The Lovebird (13 page)

“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.

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.