Chapel of Ease

by Alex Bledsoe

  * * *

  At the beginning of our second week of rehearsal, the orchestra showed up.

  Up until then, Ray had been playing piano for us. But now four other strange-looking players tromped down the aisle toward the stage, carrying instrument cases and looking around at the Armitage as if it were the Gershwin. When they got to the orchestra pit and began setting up, I saw that two were men, two were women.

  One of the men whistled long and high. In a drawl every bit as heavy as Ray’s, he said, “Ain’t this place purty.”

  “Looks like that whorehouse in Abilene your daddy’s always talking about,” the other man said. “You know, where he met your mama.”

  “Will y’all please act like you’ve been to town before?” one of the women said.

  Ray looked up at us from his piano and gestured to the newcomers. “Y’all, this-here’s the band. They’re all good ol’ boys like me. One’s from Texas, one from Alabama, and the two sisters are from Kentucky.”

  I saw the resemblance between the two women now. One of them said, “Y’all must be tickled to death to be doing a bunch of Ray’s songs.”

  “We are,” Jason said. Then he raised his eyebrows and said softly to me, “Can you actually be tickled to death?”

  “Actually,” the other woman said, “tickling was the torture reserved for the aristocracy in ancient Asia.”

  “Good ears on these ladies,” Jason said even more softly.

  “Musicians got to have good ears,” Ray said. By now the others had set up their instruments: an upright bass and banjo played by the two sisters, and an electric guitar and small drum kit for the men. They tuned up quickly, then began a song I didn’t recognize, sung by one of the women and the guitarist. The chorus mentioned something about dust and rattling bones. When they finished, they all expressed their satisfaction in a series of whistles and long calls I knew from our script were known as “rebel yells.”

  “That one of yours?” I called down to Ray.

  “Ha! I wish. That was Kasey Chambers. Australian, if you can believe that.” He looked at the rest of us. “So what’d y’all think?”

  “Very nice,” Neil said. “How long do you need to warm up?”

  “Any warmer, we’d burn through the floor,” the drummer said.

  “Yep, we’re ready to go,” Ray agreed.

  “Perfect. Let’s start with act one, then, and see what we’ve got.”

  What we had, I realized later, was the soul of the show. We all had to sing harder and louder to be heard over the band, but we responded with our best performances so far. It was as if each added layer of production brought out things we’d missed or simply hadn’t been able to create. With a full roots-rock band, the score came to stomping, aching life.

  * * *

  At the end of the second week, Ray invited all of us to his apartment for a potluck dinner. He called it a “y’all-come,” and said it was a common occurrence back in his hometown. I found out later that it was also a common occurrence among his extended circle of friends, as he threw one every six months or so.

  I almost invited Joaquim, but at the last moment decided to go solo. Joaquim, as much as I liked him, was a gossip, and enjoyed snarking about people. I did, too, up to a point, but not about these people. They were more than coworkers now.

  I took along some potato salad, and was surprised by how many people he’d crammed into his tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a prewar walkup in Washington Heights, right around the corner from the 168th Street stop. Not just the cast, but assorted friends and partners as well, all talking and drinking while a long folding table laden with food took up the center of the room. I squeezed my salad onto a corner and felt a small, slender hand on my arm.

  “Matt,” Emily Valance said. She looked adorable, dressed up but not formal, with tasteful makeup. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

  I looked around, but didn’t see Ray. “Are you the host’s date?”

  “No, I’m the cohost,” she said with a smile I’d never seen on her before. It was quiet, content, calm, and happy. Her brittle, harsh edge that I’d always encountered before was nowhere in sight.

  “Are you drunk?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No, I’m happy. And I’m happy for you, too. Ray won’t shut up about how good you are in the show.”

  “It’s hard not to be good with his music.” I winced slightly at my momentary obliviousness, wondering if she was still sore about not being cast.

  She read my mind. “I know. I’ve heard it many times. And there wasn’t really a part for me in it. Now I’m just looking forward to opening night.”

  Ray appeared from the crowd, slipped an arm around Emily’s waist, and kissed her on the cheek. “Hey-there, honeybear.” To me he said, “Hey, Matt, glad you could make it. Not sick of hanging out with us?”

  “This is the most fun I’ve ever had doing a show,” I said sincerely.

  “I’m glad to hear that. Hey, sweet pea, do you think we need to steer people toward the table?”

  Emily checked the time on her phone. “I think so.”

  Ray let out a loud whistle, and everyone turned toward him. “Hey, y’all, we better scootch up to the trough.”

  There were murmurs of confusion at this.

  “What he means,” Emily said, “is that it’s time to eat.”

  “I reckon that’s what I said, isn’t it?” Ray deadpanned, and we all laughed.

  Emily looked at me. “I’m learning to speak hillbilly, can you believe it?”

  “You still look at me funny when I ask for the clicker, though,” Ray said.

  To my puzzled look, she said, “The remote for the TV.”

  We found seats in the eclectic collection of chairs around the table. I ended up in a folding one with duct-taped padding and a tendency to squeak embarrassingly if I shifted my weight. Ray, at the head of the table, stood up and tapped his beer bottle with his knife. “Y’all, I want to say something ’fore we start. Is that okay?”

  We murmured assent. The way Emily looked up at Ray reminded me of how Nancy Reagan used to beam at Ronnie, as if he generated the light she needed to survive. If you’d told me two weeks ago I’d ever see her acting like that, I would’ve said you were crazy, and to tell you the truth, it was a little unsettling.

  “I invited you here because, where I come from, family is super-important,” Ray continued. “I have a sister, a dozen uncles and aunts”—he pronounced the word ants—“and more cousins than you could fit in this room. But as I’m pretty sure most of you can understand, none of them ‘get’ me. They didn’t understand what I wanted out of life, or why I thought it was important. I mean, not a one of ’em has been to a play that wasn’t put on at the high school.”

  I understood that, for sure. Although my father was surprisingly supportive, both when I came out and when I said I wanted to be a dancer and then an actor, my mother still thought it was phase I’d grow out of. And my grandparents simply stopped acknowledging that I was part of the family. I became “the weird one,” which was their code for “the gay one.”

  “So I sort of gave up that family when I came to New York,” he went on, “and I’ve been okay with that. But sometimes, you just need someone to look when you point at something, you know? You need someone to laugh at your jokes, or cry with you when you’re sad. That’s what family does, right? And I haven’t really had anything to fill that hole since. But those of you working on the show, and the ones who come around here to pick-and-grin, and the ones who just go out of your way to say hi and let me know I’m your friend … I ain’t exaggerating when I say you’ve become my family.”

  We all tapped on our drinks or plates with our silverware in response.

  “And I’d like to say something special to the cast and crew of Chapel of Ease. Without y’all … I mean, people that have lived nowhere but in my head now walk and talk and sing and dance right in front of me. And some of you are no doubt tired of me talking when you wa
nt to be eating,” he added with a chuckle. “But before we dig into the goodies, I just wanted to thank all of you for bringing my people to life.”

  We all raised our glasses in response, a few said, “Hear, hear,” and I even heard sniffles around me. When he sat down, Emily leaned over and gave Ray a quick kiss.

  Ray caught my eye and winked. And in that moment, it really did feel like family.

  * * *

  About eleven, I decided to call it an evening. The wine had made me loose, and I knew from experience that bad decisions lay in my immediate future if I didn’t stop now. I had just found Emily to tell her good-bye when the power went out.

  We all stood or sat immobile, waiting to see if it would come back on. “Somebody didn’t pay their electric bill,” came a singsong taunt. Through the window we saw that the apartments across the way still had electricity, but a quick check of the hallway outside showed it was the whole building, not just Ray’s apartment.

  When it was clear that the power wouldn’t come back on right away, the room filled with the glow of cell phones as people began to text and post about it. A few people fumbled around as they gathered their stuff and prepared to leave.

  “Hey, whoa, y’all,” Ray said loudly. “Emily, there’s some candles in back of the silverware drawer. We ain’t letting a little thing like no power shut us down, are we?” The strum of an acoustic guitar filled the air.

  Ray, the instrument strapped across his shoulder, walked into the center of the room. He pointed to the closet and said, “There’s another couple of guitars in there, and some drums, too. Help yourselves.” He picked away, noodling little minor chords as Emily placed candles on the windowsills.

  As the drums, mostly djembes and a couple of bongos, got passed around and the candles grew brighter, Ray said, “We got a roomful of singers here, I reckon we can amuse ourselves. Anybody else know ‘I’m Nine Hundred Miles from My Home’?”

  No one spoke up. Even by candlelight, Ray’s grin was huge.

  “What, y’all Yankees ain’t never heard of Fiddlin’ John Carson? Well, then, let me introduce you to Pickin’ Ray Parrish.”

  Something happened then, something that bound us all together in a way even two weeks’ worth of intense rehearsal had not been able to do. The air in the room grew still, and even the candles stopped flickering. Drummers found the rhythm and accompanied him. As my eyes adjusted, I watched people lean slowly forward, wanting to be closer to the music even though Ray was near enough for most of them to touch. And no one used their phone to make a video, preserving the sanctity of the moment.

  There was something in Ray’s voice, too, an ache that I’d never heard there before. Or for that matter, anywhere else. As he sang about the distance between himself and his home, I felt the distance in my own heart. And, as I looked around, I saw that everyone else did, too.

  When he finished, we all applauded. “All right, I ain’t the Bon Jovi, now,” he said, his drawl growing stronger. “Somebody else pick something, and we’ll sing it.”

  So for the next two hours, that’s what we did. We jammed. Ray passed the guitar around, and I took a turn on one of the drums. A neighbor from the floor above stopped by with his saxophone and things got a little jazzy. We sang Broadway tunes, popular songs from the ’90s and ’00s, and songs from our show. No one came by to complain about the noise. By the time the lights came back on at 3 A.M., we were exhausted, and elated, and never wanted the night to end. But of course, it had to.

  Emily kissed my cheek as I left. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Ray told me he asked you about me. You could’ve told him all the shitty stories about how I behaved, but you didn’t. So thank you.”

  “If you really want to thank me, you can get him to tell you what’s buried in the chapel.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Like I haven’t tried. He said he’d tell me after opening night.”

  “That’s what he told us, too.” I waved at Ray, who’d been cornered by two slightly tipsy cast members explaining in great detail why he was so awesome. “Good night, Emily. Thank Ray for a lovely evening, will you?”

  On the walk to the subway, I whistled and danced, not worrying or caring that someone might come out of the shadows and decide to beat the shit out of me for it. I felt invincible.

  * * *

  The next Monday found Jason, Cassandra, and me in a nearby dance studio with Stella the choreographer. The too-small room smelled of disinfectant, and the mirrors on the wall were stained and cloudy with age. Stella had a three-foot-square piece of wood propped against her thigh, and as we watched, she let it topple over to the floor. The bang as it struck was like a shot. “Everybody awake now? Good. This is what you’ll be dancing on.”

  “There’s only that much of the stage open?” Jason asked. We still hadn’t seen the set, only cardboard cutouts representing the chapel, but I thought we had more room than that.

  “No, you misunderstand me,” Stella said, stepping onto the board. “You’ll be dancing on this exact board, or one very much like it. It’s a kind of clog dancing they have in the mountains. They bring these boards along, throw them down wherever they happen to be, and dance on them.”

  The three of us exchanged looks. This was new.

  Stella, in tap shoes, began to move. “It’s called flatfooting. The idea is to raise your feet as little as possible off the board. It’s quieter than real clogging, and you don’t flop your legs around like you do in buck dancing.”

  She wasn’t kidding: her feet barely moved. Yet we could tell from the tapping that she was dancing. I’d never seen, or attempted anything like this, and Jason voiced the same immediate concern I had.

  “Will anybody be able to tell we’re dancing? Because it doesn’t look like much.”

  Before she could answer, Ray came in, carrying an instrument case. “Sorry I’m late, Stella. Have I missed anything?”

  “Just showing them what we’re doing.”

  “Great,” he said with a big grin. He dragged a folding chair away from the wall and put the case on it. He took out a banjo, put the strap over his shoulder, and said, “Ready, Stella?”

  “When you are, Ray.”

  Ray plucked and turned a tuning peg. “Hey, Stella, know why a banjo is better than a guitar?”

  “They burn longer,” Stella deadpanned.

  Ray let out a cackle of a laugh, then played a lively tune I didn’t recognize. Stella started to dance. It reminded me at first of Irish dancing, the way her upper body stayed mostly immobile while her legs from the knees down did all the work. But it was also very different: she actually watched her feet, something I was taught at an early age to never, ever do.

  “Can you read music?” she asked Ray.

  “Not enough to hurt my playing,” he said back.

  After a few moments, Ray said, “Hey, what’s the difference between a frog and a banjo player?”

  “Beats me, Ray.”

  “A frog might get a gig.” He looked at us. “Y’all got no idea what a frog gig is, do you?”

  We shook our heads, having no idea how we should respond to all this.

  Stella continued to dance as she said, “Hey, Ray, what do you call a guy who hangs out with a bunch of musicians?”

  “I don’t know, Stella. What?”

  “A banjo player.”

  Jason barked out a laugh, then caught himself. Cassandra tossed her hair and giggled.

  “Hey, Stella, you know why all these banjo jokes are so dumb?”

  “Why’s that, Ray?”

  “So dancers can understand ’em.” He grinned at us, and winked.

  He finished with a flourish, and so did she, leaping up and landing on the floor beside the board. We applauded and whistled. Ray said, “Hoo-ee! That was great!”

  “Did you just use a hog call on me?” Stella said, and wiped sweat from her eyes.

  “That’s soo-ee,” Ray said. We realized that they’d worked up
this whole schtick for our benefit.

  Ray took off the banjo. “So what do y’all think?”

  We exchanged looks; then Cassandra said, “It looks easy enough. I mean, not easy, but like something we can learn.”

  “Do we have to do the jokes, too?” Jason asked.

  “We’ll see if they work in the show,” Stella said. “The main thing is to learn to do this the way the real dancers do. I’ll send you links to videos to watch. But for now, let’s get to practicing.”

  “Wait,” Ray interjected. “Can I show you something first?”

  The tension in the room immediately ratcheted up: composers didn’t upstage choreographers. None of us had ever seen anything even remotely like this before, and braced for the expected explosion of defended territories and union demarcations. But Stella magnanimously said, “Sure,” and stepped off the board.

  Ray took her place. “The thing is, when I’ve seen the best dancers in my hometown do this, it’s looked like water dropping into a puddle. It’s graceful, but it has impact. Now, I know Stella probably told you you ain’t supposed to move your feet off the board much, and that’s true. But what you do move, you make it count. Like this.”

  He let out a deep breath and then sang the old rockabilly standard “Tutti Frutti.” And as he sang, he danced.

  What he did wasn’t hard; it certainly posed no challenge for me, after nearly fifteen years of regular dancing. But it felt exactly the way he described it, like water falling into a puddle. His boots—it was the first time I noticed he wore black cowboy boots—tapped and slid, barely rising an inch from the board, and created a noise like the flowing of a river. And it looked like water, because even though his upper body stayed essentially still, and he looked down at his feet just as Stella had done, everything flowed. He finished with a flourish on the final, “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bam-boom!”