The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  “If what’s true? That we’re together? But it is.”

  “No.” The others looked at each other. Ptarmigan nervously rolled his wheelchair backward and forward. “Just—” Bear began.

  “—what some people say,” said Raven.

  “About what?”

  “The truth about Simon’s wife.” Ptarmigan took a deep breath and stared into my face through his round little wire rims. “We’ve heard some rumors around campus—one of my professors in the theatre department teaches in the literature department, too. Some say that she didn’t really die—she just left.”

  “Left?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what some people whisper—” said Orca.

  “But that’s impossible,” I said. “What about Annette? Her mother wouldn’t just leave her.” I felt a twisting in my stomach.

  “Why not?” asked Raven. “People do all sorts of things. And Simon might have found it easier to tell his kid and everyone else that the wife just got sick and died.”

  Possibly I’d learned a secret about Simon, I thought, fingering the sharp edges of the Misfits ticket in my pocket. Possibly I’d learned the secret about Simon, shaky Simon who shaded his eyes and lived in a shadowy house, but I would not, I decided, say anything about it.

  Simon had, with his tear-tinged hyacinth sighs, breathed life into me. I could feel his affection all around me. It was a vapor that enclosed me. And I lived in a state of elation because of it, and also a state of fear that he might one day pull his attention back into himself, tuck it behind his dark eyes, and I would wither without it. I tiptoed through my own happiness, hoping never to do anything to push him away. Maybe that was what Simon had meant by marriage being Chinese water torture—maybe by Chinese water torture he meant to describe the latent terror of losing what we most desire to keep.

  “But, guys, you don’t really know what happened,” I said, “so what’s the point of speculating?” The crew was silent. “Anyway,” I continued, “what about the movie? What did you think?” And then there was no talk of Simon’s maybe-wayward wife, or even of wild horses, only of Marilyn. “She’s so tender,” said Bear, “you just hate to think of anything bad ever happening to her.”

  I DIDN’T ADOPT AN ANIMAL-INSPIRED NAME like the others. The truth was—though I never said so—I couldn’t bear to replace “Margie,” not because I was proud or particularly fond of my hopelessly clunky moniker, but because it was something Rasha had given me. The crew didn’t mind too much.

  “I must say, though,” Bumble said, “if you were to take a new name, it would have to be ‘She-Bird.’ ”

  “Indeed,” seconded Ptarmigan.

  “Not only,” continued Bumble, “because of your affinity with avian creatures, which was so evident that day in Azar’s”—he didn’t know about the lone lovebird over whom I tossed and turned—“but because of your own seemingly inherent birdishness.” He took a drag from one of the marijuana cigarettes he kept stashed in the futuristic fanny pack—it was called, he said, a marsupium, and it was, he added, waterproof—that encircled his waist.

  “Yeah, and because you are delicate—” added Orca.

  “I’m not delicate.”

  “—yes, delicate, and always looking around curiously at everything.”

  “She-Bird!” Bear hugged me.

  ON MY BIRTHDAY, JUST BEFORE I BEGAN my second year of college, Simon, Annette, and the crew took me to the same vegan Mexican place where Simon and I had gone on our date. “Why does she get to have a monkey?” Annette asked repeatedly, pointing to a Frida Kahlo self-portrait on the wall. I stared once more at the photo of the female Zapatista, the warrioress. Between bites of potato taquitos, Bumble pulled a tiny box from his marsupium and slid it across the table to me.

  “From all of us,” he said.

  I looked at Simon. He looked back in the familiar way that said he could see straight through my flushed face and messy hair into the nesty coils of my mind, and this was what he saw, I knew, shooting synaptic sparks: I had friends. Yes, I thought in answer to his question of so many months earlier, I do have friends.

  Inside the box was a silver charm bracelet decorated with its first charm—a bird in flight, naturally. When I put it on, with Bear’s help, the crew cheered, and Annette offered an exuberant “Woooo!”

  Later that night, when we were snug in his bedroom, Simon gave me his present—a second charm for my bracelet. He dropped it into my hot palm and I savored its metalline chill for a moment. Then I remembered a fragment from the conversation I’d had with Dad a couple of years before, that day on the stairs when he’d told me about meeting and marrying Rasha. “Love,” he had said, “is laying your head down on the tracks while knowing full well that the train is coming, and enjoying the coolness of the metal against your neck.” I held the charm up to the lamplight. It was half of a broken heart. One side of the heart was curvaceous and smooth, while the other was jagged, like a serrated knife. “I have the other half,” Simon said. I curled my arms around his neck, and just when I was about to utter the word “Where?” Simon put a finger over my lips and pointed once to his own bare chest.

  6 COW (Bos primigenius taurus)

  THERE WERE MANY SATURDAYS WHEN, as I walked through the cool corridors of Simon’s silent house, where the air was always sea-heavy and damp, I spotted Annette alone in her room, sitting still as a sphinx, limp hands folded in her lap, staring into her cavernous dollhouse with its miniature mother, father, son, and daughter, its pixie furnishings, its dainty dishes, and I knew we had more in common than a home. In such moments, I recognized the perpetually waiting posture and hungry look of a motherless girl.

  Whether she really had died or just departed for greener grass, Annette’s mother was gone, and so was mine. Dad always said Rasha had disappeared in a blur of red poppies.

  Naturally, I wished I had a mother to talk to about Simon’s diamond eyes and broken edges, and about the irresistible pull of hurt, helpless things. And I wished I had a mother to talk to about the limitless longing I so often felt, a nameless longing I’d first known as a youngster when the orange blossoms entered my mind’s own mythology.

  In the old days, the blossoms had been abundant in our neighborhood. But long before I was born, the orange groves had been razed to make way for the maze of tract housing developments. The tracts were assigned romantic Spanish names that struck their inhabitants as enticingly exotic—Vista Verde, Via de Oro, El Sol Rojo, and of course our own, Tierra de Flores.

  Still, there were a few lonely orange trees left standing here and there in our town, relics from the region’s rural past. One afternoon when I was thirteen, suddenly curious to discover just how their blossoms smelled, I hunted the trees from atop my bicycle. When I found one, I stood on tiptoe, straddling my bike’s seat, and broke off clusters of dust-filmed leaves where the five-pointed blossoms bloomed. I pressed my face into the waxy white stars and felt a tingling vibration, like a cello string plucked just once, in my womb. I realized the scent was one I had, in fact, smelled my whole life, that it had been there, in the air, all along.

  I wondered how something could smell like love and like home at the same time. I made a habit of keeping the blossoms on my nightstand, floating in a chipped ashtray Dad had discarded. My dreams were of dark-haired strangers who pulled the back of me against the front of them in spooning embraces.

  During the days that followed such dreams, I had that limitless feeling of longing, a nameless longing, so that the smallest sight, such as grass blades barely moving in the breeze, or a lone moth on a dusty porch light, made me sick with longing, longing to swallow the whole of life in one gulp, or to be kissed with deep, secretive kisses, to be loved by someone who could see me, the dark stranger of my dream life, someone who had known me forever in the dream world, who could speak my language, whose tongue would find my tongue. I had a searching feeling, and I was alarmed, so many years later, to find that I still had it, and I wondered why my time with Simon h
ad not extinguished it, why it lingered. I wished I had a mother to talk to about it.

  I knew something was missing. I looked and sniffed and felt around for it. And lying in bed beside mysterious Simon, listening to the rise and fall of his snores, or setting birds and lobsters free, or staging protests in front of ice cream parlors, or stealing into labs to liberate rabbits and rats, I whispered it—something is still missing—but I couldn’t hear Rasha, couldn’t hear her telling me just what it was.

  I FIRST NOTICED JACK DOLCE just before one of our Operation H.E.A.R.T. meetings upstairs at Gelato Amore. I was standing in line downstairs, waiting to order a drink, running my fingertip across the jagged edge of my half-of-a-heart charm, when I saw him as if for the first time, though surely I had seen him many times before. It was as if I’d pushed partially through a bubble in which I’d been enclosed for the better part of a year, and there he was, with a secret beauty that suddenly revealed itself. He was like a red resin bracelet of Rasha’s that I had once seen but not seen, and he radiated a romantic red amore essence that harmonized perfectly with his environs. I saw how the girls in line before me all had eyes gone glassy at the sight of his rich red mouth and his cocoa-colored doggy eyes, for he was a real Italian-American boy in Little Italy. In his warm rosiness and sensuousness—which was painted all over his face, audible in his voice, traceable in his movements—there were implicit promises of nuzzling animal love. Only the narrow-faced fellow in the newsboy cap, evidently a Gelato Amore fixture and the sole male in line, seemed immune to Jack Dolce’s charms.

  When it was my turn to order, I did so while looking not at him but at the menu, in which I feigned intense absorption. “Ginger ale, please,” I said, squinting. I thought I saw him smile out of the corner of my eye.

  “No gelato for you?” he asked, tapping on the cooler. It emitted a faint, constant hum I’d never noticed before, but now I could hear it even over the plaintive song (In the evening, in the evening, darling, it’s so hard to tell who’s going to love you the best) that played over the sound system. It sounded almost exactly like the hum of the old-timey streetlamps near the hill houses back home.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t eat dairy.”

  “What?” Jack Dolce shouted, and it was impossible to tell whether he truly had not heard me or was just incredulous.

  He handed me my drink. Then he reached into the cooler and, before I could protest, slid a pastel pink plastic cup my way. It was spilling over with lush cream all dotted with fleshy cherries, spring green pistachios, and chunks of chocolate that matched his eyes. “Here you go, darling,” he said. “Spumoni.” He winked. “That one’s on me.”

  “He’s not one of us,” Bumble said, nodding vehemently, when five minutes later, upstairs at our usual meeting table, I proposed recruiting Jack Dolce as an Operation H.E.A.R.T. crew member. Simon had not yet arrived. The untouched cup of gelato melted into a pool before me.

  “He’s a rogue,” Bear mumbled, pulling the petals from the flower in her hair with what struck me as unaccountable bitterness.

  “He’s so … coarse,” said Ptarmigan, with lips pinched and eyes squinched behind his glasses.

  “We’re talking about the kind of guy who lives to ‘eat, drink and be merry,’ ” added Orca. “Doesn’t he even have that tattooed on his arm?”

  “He has no ambition.” Raven wrinkled her nose. “He doesn’t care about anything. All he does with himself is work at this place.”

  Simon slid into a chair beside me and we all fell silent. The subject of the coarse rogue coiled into the ether with the smoke of our captain’s Camel. “What is that?” he asked, eyeing the ice cream. But later that night, after our meeting was done and we disbanded downstairs, I saw Jack Dolce—finished with his shift—don a holey sweater, mount a rusty red bicycle, and pedal into the moonlight. He was alone, and he was singing to himself in a surprisingly pliant and pretty voice. I sensed that underneath all of his seductive mannerisms, but not too deeply buried, there was an absolutely singular personality, a subterranean richness and complexity of character. Yes, there was something about him I vaguely feared and almost recognized, but couldn’t define.

  In an effort to solve the bothersome mystery of who or what he was, I dismissed the crew’s views and began a sort of surreptitious study of Jack Dolce. I visited Gelato Amore for nearly an hour every afternoon. Always Alone. Pretending to pen that week’s batch of Operation H.E.A.R.T. propaganda, I occupied a downstairs table where I had a good view of him. I learned a lot by eavesdropping on the conversations he had with customers over the music he played at a loud volume (almost always warbly songs by someone I had never heard of, a Cherokee folk singer he professed to worship named Karen Dalton). I discovered:

  he had, in childhood, been an altar boy and attended Our Lady of the Sea Catholic High School, but, judging by the tattoo of a faceless Virgin Mary on his left forearm, he was even more of a lapsed Catholic than I, who had not attended Mass for well over a year;

  he had, as the crew had so judgmentally noted, no career or worldly ambitions to speak of, and planned to continue working at Gelato Amore, he said, for as long as his boss and coworkers would tolerate his clumsiness (he sometimes slid the gelato cooler doors open with too much bangy zest and repeatedly knocked over a large canister crammed with hundreds of teensy tasting spoons, scattering them all over the sticky floor and rendering them instantly useless), his laziness (he often arrived to work late, with sleep still crackling in the corners of his eyes and the red kiss-prints of one or more admirers on his neck), and his taste in music;

  he refused to drive a car because he thought it was unnatural and, he said, practically a guarantee of premature death, and got every place he needed to go on his crimson cruiser (paradoxically, without a helmet);

  he was, as his last name more than hinted, Italian, and though his family had lived in San Diego for two generations, he was descended from a long line of Tuscan dairy farmers;

  he had many girlfriends, or, as he called them, “ladyfriends,” all of them cutely tattooed about the ankles and shoulder blades and succulently shaped;

  he regularly gave the entire contents of his overflowing tip jar to a homeless man named Baby Joe who often came into the café slurring, “Hey, Dolce, loan me some change?”;

  he was absolutely free of guile, still had a little boy’s smile, was always kind to ice-cream-craving children, and only wanted to gulp from what he termed “the good cup of life” for as long as he could;

  he embodied the earthy essence of those ancestral Tuscan dairymen who spent all day walking in fields among long-lashed milk cows and all night rolling with pretty peasant girls in the grass;

  and (this last characteristic I noted with delighted downcast eyes), he liked me.

  “Look at Margie Fitzgerald sitting over there, pretending not to hear me,” he would say to one of the regulars. “Isn’t she something? The cutest, the kindest. Hey, Curly, look up! Let me see those eyes.” But I would only sort through my stack of Operation H.E.A.R.T. flyers (“A Dirty Business: The Tragic Truth About Greyhound Racing”) and try to appear occupied.

  After a couple weeks of this, I asked Jack Dolce in a very serious tone, frowning my smile into submission, if he would ever consider joining Operation H.E.A.R.T.—if, I added, we were to make him a formal offer. I pushed the disapproving faces of the crew out of my mind. Jack Dolce gave me his guileless smile. “No way!” he said, and then added, as if attempting to be more polite, “I’m way too out of shape for that sort of thing.” He patted his very slightly protuberant belly. I reminded him that one of our most effective members was in a wheelchair, but he didn’t seem to hear. “I’ve got a question for you,” he said. “What’s the story with your boyfriend?”

  I swallowed. “Excuse me?”

  “The old guy with the beat-up Beemer and dark glasses.”

  I was disconcerted to hear Simon referred to as “the old guy.” Tongue-tied, I blinked.

 
; “When I go upstairs to clean tables and you’re having your meetings, he’s always looking around at everyone to make sure they aren’t looking at you. And if it wasn’t for the way he looks at you, I’d’ve figured he was your dad.” Jack Dolce cleared his throat and wiped an imaginary crumb off the countertop. “Forgive me for saying so, but it’s kind of strange,” he said.

  He was the first outsider to comment on Simon and me, and I wanted to say, “It’s neither strange nor any business of yours!” But I couldn’t get the words out. All the protective pity I felt for Simon came flowering up.

  Still silent, I stood and began to gather my things. Jack Dolce coaxed a napkin from a snugly stuffed dispenser. “I didn’t mean any offense,” he said in a gentle voice. He wrote something down. “This is where I live.” He handed the napkin to me. “When you’re ready, come find me.”

  I rolled my eyes. I crumpled the napkin into a ball and shoved it into my pocket. But I checked it with my fingertips for the remainder of the day, finding it a soft sort of charm, one with no sharp edges.

  • • •

  I STOPPED VISITING GELATO AMORE ALONE and tried to cease contemplating the curious creature that was Jack Dolce. The Operation was more active than ever. Each week, we celebrated another victory against animal exploiters, and we began making headlines among the modest-but-still-worth-mentioning news tucked within the middle pages of the San Diego Sun. In just one month, we:

  effectively canceled a rodeo in Ramona by stealing each and every bucking strap on the premises (BUCKING STRAP BURGLARY, RODEO RUINED, OPERATION H.E.A.R.T. SUSPECTED);

  decreased attendance at the Del Mar Racetrack by approximately 15 percent when we intercepted visitors between the parking lot and the entry turnstiles and horrified them with flyers featuring disturbing behind-the-scenes photographs we had taken on the sly (SECRET WORLD OF HORSE RACING “HORRIFIC,” SAY FORMER FANS. OPERATION H.E.A.R.T.’S INFLUENCE?);