Wild Roses (2 page)

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Commodores albums, and there was even a war
over those.

"Barry Manilow, in my house. Not Commodores,"
Zebe told me once. "Which they both hated, by the way. For a week they were
flying e-mails at each other over the goddamn F-ing Copacabana LP. They each
accused the other of taking it. 'Did your mother find my "missing" album yet?'
'Next time you go to your father's, look for my stolen record.' God."

"Was anyone hurt?" I asked.

"Aside from the e-mail bloodbath, the only
thing that was hurt was both of their egos when one of them finally remembered
that they brought the album to some party back in the seventies and left it
there on purpose."

"You wonder why they ever got
married."

"Mi mono toca la guitarra," she said. My monkey
plays the guitar. It's what she wrote on every Spanish test question she didn't
know the answer to. I cracked up. Zebe's the greatest.

If my father treated my time at my mother's
house as if he were the gold miner panning for The Dirt of Wrongdoing, my
mother, on the other hand, would listen to any news of my father the same way
someone who had plans to stay inside listens to a weather forecast. Hearing just
enough to make sure there was no tornado coming. This is one difference between
the leaver and the left, the dumper and the dumpee. The dumpee has the moral
righteousness, and the desire to hear every dirty fact that will prove that You
get what you deserve in the end. The

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dumper has the guilt, and wants to know as
little about the other party as possible, in case they hear something that will
make them feel even more guilty.

"Dad's got a new client. Some big Microsoft
person," I told Mom once. It was after she and Dino had first gotten married,
and I was starting to get a real clear picture of what she'd gotten us into. I
guess I was hoping she was seeing, too, and that a little nudge in Dad's
direction might help along the underdog. I hadn't learned yet that in terms of
divorce, your only real hope is not to play team sports.

"Oh, really Good for him," she said. She was
braiding her long hair. She had a rubber band in her teeth. Oh, weewy. Oodfor
him. She finished the braid, put her arms down. "I need to find my overalls. I'm
planting tulip bulbs today. Planting just calls for overalls." She went to her
closet, flung open the doors.

"It'll bring him a lot of money," I said. My
father was an accountant. He was a white undershirt in a world of silk ties and
berets and pashmina. He was a potato amongst pad Thai and curry and veal
scallopini. He was still madly in love with my mother. He didn't have a
chance.

"Great," she said. "My God, look at this mess.
The man is incapable of hanging anything up." She said this with a great deal of
affection, poked a toe at a pile of Dino's shirts. "Overalls, overalls. Bingo."
She held them up.

"You're not even listening."

"I'm listening, I'm listening. You're just
making me feel like I'm in some Parent Trap movie. You're not going to put frogs
in Dino's shoes or something, are you?"

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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CHAPTER Two

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

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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 town with its winding

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

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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 fones 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, Indy!" But Siang's surprised me a few times. For
example, she and her father love to watch monster trucks on the weekends. For
another