Unforced Error......a story in several parts.......3

Part 3

“You are so wrong,” said Vincent, thrusting a Parrot Tulip in Juan’s face, “She said Mrs Hollerbeck was a priority and anyway she’s uptown and uptown always goes out first.”

“I know uptown goes out first but you fucked up the Blaustein order and day gotta go now man, and dats what she told me”

“I fucked up nothing you asshole”

“Hey Aniese tell da fucking faggot what he fucked up, I’m outta here.”

Everything was as it should be at the 4^th Street Flower Shop: Vincent, the Queen arranger, was having his usual morning meeting with Juan, a six foot, Latino, ex-speed freak with an innate ability to arrange flowers and Marla, the proprietor, was still at the market. Aniese rearranged the pile of invoices on her desk and kept her head down.

“Well if you could write fucking English sweetheart, then maybe I could read the fucking order, you fucking wetback.”

The last comment was lost on Juan whose lumbering frame was already out of the door. The unlikely coupling of Juan the ex-con and Marla the fashionista’s favourite florist had come about when the young flower girl had decided to quit her job arranging for the good, the bad and the ugly on the upper Westside and branch out on her own. Juan had been there right from the start. Initially hired as van driver, then a stem cutter he had helped her re-model the empty liquor store, the only property she could afford to lease, in what was then a far from fashionable neighbourhood. He had kept the bums at bay, who insisted upon banging on the door for a bottle, while he learnt the names of flowers. She gave him the necessary references to get off probation. Now he had a bank account, a wife and a new baby boy and Marla had a thriving business in what had become a very funky hood. It was widely believed the arrangement had only lasted so long because Juan was one of the few people whom the headstrong Marla could give no shit to being as how he took no shit from no one, especially her. And this she respected and therefore he became the only member of her itinerant staff who lasted more than a year. Plus, legal employment was not something that would come easy to a man with his back ground and Juan knew that his life span was likey to be a lot longer arranging flowers than it was back on the street.

“OK cupcake,” trilled Vincent, downing his blooms, “I’m getin’ coffee, skinny latte for the lady?”

“Better make it a large one,” said Aniese, swivelling in her chair.

“Late night?”

“Long night”

“Hold that thought, honey, I wanna hear everything. And tell the arsehole the Blaustein’s are ready in the refrigerator and he can go fuck himself.”

Vincent and Juan carried on a perpetual love hate banter but would die to defend one another from anyone else. Proven when Vincent perjured himself in court to give Juan an alibi after he was accused of doing a break-in with Marla’s delivery van (a job actually carried out by Juan’s now estranged half-brother who was temporarily employed by 4^th Street at the time). And Juan had laid to waste a Neanderthal that had once tried to suggest that taking it up the butt might not be God’s way, while kicking Vincent down the steps of the subway on Astor Place.

The phone rang and Aniese remembered just in time to put on her happy voice, the voice she was supposed to use when dealing with the clients but rarely did. Instead she reserved it mainly for the call Marla always made when she was on her way back from the flower market. Yes everything was great, Vincent was great, Juan was great, there was no drama, no hiccups, no problem. She put the phone down and took the kid gloves off. To say Marla was highly strung was a mild understatement, she was a forty-year old adolescent. Yes she could do the most amazing things with even the humblest bunch of flowers, this was an indisputable fact but she was an hormonal headcase. Marla would stamp her feet, slam down the phone, scream and shout then happily sit down and discuss the tiniest minutiae of one’s personal life. However, should Aniese ever have to ask her a question regarding an account she would be off again, flouncing about the office, ranting on about having to do everything and the pressures of life and why didn’t any one care and on and on and on. So why was Aniese still there? Because she wasn’t, she was leaving. It’s just that she hadn’t gotten around to it yet and besides it was convenient. She only lived a few blocks away and the money was OK and it wasn’t rocket science and so what if her boss was a raving nutcase at least she had a job and she was able to work at her next career move in her own time. Plus, she could be late and Marla was never going to sack her, who else would put up with her?

Aniese finished writing the billet-doux from the guy on Wall St. and stuffed it in the little envelope and addressed it to Kattie Koloski. She paper-clipped it on the right hand side (always the right hand side) of the relevant yellow slip with the arrangement instructions neatly printed in the middle and the address written in the box on the left. Then, she put it with the card to the eminent English Dame who was opening on Broadway, the thank you note from the guy who had a different date every day, the well done, the commiserations, the congratulations and the you-go-girl for Naomi Campbell from her agent.

“So what shall I put?” she said, chewing the end of her pen in lovelorn angst.

“How about you may be a loser but you’re still my stud muffin?”

“Thanks Vincent, that’ll cheer him up”

Aniese stared out of the window at the strip of tree that blocked the view and thought some more. The wording had to be just right.

“Is he still doing coke?” asked Vincent thrusting a baby artichoke into the oasis.

“Only recreationally”

“Well what about sniff this?”

“Look Vincent this is important. I want him to know I have forgiven him his short comings and that I’m prepared to give him another chance without undermining his confidence within our relationship”

“ Oh Lordy let me sit down I’m having an Oprah moment,” said Vincent, fanning himself dramatically with an Arum Lily. “Listen sister, has he even called yet?”

Vincent had a point. Aniese was already working on the afternoon orders and there had still been no word from Trey; no crying, no begging, no pleading for her to come back.

“Maybe he didn’t realise I was being serious”

“But you aren’t.”

“But I was last night.”

She looked down at what she had just written on the little card she’d been planning to attach to the bouquet of berries, rose buds and baby bell peppers for Trey: Only you, forever Aniese.

“Maybe I’ll just check my messages,” she said, speed dialling her home phone.

“What like he’s lost your cell” quipped Vincent who believed Aniese would be better off with a cat rather than go belly-up with Trey. “Let him go honey, what you need…….” He stopped mid way through his denunciation of the young man as he realised Aniese was not listening. She was standing in a pool of grief stricken shock, her face distorted by disbelief, her hand to her mouth, eyes unblinking.

“Oh my God what’s happened?” said Vincent, springing in to action with a pack of Marlboro Lights.

“He’s dumped me.” She crumpled in to her chair, knocking over the out-going orders box and scattering all the messages of love and lust on to the floor.

“He says I’m absolutely right, he’s says we were strangling each others creativity and he feels like he’s just taken off a hat that was too tight. He says he wants to move to California and he hopes we can always be friends and he wants to thank me for making it all so clear.”

“Is that all?” said Vincent, lighting a cigarette anyway, “I thought someone had died or something.”

“They have, I have”

“Sweetheart, you dumped the schmuck last night.”

“But that was before….before I knew he was the one. And now I am a hat that’s too tight” she dissolved into a snotty sob, “and he did it on my answer phone.”

“Yer, that is bad.” Said Vincent, sucking ruefully while thrusting his arm through the open window, “but look at it this way, it just goes to show what a loser he is. You do not need someone like that in your life.”

Aniese bent down and shovelled the cards back into the box. She plucked out the one she’d just written to Trey and ripped it in half.

“Bastard” she sniffed.

“That’s right honey.”

“Fuck him anyway,” she blew her nose.

“Now you’re talking, you take those flowers home yourself”

“No way” said Aniese, feverishly writing out a new card, “Send ‘em out.”

Unforced Error......a story in several parts.......

Part 2.

Aniese sat and sipped and stared. She felt completely inert, unable to shake life back in to her leaden legs, unable to stop going over and over the events of the night before, trapped in a permanent loop of what she’d said, what he’d said. What she was trying to work out was had she actually broken up with her boyfriend or not? And if she had how did she feel about it? And was this feeling of nausea in her stomach and the tightening across the back of her neck and the slight throbbing in the temples a consequence of the way she felt about Trey? Or was it a hangover? And in among these questions of life altering importance she couldn’t help wondering if the old man sitting at the counter was the same old man depicted in the mural that ran the length of the restaurant. A mural that represented the happy glow of the contented customers enjoying bowls of borsch and plates of pierogis, painted in the heavy hand of the Eastern-block artist and no doubt done by one of the many émigré in lieu of payment for food already eaten.

At that moment the old man raised one hand to his baldpate and slammed the other on the counter. Voices were raised and the waitress behind the counter started shouting at the short order cook who was now holding his spatula aloft and jabbing it in the direction of the old man.

“Over easy over easy” shouted the old man, “is dat so hard?”

“Ah fuck you” replied the chief, who then resorted to his native tongue to berate the waitress, the old man and anyone else who might be listening.

Aniese took this as a sign, she could no longer contemplate her life amongst the din. So she retrieved the check from beneath the sugar bowl and moved to the cash register.

Outside, Aniese could smell the change of season, Fall seemed to hang in the air like the last of the summer leaves clinging to the trees. The sky was bright and blue and fresh, so high it could raise even the lowest of spirits. She walked south towards the 4th Street Flower Shop, one of the coolest florists in Manhattan according to New York Magazine, and her current place of employment. Had she really split up with Trey? They certainly had had a big fight and she had told him it was over, that she’d had enough, that she was thirty-two now and that they’d been going out for nearly two years and that she couldn’t afford to waste another two years if this relationship wasn’t going anywhere. And he’d said thanks very much he hadn’t realised that being with him was a waste of time, and that they were fine weren’t they and what did she want anyway, being as how they both lived in studio apartments and that neither of them could afford a one bedroom right now, unless they moved to Brooklyn, which neither of them wanted to do, and anyway they only lived a couple of blocks apart and why was she always looking at what she hadn’t got instead of what she had?

Aniese had called Trey a loser and he had called her uptight. Both of these statements were true but were they a good enough reason to split up? In a city famous for being the capital of single women, for inventing the rules and thirtysomthings and being the spiritual home of every book and TV sitcom depicting single-sad-home-alones, was Trey’s inability to get a proper job (bartending+DJing x being 35 does not= a proper job) and his love of spending half the day in bed and the other half burning toast, a valid reason to give him up?

Possibly, she thought. But as her good friend Pia had said, time spent with boyfriends when you’re past thirty should be counted in dog years and, as she also said, how can you catch a cab if you’re already on the bus? Was Aniese on the bus? She had definitely thought she was in a cab about eighteen months ago. Trey was tall and good-looking in the spends-no-time-on-his-personal-appearance kind of way. He’d been working in a bar in the evening and in a studio during the day. He already had several credits on some quite well known CDs. He was planning to start his own label and open his own studio, Trey was really going places. But somehow nothing much had happened since then, except that he didn’t work in the studio anymore because he was always so exhausted and he had to work in the bar more because he wasn’t earning enough just doing three nights a week, and now pretty much every evening he and Aniese spent together involved either being in the bar or doing something early before he went to the bar or something late after he finished at the bar and Aniese had realised she was going out with a bar tender which wasn’t quite as cool as the gorgeous music guy she’d originally met.

Mind you she wasn’t exactly scaling any dizzy career heights herself. The part-time job she’d taken in the flower shop, to cover while her friend was on holiday in Mexico, had only gone full-time when her friend had failed to return due to being busted at customs with a sizeable amount of cocaine concealed in the novelty piñata she was taking home. The photography course she’d enrolled in had failed to contribute anything to her CV, likewise the acting classes which had lasted long enough for her to declare her dislike for mime before being denounced by the teacher and forced to retire from a profession she had yet to join. Then there was the writing course, the aromatherapy massage course and the time she tried to learn how to teach English as a foreign language in order to earn her living more successfully. All had come to naught. So, was she just taking her frustrations about her own life out on poor Trey? Yes, she certainly had felt that if she’d had a better boyfriend, someone worthier of her, then she in turn would have a much better life, ergo it was all Trey’s fault. But was that fair? Of course not and besides winter was coming and if a boyfriend wasn’t forever then he certainly was for Christmas. And anyway she knew he’d get a really good gig if she did dump him and then he’d meet someone else and she’d get the benefit of all Aniese’s hard work. No it just wasn’t worth it. Aniese resolved to send him flowers and give him one more chance.

Unforced Error......a story in several parts.......

Part 1.

From the day she was born, Aniese had been a great disappointment to her mother, primarily because she was white. Aniese’s mother was white too but her boyfriend, at the time of her daughter’s birth, had been black. Not black like a Starbucks latte but real black, black like a double espresso black, and Aniese should have been a cute, coffee-coloured little kid with curly black ringlets and big eyes as round as silver dollar pancakes and the colour of Aunt Jemima’s Syrup. But she wasn’t. Aniese was as white as the driven snow that had fallen on the December night that she was born, in the state of Vermont, with hair the colour of straw and eyes as blue as the flat sky of a Norfolk summer’s day. Because as it turned out Norfolk was where her real dad came from.

Stella Siedleman, Aniese’s mom, had been a budding actress and one of the founder members of Happy Daze, a passionate group of avant-garde actors based in Cidergate, Vermont in the late 60’s and early 70’s. She wore long flowing dresses and kohl rimmed eyes and was dedicated to her art and a number of her fellow actors. But in 1969 she became particularly enamoured with a young black actor from New York who’d joined the happy band of players. Six months later she found out she was with child and she was delighted. To be having a baby outside of wedlock was, to her, quite wonderful. To be having a baby of mixed race was the ultimate badge of cool and if it gave her mother a coronary then all well and good. After all she might just as well have been in league with the anti-Christ for all the love and understanding Mr and Mrs Siedleman had shown her since she had dropped out of college.

Had Aniese turned out to be the daughter of the aspiring, young Lenny Levine (who although he never really made it big did get to be a series regular on the Cosby Show) then maybe everything might have turned out different. But it was no good crying over spilt sperm. Aniese was in fact the daughter of Dave Veral, an inept musician and one time roadie from England who’d enjoyed the pleasures of Stella, and several other young ladies, whilst on a tour across America with a band whose name no one could remember. The conception had taken place in the Astoria hotel in Manhattan during one of the few parties that Stella had attended that lived up to the era. There had been sex and drugs and rock and roll and Stella had arrived with Lenny and several other friends during a brief sojourn to the big city. No one could remember who it was who knew about the party.

There had been a fight over Lenny’s keen appraisal of one of the other guests who was wearing nothing more than body paint and Stella had walked out. It was in the elevator that she’d met Dave Veral who was staying in the same hotel but on a different floor, and was on his way home after the gig. He had been planning to have his own little party with one of the many girls who frequented the backstage environs. However, he had failed to locate any willing partner and was delighted when the beautiful, nubile, waif with the kohl-rimmed eyes fell into the lift she hoped was going down but was in fact travelling up. Four floors later Dave had persuaded Stella to join him for a little R&R and the course of history, Aniese’s history, was changed forever.

Nine months later Aniese made her grand entrance, centre stage, to the dulcet tones of Bob Dylan. It was immediately apparent to Stella’s close friend and community midwife, Dale, (who’d flown in especially from California to preside over the birth) that even in the gloom of the many handmade candles, which Lenny and his best friend Marvin had so carefully placed around the bedroom, that things were not quite right. And in the full glare of the electric light bulb, unsheathed from its tie-die scarf, Lenny knew that this baby girl was nothing to do with him.

Poor Stella, torn between the joy of mother hood and the shock of the birth, wept as she took the baby to her breast while Lenny retreated to the safety of a bottle of Jack Daniels and the first of many spliffs. Dale sat and wept with her while they pondered the mystery of Aniese. Lenny had known all about the date that was Dave for in those enlightened times love was still considered free and fairly easy. But it had never dawned on either of them that their bundle of joy was anything but the progeny of them. Stella had never been good at numbers but it was no good trying to remember dates now and anyway in the orange glow of the lamp, now draped once more, she had already fallen in love.

But that was all a long time ago, thirty-two years had slipped by since then at what seemed to Aniese to be an alarming rate. In fact as she sat in the Polish dinner on the corner of Avenue A sipping her third refill of coffee she felt the movement of time was almost palpable. Why when you wanted something to happen, she wondered, did time refuse to move and yet when you were late for work, for example, the minutes moved with the speed of light.

Being late for work had become part of Aniese’s occupation. She hated her job, she hated her apartment she hated her boyfriend. Today Aniese Siedleman hated everything especially her mother. If she’d been born Aniese Levine then maybe when Lenny had left Vermont he’d have taken them all with him to California, instead of disappearing in the dead of night with Dale the midwife. Maybe she’d have grown up in a sunny suburb of Los Angeles with her dad on TV every week instead of in a commune, a log cabin with out electricity, a Tee-Pee, a selection of hotels that have never been featured in any tourist guide and finally a cold-water walk up in downtown Manhattan where she’d slept in a loft bed above the refrigerator in the kitchen. Oh happy daze.

to be continued....