The Lovebird (11 page)

Or maybe Simon felt, when all was said and done, that he had taken something from me, and the least he could do, being a decent man, was give me something in exchange.

8
RABBIT
(Oryctolagus cuniculus)

THE STUDIO WHERE I LIVED
with Charlotte was one of several just like it in a huge Victorian house. I had to walk down a dark hallway to use the steamy communal bathroom. There were tall, spiney cactuses growing beneath a clothesline in the backyard. The rent was only three hundred dollars a month, and the landlady, while showing me the studio, had used the word
character
—which excuses all architectural and other oddities, including slanted floors, unclosable cabinets, and century-old smells—a dozen times. My new neighborhood was called Middletown because it was halfway between the up- and downtowns of San Diego, close to the airport and the interstate. It was a burg that felt between worlds, full of ephemeral embellishments and forgotten people. In Middletown, all the paint was peeling, but most of it was masked by the knotted masses of purple morning glories that grew everywhere of their own accord. The women wore pink foam hair curlers out of doors, the men stood on the sidewalks every day feeding pigeons, and there was always the rusty sound of a faraway accordion intermittently drowned out by the roar of rooftop-skimming airplanes headed for the tarmac. Charlotte grew accustomed to the growl of engines overhead
and stopped hiding under the bed (for she was, and knew herself to be, prey to large, airborne things) after a few weeks.

Most nights I could not sleep (and not because of the planes, whose engines quieted after ten), so I slipped on jeans and my lucky red Chinese shoes under a white nightgown and walked like a ghost to the nearby Middletown Community Garden. It was a patchworked assemblage of wildly verdant plots that some neighborhood folk had established on a vacant lot. I climbed over the locked chain-link fence, careful not to tear my gown, and wandered among the moonlit blooms and grasses and leaves, whose secret saps flowed, I thought, most magically through their veins in the darkness and silence of night. I always sat for an hour or two on the same mound of moss-covered dirt, beside a patch of gourds, and rested my tearstained face in my hands. The vines of the gourds had fine coiling tendrils that seemed to stretch closer toward me the longer I sat. I imagined that if I rested there until dawn they would coil around me the way they did nearby sticks and stems, cling to my mussed curls and eyelashes, encircle my fingers and toes. Being in the garden helped to soothe the constant ache that originated in my chest and oozed into my limbs. And the spirited scent of the white, night-blooming moonflowers transmitted some vibration of gratitude for being alive, which had a heartening effect.

I wrote a letter to Dad to tell him about my change of address. Not knowing how to explain I had moved in with my Latin professor, I had never told him I’d left the mildewy apartment I’d once shared with Winnie and Amy. But now I was hankering for contact and, particularly, for comfort, paltry though it might have been, considering Dad’s ignorance of my situation.

And since it was comfort I sought, calling would not do. Dad had never been a good phone talker. Our calls inevitably collapsed into awkward weather commentary before they’d even had a chance to really begin. Writing, however, could sometimes open
Dad up, as I’d learned during childhood stays at summer camps in the Southern California pines. This was because upon receiving a letter he had time to compose his thoughts and string them together in an engaging way. What sometimes arrived from Dad via the USPS in response to a missive I’d mailed was more like a pearl necklace than a plain letter—something to be treasured forever, precious and Piscean, an enchanting expression of his dreamy oceanic depths.

Then again, he was also capable of sending a five-word note scratched in haste on one of his Sunshine Realty notepads. I decided to gamble.

Dear Dad
, I wrote,
It’s been so long since we’ve talked. How are you? I miss you
.

I moved. I wanted to have my own place so I might better concentrate on my studies. It’s a gorgeous, historic apartment constructed during the turn of the century, and overflowing with character
(I thought Dad might appreciate some realtor-like rhetoric).

I have a view of the ocean
(that wasn’t strictly factual, but “ocean” sounded so much better than “airport”),
and an adorable pet rabbit named Charlotte. School is fine, and San Diego is as paradisiacal as ever. I’ve spent time on the beach
(I didn’t mention that my time on the beach consisted of releasing live lobsters kidnapped from a fancy restaurant),
and in the country
(I decided to leave out any references to fur farms, rodeos, puppy mills, and the like),
and seen some dazzling, exotic birds in a multitude of hues
(I thought it best not to note that I’d witnessed those birds flying out of Azar’s Pet Palace).

What’s new, Dad? How’s work and how’s home?

I stopped writing and tried to think of what else to ask him, but nothing came to mind, and I grew more and more melancholy with the waiting. That was all Dad had. Work and home. He didn’t even have me. I was away. And I had not visited for over a year.

Well, Daddy, I just wanted to say hello. I hope you are well. I don’t need anything
.

XOXO
,

Margie

The cap of my previously pristine pen was completely chewed up. I wanted to add a P.S. I never wrote a letter without doing so. A P.S. could be the very best part of a letter. Once, I’d had a pen pal in Tokyo with whom I’d connected through a free pen pal matchmaking service that advertised in the back of a magazine. As our correspondence progressed, I developed a habit of writing my pen pal very brief letters of only a few lines, followed by postscripts five times as long. She eventually wrote me saying she wished for a pen pal who wrote in a more traditional American style and did not want to correspond further, at which point I determined to try and shorten my postscripts, but vowed never to eliminate them.

I couldn’t think of the perfect P.S. for Dad, though numerous possibilities came to mind:
P.S. Is this what heartbreak feels like? P.S. Am I going to end up like you? P.S. What makes a man want a girl and then not? P.S. Did you ever not want Rasha? P.S. What’s wrong with me?
Exhausted, I put the unfinished epistle under my pillow and slept on it, fitfully.

Every morning I rose early and, smoking cigarettes I’d stolen from Simon before my move, drove puffy-eyed and perfunctorily groomed to campus for my classes. I transferred out of Simon’s Intermediate Latin class, in which I had been earning an A (for effort, though not for ability), into the only other comparable course offered—one taught by the English fellow whom Simon had so dismissively dubbed a “summus maximus bore.” Simon approved the transfer and so did Summus Maximus, who, when I entered his classroom for the first time, said with a smirk, “Yes, you’re not the only person I’ve met who has experienced difficulties with Mr. Mellinkoff’s teaching style,” and my eyes welled as I
remembered Simon the way I always would: seated on his desk in his black-and-white-checkered trousers and canvas slip-ons, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, telling us with his sweetly stilted semi-smile about Lesbia insulting a tormented and lovelorn Catullus in front of her husband.

But then I saw a familiar face in the back row—Jane, my old classmate and study partner, with whom I had once commiserated about Simon’s crush-inspiring characteristics over cups of PG Tips. We’d lost touch after I’d grown involved with Simon and the Operation. “What are you doing here, Margie?” she whispered as I slid, sighing, into the desk beside her. Her smile dimmed when she studied me closely. “You’ve gotten so thin,” she said, soft-eyed as ever.

“What are
you
doing here?” I whispered back.

“After Mellinkoff gave me such a bad grade last semester, I decided to try Professor Weatherbury. He’s a lot easier—though not nearly as easy on the eyes.” Weatherbury cleared his throat at us.

After class we made plans for a study session at my studio. Jane wrote down the address in bubbly cursive and tried to temper her excitement at the prospect of finding out all that had happened since I’d disappeared with Simon and left her faking a series of sneezes in his classroom so long before.

In her distraction, Jane transposed the last two numbers of my address, which was why one night, fifteen minutes after our study session was to begin, I peered through my limp lace curtains and saw an hourglass figure peeping tentatively into the windows of a cottage a hundred yards down the block on the other side of the street. I trotted down the saggy steps of the old Victorian and emerged onto the sidewalk.

“Jane!” I called. She tilted her head when she saw me.

“Margie?”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking,” she said. “I thought you lived here.”

“I live here.” I gestured toward the crumbling edifice behind me.

“There?” Jane asked. Even from so far away, I could see her pert nose crinkle.

“Yes!”

“Shut the hell up out there, goddammit!” screamed a voice from a distant window.

Jane sashayed across the street. Inside, I poured two tall cups of red wine (“I brought us some tea,” she said, setting down her thermos, “but I see you’re drinking something else …”) and lit a cigarette while she roved her eyes to take in my meager furnishings: an antique iron daybed that came with the studio, the desk Dad had bought me before I went away to college, and a nightstand. The nightstand bore a turtle-shaped lamp with a shell that glowed green, which I’d picked up at a yard sale down the street, several animal rights books from the downtown public library, a crumpled-up napkin, and the old white porcelain palm holding the rose-scented rosary made of real rose petals that I’d had for as long as I could remember.

“You smoke now?” Jane said. I exhaled through my nostrils, suppressed the urge to cough, and said nothing.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Since about three weeks ago.” She wanted to know why I had left my old apartment. After several swallows from my cup, I told her the story she was dying to hear, the story of Simon Mellinkoff, beginning with that “nap” in his office and ending, despite my efforts to stifle them, with a stormy deluge of tears that made my cigarette too soggy to smoke.

“That predator!” Jane sat beside me on the bed and curled a marble-white arm around my shoulder. “I always knew he was a cad! So self-satisfied, always sitting on that bench in the quad, staring at everyone—”

“But you liked him, too! Remember?” Jane shook her head, disavowing the crush that had once prompted her to deem Simon a “daddy.”

“And he wasn’t … bad,” I continued, “or … a cad …” I sobbed. “Really, it wasn’t like that.” I sucked in staccato breaths. “He was sad.”

“Don’t cry,” she said, patting my shoulder. I wished I were in the Community Garden with the gourds. “You have to forget him. Just forget him.”

I dried my face and, after we managed to enact some short-lived semblance of studying, Jane went home. When she was gone, I visualized her carefully and saw what I might have been had I not gone into Simon’s office that decisive day, had I been the one who stayed behind. I saw a normal college girl, plump and smiling, humming pop songs under her breath, doodling hearts in the margins of her textbook, a girl with dancing feet in fashionable flats, a girl whose left ovary wasn’t so relentlessly receptive. I felt so separate. How could I ever really confide in Jane—or anybody—about the ladybug behind my eyes, or orange blossoms tugging at a cello string in my belly, or the hill houses, or the under-the-bathroom-sink strands of Rasha’s hair, or the way Simon shook, or the tears that hid behind the hyacinths of his breath when he murmured “my girl, my dear girl,” or the Operation, or the pull and the mystery of animals, or little Annette, who had loved to comb my hair and then sit in my lap and let me comb hers. She had lent me her Strawberry Shortcake suitcase just before I’d departed Simon’s house, where the window in the bedroom was tightly closed again, the way he liked it.

“OH, YES, PLEASE USE IT,”
she said in her shrill, babyish voice, clicking the suitcase open and waving a solicitous hand over its satin-lined interior. “I used to take it to my grandparents’ house
fairly often, but I don’t go there anymore.” She studied me with her bottomless blues. “Where are you off to?”

“I have to go away for a while,” I said, gulping.

“Okay,” she replied. “But please come back. We have so much fun.” I realized I had been much more of a peer to Annette than a mother figure. She and I had both been Simon’s girls—but she would be his for many years to come. I wondered what sort of life the strange sylph would have. “Fare thee well, Marjorie,” she said after I’d packed the suitcase and clicked it shut.

Later, I unpacked the suitcase and discovered an exquisite drawing of a butterfly that Annette had snuck in. I taped the butterfly above the daybed and it hung there like an impossibility with its furred face, its jewel colors, its stained-glass wings outstretched—like something ahead of me but hard to believe.