Wild Roses (30 page)

The lights dim, and Mom grabs my arm. We look
at each other in the dimness, and I'm surprised at how fearful her face looks.
We know Dino won't be performing right away, so there is no reason for this
stomach lurching just yet. But when the curtain opens and there is such silence,
only a few rustles and a throat being cleared, and the symphony is revealed,
dressed in black, with instruments held in readiness, you know it has begun and
whatever happens is inevitable.

The conductor enters, and we like him already.
His hair is loose, and it is as swinging as his walk. He bows to the audience,
and his wide smile says he is enjoying every moment of this, that we should
relax and come with him where he is about to take us. The crowd breaks into
applause--Peter Boglovich is well loved, known for his passion for coffee and
pastries and other men. He steps up onto the conductor's stand, and raises his
baton to a pinpoint in the air. And then they begin.

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There is a frenzy of bowing, the slightly
forward tilt of the musicians' bodies, their slight sway. I can feel my mother
relax through the piece. I look over at her and see her smiling
slightly.

The symphony plays two more pieces. After the
third there is silence, and my mother takes my hand and holds it. Hers is
sweaty, and I wonder if she has stopped breathing. Peter Boglovich is speaking,
although his words are underwater. He turns to face offstage, applauds to Dino,
who emerges from the wings. There is thunderous applause, which goes on for a
long time, as Dino looks out into the black sea. In spite of all of the people
around him, he looks alone, this one man who was once this one young boy. He
takes off his tuxedo jacket, hands it to the conductor. Dino takes his place
slightly left of center.

The first piece is titled Giardino Dei Sogno,
Garden of Dreams. It is surprisingly upbeat, almost cheerful. He smiles as if he
is remembering something sweet. His white shirt billows softly The symphony
joins him after a while, an easy, lovely mix of a walk in good weather. My
mother's eyes never leave him; it's as if she is breathing for him. The piece
ends. The crowd's applause is warm and full, but not overwhelming and
astonished. Dino bows and his hair falls down over his face. He stands upright,
gives the crowd a nod, and then raises up a hand in acknowledgment. This man,
whom I share a house with and who uses the same silverware as I do, seems so
removed from me that I could forget that I know him at all.

Dino walks offstage, and the curtain closes.
The lights

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come up, and it is intermission. He will play
again afterward. I hear my mother sigh a breath of relief, and then she puts on
her smile to receive congratulations of the people who turn to take her hands
again. They are being polite, I can tell. Underwhelmed. I stand and stretch,
look around. Look up into the crowd and try to meet Ian's eyes, wherever they
are.

My mother is leaning forward and talking to
Andrew Wilkowski, who I notice for the first time is wearing a rose in his
lapel. His wife is talking to the record company woman, who can't seem to take
her eyes off of my mother. I check out the crowd and have a weird surge of panic
at the sight of one man in our row across the aisle. For a minute, I think I am
looking at William Tiero. I think the man looks just like him. In fact, I become
sure in a moment that it is indeed William Tiero. This is what living with a
paranoid can do; it makes you fear the worst things. My heart actually thumps
around in anticipation of trouble. When Mom leans back in her seat again, I
point out the man. Isn't that William Tiero? I ask.

Don't even think such a thing, she says. And
then she tells me who she thinks he looks like, names someone I've never heard
of, a movie actor probably. She tells me this man's nose and chin are too round,
and that his hair is wrong. It is not William Tiero.

A woman comes to the front and asks if she can
take my mother's picture. Andrew Wilkowski intervenes and says no, but my mother
says she doesn't mind. The woman has a hard time figuring out her own damn
camera, then

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realizes it hasn't been wound forward. Andrew
Wilkowski reminds her to keep the camera in her purse during the performance,
and the woman snaps something back to him about knowing full well the protocol.
She gives us something to talk about until the lights dim again.

The symphony performs one endless piece and
then there is Dino again. There is a long silence before he begins, and when he
lifts his violin to his chin, he closes his eyes. It is a solo piece, parts of
which I have heard again and again, but have never known the title of until I
had picked up the program earlier that night. Amore Dolce Delia Gioventu, Sweet
Love of Youth. He begins to play, and for the first time I hear the piece
unbroken. I see the entire picture. I know its name. It is strange to me that I
have before this moment only known fragments and not the whole. I wonder what
made him write it. I wonder if it was memories of his days in Paris as a young
man, or if it was something more recent. I hear the notes, this most beautiful,
tender arrangement of feeling, and I see him drawing back the curtain of the
upstairs bedroom window of our house, see him watching Ian and me on the grass
that night. Could he have seen something more than just his anger that night? Or
is every person in this room feeling as if he was there the moment they fell in
love? When the piece is over there is silence in the hall, and then frenzied
applause. Shouts of Bravo! The record company woman wipes a tear from her face.
He has triumphed.

He barely pauses to accept the applause before
he moves to his next piece, the dreaded third composition that has

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given him so much agony. It is titled simply
Lunetta. It is a piece that begins with just Dino's single, mournful violin,
until the orchestra floats in, it seems, section by section until all the
performers are playing so furiously that it is as if their instruments might
alight at any moment. He has composed the music for each instrument, written
every agonizing note, and it is true--he is a genius. The emotions pour forth,
the definitions of love and life and struggle. Dino himself has his eyes
closed--he is lost to this frenzied place. He grimaces, as if it is causing him
pain; his shirt billows, comes untucked. His sleeves are swaying a rhythm of
white, and this close you can see the sweat forming on his forehead. I hold my
own breath--it is that kind of music, where you are almost afraid for what might
happen next, afraid of where this group cry to the universe might bring us. I
look over at my mother, and see her hands clasped in her lap. Her own eyes are
closed, and she is smiling. She is gone to wherever music and passion can take
her, and I see on her face why she loves this man and what it means to her to
simply be part of this moment. I understand that that is what all this has been
about--her ability to be here in a way that is more intimate than anyone else in
the room. To have a piece of it that no one else has. This is why she has
stayed.

I think of my father right then. I think how my
mother has needs that he cannot fulfill. In some part of him, held secretly in
his palm, maybe, I know he holds out hope that she will return to him. There is
a part of me that right then opens up my own palm, unfurls the clutched fingers,
and lets the hope out.

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The audience is transported, and Dino is the
one leading the trip. I am afraid for him--he seems so overcome, so lost and
found at the same time that I wonder how he'll manage it. He leans over the
violin, and the energy and fire he pours into that instrument is the brightest
flash of light, a gamma ray burst, the death of a star and the creation of a
black hole. The piece has ended, this piece that has caused Dino so much agony,
and the audience explodes with applause, shouts, and rises to its feet. This
surpasses triumph, but Dino looks depleted, exhausted to the point of collapse.
He just stands there for a while, looking into the blackness of the audience as
if wondering where he was and how he got there. Lunetta, I learn later means
"Little Moon" in Italian. His mother's name.

Someone has the bright idea to turn up the
lights a bit so that he can see the people on their feet, their hands in the
air. His eyes settle on us, the record company woman, my mother and I, then move
across the performance hall.

There are lucky and unlucky things about that
night. The unlucky things are obvious. The lucky thing is that someone closed
the curtain a bit too early. As the heavy velvet drapes shut, the applause
finally quieted, and the rush out began immediately. That was the lucky part,
that there were many people who had already made it through the doors before
Peter Boglovich and a French horn player lost their grasp on a Dino who was
trying to make his way out to the audience through the side curtain. He had
thrown his violin down--that's how they knew that he was suddenly outraged and
out of control.

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Thrown it hard enough to cause a thin crack
down the back.

No one hears anything, although Andrew
Wilkowski's envelope wife would later claim she heard the splintering of the
wood, which was an impossibility and a lie, given the noise in the auditorium
and the chatter of the record company woman. We gather our coats. There is
supposed to be a brief reception now for a few important people. This is fine
for the record company woman, as her perfume is still going strong. I do not
know that in less than a minute, Ian will know my secret. That everyone
will.

The front rows are still making their way up
the ramp when we hear it. This animal cry of rage. You son of a bitch! We turn
to look, and in spite of everything that has happened up to that point, in spite
of all that we have lived with over the past few months, the cry is a surprise,
and I have no idea whose voice it is or what is happening. There is that sudden
disorientation of trying to make sense of something unexpected.

And then I see him. Billowing white shirt,
black tuxedo pants, and he leaps from the stage and stumbles. Andrew Wilkowski
is the first one to understand that it is Dino, and that this is a disaster. He
rushes down the ramp with a surprising degree of athleticism, but misses Dino
coming up the side aisle. Dino is pushing past startled people, reaches the man
who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Dino Tiero Cavalli's brother. He grabs a
chunk of the back of the jacket the man wears and spins him around. He raises
his fist, and with the force of the agony and pain of

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his lifetime, punches the man in his face,
sending him reeling and crashing to the floor.

There are screams--my mother screams beside me.
Dino is kneeling beside the man. He is putting his hands to the man's throat.
Blood is coming from the man's nose. Andrew Wilkowski reaches them.

Dino looks into the face of the man, and
realizes what we already know. He realizes that this is just a man, an
aeronautics engineer who played the bass in his high school orchestra and who
lucked into good seats through an online auction. This is not William Tiero, who
he is certain tried to ruin him financially by getting him the psychiatric help
he needed. Who shared the ugly history that Dino tried to escape from but feared
he never could. As my mother said, his nose and chin are too round.

This is when Dino rises. The part of him that
is sane and rational, if still a perfectionist asshole, looks shocked at what he
has done.

Two ushers and a security officer are trying to
move down the crowd of people to get to the injured man. Andrew Wilkowski has
his arm around Dino's shoulder. But he doesn't know Dino's strength if he thinks
he can hold him there. Dino wrenches himself free. He flees out the side door,
the fire exit.

He runs out into the night.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Later, after the police had gone, the one thing
I kept thinking about was Siang Chibo. I wondered if she had seen what had
happened, or if she would only read about it in the morning. I thought about her
reaction to this night even more than Ian's. I had such a profound feeling of
having disappointed her. I kept seeing her finger, straightening that painting
of Wild Roses.

Andrew Wilkowski was snoring on the couch, and
my mother was sitting up in bed with the lights on. She'd told me to go to
sleep, and I told her that sleep would be impossible. Now, she had said, and I
guess she just needed some time alone to think. She had a lot to think
about.

I'd been able to sleep, but it was a deep, dark
sleep of restless dreams, full of Dino's music, full of the knowledge that he
was gone, and that Ian was going away too. Finally I

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slept hard, woke up late, and emerged from
haziness to the awful memory of what the night before had brought. It seemed so
unreal that I had to convince myself that it was true. Dino was still gone. I
called Ian quickly, and we spoke only long enough to arrange a meeting. There
were things he needed to tell me. There were things I needed to tell him,
too.

I stayed with Mom all day, on the Dino vigil.
Andrew Wilkowski hid the newspaper and made sure the television and radio
weren't played. There was no news of Dino from the police or anywhere else.
After we tried to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and soup, I left Mom in the
capable hands of Andrew Wilkowski, still in his suit, looking wrinkled and
exhausted, his music-note tie discarded sometime the night before. Dog William
snoozed on the living room rug, looking inappropriately content.