The Lovebird

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Natalie Brown

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY
and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Art by Malin Rosenqvist
Jacket design by Emily Mahon

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brown, Natalie, 1978–
The lovebird / Natalie Brown.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Animal rights activists—Fiction. 2. Indian reservations—Fiction.
3. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R722375L68 2013
813’.6—dc23
2012032396

eISBN: 978-0-385-53676-9

v3.1

Book One

Fuit puella maxima virtute et atque simillima matri.
^*

*
She was a girl of the greatest courage and in fact very like her mother.

1
PARAKEET
(Melopsittacus undulatus)

I SUPPOSE IT ALL STARTED WITH SIMON MELLINKOFF
, though I hardly could have anticipated the consequences of our connection during that fateful hour I spent strewn on the sofa in his office. I was a college freshman with the flu—feverish, foggy, and fond. But even if, at eighteen, I’d had the foresight to see every curve of the course on which he would set me, and to know how long it would be before I would return to earth, I do not think I would have risen off that sofa, blown my nose, shouldered my backpack, and stepped outside onto a straighter, safer path. I think that, even with powers of prediction, I would have done exactly what I did, which was stay, and sigh, and squeeze pillows, and wait for him to come back.

Simon Mellinkoff was a freshly widowed professor of Latin. Our university in San Diego was as crowded as it was sprawling, but I was one of only twelve students who enrolled in his Intro to Latin course. On the first day of class, he appeared ten minutes late in opaque black sunglasses that contrasted with his fair, silvery hair. He left the glasses on for the entirety of his introductory speech, as if he could not yet bear to make eye contact with any of us. He had a lit cigarette in his mouth, which he stubbed out
and replaced between his lips, where it gave his speech a clipped, crippled quality. Also, he was shaking, but I didn’t think anyone noticed besides me. Perhaps this was because I had inexplicably taken a front-row seat while everyone else had opted for distant desks where they could idly doodle in their notebooks. I wondered what was the matter with Simon, and my left ovary, that radar for all things hurt and helpless, twinged.

Still, despite his initial distance, Simon managed to inspire a rather unorthodox sense of classroom intimacy, and counting him, we became a cozy baker’s dozen. He exuded a curious kind of dark warmth, and soon it enveloped us all—even the back-of-the-room doodlers. He insisted we call him Simon. He cringed and puckered if we called him “Professor,” as if our uttering it soured his mouth. He had little patience for the traditions and trials of academia, and was decidedly averse to consorting with his fellow professors or following any of their unwritten rules for ascending the nauseating spiral staircase to the top of the ivory tower. The only work he had ever published was an exposition on the love-hate relationship between Catullus and Lesbia—“ ‘May I Perish If I Do Not Love Her’: Antagonism and Passion in the Love Poems of Catullus”—while he was still in grad school, long before his hair turned gray and his wife made her unfortunate exit, complete with its indelible effects.

Once, during the second week of class, while explaining the positive comparative superlative comparison of adjectives to us uncomprehending novices, Simon Mellinkoff called his colleague, the only other Latin professor at our university, a smirky Englishman with a supercilious affect, a “summus maximus bore.” I don’t know if he ever told the Englishman he was a summus maximus bore to his face. Well, I’m sure he didn’t because, outside of his classroom, Simon was the sort who rarely had the time of day for anyone. That’s why it was so surprising that he opened his office, his home, and, ultimately, an entire new life to me, Margie
Fitzgerald, a shy, skinny girl from suburban Orange County, an only child, a hunter for relics, a lifelong loner.

A week later, while seeking to illuminate the positive comparative superlative comparison of adjectives once more, Simon Mellinkoff stood at his lectern and said, “Rosy, rosi
er
,
rosiest
,” with ample pauses between each phrase. “
Beau
tiful,
more
beautiful,
most
beautiful,” he said. He said these things while looking right at me.

He was alone, with a little seven-year-old daughter to raise all by himself—too young of a daughter, perhaps, for a fifty-year-old dad. Theirs was an almost-family with a piece missing. I felt his loneliness from afar. Once, two months into the semester, I saw him sitting without a smile on a stone bench in the middle of a bustling quad on campus. (Subsequently, I examined this bench and found that it was engraved with a Latin sentence, which might have been why Simon was drawn to it:
OFFICIA MAGISTRI SUNT MULTA ET MAGNA.
^*

Students swirled all around him on their way to and from classes, but Simon was very still. I saw him sitting there on his bench and he saw me as I pushed my yellow bicycle across the quad. Our Latin class began in ten minutes, and I mentally recited that day’s vocab terms and their definitions:
magister
, teacher;
bonus
, good, kind;
periculum
, danger, risk …