The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  We drank wine, and Jack Dolce always ate oysters. Soon, there were shells scattered all over the flat, their gorgeous glossy interiors facing up to catch the light.

  I often considered the oyster shells. Their two halves were joined by a supple hinge. There was something about that hinge that reminded me of Jack Dolce himself, as if he were the link between one part of my life and another. I knew what one of those parts was: the life I had lived and was still living. But I didn’t know what the other part would be, only that Jack Dolce seemed to personify the promise that there would, in fact, be something else. Maybe, I thought, there would even be a pearl. This was partly why I drew so close to him. He was my brother, my confessor, and just enough like me that in studying him I thought I might find some clue as to what, or who, or where I—now without Simon, now in charge of the Operation—would be.

  I wanted the shells to be useful, so the creatures who had once called them home would not have died in vain. I turned them into receptacles for miscellaneous trinkets (a velvety leaf, a green pebble, the tiny, tarnished key to a bike lock). This, I thought, seemed in keeping with Jack Dolce’s style of existence, which was a tribute to simplicity.

  As his penchant for bicycles over cars indicated, he had no desire for convenient and contemporary forms of technology. His only phone was a heavy black rotary model that predated his birth, and instead of a computer he had a typewriter, a 1930s Underwood portable. “This is the same model Kerouac used,” he told me, pressing the space bar over and over with a childish smile.

  “Do you think I’m strange?” he asked me once after I peeked into his middle and bottom dresser drawers and found just three threadbare T-shirts and an equal paucity of pants. “I mean, for the way I live?”

  “No,” I answered in earnest. “I think you are rare and beautiful, and like an endangered species.”

  “I know people look down on me—some of them—and think I’m some sort of loser, because I’m not plugged in, or ambitious, or what have you.” He shrugged. “I can’t say I care.” He held up a record, Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time. “Have you heard this? Sweet Jesus, what a voice!” He had many records. After rent was paid, he spent what remained of his modest earnings on music, food, and drink. And he was fond of giving me little gifts, including:

  an old brass bell blotched with a glorious green patina;

  a stuffed kitten with whiskers of fine wire;

  a box of colored chalk so we could graffiti the flat’s front porch;

  a set of jacks so we could play outside at sunset while admiring our front porch artwork;

  a turtle (who lived at the flat and befriended the green snake);

  a beat-up old paperback titled Teenage Temptress, with a pressed flower tucked into every other page;

  and a baby blue plastic rosary he bought from a Mexican boy who wandered the streets with rainbows of rosaries dangling from his skinny arms chirping “One dollar!”

  Jack Dolce bought me the rosary in spite of the fact that he was not, he asserted, a believer, certainly not in her, the one to whom the rosary was meant to be prayed, and once, when I suggested that he give a face to his faceless Virgin Mary tattoo, he challenged me. “Prove to me that she’s real!” he said with a sudden and surprising ache in his voice, revealing that underneath all the seductive smiles he directed at his would-be ladyfriends he was just a heartbroken boy who would never get enough womanly love, for his own mother, he eventually confided to me, had abandoned him when he was just fourteen years old for a new life with a travel trailer salesman from Tucson. That was why so many girls were mad for Jack Dolce. They perceived his want of mother love. He inspired ancient feelings of tenderness and motherliness. Of course, I was far too fixated on Simon to regard Jack Dolce in the same smitten way the other girls did. For me, it was different. We were like the two children on the Six of Cups card in the tarot deck Bear always toted in her purse, two motherless children meeting in a garden.

  “You’re kind of an endangered species yourself, you know?” Jack told me.

  “What?”

  “You know, like a dying breed.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Yes. You go around sniffing everything. You probably got that from your mom. And you truly love animals. You’re connected to the earth, sun, moon, and stars. So few people are earthy anymore. I mean, in a real way. They care way more about stuff.” I considered Bumble and his assortment of gear, which had lately grown to include a sleek new jacket fashioned with unpronounceable synthetic fabric, and a twenty-four-pocket backpack that expanded like a concertina. He was passionate enough about the Operation, but those acquisitions were what really made his heart pound.

  Jack Dolce was as special as I’d suspected, and I wanted Bumble and the others to see it, so Jack and I threw a party at the flat. In addition to the crew, there were people from Gelato Amore, including the man in the newsboy cap and homeless Baby Joe, and people whom Jack’s little-seen roommate, a grizzled, divorced fortysomething who had a rabbit’s-foot keychain and drove a bicycle taxi in the Gaslamp Quarter, brought home on his rickshaw. Even a few old Italian grannies, who had lived in Little Italy since it had been nothing but a stinky fishing village, were charmed into joining us after scuffling to the front door in their slippers and black housedresses to tell us to quiet down. They huddled around the record player and enjoyed cigarettes with the same sneaky relish they had felt as young girls forbidden by their husbands to smoke. It must have been the oyster shells that enchanted them. They echoed the nacreous glow of their prim pearl earrings.

  The rest of us danced, and talked loudly about inconsequential things. For the first time in a month, I forgot about Simon for a full five minutes. I even ran outside and jumped into the shallow neighborhood fountain, and watched the full moon shatter like a plate on the water’s rippling surface. I returned to the flat smiling, with my clothes thoroughly soaked. I took them off with abandon, draped the green snake around my neck, and offered shouts of encouragement while we set about discovering that Jack Dolce could yank a tablecloth out from under a dozen oyster-laden dishes without disturbing any.

  But my plan to promote some sort of camaraderie between Jack Dolce and the crew went unrealized. They, perhaps jealous of my new friendship and scandalized by its effect on me, ignored him, and he, wounded by their indifference, did the same. This saddened me. In some ways, he would have fit right in as a crew member. But he wasn’t supportive of Operation H.E.A.R.T. More than once he had termed it “an ineffectual exercise in folly.” When Jack dashed out into the moonlight to tear a handful of rosemary from the neighbor’s porch, the crew crowded around me for an impromptu meeting.

  “I’m exhausted,” Bear said. In accordance with my instructions, she had parlayed her experience hostessing at Laminaria into a new job as a waitress at Untamed, where she was our spy. She had just finished a shift that night. “I smell of death,” she continued. “The customers are brats.”

  “And what about Chef Zac?” I asked.

  “Hmm? Zac? Oh … Zac is …” Bear’s weary eyes brightened. “He … he’s a double Scorpio,” she breathed, “with a forked love line. And he is so good about letting me wear my hair daisy, even though it’s not part of the official Untamed uniform—”

  “Bear—” I began, incredulous at her crush.

  “But … well …” She hesitated. “He’s a killer. Obviously. We throw away two hundred pounds of bones a night, at least.” Ptarmigan clucked in wonderment.

  We discussed a few other matters. Life was growing increasingly miserable for the dolphins in the petting tank at Ocean World, Ptarmigan said. They had lately been demonstrating signs of real psychological distress—deliberately banging their heads against the cement walls of their tank and refusing to come up for air—as a result of being confined to a space that was, he explained, a mere one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the size of their natural habitat. Moreover, he added, there was so much chlorine in their water that they couldn’t open their eyes
, and their skin was peeling away. A flashy pet store in Hillcrest was illegally selling abductees from foreign jungles—spider monkeys, yellow-shouldered Amazon parrots—out its back door, Bumble told me. And Moi Moi the baby panda, Raven reported, was still looking pretty depressed at the zoo. “What’s our next campaign? You said you were ready to make some decisions, remember?” Bumble prodded. They were antsy. And I was overcome by that familiar ovarian flare.

  Jack Dolce returned with a few rosemary strands, appetizingly aromatic and speckled with tiny blue flowers. He curled them into a ring and rested it atop my head. Then he led me to the sofa, where he told me to stretch out. The crew stepped back to watch, shaking their heads. I was still naked, except for the green snake. Jack rummaged in his top drawer for the silver Navajo hair comb and pushed it into the curls above my ear. “Now,” he said, cupping my face in his warm palms, “turn your head just a little … good.”

  He found his camera—the same one he’d had since boyhood. “My portrait? My portrait!” I cried. “Rosemary for remembrance. Now I’ll never forget this moment,” I added.

  There were exactly three shots left in the camera. In the first photo, I was tentative. In the second, a smile bloomed over my face like a red and white flower. In the third, I looked accidentally away from the lens and off to the side, as if gazing at a future I could not quite see.

  11 SWAN (Cygnus olor)

  A FEW DAYS AFTER THE PARTY, the crew and I convened at Gelato Amore. They were relieved that I came, for they feared my new friend would lure me away from them and the animals. “Good to see you with your clothes back on,” said Orca, who had just won a regional floral design competition and proudly wore the first-place ribbon pinned to her vest. “Well,” she grinned, “not really, but …” Bumble hugged me so tight I bumped into his marsupium. When Ptarmigan maneuvered toward me to peck my cheek, his wheelchair was completely silent. He had upgraded to a glossy black Rolls-Royce model because his well-to-do British aunt had died in a polo accident and left him an inheritance. From a distance, the man in the newsboy cap eyed the chair with the sort of admiration usually reserved for cars and motorcycles.

  Bear gave us another Untamed update. Chef Zac had recently shot her an unabashedly hungry look that, she confessed, made her “knees turn to mashed potatoes.” He’d told her she had the “elegance of an egret” as she waited on tables, daisy in place, radiating her milky magnetism. Their relationship had progressed and this slightly complicated, though did not compromise, her position as an infiltrator.

  “An egret?” scoffed Raven.

  Blushing, Bear shared her latest findings. “Zac got an A from the county food facility inspection people. No customers have reported any food poisoning, or even so much as sent a plate back to the kitchen. The crew from Rise and Shine, San Diego came last night to film Zac giving a cooking demonstration, which aired this morning.” She paused, as if considering, then dutifully reported, “He made smoked swan omelets.”

  “Heavens!” exclaimed Ptarmigan.

  “All the meat—er, I mean, slaughtered animals—comes from one wholesaler, who obtains it from various sources around the globe,” Bear continued, reading aloud from a diary she kept beside her bed and scribbled in by flashlight every night after the lusty chef fell asleep. “Everything is inspected by the USDA or the state before it is served. Oh”—with a guilty expression, eyes shining, she interrupted herself—“and Zac is so happy that I’m so interested in the restaurant and ask so many questions about what he does.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Bear,” Raven said. “I don’t really see how we can do anything, anyway. The guy isn’t breaking any laws. The place is untouchable. Maybe we should shift our focus to Ocean World and those dolphins—”

  “I don’t agree,” I said. “I’m very disturbed about the dolphins, but we can’t just allow this to go on. It’s so brazen, so deliberate, so celebratory …”

  “I’m with Margie,” said Bumble. “We could distribute some damning flyers—”

  “Or stage a protest in front of the restaurant,” said Ptarmigan.

  “Maybe mildly harass some customers and employees,” added Orca.

  “No,” I said. “Those are the sorts of things we have always done.” Simon would see, I thought. He would see the story about us, would release a satisfied sigh, would smile. “I want to take this to another level.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have something in mind,” I whispered, thinking of my series of bedside candles and the flickering of their flames. The candles melted down to red puddles that reminded me of the red poppies Dad had seen blooming on the white sheets of Rasha’s hospital bed the day she died. I’d come early, and because I was a “small and well-positioned baby,” the hospital report said, it was a “precipitous labor”—meaning I’d come too fast. “Next time, we’ll meet in my studio,” I told the crew. “This is too sensitive to discuss here.”

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, JACK DOLCE AND I played jacks on his porch. “I think I’m going to take down that awful restaurant,” I told him. The turtle stood amiably beside us. “It is a blight on this city.”

  Jack Dolce scooped three jacks into his palm and grinned. “I win,” he said.

  “I think Operation H.E.A.R.T. should tame Untamed.”

  “I don’t want to know anything about it,” Jack said. “It’s crazy, Margie. Please stop all that stuff. Quit the Operation.” And then he added (rather inexplicably, I thought), “Give up your apartment and come stay with me forever. I’ll ask Hank to go. Maybe he can sublet your place.”

  “No,” I murmured. “That won’t work.” I fed the turtle a leaf of lettuce. “A fire …”

  “You’re going about this all wrong,” he said. “Violence and destruction are not the way. Please, Margie. I know I’m right.”

  “What about all those Indian warriors you like so much?” I asked, thinking of the female Zapatista Simon had praised, the warrioress.

  Jack Dolce laid down the jacks and sighed. He released the two red rubber balls and watched them roll down the steps. “When you first came to visit me here, you told me you were tired of tears running into your ears at night. I haven’t seen a single tear since you’ve been hanging out with me.” He tried to catch my gaze, but I could only stare at the turtle until it grew hazy. It was true. I had completely stopped crying, until that moment. And the ladybug had come back. She was crawling around behind my eyes again. “What reason is there to go to such extremes? For some silly animal rights group?”

  “It’s not silly—”

  “You’re too much under the influence of that Simon, that’s all. I wish it wasn’t so.”

  “You’re just jealous,” I said.

  “You’re right. I am. Not of the Operation, but of Simon, yes. I’d make you mine if I thought I could take your mind off him for more than a minute or two.”

  I looked at Jack Dolce. I looked at his clear open eyes, his guileless grin, which even in the middle of our argument he proffered as a plea for peace. I looked at his uncombed hair, the red blood beneath his cheeks. He was a warmhearted creature.

  But there was a rigidity in me. I had studied Jack Dolce to see a vision of my future, and he was showing me one, but now I would not bend to it.

  “I just … can’t …” I said. “I have to make a difference. There is so much work to be done. Those swans …”

  “Those swans?” Jack Dolce hid his face in his hands. He stayed like that for a few moments. Then he looked my way again, and I couldn’t believe the rosy-mouthed rogue for whom hundreds of glamorous, gaga girls had stood in line now had wet eyes for skinny me. “Margie,” he said. “You are connected to the earth, sun, moon, and stars. Just like I’ve told you. You already are. Don’t you see? You don’t have to be so desperate to ‘make a difference,’ like you’re always saying.”

  Some part of me thought he might be telling the truth. Still, I felt a stiffness in both of my shoulder blades, as if I had sprouted invisible wings
in want of exercise and was helpless not to flap them.

  “Just live your life,” he said. “It’s not your fault your mom didn’t make it.”

  “This is my life.” My voice shook. Who had ever dared to say such a thing? “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I understand more than you think I do.”

  And there, on the porch, Jack Dolce and I turned away from each other. All at once, our sweet siblinghood was gone. Crushed, I walked inside the flat and looked under the bed for the green snake. He was gone, too.

  I heard the scrape and squeak of Jack Dolce pushing back the kickstand of his bicycle and pedaling away.

  Crying noisily now, I took the baby blue plastic rosary, which I had been wearing as a necklace, and laid it on Jack Dolce’s pillow. Then I left the flat, and as I walked the new stiffness in my shoulder blades subsided slightly. I traversed the sun-striped sidewalks of Little Italy, past the red-and-white-checkered tablecloths of outdoor cafés, past the shop windows festooned with garlands of chili peppers and garlic, past the Virgin Mary statue where I’d left many offerings of oyster shells, and saw a wedding party come foaming out the door of a spaghetti restaurant. The bride was adorned in endless snowy layers of tulle, and a gust of wind came along and carried her veil into the sky.

  BACK HOME IN MIDDLETOWN, I ran into my landlady, who was patching a hole in the hallway. Her oxygen tank was stationed beside her. “Sweetie,” she said in her scratchy voice, “your phone’s been ringing like mad for the last hour.” She stepped toward me, towing her tank behind, and peered into my face. “What’s the matter? You’ve got boy trouble? Forget it, girly. My only husband was a miserable bastard. It took me forty years to get up the courage to leave. By that time, I was sixty-five, and it was too late for me.” She cleared her throat with a guttural growl. “You’re young. You’ve got your whole life yet.”