Wild Roses (21 page)

Siang came over one afternoon, when they were
at their height of joint possession, Dino with his composing, Ian with his
practicing. I was worried about her being

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there, tried to get her to go home, as I was
afraid of what she might see. The day before I'd experienced the first sign in a
while that Dino was still in the throws of his illness. I had come home to the
stereo blasting, and when I turned it down Dino stormed from his office. What
are you doing? he had said. I need that on. If that prick is listening somehow,
he won't hear a thing.

Siang had practically begged to come in. When
we finally went inside, I wished right away I had held my ground. The kitchen
was a mess--filled with clutter and disgusting cigarette butts. Their snakey
stink was everywhere--in coffee cups, on the newspaper, in the sink. I cleaned
up as Siang either didn't notice or pretended not to. She had slung her backpack
to our kitchen floor, unzipped it and rifled through.

"I want to show you something," she had said.
"Something I found out."

"I don't want to hear obscure facts of Dino's
life, okay? I don't give a shit how old he was when he first rolled over." I
clanked a coffee cup against the side of the garbage can to dump the ashes,
saved it from getting cancer.

"It's not that," she said into her open
backpack.

"I don't give a shit when he first said goo
goo."

"Just wait," she said.

"He got his first chest hair at sixteen.
Whoopee."

Finally, Siang pulled a folded sheet of paper
from her backpack. She carefully flattened it out, smoothed out the creases with
her palm. "That painting. In his office. The one over his desk."

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I looked at the image. Sure enough, it was the
painting of the flowers that Dino had there, the one Siang had straightened so
carefully that day we had seen the blank pages.

"So?" I said.

"And this," Siang said. She fished around in
her backpack some more, pulled out Strings Magazine. She folded back the cover
to an interview that Dino had given, and began to read.

"'Question,'" Siang squeaked. '"Who or what was
your greatest influence?' Answer: Well, naturally it was my mother. She was a
rose. A wild rose. Beautiful because she was wild. Wild because the world gave
her too much beauty. More than could be tamed.' 'Question: Is that a good
description of you too? Beauty that cannot be tamed?' 'Answer: I wish it weren't
so. Then I could be at peace. Wearing my slippers and smoking a
pipe.'"9

"What's your point?" I asked.

"That's the name of the painting. It's called
Wild Roses. It was done by van Gogh."

"I think it should be called Ugly Flowers on
Bland Canvas," I said.

"I think it is especially
beautiful."

"Jeez, Siang. Maybe if you cross your eyes.
Maybe if you're color-blind. Or asleep."

"It's beautiful because it was one of his last
paintings.

It was done when he was at Daubignys garden,
experiencing his most intensely creative period. Right before his
suicide."

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The word hung there between us. Suicide. This
word that is usually so far away from you as to have a sense of unreality. Right
then, spoken aloud, it became as real as those ashes, as Dino's eyes searching
for villains, as my mother's hushed calls to the doctor.

Siang was trying to tell me something, I knew.
Her urgency, these clippings, were both a warning and an attempt to get me to
understand something important. I'm sorry, but it wasn't anything I cared to
hear.

I gathered the clippings, put them back inside
her pack, and zipped it closed. "It's just a stupid painting, Siang," I
said.

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CHAPTER TEN

You should have seen Ian's eyes. Dark, smeary
circles underneath, like someone had set a pair of coffee cups thoughtlessly
there without a coaster. I kissed him goodbye one day, and then put my hands in
his coat pockets. The underside of his neck was a bright, angry red from the
violin.

"Cassie, I've got to go." His tone was sharp.
He'd never been short-tempered with me before. He was such a gentle person. I
took my hands from his pockets, went inside. He called that night to apologize.
I'm just so tired. This schedule is killing me.

He wasn't the only one looking like hell.
Dino's concert was a few weeks away, and rehearsals were scheduled to begin.
According to Mom, he had two of the three pieces finished, but was still writing
the last one. Worse

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yet, he'd heard that William Tiero had taken on
a new client, the acclaimed female violinist Anna Zartarski. She'd been asked to
do the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center in New York, which would then
be shown as a PBS television special. Dino walked around in a perpetual state of
anguish. His body was there, his eyes would even look at you, but his replies
were random. He went through those horrible cigarettes like Zebe can go through
a bag of Cheetos. His paranoia was increasing, though it came in waves. I saw
him checking the caller ID repeatedly, and he asked daily about the numbers that
appeared there. That's Zehe's number, I'd say for the thousandth time. That's
Sophie's. He pelted my mother with questions about when she went out. If she'd
seen anyone hanging around. If she'd heard anything from various people who knew
William Tiero. Even if she were meeting with him herself. He looked in the paper
twice a day, the same paper, for mention of Anna Zartarski, I guess. We were
living with an astrological phenomenon--something like the comets the size of a
house that every few seconds break up in the atmosphere as they approach Earth.
Daily explosions, not quite disasters.

Irritability was going around like the flu. It
seemed like it was just as contagious. My mother had to practice now too, as
performances were coming up for the theater she was contracted with. She'd set
up in the dining room, but suddenly our house was too small. She couldn't
practice when Dino was working, so she waited until the evenings, after he'd
holed himself in their bedroom. The

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low tones of the cello were soothing after the
manic, high-strung violins I'd been hearing for weeks. The cello sounds like a
kind grandfather, while the violin is the ultimate PMS instrument.

One afternoon, I listened to Mom play for a
while as I did my homework in my room. World History had given me the sudden
craving for food that boredom can bring, and I had just gotten up to head down
to the kitchen when I heard the thud thud thud of feet on the stairs, then in
the hallway, heading for the dining room. The cello stopped.

"Am I disturbing you?" Mom asked.

"Your playing is grating on my nerves," Dino
barked. "I am trying to rest."

"You know I have to practice too." I could tell
she was on the edge of being really pissed off. Her voice gets this sound of
having walls around it.

"That is abundantly obvious," he
said.

What came next wasn't exactly silence, because
although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part
about an unhappy household--that feeling of being perched and listening, the way
an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger. Dino must have
decided to leave then, because I heard the front door open and close. His car
started up in the driveway. My heart felt sick for my mother at the blow he'd
dealt. I had Brief Fantasy Number Twelve Thousand and Four, Dino wrapped in the
heavy, partly singed dining room curtains. Rolled up like those foil-wrapped
candies, twist-tied at the end. After a few moments I went downstairs and into
the

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dining room where my mother stood, holding up
Grandfather Cello as if she'd just helped him to the bathroom. She sat back down
again in front of her stand, looked at me, and then groaned out a few notes with
her bow.

"Damn it," she said.

"That was real nice of him."

"I shouldn't say this, but you know, sometimes
he's really an asshole."

"News flash," I said.

"I keep trying to tell myself he's a sick
man."

"Yeah, but maybe if he wasn't sick, he'd just
be a healthy asshole."

"I'm tired, you know that? I'm going to become
a nun."

"Then you'd be married to Christ and he
probably wouldn't pick up his socks, either," I said.

"Really," she sighed. "A few more weeks. Four,"
she said. "He promised he'd go back on the medicine right after the
performance."

"If he doesn't crack up before
then."

"Please, Cassie. You know? Let's not do this
just now. I've got more than I can take as it is."

As I said, irritability was
everywhere.

I heard violins in my sleep. I'd actually be
dreaming and they'd be playing in the background, or they'd be the focus of the
dream, my math class playing them, say, or me performing in front of an audience
but forgetting my music. Mostly I dreamed of violins destroyed. People bashing
them, violins falling from the sky, or floating on

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the water. Thrown into the water and sinking.
We were a month away from that horrible concert. Just two weeks from Ian's
audition.

I began to shut out the sound of those violins
whenever they were practicing. Even Ian. What was my only connection to him
became a hated sound. The violin was the object of his possession, in the way a
bottle of wine possesses an alcoholic before it destroys him. I put on
earphones, or got into the car and drove when I would hear the instrument. I
would stand out with my telescope under a sky too clouded to see a thing. I
would slam the door before I left so that my mother would know how angry I was
at where our lives had gone. I felt sorry for her and her obvious unhappiness,
but then my pity would just flee the scene and I'd get pissed. I blamed her for
bringing us there, for being taken in by genius and fame and some twisted form
of love, blinded, so that her own well-being and my well-being had been drowned
out by the sound of that music. So, slam--that's how I felt about it all. Let
the windows rattle with my fury.

The next time Ian came for his lesson he was
wearing his dark coat and his scarf. When he came inside I saw that the scarf
had slipped down so that one side was falling down the back of his coat,
prevented from hitting the ground only by one small end piece that was doing its
desperate best to hang on. It was just luck that kept it from dropping away from
him on the way over, lost in a juniper bush somewhere, carted off by some
neighborhood dog, dropped on the muddy street and run over by

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the tires of a telephone company truck. Okay if
I'm sounding a bit dramatic here, it's because I was feeling a bit dramatic. It
was symbolic to me, that scarf I gave him slipping and falling, the carelessness
he showed in letting it happen. The way it could be lost without him
noticing.

He was already in practice mode, so I doubted
he even realized that when I pushed past him that day and went outside it was
with the same kind of fury and helplessness I slammed doors with. No one was
paying attention. No one was seeing. Our lives were careening downhill, gaining
the momentum that only self-destruction has, and no one was even trying to hold
on.

My scarf anger turned to surprise when I saw
Chuck and Bunny in the Datsun parked at the curb. For some reason I pictured Ian
on his bike, the scarf dropping off behind him as he rode on, oblivious to the
near miss of it getting caught in the spokes. I hadn't pictured it slipping off
in Chuck's backseat, lying there for a nice ride around town amid a couple of
old coffee cups, a pair of muddy tennis shoes, a two-disc compilation of Donna
Summer hits and some library book titled Planning the English Garden.

I poked my head in the open window of the car.
"Don't you guys ever work?" I asked. "Hey, Lassie," Chuck said.

"There's a strike at the Dairigold plant,"
Bunny said. He was unwrapping the foil from a cheeseburger. "That's where we
work. Anyway, I got some money tucked aside."

"We both got our massage therapist licenses,
but

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there're not many openings here," Chuck said.
"Jesus, Bun, eat over your napkin. You see why I don't let him eat and drive?
It's a hazard."

"These aren't my clean jeans," Bunny said with
his mouth full. He plucked the spilled bit of pickle and lettuce from his lap
and popped that in too.

"Massage therapists? You're kidding." That
could scare the crap out of you, lying there on some table with only terry cloth
for protection and seeing one of them walk in. You'd scream with fear that you
were about to be taken hostage and made to wear leather pants and a shirt with
some biker chick on it that said built to ride.

"The healing power of touch can work miracles,"
said Bunny through the cheeseburger. At least I think that's what he said. It
could have been "The strength in my hands could break you in half." Or maybe "I
should never be allowed to touch anyone because the back of my Harley-Davidson
T-shirt says if you can read this, the bitch fell off.