The Flower Bowl Spell (5 page)

I ask them if they are excited about opening
for Yeah Right and they shrug and nod: “Of course. Naturally. Who
wouldn’t be?” I ask how their manager scored such a fantastic gig
and Babs says, “Well, Ty got it for us,
duh
. Next
question.”

There’s something I’m not getting. I cover my
confusion by moving on to a safe question: how did they meet? They
talk over each other again, their mutual histories colliding in
lies, legends, and half-remembered banalities.

At some point, Tyson slips into the room
wearing a pair of sunglasses—so rock-and-roll—and a bell goes off,
a sweet tinkling that reminds me of a pair of metal Zen meditation
balls Auntie Tess used to roll around in her hands. They were
supposed to relieve stress.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“What’s what?” Hugo says.

“Maybe someone’s cell phone.”

They all shake their heads. Nope, not their
phones. Not mine either.

“All’s I hear is my bro noodling his bass,”
Horatio says and starts tapping a pair of drumsticks on his
thigh.

Then I see it. Sitting on the edge of a
coffee-stained mug, the hummingbird-winged fairy holds what looks
like a silver baby rattle. When he sees that he’s caught my
attention, he starts gesticulating, pointing at the door then
covering his eyes. Over and over he does this.

I shake my head. “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?” asks Babs.

I glance at the members of Arsenic
Playground, who are watching me with a tad more interest than
before.

“I don’t get why…why you guys haven’t made a
video yet.”

They all begin to rant and rave: And what?
Sell out? Go MTV? Sign their rights away? Never! Ever. Actually,
just kidding: they’re going to make a video in the next few weeks
and let it go viral on YouTube. They were just waiting for the
right director to come along but they’ve found him, a true
artiste
. On and on they go. I look back at the fairy. He’s
gone. But the rattle is there on the table next to the cup. The
others couldn’t hear him or the bell sounds. I wonder if I could
have heard the fairy if he had tried to talk. Another bell goes
off, but this time it really is a cell phone, Tyson’s. He mumbles
into it for a bit.

“That was D.B.” His mates nod. His eyes are
hidden behind the sunglasses, but he’s looking towards me. “Yeah
Right’s manager. He’s going to be here soon. You should talk to
him.”

I try to make the connection between my
interview and the manager of another band, even one as awesome as
Yeah Right. I know I should jump at this opportunity, but I feel a
queasiness in my belly all of a sudden, and I just want to
am-scray.

“Actually, I’d better get going.” I’ve got
enough to fill fifteen hundred words. “I can always email him,
right?”

Tyson shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He looks like
he doesn’t care one way or the other, but there’s something pulling
at him—I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like he’s amped up on
caffeine but trying to remain sleepy. He meets my gaze with a
slight turn of his head. Behind the shades, his eyebrows go up.
“Goodbye, Memphis.”

I thank the band and begin packing up. They
immediately ignore my presence as if I’ve disappeared. Poof! I get
up from my seat and pass the table with the rattle. I don’t think
twice about pocketing it.

As I make my way through the hallway to the
front of the club, something stops me. I listen, my eyes searching
the dark corners of the backstage area. Shadows loom but none of
them move, although I will them to. It’s not the fairy—something
bigger. I touch the bell in my sweater pocket and head out the
door.

****

As soon as I toss my bag on my desk, Marisol
pokes her head around our adjoining cubicle wall. “How’d it go with
Ty Belmonte?”

“You know his name?”


“I read.” She eyes my cubicle-mate’s
menagerie and picks up the baby Jesus from his tiny plastic manger.
“So? Did you get the skinny on Cheradon? When do we get to meet
her?”

“
We
get nothing. Except a stern
ass-whupping if I don’t get this in Ned’s inbox by sunup.” I sit
down in my chair and push the on button of my computer, which bongs
to life. “You know, I used to know Tyson’s younger sister.”

“Ty Belmonte’s sister? No way!”


“We were actually pretty good friends.”

“But not anymore? What happened? She steal
your boyfriend?”

“No. She died.” I look Marisol in the
eye.

“Jesus.” She glances at the baby Christ in
her hand, gives him a kiss on the head, and puts him back. “Really?
I’m so sorry. How?”

“In Africa.” I tell myself to just get it
out. It’s normal to act sad, a little weird even, over a friend’s
death. No one knows what I did. “Gabon. She was working with a
European aid agency trying to get food to some out-of-the-way
villages. And she got killed.”

“Shit. I am so,
so
sorry.” Marisol
exclaims some more. My computer is now fully awake so I open a new
document and start typing. My friend drifts back to her desk. I
stop and pull the rattle out of my bag, putting it next to the
plastic crèche. I touch it, hoping for a morsel of information, but
it’s clean—wiped of memories.

Chapter Five

Every band’s press kit comes with at least
one of its CDs, a perk of the job that never fails to give me a
bigger-than-it-should thrill, like finding cash on the sidewalk. My
bookshelves and floors are piled high with jewel cases and advance
copies of books from hopeful, eager musicians and authors. They
pray that Ned will see their shiny glimmer of talent and pick them
for a story, which will make them famous or, at the least, give
their sales a boost. The
Golden Gate Planet
is just a little
freebie rag, but Ned did win a Pulitzer back in the 1980s for his
AIDS plague exposé, and he’s been riding that gravy train ever
since.

The Arsenic Playground press kit is sticking
out of my bag, and I grab it, ready to listen. I slide their CD
into my computer, slip on my headphones, and close my eyes. A
mellow guitar strums in my ears, joined by a thrumming bass that I
feel in my chest. Then the shimmering clash of the drummer’s
cymbals, and finally a voice that starts out husky and low,
pitching upwards to a few almost too-high notes and back down into
its more natural register. This is Tyson of course. The chorus
goes, “Highlight the revolution/Can’t stop the confusion/Into the
forest of the night.” I open my eyes and flip over the CD case. The
name of the song is “Purify.”

I rummage through the folder, thumbing aside
the usual magazine reviews and headshots until I come to a photo
that catches my attention. I pull it out and place it on my
keyboard. It’s a photocopy from a
People
magazine, dated a
couple of months ago. The photo is overexposed from copying, but I
immediately recognize my pop diva heroine, Cheradon Badler. Her
platinum ponytail and glossy, hard-kissed lips are unmistakable. In
the photo her arm is hooked into the crook of a man’s elbow. His
head is turned away from the camera, but I recognize the side of
that nose. It’s the one I just spent lunch with.

Their free hands are clasped loosely in front
of them and they aren’t smiling as they push through a paparazzi
embankment of cameras, tape recorders, and shouting faces. The
headline reads, Are They or Aren’t They? I scan the caption and the
pull quote: “Neither Badler nor Belmonte will confirm or deny the
hot rock on her finger is an engagement ring.”

How could I have missed this? I won’t say I’m
obsessed with Yeah Right, but I keep up with the pop gossip, or try
to. Clearly I need to consider a subscription to
People
.

In the photo, Cheradon Badler’s ring is just
a blur, no more than a pinprick of light. Her expression is
blank—she just wants to get through the crowd and into whatever
movie premiere or restaurant opening they’re going to. I study
their hands. Are they just holding onto each other for support or
is there something more? I think back to my conversation with him.
His aura was so dark, overwhelmingly so. But just underneath the
darkness and closest to his body was the faintest rose-tinted
gleam.

****

It’s almost seven by the time I’m done with
the article. Something that should have taken one hour took three
because I had to throw out my first version completely. My second
left nothing to be desired in the snarkasm department. I forced
myself to read all of the promo materials and listen to my taped
conversation with Tyson—
pardonnez-moi
, I mean Ty—from
beginning to end. It was no exercise in futility. I write:

“
We try not to think about success in
conventional terms,” says lead guitarist and vocalist Ty Belmonte.
He is the heart of Arsenic Playground and a local boy to boot, a
graduate of Lowell High School.

Even if conventional success is not the
driving force behind the band, it’s a sweet by-product. Their first
album
Unhinged
was a college radio Top 30 request two years
ago, and
Bath Tyme
has caught the ears of mainstream
listeners as well as those of the producers at MTV. The
Playground’s first video, directed by O’Shaz of La Diabla and Yeah
Right fame, will debut next month on the “Altie Hour.”

It goes on. I toss in a few quotes from Babs
and the twins and then mention their opening for “glam rocker grrl
Cheradon Badler and her band Yeah Right, who enjoy a close working
as well as extracurricular relationship with Arsenic Playground’s
band members.”

I email the article to Ned, who is hunched
over his keyboard in near darkness, save his desk lamp. The man
does not have a life outside of work, and I find this
comforting.

Before leaving the office, I slip the fairy’s
rattle into my bag and it falls to the bottom, muffled by all of
the stuff—notebooks, water bottle, extra scarf—I carry with me
wherever I go.

****

The next day is a dog-walking day, which
gives me an opportunity to more or less turn off the hyperdrive of
my brain and exercise my other muscles.

I wish we could have a dog or cat, but Cooper
is allergic. This made it easy for me to give up yet another craft
habit—the keeping of a Familiar. Still, it’s what I yearn for more
than any other part of my old life. For almost one glorious year I
was the humble guardian of Rexie, a long-haired miniature dachshund
I inherited from one of my clients. But after Cooper moved in, I
had to find Rexie new digs. It wasn’t hard to do, what with all the
dogs I walk and the dog-lovers I know.

Ham Sandwich is waiting by his front door as
he is every time I turn the key, his tail stump wagging, his leash
tangled around his feet. He knows how to pull it down from its peg
near the coats with his teeth. I let the geriatric bulldog sniff my
hands—he’s pretty blind and deaf—and he licks my fingers and
whimpers in ecstatic anticipation of our walk to come.

Once his leash is attached, I lead him to the
truck, which belongs to my boss, Justine. The logo on the side
reads Paws in Motion and shows a cartoonish dog walking upright
like a human, tongue out, elbows cocked like a competitive marathon
walker. Justine has walked dogs since time immemorial. It’s
possible she invented the occupations of dog walking and
pet-sitting. We met at my neighborhood park and she saw me lurking
on the periphery of the off-leash area like a playground pervert,
watching the dogs chase and pile, their owners standing around in
cliques, oblivious to my avid surveillance.

Ham Sandwich sniffs the butts and touches the
noses of the dogs I’ve already gathered for our foray—Twinkle Toes,
Vincent, Junkyard, Lothar, and Daisy. We have a six-dog limit,
glory be, because I don’t know if I could handle more than that on
my own. Fortunately, Lothar is a pug, so he’s pretty easy to
manage. The others are big’uns, rotties and goldens, but I’m top
dog. Dog treats work wonders. Plus—and even though I gave up
magick, I can’t help but do it, it’s such a small thing—I put an
eensy-weensy binding charm over each dog before our first walk.
It’s like an invisible leash, and it never hurts.

Dog walking, not writing, is how I make the
real money. Writing keeps me respectable among friends and
acquaintances. It’s good party conversation. People love it, and
after two to three minutes I can sense how receptive they’ll be to
the news that what I really do is walk dogs for a living. It amuses
me that people think they’ve got me nailed down by my paycheck
source. If they only knew the rest of me—a lapsed witch who is
starting to see things despite herself.

Sometimes I take the dogs to a dog run and I
hang out with the other walkers and owners. No longer a playground
perv am I. But today I’m feeling more invigorated, and I take my
pack to McLaren Park with its acres of trees, ponds, and views. I
suppose it can get a little sketch over there—I’ve found more than
one homeless encampment during our treks—but I feel safe with the
dogs. And usually I get a clue in advance if something wicked my
way comes.

I park alongside a trailhead near a
convenient trash bin and the dogs, led by Twinkle Toes, yank me
into the forest. I wait until we’re a hundred feet in before I let
them off their leashes. Away they go, lunging like greyhounds into
the underbrush, barking and yipping with glee. And then they stop
with a suddenness that’s startling. All at once they crap, as if
they consulted with each other previously. I snap a few plastic
bags from my dog-walking satchel and hold my breath. Twink gets his
mouth around Daisy’s throat and she jerks away, baring her canines
before running him down a hill, the two of them rolling like a
couple of acrobats in a thrash of legs and fallen eucalyptus
leaves.

I toss the poop bags in the trash and
whistle, and the dogs course back up the hill and down the path in
front of me, stopping now and then to mark trees and check on my
progress. We head up and away from the road deeper into the trees,
the ground dappled here and there in sunlight. It’s not long before
I’m sweating. My thoughts are filled with the light in my eyes, the
smells of damp dirt and the licorice of eucalyptus leaves, the
sound of my own breathing. For a while there’s no room for dead
friends, sullen rock singers, scattered aunties, or rattle-wielding
fairies.