by Susan Conley
They were from Kelli’s stupid dinner meeting thing, and there he was, that messy Irishman and his big goofy smile, grinning down the table, laughing over something that had been said. She sighed, remembering his laugh. He laughed at everything she said, which was, like, a dream of hers … oh, but maybe he was just an easy laugher? Maybe he just laughed at everything, even though he seemed to find her — oh, whatever, Annabelle!
She leafed through the images, and wondered about her reaction to this disgracefully disorganized Dub. She’d found out, in passing, only in passing of course, from Kelli, who’d been fairly forthcoming with information, that he was from Stoneybatter, a born and bred Northsider, whatever that signified. It wasn’t like she’d called Kelli or anything, Kelli had called her, already demanding copy and if she — Kelli — had mentioned Jamie Flynn casually, and expounded, perhaps with intent, then it was nothing to her — Annabelle.
She tossed the pictures into the garbage can under the desk, and got back to work.
Chapter Eleven
Hesitating outside of her apartment, Annabelle looked up and down the hall, and then pressed her ear against the door. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was hoping to hear, or better yet, not hear, but it seemed like a good idea and —
“You left your radio on!”
She leaped away from her door, the voice exploding out of nowhere. Damn it.
Nosy Ned the Neighbor had materialized at the foot of the stair, as he often did, the minute she’d arrived. Short, round, and avid, he was forever knocking on her door asking to borrow a cup of this or a pint of that, and at least three times a week always seemed to be on his way down to the basement or out to the lobby to check for errant Chinese food menus just as Annabelle was unlocking her door. Ned the Nuisance.
“Yeah, hi, Ned,” Annabelle mumbled as she nearly broke the key in the door trying to open it as swiftly as possible.
Ned the Nuisance insisted, “All day! There was noise coming out of your place all day long! I almost called the super!” His beady little eyes lit up like Christmas. “You know, if you left a set of spare keys with me, I could go in and take care of stuff like that for you.”
“No, thanks, Nos — Ned. It’s not that big a deal. Thanks, though.”
“Well, you know that the more energy you use, the more the building uses and then we all get charged accordingly. That could drive our monthly rates up two, three, four dollars! It could, you know!”
“Thanks, Ned, okay, yup, okay, bye, bye,” and Annabelle slipped into her ‘living room’. She leaned her head against the door and threw the two deadbolts, locked the doorknob, and drew the chain across. All of this was fairly routine, but tonight she added a new challenge by executing the familiar maneuvers with her eyes closed. She leaned her forehead against the door, and considered knocking her head lightly against the wood, but figured that would just send Ned back down the staircase. Was she too mean to poor ol’ Nosy Ned? Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he didn’t have any friends. Maybe he was hopelessly in love with her. Maybe she was losing what remained of her mind.
Maria Grazia would bellow that Annabelle was too busy taking care of other people’s feelings to take care of her own …
If she was being honest with herself — oh, go on, why not — she was afraid to open her eyes. The day had been busy enough without having to deal with what was going on under her very own rented roof.
If she was really really being honest with herself, a part of her was intrigued by what was going on. Hadn’t she loved watching re-runs of Bewitched, reading The Chronicles of Narnia, when she was a kid? Hadn’t she always wanted to wiggle her nose and send herself flying through the air — hadn’t she spent an entire summer poking around the closets of her childhood home, looking for a portal into another world? She’d always hoped something like that would happen, but still …
Hey. She opened her eyes. Maybe I could talk to the thing.
Weren’t people supposed to talk to their plants?
Did any of them actually expect answers?
Annabelle turned slowly, keeping her back against the door, and took a deep, cleansing breath. And blinked.
Every one of the little pink blossoms had disappeared, leaving behind one single, extremely large bloom, a bloom bigger than her head, and the slightly swaying branches. “Ooooookay,” she took in another deep breath. “Done a bit of pruning while I was away, huh? Is that the noise that Nosy Ned was talking about?”
No response, although the branches seemed to sway more energetically.
“Uh. Right. Um, there was a flower in my bag, at Kelli’s dinner — did you put it there?”
The branches continued to sway, and the flower began to rock — was it nodding?
Was it time for her to call the nice men in the white suits? Annabelle sighed and gave up. She just needed to do some more research, even though Google had been shockingly mute on the subject of enchanted hazelnuts. Maybe she could ask around a bit, although she couldn’t imagine how she’d broach a conversation concerning large scary sentient plants that bloomed overnight.
“Okay, let’s just be normal. Let’s just do what we do every night, even if there’s an Unidentified Growing Object in the house.”
Well, one good thing: she hadn’t rushed in and headed straight for the landline. The landline that Wilson had relentlessly encouraged her to ditch, and then in turn was one of the very few who actually used that number. Even though cell phones had made contact a fait accompli, there was nothing that warmed her heart like the ‘boopboopboop’ tone in her ear when she picked up the receiver. Four ‘boops’ — hurray! Annabelle jabbed the ‘play’ button, lugged her bag over to her ‘office’, and listened to her messages while she unpacked.
Beep. “Hello, Anna. Calling to see if you’re … fine, and to invite you to a work party, which I know sounds dull, dull, dull, but it shouldn’t be too awful, it’s in the new condo place over in North Chelsea. This Saturday. Call me.” (Lorna). Annabelle huffed. Maybe a party might be okay — but ‘North Chelsea’? Who made that up?
Beep. “Well, hi there, Annabelle!” (Kelli) “I had this wonderful idea, I know you’ll just love it. There’s show going up that I think you should see, it’s very much along the lines of what I’m hoping to achieve, and let’s say we make it a little ol’ assignment for the paper as well. Now, it’s down on the Lower East Side — ” And Annabelle grudgingly took down the info. It was work, after all.
Beep. “Hi honey, it’s MG.” She still identified himself, even though Annabelle would know her voice in a crowd in the midst of a tornado. “Sorry I missed you, I was thinking of you, and I was hoping everything was okay with your … nut, and how you were feeling, and Jesus, that Kelli thing, my momma always said, no such thing as a free plate of puttanesca, but aaannnyway, yeah, I have to go to some boutique opening in your neck of the woods, probably three frickin’ shirts and a beaded hand bag, but why not come along? Ooookaaay, using up all your tape, okay, please, call me honey, okay? Bye!” Someone just had her dinner …
Beep. “Annabelle, this Cybill Franklin-Smith, editor of World Trax magazine. Got your number from Kelli over at NYC Weekly. I’ve got a tough deadline to meet and she recommended you very highly. It’s an interview with Dan Minnehan, the world famous Irish singer and guitarist, and I’m hoping you’re free. He’s, well, a character, and I hear you’ve got a way with, uh, difficult personalities. Give me a ring on my cell at — ”
Annabelle pushed the ‘delete’ button. “No, I will not interview some grumpy old man. Damn it!” She glared at the plant, which had begun to wave in protest and was, she was sure, emitting some kind of low-level whine. “Mind your own business!” Grabbing her smokes, she went into the bathroom and shut the door.
Lorna first. Annabelle always returned calls in the order that they were received.
Machine. “Hi, it’s me.
The party sounds good. Let me know what time to meet. Oh, by the way, that was a great idea, the one about planting the hazelnut? It grew over night and it’s a big enormous flowering plant that hides my cigarettes and sometimes answers the phone for me. See ya!” Ha — put that in your Gucci bag and smoke it.
“Hey, Kell, yeah, that sounds fine, the show thing, and I suppose it’ll go toward helping develop your website — ” Whenever I get around to it — “I also got a message from some magazine person, and I know you think you’re doing me a favor, but I’m not interested in — hello? Hello? Hello?” An enormous burst of static had cut off Annabelle’s tirade, just as she was building up a good head of steam.
She stuck her head out the bathroom and glared at the plant, its tentacles guiltily fluttering, as though trying to appear ineffectual. “Don’t touch anything! You hear me? Nothing!” Slam.
Maria Grazia — cell phone. “Hello, this is Maria Grazia.”
“Hello, this is Annabelle.”
“Hey, honey. I thought you might be mad at me, and that you were screening your calls, and that — ”
“Did you have a nice dinner?”
“I did, sushi, a nice crab roll and some tempura. So, are we okay?”
“I guess. It was more Lorna than you, anyway. But I’m going to a party with her, so. We’re okay too.”
Score! Maria Grazia punched the air with a fist. And speaking of … “So what about that guy in the white shirt? Yowza!”
“What, the Irish Guy?” Annabelle began twisting a lock of her bob around her finger, and watched herself in the mirror, to assure herself that she looked utterly blasé. “He’s very disorganized.”
“Yeah, whatever, honey, but he sure got those shoulders organized!”
“Maria Grazia! This is so unlike you.”
“Big changes for everybody, it seems — I’ve never heard you yell at Lorna in all our years.”
“You know, I’m just trying to defend my serenity, and I suppose that you can’t always be serene about defending it, if you know what I mean.”
“Kelli said he was asking about you.” Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have said that. MG pointlessly clapped a hand to her mouth.
“He?” Annabelle stalled for time as her heart inexplicably began to race. He was asking about her, after she said rude things to him and stuck out her tongue at him? Freak. “He who?”
“Picasso! I don’t know, I have a feeling about him — ”
“Yeah, whatever. I’m not interested. You should have seen the state of his tools.”
“I did, sweetie, and they looked fine by — ”
Annabelle hooted. “What’s gotten in to you?”
“Spring is in the air, Belle, and, you know, I think he likes you.”
“Gee, you think so? Really and truly? You know, he did ask if he could carry my books home for me — ”
Maria Grazia heaved a sigh. “Never mind, forget it, I just have a feeling about this, and my thumbs are tingling, it’s a Bevilacqua thing, they never lie.”
Time for a change of subject, thought Annabelle. “Hey, you know, I did what Lorna said.”
A strained silence proved the tactic’s success. “What did Lorna say?”
Ha ha! “You know, to plant the hazelnut. I planted it.”
“Uh huh.”
“And it grew out of the pot, like bang! Overnight. It’s huge,” Annabelle went back out into the ‘living room’. “This morning it had big pink floaty flowers all over it, but when I got back, they’d all disappeared except for one really gigantic bud — well, no it’s too colossal to be a bud, the thing’s as big as a bicycle wheel — so this one big flower and it nods at me — yes, yes, I’m talking about you, and it, like, screws up my phone calls when it doesn’t like what I’m talking about.”
Panic fiber-optically sped down the line into Annabelle’s ear. “Sweetie, are you — do you want me to come over, maybe — or why not crash with me tonight, I — ”
“Hello? Hello?” Annabelle infused her voice with nerves and, she hoped, terror. “Maria Grazia? I can’t hear you! Hello? Oh, no — ohmigod! Please don’t! Please don’t!”
“Annabelle!”
“Oh, hi. You broke up there a bit.”
“Fine. Be that way. But don’t come crying to me if this turns into Little Apartment of Horrors!” Click.
Annabelle gently returned the handset to its cradle and went back into the bathroom. She left the door open and started taking off her makeup.
“That worked out great, don’t you think?” She stuck her head around the door again. This wasn’t really all that crazy, lots of people talked to their plants. “MG means well, and she supports my alternative therapies and all that, but I feel like she let me down a bit. I really do. When push came to shove, she just wasn’t all that open-minded. And I suppose Lorna thinks she’s going to point me in the way of a rebound. That might not be such a bad idea. What do you think?” The plant seemed to be shuddering with displeasure. Annabelle went back to her toner. “No? Don’t like that idea? Well, too bad. Boo hoo hoo. I’m going to do just what I want, and if that means getting loaded and bonking some twenty-year old mailroom boy, that’s exactly what I’m going to do!”
She could hear a noise that sounded like wood scraping on glass, plaster and linoleum, but decided to ignore it. “Having a little hissy fit, are we? You know, it’s about time that we got something straight here, like, who’s the boss, right? I’m the boss! I supplied the dirt under your roots and I pay for the roof over your petals, and that’s that! And if you think that I’m going to be strong-armed into taking any jobs that I don’t like, for people that I don’t even know, then you’ve got another thing coming, missy — although I don’t know if hazelnut trees are feminine, I’ll check that online. And another thing, I — ”
A tiny, tinny voice was coming out of the other room, and Annabelle froze, mid-way through smearing paste on her toothbrush. Ohmigod! she thought, ohmigod, it’s not talking back, is it?
She charged into the ‘living room’, only to find the phone on the table, the voice coming through the receiver. She picked it up, and gingerly held it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Annabelle, thanks for getting back to me.”
“Uh. Sure. Um — ”
“Cybill Franklin-Smith. World Trax magazine?”
“Of course. How are you?” Annabelle stabbed at the plant with her toothbrush, and it evaded her with the grace of a prizefighter.
“A bit under pressure, as you can imagine, so I’ll have to cut to the chase. Minnehan’s a crotchety old guy, tough on even his best days. He won’t have had a gig the night before, so he should be … fresh enough for a 10 A.M. chat. The turnaround is brutal — ”
“I’m pretty fast — damn it!” The plant took her toothbrush. It completely disappeared.
“Sorry?” The branches waved wildly in Annabelle’s face.
“No, I’m sorry. I, um, dropped something. I transcribe really quickly. And I take notes during the interview.”
“Old school, excellent — ”
“Listen, Cybill, thanks for thinking of me, I’m not interes — ” Thwack! Annabelle rubbed her bottom. Would she have to go out into the street to get away from the flippin’ thing? Only the idea of Nosy Ned kept her in her apartment. She hissed at the plant, and was sure that it hissed back.
“If it’s money, let me tell you, I’ve got a pretty healthy budget for this. Minnehan is making a dramatic comeback, and who knows, if he likes you, it could turn into more. Anyway, the number I’m thinking of is — ”
Cybill quoted a fee that stopped Annabelle in mid-swing, and caused the plant to relax back into its pot, and, if possible, look infuriatingly complacent.
“Oh.” Annabelle sat down on the floor, hard. “So, um. What exactly
are you looking for? General interest, or a time-of-day kind of thing, how he is at that moment, or — ”
“Surprise me. Do what you want.”
“This seems a bit too good to be true.”
“So you’d be crazy to turn me down.”
They both laughed, and despite the unforgivable coercion on Kelli and the plant’s part, Annabelle couldn’t help liking this Cybill Franklin-Smith. “Okay, I give up. When and where?”
As they firmed up the scheduling, Annabelle kept the plant in her peripheral vision. It seemed quite calm, and damn it, yes, it was definitely self-satisfied. Hanging up, she turned on it.
“That was manipulative and sneaky! I know you’re behind all this weird shit that’s been going on! And that was my favorite toothbrush! I have had enough of you for one day and night, so just … sit there and leave me alone!”
She stomped over to her ‘office’ to fire up her laptop, dug into her bag for her memory stick, and her hand hit — a Polaroid?
An exact duplicate of one of the Polaroids of that slapdash Irishman.
Polaroids do not have negatives. She shivered, and spun around and glared at the plant.
“I threw those in the garbage!” Grabbing it by a corner, she winged it over in its direction. “Since this is obviously your doing — you keep it!”
If she hadn’t sailed in to her bedroom and slammed the door … she would have seen the picture get caught.
Chapter Twelve
The breeze off the East River carried a smell that was astoundingly close to nature, the smell of actual water with a touch of actual sea salt. Amazing, thought Jamie, ambling down Greenpoint Avenue for home. Live here long enough, and you see — or smell — everything; the next thing they’ll be telling you, there’ll be fish living in that river.
But who needs a river full of fish when you’ve got the city that never sleeps? Jamie laughed at himself, at his own corniness, at the idea that he could still be impressed by this sprawling, impossible place. And that he could still, even after six and a half years, almost seven, feel like he’d only just arrived.
