The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  snuck into a foul-smelling fur farm full of chinchillas, all of whom we captured and left on the front stoop of the local Humane Society under cover of night (RODENT OVERLOAD: HUMANE SOCIETY GLUTTED WITH MYSTERIOUSLY ABANDONED CHINCHILLAS, OPERATION H.E.A.R.T. AT WORK?);

  and, at a particularly offensive booth at a craft fair in Vista, we smashed fifty glass shadow boxes featuring captured rare butterflies pinned into permanent submission, which were for sale at a hundred dollars each (“BRATS WITH BASEBALL BATS,” VENDOR SAYS, DESTROY BUTTERFLY ART AT COUNTY FAIR, OPERATION H.E.A.R.T. AGAIN?).

  The Sun had fallen in love with us, it seemed. Still, while the headlines always held back from declaring us unequivocally responsible for the acts of derring-do that brought, as Ptarmigan put, so much “pizzazz” to the paper, they did bring us a certain degree of notoriety. This, coupled with the fact that the police evidently had more pressing concerns (understandable in a crime-ridden county of three million people) than the shenanigans of a small group of college kids obsessed with animal rights, enveloped the crew in a kind of heady haze—one in which it seemed the only consequences of our actions were the flickering beginnings of fame and, of course, happier animals. “Good work, crew. We are on track,” Simon said.

  The others were gratified by the glory of being mentioned in the paper. Bear even created an elaborate scrapbook comprised of all our clippings. Bumble, shaking his head at what he called Bear’s “archaic habits,” scanned the clippings into his computer. But I appeared, much to their perplexity, insufficiently excited. “Can you believe this?” Raven said, shaking another edition of the Sun in front of my face. I offered a slight sort of smile.

  The truth was, a new desire had welled up in me, one that I couldn’t bring myself to articulate to the crew, or even to Simon. It had happened gradually over the last several months, and now, I feared, it set me apart. Maybe, I worried, I had spent too much of my free time reading animal books—not just nonfiction treatises like the ones Simon had given me, but novels, and even children’s books I’d purloined from Annette’s room (Misty of Chincoteague, Where the Red Fern Grows, Penguins!, Pat the Bunny). Maybe my left ovary had twinged far too many times during our campaigns, leaving me in a permanent state of oversensitivity. Or maybe I had, a couple of years earlier, taken too many drives up to the hill houses to capture an ever-elusive feeling of closeness that I constantly craved. Whatever the cause, animals, the idea of animals, the feeling of animals—not just the physical fact of their existence or their suffering—had sunk straight into my soul.

  I wanted to hold them all in my hands, to know their little touches, to press my fingers into the fleshy cushions of their paws, to hear the clacking hardness of their hooves. I wanted to grow goosebumps from the ribbons of air they exhaled against my cheek and into my ear, and to be softly sniffed by them, and tickled by wiry, weird whiskers. I wanted to be bitten, scratched, to have my blood drawn one droplet at a time by fangs and claws, and I wanted to sleep among them in a sighing, smelly pile. I wanted to tuck my beak into my feathered chest and fall asleep to my own breast’s rising and falling, to warm myself, to make sad shrill songs in the night, to be a soloist. I wanted to smell every feeling before it was felt, to run, to dig, to dive, to breathe underwater, to open and close my silken gills without trying. I wanted to frighten, to surprise, to wiggle my antennae, to let my hair grow matted, to exude strange perfumes, to buck, bellow, bugle, and bray, to low, to preen, to stot, to trot. I wanted to bear young and lick them clean, to usher them forward on their wobbly legs, to nose the ground in search of the finest-tasting grasses and flowers, to live and move according to the seasons. I wanted to love because my body and biology willed it, to love without any threat or presentiment of loss, without any ladybug wandering behind my eyes. It was no longer enough to just help them. I wanted to be among them.

  Among them, I knew, loneliness was an impossibility. I could feel that all of them, every species, even those carnivorous ones who hunted and ate others, were part of a community from which I and every person I knew were excluded. But I didn’t know why we were excluded, always outsiders, and always manipulating a realm of which we were not even a part—their realm.

  I wondered why there was a separation, and how people had ended up in a position that was so harmful to animals, and then in a position to try to undo the harm. The situation seemed artificial, somehow—that we must be “us” and they must be “them.” I was troubled, a little, and so was my sleep.

  One night, several weeks after he’d written his address on the napkin, I had a dream about Jack Dolce. In the dream, he stood beside the cooler at Gelato Amore. I approached him and said, “One small spumoni, please.” He dropped his ice cream scooper and lifted up his T-shirt, and I saw that he had the proud, bulging, red-feathered breast of a bird. When he reached toward me, I saw that the back of his hand was covered in a thick, furry pelt, while his palm was soft, pink, and puffy. He was careful with his claws when he clasped my fingers. As he bowed his head and pressed his lips to my knuckles I saw, tucked beneath the dark waves of his mussed hair, two curved horns, like those of a goat. And when he slipped off his shoes, I noticed that his feet were webbed. Something in the way he smiled, lifting his long tiger’s whiskers skyward when he did, told me that he was the happiest man I had ever seen. I awoke from the dream slick from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. My sweat-soaked nightgown formed a fine film on my skin, and, thus cocooned, I remembered that once, only once, I had looked up when I felt Jack Dolce looking at me, and allowed him to peer into my eyes. I rolled over and clung to Simon in fear, Simon, my Simon, my miller, Simon Melnikov of the silver hair and the nineteenth-century Russian army.

  “A dream,” I mumbled into his neck, searching for a hint of hyacinths. “Oh, a dream.” I tugged at the plump lobe of his ear.

  Simon stirred irritably and with a sudden sniff. Half asleep, he slurred, “Are you still worrying about that lovebird?” and then immediately started to snore, and I was left with nothing to do but press myself as close as I could against his hard back.

  7 MOURNING DOVE (Zenaida macroura)

  AFTER MY DOLCE DREAM I KNEW I was changing, but I soon discovered that Simon was, too. His change seemed to have happened suddenly. Later I realized it had probably been happening for a while and had gone unnoticed, the way orange blossoms can be smelled but not smelled, or a red resin bracelet can be seen but not seen.

  I also discovered that, even though I might have been changing myself, Simon’s shift cut my heart to such a degree that I would have, for my part, never begun to change at all and would have made sure Simon did the same, so we could have stayed near to each other always, with our noses pressed in the nights, with my thumb pushed into the cushions of his palm. I would have ignored utterly and forever any sense of something missing and remained an earnest explorer of his impenetrable eyes, a steady She-Bird. That was how I felt when Simon transformed, that I would reverse it, if only I could.

  One Saturday morning in January I rose just before noon, my usual weekend wake-up time. During an unsuccessful search for Simon in the chilly chambers of the white-walled house, I found only Annette, still in her fleece footie pajamas. Simon had cut off the white vinyl tips of the footies to make room for her rapidly growing feet. Her bitsy toes hung out and now, encased as she was in the soft lavender fleece, she struck a slightly simian figure. She was in her bedroom, speaking intensely to one of her stuffed animals, an opossum: “I told you, Mrs. Gerkin, the only food that lasts forever is honey.”

  I stepped into the backyard wearing a pair of Simon’s boxer shorts and one of his undershirts, crunching a spoonful of cereal in my mouth. Simon was in his wife’s garden, stripped to his underwear, pushing a shovel into the dirt and squinting against the sweat that stung his eyes. His black-and-white-checkered trousers and button-down were in a pile next to a patch of pansies.

  I saw that he had done much pruning, snipping, shaping, and weeding. The garden looked nearly
groomed. And he had picked dozens of flowers. They snoozed beside him in a bucket.

  “Wow,” I said in a voice garbled by cereal and sleep.

  “You’re up bright and early as usual,” he said. I smiled, but he did not. “And I see you’ve helped yourself to my clothes—”

  “We look the same.” I giggled.

  “—and to some breakfast.” He snapped the end off each word as he uttered it.

  I didn’t know what to say. He had asked me what my favorite type of cereal was as soon as I had moved in and had been faithfully bringing it home from the supermarket ever since.

  “The garden looks amazing.”

  A full minute of silence passed. I tried not to chew too loudly. Then he said, “This is close to how she kept it.”

  He didn’t say anything else, just stood back and studied a lavender bush from which he had removed a handful of dead flowers. He was without sunglasses, and his eyes were full of the pain I had, until that moment, always sensed but never seen. He squeezed the dried lavender blooms hard in his hand and then uncurled his fingers to let them fall to the ground. Their smell, old and herbaceous and so very different from our rich and moony jasmine, wafted up to me. I went inside.

  I TRIED TO BECOME AS UNOBTRUSIVE as possible. I knew Simon waged a perpetual and private battle against moodiness. And it had been his talent for temperance, for avoiding extremes of happiness or unhappiness, that had charmed me when I had been nothing but his admiring student—the way he walked a tightrope between the two extremes, so his smiles were always dry and wry, his laments always tinged with amusement.

  I waited, outwardly patient and uncomplaining, for Simon to regain his equilibrium. I occupied myself with a Jane Goodall book. I didn’t ask any questions when he stopped joining Annette and me for dinner. I switched on my book light to continue my reading when, after finishing his increasingly vigorous nighttime ablutions, he turned off the lamp, fell into bed, rolled over, and pretended to sleep.

  I thought about all the nights we had lain, after talking and touching, with our backs turned to each other, and how a feeling—a mutual, tender uncertainty, the uncertainty of lovers—would paralyze us. I would lie wondering, Does he still want me? And he would lie wondering, I suspected, the same. And then one of us—it was always impossible to tell which one—would slightly shift and begin to turn, and the other would, at almost the same moment, also turn, and in a second we’d be facing each other again, our hands searching for each other and damply clutching, our arms encircling shoulders and waists, saying without speaking, Yes, I do still want you, yes. How many times had it happened? Four? Six? Sixteen? We had met. We had met in that sliver of a place, a sweet place.

  And now there were only aching nights when Simon, after brushing his teeth and sliding under the sheets, lay with his back to me and I lay with my back to him, and then I began the turn and he did not follow it. He stayed still, and when I turned all the way around he still did not move, and even when I rested my fingertips against the back of his neck where his straight hair stopped and the skin was soft as a boy’s, he remained where he was, and the hours passed, and we did not meet.

  A couple of weeks after Simon first groomed the garden and brought it to a condition of such order and formality it rivaled the famous Roman Gardens of Lucullus mentioned in Wheelock’s, I made my way down the hallway toward his study with a tray bearing dinner. I wore an apron I’d sewn with some of the fabric he had bought for me. It was printed all over with seashells. I hoped he might notice it. But instead of stepping right in to say, “Here you go, handsome,” and smilingly setting down his plate, I stopped at the threshold.

  Simon had his elbows on his desk. His eyes and forehead were crushed into the palms of his hands. He was encased in a box hammered together by his own thoughts. His back muscles twitched tensely beneath the fabric of his shirt, and he exhaled a deep, long sigh.

  Watching him, I had the disturbing sense of almost-knowing, the feeling that comes when a not-quite-remembered word is on the tip of the tongue, or when a fast flash of a forgotten dream flickers into the mind and then flees, or when the secret truth of someone’s heart sits like a snake pausing in tall grass just long enough to show the pattern of its skin and then slips swiftly away so the design is forever irretrievable.

  Looking at Simon, I almost knew. I almost knew something about love, about marriage, about torture, but then he suddenly turned around in his chair, and what I almost knew flew like so many uncaged birds out of the room.

  “Margie,” he said. There was a period audible at the end of my name.

  “Here’s dinner,” I said in a strained chirp. “It’s that recipe I found, for wild-rice-and-tofu-stuffed bell peppers …”

  “Okay,” he said. I set the tray down. He looked at me with his soft gray eyes—the gray of the mourning doves that lived on the ledges beneath the eaves of his house. They were Annette’s favorite animals. “I like their calls,” she always said. When he looked at me and I looked at him, I got the usual warm stirring in my belly. He’s back, I thought, and waited for him to call me to his lap. But instead he just repeated my name, and turned his face away, and told me that one daughter was more than enough, and that I needed to leave. “I’m tired,” he said.

  WHAT PERPLEXES ME IN RETROSPECT is that I didn’t feel awful right away. If my heart were a peach it stayed unbruised and intact for several hours after Simon’s declaration, which I’d heard clearly but, perhaps out of self-preservation, did not understand all at once. It was only partway through the next morning that the break happened—slowly at first, as if a pair of thumbs were carefully, even tenderly, splitting my peach apart right up the length of the cleft, causing the juice to seep out and make a sticky mess of my insides. And then, all of a sudden, it was halved. It made a sound like tearing flesh, and the pit fell out without any prying and rolled somewhere unseen where I was sure I’d never find it again, and I huddled behind the locked bathroom door, crying into my hands. I never wanted Simon to see me cry or to hear any of the questions that clustered in my clogged throat, and I left before he had the chance.

  • • •

  ON MY NIGHT DRIVES TO THE HILL HOUSES, I had always loved to imagine the rooms where the children slept, warm and dreaming with eyelids gently rippling, and especially the master bedrooms—the bride and groom rooms, the mommy and daddy rooms—where all the life-giving saps that flowed through the houses originated. Those rooms, I knew, were kept safe in the embrace of the climbing ivy, honeysuckle, and roses that covered their exteriors, and set slightly aglow by the proud lamps that lined their streets.

  But after Simon told me to go, it seemed as if I had dreamed the hill houses, that perhaps they had been nothing but images beneath my own rippling lids as I’d slept in my girlhood bedroom beside the ashtray of floating orange blossoms. Perhaps the houses and the feeling of closeness they represented were an invention, and what was real was only this: People were separate from one another, always, and could not really connect, could not merge at all, and not only that, the ivy and honeysuckle and roses cared little for us because people were divorced from the earth, too, and from all of its creatures, who could not understand our language any better than we could theirs, and it was just as the nuns in CCD had always said, we had been cast out of Eden, we were set apart from the earth and everything on it, estranged. The old union that we had once known, ages and ages before, had been severed forever, and there was no reclaiming it. Everyone was alone.

  I MOVED INTO A STUFFY STUDIO APARTMENT and, for companionship, adopted Charlotte, one of the rabbits we had rescued from an addiction research lab who had since been living at the Humane Society. Simon had been adamant that I remain active in the Operation, and when he e-mailed me an impersonal notification about a crew meeting at Gelato Amore one week after I settled into my new place, I dried my tears and quelled my constant nausea long enough to attend. I had not yet told the crew about my move or what had happened in case Simon changed his mind a
nd we could go back, back, back. I hoped he wouldn’t notice how much weight I’d lost. Our time together had confirmed that he was, after all, an Audrey man, but compared to me, emaciated by the loss of love, Audrey was positively zaftig.

  Jack Dolce was gone that night. I shuffled up the stairs, walked past the man in the newsboy cap, who was scribbling intently in a journal, and collapsed into a chair at our usual table. “What’s the matter?” Ptarmigan observed me with a furrowed brow.

  “Are you sick?” Bear asked, stroking my hair.

  Simon had his sunglasses on. I melted with sympathy for him the same way I had the first time I’d seen him. I felt sadder for him than I did for myself. He cleared his throat. “If I may have your attention, please,” he said. “This meeting is very important. I want you all to listen carefully, and as you listen, remember the following: Change is part of life. It is inevitable, constant, necessary. Just as we, Operation H.E.A.R.T., seek to promote change, to be, as Gandhi said, ‘the change we wish to see in the world,’ so, too, must we undergo change.”

  Everyone stared at Simon. Bumble tugged on his shortest dreadlock. Raven played a few dissonant chords on her guitar. Ptarmigan nervously rolled his wheelchair backward and forward, over and over, until he ran atop Orca’s toe.

  “Watch it!” she shrieked.

  Simon continued. His cigarette was unlit and nestled between his fingers. His upper lip trembled. “I’m officially resigning as the leader of Operation H.E.A.R.T.”

  The group sucked in a collective gasp. Raven swore.

  “After much deliberation,” he said, “I have decided that for the Operation to remain strong—to thrive, to flourish, to grow—it requires leadership with more vitality than I—for reasons I won’t delve into—can presently offer.”