The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  I snatched the paper from Raven’s hand to read the ad myself. “Meat!” I exclaimed. “It isn’t just meat. These are living creatures they’re talking about!”

  “Were living creatures,” noted Orca.

  “It’s all so callous,” said Bear.

  “Yeah, and people are eating it up. Literally,” said Raven. “They’ve only been open for a week and there’s already a three-week wait for a table. I called yesterday. Every night, they are filled to maximum capacity.”

  “That’s a lot of dead animals.”

  “As if it isn’t bad enough,” I said, “that millions of animals are already born and raised to be slaughtered and eaten, suffering the tortures of factory farms this very moment, now other animals, the ones ostensibly lucky enough to be wild, are being killed so that adventuresome diners with disposable incomes, no longer satisfied with run-of-the-mill flesh, can satisfy their spoiled palates.” I took a breath. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ever-present man in the newsboy cap lower his book and raise an eyebrow.

  “Yes. Exactly,” said Bumble.

  “Hunting is always wrong,” declared Orca.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Ptarmigan. “I can see some impoverished family living in, oh, I don’t know, rural Appalachia, surviving off the meat of one felled deer for a winter.”

  “But to hunt and kill these animals,” I said, “peacock, kangaroo, African lion?—this is just about people wanting to dine on something exotic and tell their friends.”

  “The hostess I spoke to when I called told me the meat tastes so much better,” said Raven, “because the animals haven’t been penned up—they’ve been using their muscles, they’ve had good exercise—”

  “Yeah, dodging bullets!” cried Orca.

  “Let’s keep this in mind,” I said. “Gather as much information about Untamed as you can. We’ll meet again in three days.”

  “Three days?” asked Bear. “So soon, Margie?”

  “Yes,” I replied in an all-business tone. “We need to meet more frequently now. It’s been a month since Simon resigned,” I added, “and it’s time to make some decisions.”

  “Have you heard from him?” she asked. Her face went soft and sorry when she saw the look on mine. “I mean … have you …” She bit her lip.

  “It’s okay, Bear,” I told her, but my eyes stung. I put my hand on top of hers. Raven, Orca, Ptarmigan, and Bumble added theirs, and we recited our motto and disbanded.

  “I LIKE THE DIRECTION WE’RE GOING,” Bumble said. “It feels more … serious.”

  We lay on the steeply slanted roof of the old Victorian and watched the airplanes sail past. I’d brought up a blanket and a bottle of wine (I always kept one on hand now, and the mumbling man at the Middletown liquor store never asked about my age). Bumble had his digital camera aimed skyward. He’d been wanting to lie on my roof and take photographs of the planes ever since I’d told the crew about my new studio.

  “It is more serious,” I said. “I want it to be.”

  “I have to be honest.” Bumble snapped some shots of the belly of a Boeing as it whooshed over us. “At first, I wasn’t sure if you could handle it. Taking over, I mean. You seemed so fragile—well, more fragile—after the whole thing with Simon ended.” I took a big draught from my glass. Bumble looked at me a bit bashfully. “I want you to know, I’m not going to ask what happened and I promise I never will.” I noted wryly that I didn’t really know what had happened myself. “Simon’s a complicated guy,” Bumble said, “and—anyway, it’s none of my business. But I wasn’t sure at first. About you. Now I am.”

  Another plane rushed overhead and, gratified, I lay back down on the blanket, letting the stirred-up air lift the locks of my hair. A few birds sent end-of-day trills out from hidden boughs. “Do you think any of those birds are the ones we let out of Azar’s?” I asked. The wine was making me fanciful. Bumble laughed and said yes. I noticed he had decorated his red dreadlocks, which had grown long and woolly, with a single plastic barrette of the sort Annette wore. It was shaped like a poodle. “I’m almost perfectly content at this moment,” I said, and I was. The wine moistened and cooled my still-smoldering heart, the twilight delighted my senses, the planes seen from our perch electrified me, and Bumble was a bolstering companion. “You’ve grown so fiery on us, Margie,” he said.

  It was true: I had become more fiery, and not only because I wanted Simon to notice me and to be proud of the things I would accomplish as the leader of the Operation, but:

  because I wanted there to be a reason I was born, so Rasha didn’t disappear in a blur of red poppies and Dad didn’t consume an ocean’s worth of Maker’s Mark with a splash of water for no purpose at all;

  because I was alone, Always Alone, and wanted to be among, to be a part, to be a piece of a whole, to be a portion of all that was alive, linked to the tendrils and the peacocks and all the people of the world;

  and because of the way Charlotte always sat on my chest and licked my face with her narrow pink tongue when I lay on my daybed staring at the ceiling, and I knew her mind was a finely wired web of perceptivity and sensitivity that my own could appreciate but would possibly never fathom, and I wanted to honor her and her kind.

  And, since I was feeling so fiery, it was fire that captured my attention. I was interested in things that sparked and flamed, that contained and exuded heat, that built to a frenzy and then released their tension, that spent themselves.

  I took to buying red taper candles and burning one beside my bed each night. I thought the warm, flickering light might help me to sleep, but I was always still awake long after my candle had disappeared.

  I WENT TO GELATO AMORE FOR our next Operation H.E.A.R.T. meeting. While ascending to the second story, I met Jack Dolce coming down with a tub full of freshly cleaned and clattering dishes. They gleamed like his grin, and a few iridescent soap bubbles slid joyfully atop their surfaces. “Curly,” he said. “Long time no see.” He stopped and leaned against the stair railing. I stopped too.

  “Hello,” I whispered. I didn’t mean to whisper, but he inspired such a feeling of shyness. With one glance I could see the brightness of his spirit.

  “I’ve been missing a lot of work lately. You probably noticed.”

  It was true. He had not been at Gelato Amore for weeks, and I’d assumed (with a little pang of regret) that he’d finally been fired for clumsiness. Even now, a ceramic mug teetered dangerously out of the dish tub and threatened to bounce into bits down the concrete stairs. I flared my eyes at it, and Jack Dolce steadied it with his chin.

  “Yeah,” he continued, “I had mono. You know”—he winked—“the kissing disease.” I rolled my eyes. “Just kidding,” he said. “I really was sick though. With mononucleosis.” He looked down and leaned more deeply, with real weariness, into the railing of the stairway.

  I stole a good look at his fair face. There were bluish half-moons beneath his eyes, and the vivid Tuscan ruddiness was absent from his cheeks. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that some of his dark eyelashes were damply clumped together from the steam of dish-doing. My left ovary flamed at the sight of frailty in the fancy-free rogue. His singularly sweet quality was more evident than ever, and I had an almost overwhelming impulse to tell him all the sadness of my heart, as if he were my best friend in the world. The gentleness of his brown eyes when he fixed them on me made my own tingle with imminent tears, and I had to look away. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” I said, and resumed making my way up the stairs.

  “None of your pals are here yet,” Jack said. “Neither is your old man.” I tripped slightly on a step. “Shall I bring you up a cup of spumoni?”

  “No dairy, thank you,” I said over my shoulder, thinking of how his favorite offering—ice cream—perfectly epitomized what I was certain was his fundamental innocence.

  Our table was empty, and the only person around was the man in the newsboy cap, who was reading Famous Rose Gardens of North America. We exc
hanged nods, and I sat down to wait. It was early spring, almost Easter, and the air had a spun-sugar softness. I rested my face in my hands and stared out the window at the traffic on the street below, at the green-gray ocean in the distance, and, hovering above it all, the dusk, the dusk shimmering with specks of pollen spread by bees during the day, shimmering with fibers of feathers shed from flapped bird wings, and shimmering with seadrops sprayed by whales, the dusk where the secrets of all hearts hung suspended for a few delicious minutes before they were enfolded into the night and dissolved, before they closed like pink undersea anemones, only to be unpacked and hung out like almost-stars again at dusktime tomorrow. The moonflowers in the Middletown Community Garden would be unfurling soon. Jack Dolce came upstairs and pulled me out of my chair for an embrace. His T-shirt was damp from the sea air, from washing dishes, and from his own self. I felt his wet eyelashes against my cheek as he squeezed me close. A small seed sprouted in the center of my chest and flooded me with comfort. He lifted me up so my feet dangled with delightful helplessness five inches above the ground. His chin nuzzled my neck. He sent soothing rumblings into my ear, low and warm, and I recalled how, before I’d opened their cage, the lovebirds in Azar’s had spent so much of their time side by side on their perch, so pressed, so pleasantly pressed, and I knew that this was the feeling of that, safe and animal and soft. I sighed. The man in the newsboy cap laid down his book with a thump, and I saw that I was in my chair with my face in my hands. One star had come out. Jack Dolce was still downstairs, and I was still alone.

  “Lovely night,” said the newsboy.

  “Yes,” I said. “What time is it?” I asked, and then, “What day is it?”

  The discovery that I had not, in fact, known the day of the week was a disheartening one. Nobody from the crew had come because there was no meeting. The meeting was still one night away. I had been so much in my own world that I had lost track. I spent my days at school, my evenings staring at the ceiling, and my nights wandering wine-drunk through the Community Garden after my red bedside candle burned out. This routine never changed, and time had become indistinct. It wasn’t passing so much as compressing into a lump of lonesomeness.

  “Oh.” I stumbled toward the stairs. “Goodnight.” The man already had his face back in his book.

  IN SPITE OF ITS ALREADY OBVIOUS POPULARITY, Untamed was aggressively marketing its offerings with more print ads and even a TV commercial. We all watched the commercial together on Bumble’s laptop during our next meeting. Its star was Untamed’s owner and head chef. Young and pink-faced, he wore a spotless white jacket and stood in the center of his crowded dining room. “I’m Zac, executive chef here at Untamed,” he said to a spot slightly left of the camera’s eye. He had a bleached-white smile and spiky hair.

  “He looks so pure,” breathed Bear.

  “He has blood on his hands,” Orca said.

  Zac talked too fast. “This is meat the way the first humans enjoyed it: wild, flavorful, and free-range …” With his eager gestures and darting eyes, he was reminiscent of a rodent in a way I found unsettling.

  “He reminds me of a squirrel,” I said.

  “I know,” Bear agreed, “it’s kind of cute.”

  “They serve that, too,” noted Raven, tapping the menu she had obtained.

  “Come,” Zac said, “indulge your most primitive desires, and let your taste buds be …” Here he paused, counting three beats with a few unconscious bobbing movements of his head. “… Untamed.”

  The crew groaned (except for Bear, who giggled). “What if a bunch of emus came and hunted him down?” wondered Bumble boyishly.

  “That will never happen,” I said. “It’s up to us.”

  10 OYSTER (Crassostrea virginica)

  AT HOME, I SAT IN THE DARK with a glass of wine and Charlotte on my lap. I knew Dad was doing the same thing, only instead of a rabbit he had an album of photographs opened across his legs and was drinking whiskey rather than wine. I could not stand the smell of whiskey, but Dad had said Rasha knew all about wines. I inhaled from my glass to see what I might know. There were hyacinths, predominantly, and the slightly metallic tang of an empty birdcage, orange blossoms of course, the sharp chlorophyll of just-cut suburban lawns, the powderish odor of old lipsticks, the sultriness of jasmine, the uncompromising finality of lavender, and the scent of my own breath, which was the smell of the wet dog that had sniffed and circled and curled around my heart again. He was a stray, and he had an awful keen, and jutting ribs.

  I flipped on my turtle lamp. Charlotte twitched at the light and propelled herself off me by the impressive force of her hind legs. I lay back on my bed. A tear ran into my ear, always an unpleasant sensation. I heard the unfinished letter to Dad crinkling beneath my pillow, but still couldn’t think of a satisfactory P.S.

  I could always call the crew for company but didn’t know what I’d say once I had them near. I was perturbed to feel such a yearning and to feel like a corked bottle, too, because none of them, not a one of them, would do. I recalled the frequency with which Annette had spoken to her stuffed toys—not always, I knew, because she was childish but rather, I suspected, because she was precociously aware of the occasional impossibility of uncorking oneself for any of the actual people in one’s life. It was the longing, of course, the old feeling of limitless longing.

  I reached over to the nightstand and picked up the crumpled-up napkin that had rested there, untouched, since the day I’d moved in. I uncrumpled it and read what was written over its soft folds. Then, for the first time in months, I fell into a deep sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY, JACK DOLCE DIDN’T ASK any questions when I showed up at his Little Italy flat wearing my lucky red Chinese shoes. He was drinking orange juice from a jelly jar and playing a scratchy record on the patio. The cord from the record player snaked into the house through the open screen door, along with an army of ants and at least two lizards (one of whom I later found snoozing in my left lucky red Chinese shoe). When he saw me coming up the splintery steps, he rose.

  “You finally came,” he said. And then, for the very first time outside of dusk-dreams, we hugged. His warm neck left a salt residue on my lips. He smelled of gardenias, luscious tropical flowers with a thick, desirous scent.

  He rode his red bicycle to the waterfront. When he returned, the front basket was filled with oysters. “Let’s steam these!” he cried. I supposed, staring at the rough ruffles of their shells, that while I certainly would not eat any oysters, I couldn’t force the unabashed bon vivant, who really was tattooed with the words “eat, drink, and be merry,” to abstain. With some effort, I suppressed any thoughts of the sad sensations the beautiful bivalves might have felt upon being snatched from the watery rocks to which they had clung. For once, my own survival was my foremost concern. I was on the run from loneliness. And the extravagance of the oysters somehow reflected my own impulse to finally come and see about Jack Dolce.

  His flat was cozy. There was a claw-footed bathtub in the kitchen and a surprising abundance of pampered potted plants. Jack Dolce kept everything spotless, and in the late afternoon it was so pleasant to see the white walls drenched in lemon light, as if there were no barriers at all between indoors and out.

  A poster of an Indian chief hung above his bed. “That’s Sitting Bull,” Jack Dolce explained. “Probably my number one hero. He was a holy man of the Hunkpapa Sioux. All he wanted was to be true to himself and his people, and he died trying.” I nodded my head in silence, wishing the crew, who had been so dismissive of Jack and derisive of his seeming carelessness, were there to hear him. “I respect American Indians,” he said.

  “Did you know Bumble is partly Indian?” I asked.

  “The guy with the red hair? Really?” Jack Dolce’s face turned dubious.

  “Yes. His mom is half Crow.”

  “Crow, you say? Like Pretty Shield!” Now his face glowed. “She’s one of my favorites. She was a medicine woman of the Crow tribe. The Navajo culture is wonderful,
too—come here.”

  He clasped my hand and pulled me toward his dresser. “I want to show you something.” He kept my hand in his left one while using his right to rummage through the top drawer. My cheeks grew hot, though I wasn’t sure if it was the hand-holding or the sight of Jack Dolce’s underwear.

  “I took a bus tour through New Mexico last summer and bought this from a Navajo silversmith. Isn’t it pretty?” He showed me his trinket, a hammered silver hair comb inlaid with real turquoise hearts. “I thought I’d send it to my mom, but …” He bowed his head as if stifling some momentary sadness. His hand grew slippery in mine, and he let me go.

  “It is pretty, Jack,” I said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” He panted on the comb a few times to make it steamy, then polished it on his T-shirt. “Want to just hang out for a while?” he asked. “Before we eat the oysters?”

  “Yeah.”

  We lay side by side on his bedroom floor. Turning my head, I saw a slim little bright green snake spiraled contentedly under the bed. The snake lifted his neck to look at me and tested the air with his tongue. “He’s been here for a while,” Jack said. Then, with the snake listening in, I told Jack Dolce my story. When I told him about Simon, I didn’t cry like I had with Jane.

  “You should quit that animal rights club,” Jack said. He tipped his head onto my shoulder for emphasis. “I don’t think it’s going to bring you anything but heartache and trouble.”

  I told him about Dad. “He’s a dreamer, and he drinks.” And I told him about Rasha. “She was from Beirut, and she was a perfumer. She died while she was having me.”

  And so Jack Dolce became my good friend. I visited his flat many evenings. Light from the setting sun moved through the rooms and graced my face with warmth. I felt the worn wooden planks of the floor as the trees they used to be, bending and creaking in the wind and humming with persistent life through the soles of my bare feet.