The Lovebird (8 page)

Despite the diversity of our backgrounds, we all had something in common. And it seemed as if the longtime loneliness we had each known would lessen the more we worked together toward our shared, if small, goals.

Still, sometimes I felt like the only one in the crew who had genuine and enduring empathy for the creatures we sought to help—a real piercing pain over their often pathetic circumstances. Even Simon, despite his passion for the cause, was oddly
indifferent to animals as individuals, which confused me. There were many nights I could not fall asleep, so fixated was I on the left-behind lovebird at Azar’s. Simon didn’t understand. “You’re sentimentalizing,” he said. And though Annette found the companionship of her plethora of plush whales and bears insufficiently stimulating and routinely asked for a “pet cat, bird, dog, fish, or turtle,” Simon refused. Pet ownership, he said, was yet another assault on the rights of animals. “The very idea of a ‘pet,’ ” he declared, “is totally offensive, comparable to keeping a human enslaved.”

“What about a hermit crab?” she suggested, sucking the bottom of her blond braid, hoping a crustacean might make the cut.

“No, Nettie.”

“Didn’t you ever have a pet when you were small?” I asked Simon one night after he had tucked Annette into bed with a stuffed chimpanzee clutched against her boyish breast.

“Yes,” Simon answered. “Rupert. Our beagle. He went with my father.” Then Simon told me that his dad had hastily packed his clothes, books, bowling trophies, shaving kit, and Rupert into his car and driven away from home for good one evening while Simon, his mom, and his big sister sat unawares through the usual Friday night services at Congregation Beth Elohim. They had all four of them licked sweet pancake syrup from their fingers as a family at eight that morning, and by eight that night they were a family no more.

That was the most Simon ever told me about his youth. He never spoke about the past, or about himself. The crew liked to speculate about Simon’s background and pose possible reasons for the gemlike quality of his character—as hard and impenetrable as it was radiant and alluring. And they had known for months that Simon and I were amorously involved, so we all gave up pretending otherwise.

“You’re good for Simon,” Bear said as we all exited the
Sea Breeze Cinemas, where I’d dragged the gang for a special screening of
The Misfits
—ostensibly to examine the problem of wrangling wild horses for deposit to the dog food factory, but actually, at least for me, to steep in Marilyn’s sad sweetness for a while. “Especially if it’s true,” Bear added.

“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 had 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.