Wild Roses (3 page)

' Dino Cavalli--The Early Years: An Oral
History. From Edward Reynolds, New York, N.Y. Aldine Press, 1999.

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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--

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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

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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.

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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

21

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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 he 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

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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 oj 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

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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.

"Hello, my wonderful mother. How was your day?"
she said.

"That too," I said.

"I got off early," she said. It seemed like a
lie, but I let it pass. "What are you two up to?"

"I was just heading home," Siang said.
"Chemistry test to study for."

Mom shuddered. "God, I'm glad I'm done with
school."

"Then she's starting a new hobby," I said.
"Crafts," Siang said. I smiled. It was pretty close to a joke.

"Puff paint. Shrinky Dinks," I said.

"Cool," Mom said. She took a long drink of
water. You could usually count on her to make her best effort to one-up your
jokes. Obviously she was distracted.

Siang left, and I went up to my room, turned on
a few of my lamps. My head was achy and tired--I'd slept like shit for the past
few nights. Dino kept turning down the heat below zero to save money, and in a
few days my nose and toes were going to turn black and fall off from frostbite.
Far as I knew, Dino had a lot of money, but he was really attached to it. Any
time he had to spend any, he acted like he was parting with his cardiovascular
system.

I looked at my homework and it looked back at
me, flat and uninspiring, growing to impossible proportions

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right in front of my eyes. Sometimes a little
math and science is as easy as tying your shoes, and other times, it feels like
an Everest expedition, requiring hired Sherpas and ropes, oxygen bottles, and
crampons, which always seemed like an especially unfortunately named word--a mix
between cramps and tampons. I picked up a book of poetry beside my bed instead,
thumbed through e.e. cummings, my favorite poet for probably the same reason he
was other people's favorite poet--he chucked grammar and got away with it. It
was like thumbing your nose at every one of those tests where you had to
underline once the main clause, and underline twice the prepositional phrase. I
stank at those. Grammar words were so unlikable--conjunctive, some eye disease
you need goopy medicine for; gerund, an uptight British guy. Gerund would like
his tea now!

I amused myself with these inane thoughts until
I heard Dino's car pull up. He had a Renault, and it made a particular
clacka-clacka-clacka sound so that you always knew it was him (okay, he, for the
above-mentioned grammar neurotics, although no one really talks like that). The
engine was still on when he came through the front door. Then he went back out
again and shut it off. It was entirely possible that he forgot that he'd left
the engine running, as this was pure Dino, distracted to the point of barely
functioning in the real world. Mom sent him to the store once for dinner rolls
for a small party they were giving, and he came back two hours later with a
glazed expression and a pack of hot dog buns. Another time, he tried to catch a
bus from one part of Seattle to another,

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and ended up across the lake, calling my mother
for rescue from a phone booth. He can play the first page of any major concerto
off the top of his head, but doesn't understand that it's time to cross the
street when you see the sign change to the little walking guy.

I heard my mother and Dino talking downstairs,
which for some reason actually spurred my sudden desire to do my homework after
all. We were maybe a month into the school year, and every teacher was beginning
to pile homework on as if they had sole responsibility for keeping you busy
after school and therefore out of jail and drug-free. My head was really hurting
now. I worked for a while, then I heard the crunch of bike wheels down our road.
This was not an uncommon sound, as Dino also often rode his bike; we Americans
drove our cars too much, he said. Growing up in Italy, it was the only way
people got around, he said. It was no wonder Americans had such fat asses, he
said. You could often see him pedaling to town and back with a few grocery items
in his basket. Yes, he had a basket on his bike. It wasn't a tacky one with
plastic flowers or anything (thank God), but a real metal basket. The whole bike
itself, old and quaint and squeaky, looked snitched from some cliched French
postcard, or stolen from some History of Bikes museum.