That Magic Mischief (8 page)

Obviously, the statute of limitations as regarded the public mourning of ex-relationships had expired. Obviously, she was meant to adhere to some sort of schedule of recovery not of her making.
Obviously
, she was just a big fat baby and nobody cared about her, or about her
feelings
.

“Okay, Walsh, cut it out!” She leaped out of bed, then briskly made it up, straightened her shoes to run in neat pairs at the foot of her bed, threw yesterday’s clothes into her laundry bag — and then caught sight of herself in the mirror above her dresser. Still a little on the wan side, hair a bit lifeless, but it all showed in her eyes, eyes that despite the flashes of anger and the blur of activity, still looked like two little blue pools of hurt and sadness and despair. She touched her reflection, barely recognizing herself —
Who am I, who am I, who am I?

She got back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.

If only she could sell her book. If only she had an agent. If only her blog would hit the big time. If only she didn’t have to pick up the odd sub-editing job, the occasional review, the random feature. She cared about history, not the dry, dull kind, but the kind that was about people who did interesting things in interesting times. If only her areas of expertise — artists, musicians, actors — weren’t so oversaturated. All she needed was the
one
break, the
one
subject, and she’d be minted. She cared about what people did, and how they did things, and the things they made, and she knew she was good at it, at translating their actions into words —

Maybe I just suck
, she whined to herself. “Maybe I am, quite simply, a crappy writer and a crappy girlfriend and a crappy person.”
Which is why I have friends that
suck.

Lorna and her magical snickerdoodles. Bitch. Just to show her, Annabelle had gone and planted the hazelnut, liberating a long-dead fern from one of her prettiest pots, a hand-thrown, hand-glazed terracotta she’d picked up at a Celtic Arts Fayre, a beautiful bronze and green thingie covered in spirals and whatnot.

Ha. And Maria Grazia — “Now, sweetie, maybe you could let us know exactly what you mean by the phrase ‘out of thin air’. Do you mean that it is made, possibly, out of air, air that is thin, right?” Annabelle mocked MG’s thick Italian accent, and then felt terrible.

“Okay, get up
now
, Annabelle,” she said, “Get up up up up up and out of this bed and send out a query, write a post, get some crappy freelance gig, think positive! Gogogogogogoooooo — Go!”

She lay unmoving, staring at her one true friend, the ceiling: always willing to listen, always there. She closed her eyes, knowing that it wouldn’t be offended, and ran through her mental Rolodex, trying to come up with some names of people she’d worked for, trying to remember who might be busy enough to throw her a bone. She’d fallen out of touch with most of them. How’d that happened? Well … in the last year or so, if she was being honest, she
had
kind of blown off a few things, not returned calls, because, well … she and Wilson had always seemed to be away whenever a gig came up, or on their way out of town, or else, you know, they’d been busy with stuff … Then Wilson would talk her out of her self-chastisement and say it didn’t matter, and why should she take other people’s dregs. And what was the point of all this commercial stuff? She didn’t want to be a hired gun, he had insisted, there wasn’t much of a future in that, didn’t she want to be a serious writer anyway, it was certainly more legitimate cachet to be literary rather than commercial —

“Wait. A. Minute.” Annabelle sat up suddenly. Wait just one minute. That had been her idea … right? Literary historical fiction as opposed to straight biography, so much sexier and trendier and … She fisted her fingers in the hair at her temples. “It was my idea, wasn’t it? It was — oh my God. But. No, I said — I thought I decided —
no way
.” Whose decision was it?

Was she
that
far gone?

Annabelle finally got out of bed for the day. Shuffling her feet into her plush bear foot slippers, she decided that she couldn’t possibly investigate that train of thought without a serious infusion of fennel tea to ensure clarity.

Wow.

Way too much excitement for one morning.

She opened the door that led to her ‘living room’ — and gasped.

Overnight, a plant had grown in the pot in which Annabelle had sown the hazelnut, if grown is the proper word. No, on second thought, it didn’t even come close. A growing plant implies quiet, peacefulness, a gradual unfolding of branch and flower.

Overnight, a plant had
exploded
out of the pot in which Annabelle had planted the hazelnut.

“Holy shit!” shouted Annabelle.

She couldn’t take it in; an entire corner of her ‘dining room’ had been shanghaied by a twisting, gnarled, and enormous … tree, practically. If not for the large pink flowers that seemed to float above the knotty branches, the thing would look quite sinister indeed. It seemed to be swaying slightly, and dreading the mess if it actually toppled over, Annabelle inched over and propped the heavier bits over the back of a chair. The plant vibrated a bit at her touch, and seemed to send out a slight, airy hum as she arranged it. She lowered herself into the second of her two chairs, and stared.

Somehow, the pot was still intact despite the fact that, in theory, the roots of the … thing should have been as great in size as the plant itself. No horticulturalist, Annabelle at least knew that much, that the roots of trees went as far down into the earth as the tree itself shot up toward the sky … or something.

She cautiously extended a finger and lightly stroked one of the branches, and the result was a sound akin to delicate wind chimes. Oddly enough — as if things weren’t already odd enough — despite the fact that plant ranged up toward the ceiling and completely filled its corner of her ‘dining room’, it didn’t seem to be blocking light coming in from the window; always low lighted at best, the room actually seemed a bit brighter.

Annabelle thought longingly of a cigarette. As if it had read her mind, the plant quivered in distaste. “Great,” said Annabelle. “Not only enchanted, but judgmental. I’ll smoke if I damn well please!” Branches began to wave in reaction, and Annabelle scooted her chair back a bit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bough slowly edging a pack of Marlboro Lights toward the main body of the plant. “Shit,” Annabelle leaped up from her chair and backed up against the door to her flat. “This is getting too weird, even for me.”

The phone rang, and Annabelle was tempted to let the machine get it, but somehow the handset landed on the floor. As she picked it up, out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of branches waving a bit as if it had knocked the phone off its cradle. Annabelle took a deep breath, and answered without checking the caller ID.

“Hello?”

“Well, hi there! It’s Kelli callin’!” Her gushy Southern accent oozed down the line.

“Hey, Kell. How are things?”

“Oh, I’m just fine. But,” pause, lowering of voice, sympathetic. “How are
you
?”

Annabelle stared at the plant, and then turned her back on it.

“Oh, you know.”

“Yes, I do. I do know. Oh, Annabelle.”

“But I’m getting back out there, work-wise, I mean, sending off to the agents.”

“Good for you! Keep busy with work, that’s what I always say.”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Well, as to that! I’ve got a new show about to get off the ground, and I really need someone to develop the website for me. I’d do it myself, but I’m producing and directing, and gosh, I can’t do everything myself!”

“Yeah, I don’t know, Kell —
ow
!” She turned to look at the plant, which was quivering slightly in its pot.

Kelli’s molasses voice exuded solicitude. “You okay, sugar?”

“I just — something — hit me on the … head. Yeah, okay, okay, I’ll do it.”

“That’s so great! And maybe you could look at the script?”

“Uh, screenplays used to be more my thing, Kell — ”

Bright tinkling laughter made Annabelle wince. “Oh, close enough! Listen, my little brain trust is meeting tonight, downtown. You can come on down, can’t you?”

“Yeah, got nothing else going on,” Annabelle muttered as she put down the phone. She could have sworn that the plant folded in upon itself, smugly.

• • •

Trudging up the stairs of a restaurant so expensive she was surprised she was let in without showing the maitre d’ the contents of her wallet, Annabelle wondered, again, what the hell she was doing. Being gently bullied by Kelli was one thing, but being rather more tenaciously bullied by a plant was another entirely. She paused on a landing, not so much to catch her breath as to catch her … spirit. A roomful of strangers wasn’t exactly something to look forward to. The fact that these strangers had all been inveigled into doing something they probably didn’t have the time to do added another layer of lunacy to the whole mess.

She felt like she owed Kelli, but she didn’t really, not in material terms. An editor of the popular and influential
NYC Weekly
, the city’s most highly regarded alternative newspaper, Kelli had basically, for all intents and purposes, been keeping Annabelle solvent for the last few years.
I
do
the work, it’s a fair exchange
, she scolded herself. But there was this thing about Kelli, this eternal feeling of obligation, like the exchange could never be even-handed, because wasn’t Kelli
so
thoughtful,
always
thinking of Annabelle,
ensuring
that her name stayed out there — whether she wanted it to or not?

And publishing didn’t pay, as everyone knew, but nobody knew where Kelli’s money came from. Not her everyday capital, but the flow that allowed her to finance her thrice-yearly forays into theater, video, art installation … just about any idea Kelli had, she executed via a decidedly un-anorexic cash cow.

I’m outta here
, Annabelle thought just as Kelli appeared at the top of the next flight. “There you are, sugar! We’re all just waiting for you!”

Annabelle smiled wanly up at the vision that had appeared on the landing, turned out in a severely tailored oyster-colored designer suit. Unlike the majority of New York females of ‘a certain age’, Kelli actively cultivated a settled and matronly air, mitigated by expensive clothes and unmistakably real baubles. Her ash-blonde hair looked entirely natural, and her seemingly innocent ice-blue gaze was bracketed by barely discernible lines. In spite of all this — the Ladies Who Lunch suit, the limpid gaze, and the lazy drawl, Annabelle knew that if she so much as made a move to leave, Kelli would be on her like a puma on an antelope.

She meekly followed Kelli into the exclusive eatery’s ritzy private dining room.

Head down, she charged toward the only empty place, uncomfortably squeezing her bags between the table and her lap. She nodded to what looked like several ethereal dancers across the table, and sneaked a glance down the long — Maria Grazia!

She raised her eyebrows slightly.
What are you doing here.

MG flicked her lashes at Kelli.

Annabelle waggled her head a shade.
Thought you were immune …

Maria Grazia lightly rubbed her thumb over the fingertips of her right hand.
Amex.

Annabelle smirked and sat back, and began arranging the tools of her trade on the table. She knew that Kelli liked to get business out of the way of the enjoyment of not only the food, but also of her own particular brand of bonding, which involved the amplification of everyone’s accomplishments, a continual recital of the project’s worth, a gentle reminder to all and sundry of the career-boosting properties of the job at hand, and matchmaking.

Laptop was joined by pad and pen. Annabelle could cross-platform multitask, and relished any opportunity to do so. She set up her micro-cassette recorder with its multi-directional mic — better safe than sorry — and rolled some tape.

“Testing … testing … one, two, three — ”

“
Da da dada dum DADA dada dum —
”

Annabelle heard the voice — a wordless rendering of the opening bars of
New York, New York,
in just about the worst Frank Sinatra impression she’d ever heard — but all she saw, at first, was an arm, male, sheathed in a blinding white shirt. The sleeve was turned up to reveal a rather fine specimen of forearm, but her vision was filled with the whiteness of the shirt, and the texture of lovely, heavy cotton. Her nose twitched, entranced by the shirt’s freshly laundered scent, with just the hint of the heat of the iron lingering. What was it about a clean white shirt on a man? A nicely pressed white shirt, as she let her gaze slide upwards, that billowed over the outline of a solid bicep, that clung so evocatively to a strong male shoulder?

She cut her eyes up to the face that was smiling down at her. Green eyes, tousled auburn hair, and a dimple in the cheek greeted her discomfited gaze. Her apparent chagrin only increased the blinding quality of his grin.

He shrugged. “Thought it might give you something more interesting to listen to.”

Annabelle rewound, the screech of the tape covering her increasing … What? Her increasing what?
So what,
she thought,
cute guy, with an accent, nice shirt, dime a dozen — is my hand shaking?

She played it back, and grimaced as his voice came on. “Your Liza Minelli needs work,” she … teased?
What? Am I teasing? What am I doing?

“Ah, now, no need to pander to the ego,” he rejoined, and bumped her shoulder with his.

Which she ignored, because she got a look at what was spread before
him
on the table. “Is that — ” she gasped for air. “What is that, that … mess?” She looked up at him —
Up? Was he
tall
on top of everything else? Wait, what
‘else’?

And Jamie Flynn’s first good look at Annabelle Walsh involved two very wide, very outraged, and very, very blue eyes.