then Loni had gone on to college and Zee hadn’t. She’d jumped right into 9-to-5 employment, mostly at the administrative support level. They hadn’t seen each other much during Loni’s college years, and now their world experiences were vastly different. It was getting harder and harder for them to find common ground.

  So it seemed like an obvious move to say yes to Byron and become his TA. The problem was that he’d accepted a post as head of the Poetry Department at St. Nazarius University, so taking the gig meant moving with him to the West Coast. Something about the idea frightened Loni. She liked Byron, of course, and she trusted him. But to be uprooted from everything and everyone she knew for a new life where she was entirely dependent on him made her balk.

  She could, of course, stay right where she was and become a graduate student at Mission State, but she’d be an orphan. Byron had so completely taken the role of her advocate on the faculty, that there was no one else she really even knew. It was like she’d burned those bridges without even realizing they were there.

  And then there was the big problem.

  The one that kept her awake at night.

  There was something she really wanted—deeply wanted, in the most private recesses of her innermost whatever (“soul” being a word she stringently avoided, it having been debased by excessive and trivial usage)—and that was to write. She wanted to be a poet herself. Not to teach the skills to others. Not to forever live in academic awe of those who actually did it. She wanted it for herself. Just thinking about it made her flush. She could feel her face go red, and she fell back on the bed and buried her head in her pillow.

  It was so embarrassing. It seemed like every girl went through a phase around fourteen or so when she wrote poetry. Usually in a special journal that she also decorated with drawings of daisies, broken hearts, or unicorns. The poems had titles like “My Tears Like Wine” and “Wind-tossed Is My Love.” Most girls outgrew it. But not Loni. She’d just kept on writing. That’s why she’d pursued an academic career. A young woman writing poetry is a cliché. A young woman studying poetry, however—no one laughs at that. No one actually respects it very much, either, but at least they don’t laugh.

  Even now, Loni had a briefcase under her bed that was filled with notebooks of her verses. (She never composed on her laptop. She thought it was an affront to the Muse.) Every once in a while, when she was certain no one else was around, she’d take it out, flip through the pages, and engage in some strenuous self-criticism. And, occasionally, some self-congratulation. Some of her poems were actually pretty good. She even considered trying to sell them to magazines.

  But that seemed like a big risk—opening herself up to blatant rejection, and for what? A little shard of glory and a paycheck of, what, twenty-five bucks? If she was lucky enough to get paid at all? And the big publications, like The New Yorker, didn’t really go in for the kind of poetry she liked—the old kind, filled with roiling lines and vivid imagery.

  She gasped and pulled her head out of the pillow. It had been getting hard to breathe in there.

  She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling. There was a crack running along its entire length, from one side to the other. Sometimes she would lie on her back, stare at that crack, and challenge herself to write a poem about it. She’d worked out a decent first two lines, but inevitably by the time she got to the third, she fell asleep.

  Well, it was morning now, so why not have at it? There was no one around, and if what she really wanted was to write, why wasn’t she writing? She had a flashback to her dream. It had already faded away to almost nothing, but she did remember William Blake telling her something about the value of silence. Okay then, it was plenty silent right now.

  She pushed her torso over the side of the bed, reached down, and pulled the tattered briefcase from its hiding place. She opened it, withdrew the topmost notebook, and settled back on her pillow, holding the notebook against her knees. She opened it to the last scribbled-on page, grabbed a pen from her nightstand, and had a good look at the two lines she’d written so far:

  A hairsbreadth divide that does not divine—meaning

  gutters when division uncouples a nullity—

  The dashes were a device she’d picked up from Emily Dickinson and had never been able to give up.

  Looking at the lines now, she realized how unhappy she was with the word “uncouples” and remembered that this was why she hadn’t gotten any further. There was certainly something better—something more appropriate to both the meaning and the meter…

  Suddenly a tremendous battering noise shook the room. She jumped up in a flourish of alarm, then recognized the sound as a jackhammer. She went to the window, parted the curtains a few inches, and peered out. A pair of helmeted workers were just outside, methodically busting up the street in front of the building.

  Her attention was pulled away by a knock on the door. So much for silence. It was no use trying to escape noise anywhere in this insane asylum of a world. She opened the door and found the landlady, Mrs. Milliken, on the stoop.

  Loni was always a little taken aback by Mrs. Milliken’s appearance. Apparently she’d spent nearly thirty years driving eighteen-wheelers across the country, and the left side of her face—the one exposed to the sun from the interior of the truck’s cabin—was leathery, lined, and mottled by brown spots. The right side of her face, by contrast, was creamy pink and comparatively smooth. In the right light, Loni was sure she could frighten small children.

  Mrs. Milliken looked over Loni’s shoulder into the apartment. “I thought Zee would be home,” she said.

  “No,” said Loni, raising her voice to carry over the sound o
f the jackhammer.

  Mrs. Milliken frowned. “I was going to tell her about the work being done in the street. I just found out. They told me there’s a burst water main or something.”

  “Is it going to interfere with our water pressure?” asked Loni, who hadn’t showered yet.

  “I was going to tell Zee,” said Mrs. Milliken, not meeting her eyes, “that there may not be any water pressure for a couple of hours. I guess I’ll have to call and leave a message on her voicemail.”

  “I can tell her,” said Loni.

  Mrs. Milliken turned away. “Or maybe by the time she gets back, it will all be fixed. It depends how long she’ll be gone.”

  “She should be back around lunchtime.”

  “If she’s gone for a few hours, she may never even know.” And with that, Mrs. Milliken drifted away.

  Loni sighed. She’d never met anyone quite so passive-aggressive as this creepy-faced landlady. Mrs. Milliken had never once spoken directly to her or even so much as said her name. Apparently she wasn’t too keen on Zee having someone live with her—even as a visiting friend, not a subletting tenant—and had decided to respond by pretending Loni didn’t exist at all.

  Someday, Loni thought, I am going to make that woman look at me and call me by name.

  But not today, obviously. The noise from outside was just too much to allow her any thought processes at all, much less crafty ones.

  She went to the bathroom and tried the faucet. A trickle. There was no hope of hiding from the din in a nice, hot shower.

  She went back and sat on her bed. She felt a little swirl of hopelessness. It was no good trying to insert her earbuds and drown out the noise with her iPod; nothing in her music library—filled as it was with piano concertos, string quartets, and art-song recitals—had the power to block out a jackhammer at close range.

  Then she thought of Zee’s iPod. Maybe she hadn’t taken it with her.

  This was unlikely, of course. Zee didn’t go anywhere without music blaring. But Loni didn’t remember Zee having her earbuds in when she left for the interview.

  She went down the hall and entered Zee’s cottony mess of a room. It was as though her laundry pile had exploded, strewing shirts, bras, and panties all over the floor and fixtures. Across the mountain range of clothes, Loni saw that the iPod was not in its cradle. Zee must have had it in her purse. But, in turning to go, her eyes fell on Zee’s CD player, atop which were a few discs. Zee still bought CDs, when she liked an album enough to want to possess it physically—to value it as much as artifact as art. Loni picked up the topmost disc.