Overnight, a plant had grown in the pot which Annabelle sown the hazelnut, if grown is the proper word. No, on second thought, it didn’t even come close. A growing plant implies quiet, peacefulness, a gradual unfolding of branch and flower.
Overnight, a plant exploded out of the pot in which Annabelle planted the hazelnut.
“Holy shit!” she shouted.
She couldn’t take it in; an entire corner had been shanghaied by a twisting, gnarled, and enormous… tree, practically. If not for the large pink flowers that seemed to float above the knotty branches, the thing would look quite sinister indeed. It seemed to be swaying slightly. Dreading the mess if it toppled over, Annabelle inched over and propped the heavier bits over the back of a chair. The plant vibrated at her touch, and seemed to send out a slight, airy hum as she arranged it. She lowered herself into the second of her two chairs and stared.
Somehow, the pot was still intact even though the roots of the… thing should have been as great in size as the plant itself. No horticulturalist, Annabelle at least knew that much, that the roots of trees went as far down into the earth as the tree itself shot up toward the sky… or something.
She cautiously extended a finger and lightly stroked one of the branches, and the result was a sound akin to delicate wind chimes. Oddly enough—as if things weren’t already odd enough—despite the fact the plant ranged up toward the ceiling and completely filled its corner of her ‘dining room,’ it didn’t seem to be blocking light coming in from the window. Always low lighted at best, the room actually seemed a bit brighter now.
Annabelle thought longingly of a cigarette. As if it read her mind, the plant quivered in distaste. “Great,” said Annabelle. “Not only enchanted, but judgmental. I’ll smoke if I damn well please!” Branches began to wave in reaction, and Annabelle scooted her chair back a bit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bough slowly edging a pack of Marlboro Lights toward the main body of the plant. Annabelle leaped up from her chair and backed up against the door to her flat. “This is getting too weird, even for me.”
The phone rang, and Annabelle was tempted to let the machine get it, but somehow the handset landed on the floor. As she picked it up, out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of branches waving as if it knocked the phone off its cradle. Annabelle took a deep breath and answered.
“Hello?”
“Well, hi there! It’s Kelli callin’!” Her gushy Southern accent oozed down the line. “I tried your cell first but as usual, it went straight to voice mail!”
“Hey, Kell. How are things?”
“Oh, I’m just fine. But,” she paused, lowering her voice sympathetically. “How are you?”
Annabelle stared at the plant, and then turned her back on it.
“Oh, you know.”
“Yes, I do. I do know. Oh, Annabelle.”
“But I’m getting back out there, work-wise, I mean, sending off to the agents.”
“Good for you! Keep busy with work, that’s what I always say.”
“Yeah. Definitely. Same.”
“Well, as to that! I’ve got a new theatre show about to get off the ground, and I really need someone to develop the website for me. I’d do it myself, but I’m producing and directing, and gosh, I can’t do everything!”
“Yeah, I don’t know, Kell—ow!” She turned to look at the plant, which was quivering slightly in its pot.
Kelli’s molasses voice exuded solicitude. “You okay, sugar?”
“Something… hit me on the head. Yeah, okay, okay, I’ll do it.”
“That’s so great! And maybe you could look at the script?”
“Uh, screenplays used to be more my thing, Kell—”
Bright tinkling laughter made Annabelle wince. “Oh, close enough! Listen, my little brain trust is meeting tonight, downtown. You can come along, can’t you?”
“Yeah, got nothing else going on,” Annabelle muttered as she put down the phone. She could have sworn that the plant folded in upon itself with apparent smugness.
62y
Trudging up the stairs of a restaurant so expensive, she was surprised she was let in without showing the maître d’ the contents of her wallet. Annabelle wondered, again, what the hell she was doing. Being gently bullied by Kelli was one thing but being rather more tenaciously bullied by a plant was another entirely. She paused on a landing, not so much to catch her breath as to catch her… spirit. A roomful of strangers wasn’t exactly something to look forward to. The fact that these strangers had all been inveigled into doing something they probably didn’t have the time to do added another layer of lunacy to the whole fiasco.
She felt like she owed Kelli, but she didn’t really, not in material terms. An editor of the popular and influential NYC Weekly, the city’s most highly regarded nightlife guide, Kelli basically, for all intents and purposes, been keeping Annabelle solvent for the last few years. I do the work, it’s a fair exchange, she scolded herself. But there was this thing about Kelli, this eternal feeling of obligation, because wasn’t Kelli so thoughtful, always thinking of Annabelle, ensuring that her name stayed out there—whether she wanted it to or not?
Publishing didn’t pay, as everyone knew, but nobody knew where Kelli’s money came from. Not her everyday capital, but the flow that allowed her to finance her thrice-yearly forays into theater, video, art installation… just about any idea Kelli had, she executed via a decidedly fat and happy cash cow.
I’m outta here, Annabelle thought just as Kelli appeared at the top of the next flight. “There you are, sugar! We’re all just waiting for you!”
Annabelle smiled wanly up at the vision that appeared on the landing, turned out in a severely tailored oyster-colored designer suit. Unlike most New York females of ‘a certain age’, Kelli actively cultivated a settled and matronly air mitigated by expensive clothes and unmistakably real baubles. Her ash-blonde hair looked entirely natural, and her seemingly innocent ice-blue gaze was bracketed by barely discernible lines. Despite all this—the Lady-Who-Lunches suit, the limpid gaze, and the lazy drawl—Annabelle knew if she so much as made a move to leave, Kelli would be on her like a puma on an antelope.
She meekly followed Kelli into the exclusive eatery’s ritzy private dining room.
Head down, she charged toward the only empty place, uncomfortably squeezing her bags between the table and her lap. She nodded to what looked like several ethereal dancers across the table and sneaked a glance around—Maria Grazia!
She raised her eyebrows slightly. What are you doing here?
MG flicked her lashes at Kelli.
Annabelle waggled her head a shade. Thought you were immune…
Maria Grazia lightly rubbed her thumb over the fingertips of her right hand. Amex.
Annabelle smirked, sat back and began arranging the tools of her trade on the table. She knew Kelli liked to get business out of the way of the enjoyment of, not only the food, but also because of her own particular brand of bonding, which involved the amplification of everyone’s accomplishments, a continual recital of the project’s worth, a gentle reminder to all of the sundry career-boosting properties of the job at hand, and matchmaking.
Laptop was joined by pad and pen. Annabelle could cross-platform multitask and relished any opportunity to do so. She set up her micro-cassette recorder with its multi-directional mic and pressed record. “Testing… testing… one, two, three—”
“Da da dada dum DADA dada dum—”
Annabelle heard the voice—a wordless rendering of the opening bars of New York, New York, in just about the worst Frank Sinatra impression she’d ever heard—but all she saw, at first, was an arm, male, sheathed in a blinding white shirt. The sleeve was turned up to reveal a rather fine specimen of forearm, but her vision was filled with the whiteness of the shirt and the texture of lovely, heavy cotton. Her nose twitched, entranced by the shirt’s freshly laundered scent, with just the hint of the heat of the iron lingering. What was it about a clean white shirt on a man, a nicely pressed white shirt, as she let her gaze slide upwards, that billowed over the outline of a solid bicep, that clung so evocatively to a strong male shoulder?
She cut her eyes up to the face that was smiling down at her. Green eyes, tousled auburn hair, and dimples greeted her discomfited gaze. Her apparent chagrin only increased the blinding quality of his grin.
He shrugged. “Thought I might give you something more interesting to listen to.”
Annabelle rewound, the screech of the tape covering her increasing… What? Her increasing what? So what, she thought, cute guy, with an accent, nice shirt, dime a dozen—is my hand shaking?
She played it back and grimaced as his voice came on. “Your Liza Minelli needs work,” she… teased? What? Am I teasing? What am I doing?
“Ah, now, no need to pander to the ego,” he rejoined, and bumped her shoulder with his.
Which she ignored, because she got a look at what was spread before him on the table. “Is that—” she gasped for air. “What is that, that… mess?” She looked up at him—Up? Was he tall on top of everything else? Wait, what ‘else’?
“What, my gear?” He looked down at his pencils, colored and otherwise, the sheets of slightly crumpled paper, the pad that had long since lost its cover, the edges of the pages curling willy-nilly, the squashed tubes of gouache, the battered brushes, and the large and blackened wad of kneaded eraser.
“It’s a mess!” Annabelle squeaked, and had to sit on her hands to resist smoothing the papers, lining up the brushes, and squeezing the bottom of every tube of paint until they were uniformly ready to dispense color evenly and in the most cost-effective fashion. “Is that how you treat your tools?”
“Now that’s a kinda personal question.”
Annabelle winced. “And was that supposed to be Mae West?”
“Are you keeping your sense of humor packed away somewhere in that unimaginatively orderly rucksack?” He gestured with a chewed-up charcoal pencil, a look of equal distaste on his face.
“This, if you must know, is the way a professional keeps on her toes when on location. When the number of variables that would impede a successful transcription of events naturally increase a thousand-fold.” Annabelle pretended to tend to her laptop, even though it was already well-tended.
“Calm yourself, missus, I’m only joking you.” He reached into a brown paper bag and tossed some more arty implements down on the pile. “You really shouldn’t scold strange men about their tools.”
Annabelle tried to keep her eyes off the growing pile of disorganized stuff that was spreading all over the table. “Hmmm,” she said, changing the subject. “Irish.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Indeed.”
Kelli came meandering by, a bit breathless, as usual. “We’re just now about to start, ya’ll. So exciting. Oh, have you two met? Annabelle Walsh, Jamie Flynn. Jamie, Annabelle.”
“Sort of,” said Annabelle, cutting her eyes at him.
“She’s been criticizing my tools,” Jamie said, cutting his eyes right back.
“Isn’t that fiiiiine,” Kelli murmured absently, and meandered away again.
Jamie looked at Annabelle and laughed, and she felt a weird little thrill, something that reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. This thrill was located somewhere in her belly, and it rolled around as if she’d swallowed a goldfish. Self-conscious, she began to move things around in front of her. Was she flustered, or something? She was definitely nervous all of a sudden, as the gleam in Jamie’s eye triggered something kind of simple and kind of complicated at the same time. She grabbed her wine glass.
“So, you’re the playwright?” Jamie shifted in his chair to fully face Annabelle. Over his shoulder, she saw Maria Grazia, who had been meditating over her glass of red, pin them with a look.
“God, no!” Annabelle launched her word processing program. “I’m a writer, but I think in this instance, I’m more of a scribe.”
“I’ve got some parchment in here if you’d rather go the medieval route—”
“Don’t! Don’t take anything else out of that bag!”
Jamie laughed again. “I don’t need to take my show on the road, generally, as it were.”
“Aren’t you the set designer, or something?”
“Uh, no. Doing Kelli a favor…”
“You and everybody else,” Annabelle muttered into her own glass of what was truly fine Bordeaux.
“She ‘made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’”
“Excellently rendered Robert Redford—”
“Ah, now. You’re just winding me up.”
“So, what do you do?” Annabelle twirled her wine glass and then made herself stop. Just a question, she thought. Not flirting.
“I’m a painter,” Jamie replied. “Well, you know. I paint, not so much selling yet, but some. I restore things, paintings, painted furniture, and the like. So I’m a restorer-slash-painter.”
“Slashed, huh? So you’ve been living here for a while.”
“A good few years, almost 6 and a half.”
Any potential banter was interrupted by Kelli’s sudden business-like voice delivering her spiel. Annabelle listened with half an ear, aware of the guy beside her, aware of Maria Grazia signaling her from her end of the table. MG spun her butter knife around to point in The Irish Guy’s direction.
Annabelle shrugged her right shoulder a fraction. So?
Maria Grazia tucked a curl behind her right ear and tilted up her chin. So who is he?
Some guy. Annabelle flicked her fingers dismissively.
Maria Grazia blinked slowly. Hot.
Annabelle took up her pen and began to make nonsensical notes. Stop it.
MG smiled into her wine but stopped it.
The pitch—which wasn’t really necessary, they all could use the abundant funds Kelli was sending their way—was brief; it was ardently attended to by the dancer types, who were painfully sincere, and less zealously heeded by those who felt shanghaied, which was basically everyone else. Annabelle snuck a look at her watch, energy flagging, that dragging feeling of sadness and emptiness threatening to swell—
“What?” Annabelle looked up as Jamie’s elbow nudged her side. “Yes?”
Kelli smiled brightly, a sure sign she was peeved. “I was just sayin’, sugar, that this was where you come in! We need words, words that encapsulate the essence of the work. Beautiful words. Unique words. Nouns. Verbs. Adjectives.”
They all looked expectantly at Annabelle, Jamie managing to grimace at her with only half his face.
“Uh. Sure. Can you give me an idea of what you’re looking for?” Good bluff.
“Nice one,” Jamie whispered.
Kelli took a deep breath. The dancers joined her as one, with hands clasped at their hearts. “Scallop. Waft. Bedazzle.”
Fuck’s sake. Annabelle dutifully typed them into the blank document as the dancers cooed. “Got it,” she said, and stifled a sigh.
“Wonderful!” Kelli enthused, and called a halt to the proceedings as the waiters descended with the first course.
“Need some help?” Jamie leaned in again as Annabelle shut everything down. “Let’s see. Gallop. Shoelace. Noodle.”
Annabelle laughed at him and he smiled in return, an almost excessive delight of plush lips and dimples. Flustered, she returned everything to its place in her bag and tried to keep her itching fingers away from Jamie’s brushes. Surely, she had some zip-close plastic bags on her. She rarely went anywhere without them and could casually offer to show him how easy it would be to scoop up the tubes of paint and put them in the—
“I see I was a bit too hard on ya.”
Annabelle broke out of her reverie. “Huh?”
Jamie pointed at her bag. “That. It’s a nice touch.”
Tucked into a corner of her backpack, as if it were meant to be there, was one of the blossoms off the mystery monster plant. “Hmph,” she huffed, and glared at it, and then, by extension, Jamie. This seemed to strike him as funny, and he snickered again, a mischievous little giggle that sounded as if it had its roots in his childhood.
“Surely I’m not to blame for that as well—”
“Everyone! Let’s all move ourselves around now, we must all meet one another if we’re going to be a team!”
Everyone rose, and began to mill about, changing places. A scenic designer started brandishing an old-fashioned Polaroid camera that actually spit out pictures, right there, in the moment, and Annabelle nearly swooned. Jamie swept his gear off the table into the paper bag and smiled at her gasp of outrage.
The meal dragged on. Trapped between two mimes, Annabelle ate as quickly as was humanly possible, refused a coffee, and said her goodbyes to Kelli. Maria Grazia tapped her throat—Call me!—and Annabelle tried to ignore the staring Irishman, until, annoyed at his gawking, she stuck her tongue out at him and left.
62y
“She has funny way of flirting with a fella,” Jaime murmured, but not indistinctly enough for Kelli’s finely tuned ear.
“Why, Jamie, was our Annabelle flirtin’ with you?” Her drawl increased exponentially with the prospect of romantic intrigue.
“I reckon it was flirting. I—she—we’d been having a chat, like, and well, it was, you know. Feck’s sake, like.” Jamie briskly dug into his crème caramel.
“That’s real interestin’,” Kelli drawled. “You interested?”
“In her?”
“No, in investing in the stock market.”
“Both, actually,” Jamie grinned.
Kelli patted him on his forearm and couldn’t help letting her hand linger to give it a little squeeze. “I’ll have my broker call your broker, but as far as the other is concerned… well. Annabelle’s somewhat emotionally distressed, due to an unexpected and inelegant termination to a long-term relationship.”
“She’s single?” This was more important than ‘buy low, sell high’ any day.
“Umm hmm.” Kelli’s own eyes took on the dreamily fervent gleam of the unrepentant matchmaker. “This might take some… finessin’. You just leave it all to me, ya hear?”