Wild Roses

by Deb Caletti

  Mom’s unwillingness to get involved may have also had to do with her own experience of her parent’s divorce. Thirty-two years after the end of their marriage, she still can’t tell one of her parents that she’s visiting the other, or she’ll be punished with coldness, hurt, and upset. Thirty-two years later, and her mother still refers to her father’s wife as That Tramp.

  “I thought you’d like to know. Jesus, Mom.”

  “Good. Thanks for telling me. You’re not the Parent Trap type anyway. What was the name of that actress? Started with an H. Heather. Hayley! Mills. God, how’d I remember that? You, girl, are not Hayley Mills. I’d like to see them put you in a remake. Disney’d ditch the hemp bracelet. Don’t you think? Too edgy.”

  “I hope squirrels dig up your tulip bulbs,” I said.

  She socked my arm. “You know how much I respect you. I like your hemp bracelet.”

  Respect—that was what was lacking in the other member of our household. Dino didn’t respect me, or my mother, either, for that matter. Or anyone who wasn’t his own perfect self. See, Dino hadn’t always acted crazy. For a while, he was just plain arrogant. Dino was fluent in criticism, as generous in spirit as those people who keep their porch lights off all Halloween. If my mom was dressed up to go out and looking beautiful, he’d point out her pimple. If you opened the wrong end of the milk carton, he’d make you feel you were incapable to the point of needing to be institutionalized. After I’d bought this jacket with fur around the collar and cuffs at Old Stuff, Dino had pointedly told me that people who tried to make some statement of individuality were still only conventional among those of their group.

  “I’m not trying to make a statement,” I said. I was trying to keep the sharpness out of my voice, but it was like trying to hold water in your hands—my tone was seeping through every crack and opening possible.

  “I didn’t say you were. Did I say you were? It was a commentary on dress and group behavior,” he said in his Italian accent. He chewed a bite of chicken. He was a loud, messy eater. You could hear the chicken in there smacking around against his tongue. His words were offhand, casually bragging that they meant more to me than they did to him. “By avoiding conventions, one falls into other conventions.” He plucked a bit of his shirt to indicate someone’s clothing choice. I felt the ugly curl of anger starting in my stomach.

  “I’m sorry, I just don’t want to be one of those See My Thong girls who bat their eyelashes at boys, rah rah rah, wearing a demoralizing short skirt and bending over so a crowd sees their butt,” I said. “That’s convention.” Anger made my face get hot.

  “Be who you like. I was simply making an observation. You don’t need to bite me with your feminist teeth.”

  Honestly, I don’t know how my mother didn’t poison his coffee. Certainly I wondered what the hell she was thinking by loving him. If this is what could happen to a supposedly charming, romantic guy, then no, thank you. And this was before everything happened, even. Before Dino’s craziness became like a roller coaster car, rising to unbelievable heights, careening down with frightening speed; before he started teaching Ian Waters; before he began composing again and preparing for his comeback after a three-year dry spell. But in spite of what must have been perfect attendance in asshole classes, Dino was one of those people who got under your skin because you cared what they thought when you wished you didn’t. So after that conversation I did the only thing I could. I wore the coat the next day, too. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I liked it either. It was vaguely Wilma Flintstone and Saber Tooth Tiger. Little hairs fell into my Lucky Charms.

  Because I wanted his approval and hated that fact, I did what I could to make sure I didn’t get it at all. One of those things you should be in therapy for. Before I met Ian Waters, for example, I had no interest in music, which was an act of will living in a house where my mother was a cellist and my stepfather a prominent violinist and composer. But Ian Waters changed that about me, and everything else, too. Before I met Ian the music I liked best was something that sounded, if Dino was right, like your mother hunting for the meat thermometer in the drawer of kitchen utensils. My interest was in astronomy—science, something that was mine and that was definite and exact. I felt that the science of astronomy existed within certain boundaries that were firm and logical. If you think about how vast the universe is, this gives you some idea of how huge and wild I thought the arts were.

  After three years of living with Dino Cavalli, I had had enough of people of passion. Passion seemed dangerous. I’d seen the tapes of his performances, the way he had his chin to his violin as if he were about to consume it, the way his black hair would fly out as he played, reaching crescendo, eyes closed. It made you feel like you needed to hold on to something. I’d never felt that kind of letting go before. It all seemed one step away from some ancient tribal possession. And that crescent scar on his neck. That brown gash that had burned into him from hours and hours and hours of the violin held against his skin. He had played until the instrument had made a permanent mark, had become part of his own body. If Chuck and Bunny are right, and everyone should hunger for life and its banquet, I would rather have the appetite of my neighbor Courtney and her two brothers, over Dino’s. All Courtney and her brothers hungered for in life was a box of Junior Mints and MTV, fed straight through the veins. Dino, he could inhale an emotional supermarket and still be ravenous.

  Right then, the only thing I was hungry for was to have Dino Cavalli, this flaming, dying star, out of my universe. It was the only thing I would dare be passionate about. That is, until Ian Waters veered into our driveway on his bike, his tires scrunching in the gravel, scaring Otis, the neighbors’ cat, who ran across the grass like his tail was on fire. Otis was running for his life. In a way, that was when I began finally running to mine.

  Edgar Allan Poe watched his mother bleed from the mouth as she died from consumption, as he and his two siblings lay in bed beside her. Hemingway committed suicide with the same gun his father had used to kill himself. Lord Byron’s father had an incestuous relationship with his own sister, and his mother’s relatives were a toxic mix of the depressed and suicidal. When you look at the families of crazy geniuses, you start to understand where their pain comes from. You start to get their need to paint it away, write it away, compose it away.

  But Dino Cavalli’s childhood in Sabbotino Grappa (population 53) sounded like one of those lush movies filmed in hazy golden-yellows with a sappy soundtrack that makes you cry even though you know it’s just music manipulation. It sounded close to perfect. Reading The Early Years snapped me right up from Seabeck, the island where we live, just a ferryboat ride from Seattle. It lifted me from the salty, wet air and the evergreens and the cold waters of the Puget Sound, and landed me in the warm orange tones of a Tuscan hill town. I would open the shutters in the morning, said Antonia Gillette, wife of town baker Peter Gillette. And I would see little Dino walking to school in his white shirt, holding his mother’s hand. I remember the smell of the lemon trees, and the smell of the baking just done, coming up warm through the floorboards. Peter would hurry out to give a frittelle to Dino, and one to his mother, no charge. Always no charge. He should have charged the mother, but she was too pretty. And the father—ah. Handsome, like from a magazine. And a beautiful voice. Dino, we all knew he was special. His hair shined; his fingers were magic on his little violin. We knew he would bring us fame. I heard him from the open window, Grazie, Zio. That’s what he called Peter. Uncle.5

  “It’s too good to be true,” my father said once. “You mark my words. If it sounds like a duck and looks like a duck and smells like a duck, it is a duck.”

  “Quack,” I said.

  The stories of Dino’s childhood glowed like firelight or radiation, one or the other. You could see those townspeople sitting at their kitchen tables, remembering a time past, smelling of wine and salami, a thick, wrinkled hand grabbing the air to emphasize a point. You grew to love those old Italians, and that ragged tow
n with its winding streets and good intentions, more than you liked Dino himself. I did anyway. The only real nasty thing that was said came from Karl Lager, Sabbotino Grappa grocer. The child was a monster. Spoiled and sneaky. He stole candy from me. Later, cigarettes. Slipped them up the sleeve of his jacket as he looked at me and smiled. I tried to grab him, took off that jacket, but nothing was there. Born of the devil, and any idiot could see it.

  Karl Lager is a drunk and a bastard, Antonia Gillete said. He’d accuse the pope of stealing.

  Karl Lager had no business in Sabbotino Grappa, Peter Gillette agreed. He is a German, after all.6

  You imagined a childhood like that creating a genius. You did not imagine those two beautiful and perfect parents and the adoration of a village creating a Prozac-ed pit bull.

  “Is Mr. Cavalli home?” Siang Chibo said the day that I first saw Ian Waters. She was whispering, following me around the house as I dropped my backpack on a kitchen chair and looked around in the fridge for something that might change my life. If you want a good picture of Siang Chibo, imagine that little boy in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that kid that rides around with him in the runaway mine car. She’s not much taller, and has that same squeaky voice—“Indy, Indyl” But Siang’s surprised me a few times. For example, she and her father love to watch monster trucks on the weekends. For another example, she’s a fierce flag football player. I once saw her nearly knock out Zane Thompson’s perfect teeth as she reached up to catch a pass in tenth-grade PE. Zane had to rush to a mirror to see if he was still beautiful. Go Siang.

  “Dino’s at the symphony offices,” I said. I didn’t want to let Siang down, but the truth was, I had no idea where Dino could be. He might have been at Safeway, for all I knew. Being a violinist was not a regular nine-to-five job, I guess—in fact, lately he didn’t seem to have any job at all except for being famous and giving interviews about his past glory days. He gave one concert that I knew of, traveled to Chicago for it with Mom. I stayed with Dad a few extra days, days that were mostly spent trying to talk him out of searching the Web for every nasty comment or review about the event. He even printed out one Chicago Tribune article and posted it to the fridge with this glittery macaroni magnet I made in preschool. RERUN PERFORMANCE BY MASTER DISAPPOINTS.

  What Dino spent most of his time doing was hiring and firing new managers. Since he ditched William Tiero three-plus years ago, he just went through these poor guys like you go through a bag of M&M’s when you’ve got your period. Consume, and on to the next. One of the first exposures I had to Dino’s temper was when we had all just moved in together and this manager got booted. I heard only a part of the enraged conversation before I left and walked down toward the water, went far enough so that the cries of the seagulls and gentle voices on the beach—Olivia! Roll up your pants so they don’t get wet— replaced Dino’s shouts. The few pathetic imaginings I was trying to hold onto about a stepfather—new beginnings, new adventures, new life—were instantly shot to shit and replaced with a deep distrust of the word new. It is bad enough to be suddenly (even if it is not so sudden, it feels sudden) living with a male stranger who sleeps in bed with your mother and eats off of your forks and who farts with an unearned degree of familiarity. But when the male stranger yells loud enough to shake your baby pictures in their frames, too, then, God, where have all the boarding schools gone?

  Anyway, almost six months before Ian Waters first came, Dino got this new manager, Andrew Wilkowski, this skinny guy with music notes on his tie. It was practically a long-term relationship. Andrew Wilkowski flattered Dino’s ego, talked to him about writing again. I heard them when Andrew came over for dinner. They could take it slowly, he told Dino. But the world was ready. Dino was ready. I’m sure Andrew Wilkowski only had staying power because his ass-kissing skills were so perfected, his lips were chapped.

  If I had to create a job description based on Dino’s behavior before he really went nuts, I’d say being a violinist and a composer meant spending some days in bed, some holed up in your office, occasionally playing music and stopping over and over again, and storming around the house as your wife walked on eggshells. Oh, and seeing your psychiatrist. Mom said this was necessary for Dino to deal with the stresses of his work, but to keep that information private for the sake of Dino’s reputation. It was okay to look like a tyrant, I guess, but not to talk with Freud about what your id did. Basically, a genius composer/violinist meant being a tantrum-throwing toddler with an expensive musical instrument. My mother should have given him the spaghetti pot to pound on with a wooden spoon instead.

  I wouldn’t tell Siang any of those things, though. I could have destroyed him in an instant for her, but it seemed too cruel. To her, not to him. “Apple?” I offered. Mom was on a diet kick. I hated when the adults in my life went on a diet kick. There was never anything good to eat in the house. I hoped Dino was at Safeway.

  “Okay,” Siang said. She took the apple, but didn’t eat it. She put it in her sweatshirt pocket. I imagined a Cavalli Collection—empty TP rolls from our bathroom, pebbles from the insides of Dino’s shoes left by the front door, William’s squeaky rubber hamburger dog toy that had vanished without a trace. “Can we go in his office?”

  “I worry about you, Siang, I really do.”

  I took the key to Dino’s office out of the sugar canister that was empty of sugar. Mom put it there because she was sure that Dino, in a distracted state, was going to one day lock himself out. That there was a key at all should tell you that Dino would have gotten furious had he known we were in his study, but I couldn’t let Siang down. I had a little problem saying no to people with eyes as pleading as in those ads FEED A STARVING CHILD FOR AS LITTLE AS ONE DOLLAR A DAY. She practically left offerings on his desk blotter.

  The room always felt cool when you first opened the door, cool and musty There was a fireplace in that room, though it was never lit except when guests came over. The fire showed off the room for what it was—one of the best in the house, with big windows that had a peek of the waters of the sound, if you stood on your toes and looked high over the neighbor’s hydrangea bush. His desk was dark walnut, and a mess—papers and books, mail and clippings, piles of sheet music. There were three clocks on it, only one which you could hear ticking, sounding like a metronome, and an old coffee mug with a ring of dried brown on the bottom. Assorted objects lay among the clutter—a robin’s egg, a golf tee (Dino was not a sportsman), a cigar box (Dino did not smoke cigars). There was a paperweight with a white dandelion puff saved perfectly in glass, and a spare pair of Dino’s glasses worn sometime in the seventies, if you judged by their size and thick black frames. Above the desk was a painting of white flowers against a dreary green background, and in the corner of the room sat a globe that always settled toward the side revealing the African continent. An antique music stand, ornate silver, delicately curved, stood in another corner, and there was a bookcase, too, filled with Cavalli biographies, volumes of music theory, history, and art, and one of those enormous dictionaries.

  Siang strolled by the desk, her fingertips lightly touching the edge. She looked up at the painting, tilted her head to the side and examined it for a moment. Her eyes moved away to a frame facedown on the desk. She took hold of the velvety frame leg, rubbed her thumb along it. “What’s this?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  Siang raised the picture carefully, the way you lift a rock when you’re not sure what’s underneath. It was an old black-and-white photo of a young man. He was standing in front of a building, a theater, maybe, as you could see a portion of a poster in glass behind him. He was beaming, hands in his pockets.

  “That’s William Tiero,” I said. “At least I think it is.” I squinched my eyes, looked closer. “Same beaky nose. A much younger William Tiero. He still had hair. I never knew the guy ever had hair.” I chuckled.

  “William Tiero became Dino Cavalli’s agent shortly after Cavalli won the Tchaikovsky competition in Russia when h
e was nineteen,” Siang said.

  “Jesus, you give me the creeps sometimes,” I said. “Put that back down.”

  “They say it was a partnership made in heaven.” Siang set the photo on the desk the way it was.

  According to Mom, William Tiero had been dismissed no fewer than five times before the final break a little more than three years ago. I could only imagine what that firing must have been like. Before Andrew W. came on the scene, the last poor manager that was booted got a wineglass thrown in the direction of his head. I saw the delicate pieces of it, sitting on top of the garbage can, and felt the silence that lay heavy as a warning in the house. I remember the drops of red wine on the wall, looking as if a crime had been committed there. If being fired five times by Dino was a partnership made in heaven, I wondered what a bumpy working relationship would look like.

  “Siang, really. You need a hobby or something. Crochet a beer-can hat. Learn fly-fishing. Whatever.”

  “The pursuit of understanding genius is always a worthwhile endeavor,” Siang squeaked in her Temple of Doom voice.

  “Did some famous person say that?”

  “No. I just did.”

  “Shit, deprogramming necessary. We are going to walk down to 7-Eleven. We are going to have a Slurpee. Corn Nuts. Or one of those scary revolving hot dogs. We are going to take an Auto Trader magazine, just because they’re free.”

  “I hear the door,” Siang said.

  I froze. Listened. “You’re right. Damn it, get out of here.”

  We hurried out. My heart was pounding like crazy, and my hand was shaky on the key as I locked the door again.

  “Cassie!”

  “It’s just Mom,” I said.

  My chest actually hurt from the relief. We walked casually into the kitchen. At least I did. God knows what Siang was doing behind me—probably putting her hands up in the air like a captured criminal in a cop show. Mom was filling a glass of water. Wisps of her hair were coming loose from her braid. “What are you doing here?” I asked. Mom was in a rehearsal period with the theater company of her current job. By the time she took the ferry home from Seattle afterward, she didn’t usually arrive until dinnertime.