The Lovebird (7 page)
I looked at the way the carpet at the center of each stair was worn. When I stared at it long enough, I could hear the thumping sounds of their feet rushing up.
THE SUMMER DAD TOLD ME ABOUT CHASING
Rasha up the stairs was the same summer I started driving, and lots of late nights I took Dad’s Skylark for solitary excursions. I loved the moon-coolness of the nighttime, and the nocturnes of the nightbirds, and the fine gloss of dew that slightly darkened the streets. The Skylark always smelled like Dad (a synthesis of Ivory soap and cigarettes), and of the leather of the bench seat (which had eight little tears mended with eight silver squares of duct tape), and of the coffee that he spilled when he drove from one newly listed home to another.
My night drives, like my lazy afternoons, all started out as meandering, but they invariably led to the same place. I tried to tell myself I was only going out for fresh air and a change
of scenery, but really I was after a sensation that hit me hard, a heart-drug that made me both dreamy and desirous. I always got this feeling by driving out of our neighborhood to the houses in the hills.
The houses in the hills were relics of a different sort, left over from the time when there had been vast orange groves covering the flat land below, not endless tracts of homogenous homes like ours. The hill houses stood on streets lined with old-fashioned lamps that cast a mellow amber glow. They were covered in ivy, blanketed in bougainvillea, clutched by climbing roses, guarded by trellises. There were always lights shining out of their stained glass. And in the cool shadows of their low-hanging eaves and the fairy-tale tangles of their honeysuckle, where crickets bedded down to sing, the hill houses contained an almost unbearable romance.
When I parked the Skylark to sit and be near them for a while, I thought about the people who lived inside, the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, babies, brothers, sisters. I would sit with my arm dangling out the open window and my head tipped back against the seat, watching, listening, and longing. I would glance over to the empty passenger seat, past the cellophane cigarette box wrappers and Sunshine Realty notepads bearing Dad’s name and photo, past the pieces of newspaper folded into unfathomable origami airplanes that went nowhere, and I would almost see Rasha sitting there in a white dress with the backs of her legs sticking slightly to the seat. I would almost see her there, and then instead of me behind the wheel it would be Dad. I would be in the backseat, but I would be able to tell he was smiling by the curve in his right cheek, and “Chances Are” would be playing on the radio, and we’d be on our way home to our own house high in the hills because we were one of those families that the streetlamps shone above.
Once, in the middle of such a reverie, I caught a flash of my
face in the side-view mirror. When I saw my ravenous expression, I felt embarrassed, even though no one was around but the cricket choir. I drove out of the hills toward home, hoping for one of the rare occasions when Dad had fallen asleep in his recliner and I could gingerly pull his reading glasses from his bowed, stubbled face, cover him with a blanket, and hear the soft purr of his snore, but when I arrived he had already gone up to bed, and his chair was empty.
I TRIED TO TELL SIMON
about my night drives to the hill houses. “They gave me a feeling,” I said. We lay in his bed face-to-face with our knees pressed together. Already we had talked, touched, and turned away from each other to finally fall into sated sleep. But, as was our habit, one of us had turned back around to face the other, and the other, sensing a stirring, had done the same at almost the exact same moment, so that, forgoing sleep a little longer, we could touch and talk again. He bathed my face in his hyacinths.
“What was it?” he asked. “The feeling?”
“I can’t explain,” I said.
“Try.” The moonlight slipped into the windows through the trees that enclosed Simon’s house. Annette was tucked in her room down the hall, a babyish stream of saliva slowly dampening her pillow. A nightbird crooned.
“It was,” I whispered, “almost like this.”
LOBSTER(Homarus americanus)
AFTER I HELPED TO FREE THE BIRDS
from Azar’s Pet Palace, Simon drew me even closer and enveloped me even deeper in his dark warmth. We whispered away many nights in his bed while I stared at the sharp, shadowed planes of his strong Russian face (it was easy to imagine him as young Melnikov, the dashing, doomed soldier who was never mentioned in
War and Peace
), and traced my fingertips over the broad high cheekbones that rose up into his sad eyes, and petted his lush eyebrows and eyelashes. I loved to pinch the plumpness of his earlobes, which echoed the plumpness of the place where his thumb joined his palm and betrayed the vague vulnerability I’d sensed the first time I saw him.
Simon liked to keep the house completely closed up, but when I saw the eager jasmine vines shooting up from his wife’s garden, which had been left to grow wild and weedy in her absence, I begged him to open the bedroom window. He relented, and we breathed the flowers all night.
With our noses touching, he told me about all the dreams he had for the future of Operation H.E.A.R.T., about the projects he envisioned, and about the offshoots of the
Operation he hoped to establish across the nation and, eventually, the world.
“The problems in this country are only a drop in the veritable ocean of animal suffering and injustice that drenches the globe. Look at Africa,” he mused. “Just think of what we could do about the poachers there.”
He asked me my opinion on many matters, for now that I had been in the field, albeit in what had only been categorized as a “low- to medium-risk situation,” but in the field nonetheless, he trusted me to assess the feasibility of the other campaigns we had tentatively planned.
“After we are in Doctor Sorensen’s office,” Simon whispered, referring to the Del Mar veterinarian who catered to the moneyed crowd and made his own fortune declawing Persians and docking the tails of Dobermans, cruel and unnecessary practices, “do you think we will have enough time to pour purple paint all over his surgical instruments before the security company responds to the alarm system?” Purple was the Operation’s signature color.
“Yes, but it depends on how many of us go in …”
“I want to take the crew to Tijuana so we can see how bad those bullfights really are. Who do you think I can count on,” he asked me, “to stay serious and not just disappear for a beer somewhere on Avenida Revolución?”
“Ptarmigan, for sure,” I replied. “Bear, maybe …”
And, on many nights, once he had finished soliciting my take on this idea or that, he asked me, with his hyacinth breath in my ear, “How long will you let me do this for?” and stirred in secret and familiar ways under the sheets, which were subtly scented with the sweat our skins seeped in our sleep, and with the narcotic smell of the jasmine that thrived despite neglect and clung with tenacious tendrils to the window screen.
“As long as you want,” I always answered. And I felt a pleasant
kind of cloak falling over my consciousness, softening my awareness of time, blurring the space between us, and stilling, for a few precious moments, the ladybug that so often wandered behind my eyes. I smelled jasmine and heard Simon’s voice saying, again and again, “My girl, my dear girl.”
SOMETIMES, ALMOST AGAINST MY OWN WILL
, I gave quick consideration to how paltry—silly, even—Operation H.E.A.R.T.’s actions were, especially in contrast to Simon’s ambitions. We:
smashed the windows of Superior Skins, a fur coat and fine leather goods shop in the Gaslamp Quarter, and destroyed its inventory with seven cans of purple paint;
staged a peaceful protest near the pony ride at the annual Lakeside Fair. (“These poor, put-upon ponies,” Ptarmigan yelled into the camera, “deserve better!”);
removed dozens of live lobsters more than once from the confines of an enormous saltwater tank in a chi-chi seafood restaurant called Laminaria, where Bear-with-a-flower-in-her-hair worked as a hostess, and transported them in the back of my station wagon to the shores of Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach, and Mission Beach during high tides;
infiltrated the cognitive research laboratory of our university with the help of a brilliant, wheelchair-bound exchange student from Prague, one Damek Kafka, a.k.a. our very own Ptarmigan in disguise, who surreptitiously slipped lab mice into secret compartments I had sewn into his voluminous sleeves and then released them into the eucalyptus groves;
and left harassing notes taped to the vehicles of employees at a cosmetics testing lab in Escondido, where, I imagined, there were dozens of bunnies smeared in Champagne Charm, Frosted Fuchsia, and Peach Fizz.
Still, despite their relative inconsequentiality, I was thrilled
with these small successes, as were Bear, Ptarmigan, Raven, Orca, Bumble, and Simon. After all, we were each of us just looking for a way to make a difference.
Bear was an Iowa girl with yellow corn silk in her hair and auburn freckles sprinkled across her nose and cheeks. She was the oldest of eight children raised by a conservative preacher and his obedient wife who, when it came to looking after their offspring, were always, Bear said, “otherwise occupied.” Consequently, Bear had been a mother of sorts to her brood of siblings. She was mild and milky, patient and soft-spoken, with a slightly distracted air, as if she had early on begun retreating into her own world (with a placid crescent-moon smile on her face) as a way to cope with so many children constantly clinging to her floor-skimming skirts. Bear’s father had lately disowned her. Though she was a perfectly respectable nursing student, she also enjoyed reading philosophy and pursuing interests that were, he said, “ungodly” (astrological charts, chakras, dowsing rods, crystals, Kundalini yoga, etc.). Her mother echoed his disapproval, but she still sometimes sent Bear boxes of sugar cookies on the sly.
Raven had been orphaned at ten after her preppy parents, college sweethearts, died together in a paragliding accident off the rocky coast of Maine, her home state. She was shipped to California to live with her grandparents in Santee, a sleepy suburb east of San Diego where there was, she always said, “nothing happening of note.” She found her father’s old guitar in a closet and taught herself to play. Starting at the age of eleven, Raven made a habit of hitchhiking—instrument in hand—into the city so she could busk in front of a place called the Cue Club, where she spent all her earnings beating men three times her age at billiards. The “Santee Shark,” as they called her, deposited her pool winnings into a college fund she established for herself and was now paying her way through school. As a math major specializing in geometry,
Raven knew the exact shape of the invisible triangle a billiard ball would trace atop a pool table when struck in a certain way, and the precise trajectory at which her parents had fallen from the sky.
Bumble was the son of a half–Crow Indian mother who had caught the admiring eye of his father, an uptight army officer, after she’d participated in the American Indian Movement standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973 and her picture appeared in the paper. Bumble was a self-described military brat who had seen most of the world before his father was finally stationed at Camp Pendleton. Having spent so much time immersed in army culture, he loathed conformity, uniforms, and short haircuts but had developed an obsession with all types of gadgets and gear. Friendships had been impossible due to the frequency with which he had been forced to move, but the greenish, glow-in-the-dark radiance of a GPS device picked from one of his dad’s pockets was always a comfort to Bumble (who had also been, he had once told me in confidence, “very fat”). He had hopes of becoming an engineer, but was floundering in college because it was, he believed, just another oppressive institution with too many rules and regulations.
Orca was always unafraid to speak her mind and had once boldly spoken her heart to her fourth-grade classmates when, during Show and Share, she had held up a framed photo of Susie, her towheaded second cousin from Georgia, and said, “This is the love of my life. I get crushes on girls.” After that, she felt she had nothing to hide. She dressed exclusively in slacks, vests, and bow ties, and often asserted that she was “handsomer than most guys.” With her curling black hair and arch smile, she was. After legally emancipating herself from her parents, who shared none of Orca’s sense of peace with her identity, she began supporting herself as a floral designer. (It was she who supplied Bear with the flowers she always wore in her hair.) When she wasn’t in her art classes at
the university, she worked at a popular flower stand in Leucadia, a bitsy beach town up the coast. Because she made the best floral arrangements in the county, customers didn’t raise eyebrows when they noticed she had used a pen to draw a mustache on her upper lip—an occasional addition to her grooming routine in which she delighted.
Among the crew there was none sweeter or gentler than Ptarmigan. At seven, suffering extreme nearsightedness and in desperate need of spectacles (a fact to which his mother, who had refused to name a father when she’d borne Ptarmigan at the age of fifteen, was oblivious), he sped on a borrowed skateboard down a steep hill in starry Los Angeles and smashed right into a jacaranda tree, which he hadn’t seen until it was too late. When the paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher, he was covered in hundreds of blossoms. They were, he said, “like little purple trumpets. I still like those flowers. They remind me of angels’ trumpets, and I was born in the City of Angels, and I think angels must have been with me that day, because I only lost the use of my legs and not my life.” Ptarmigan shared an apartment with his mom in the Kensington borough of San Diego. He stayed up late most nights writing plays because, he said, the defining moment of his life had not been the accident, but the first time he saw
The Glass Menagerie
performed by the theatre department at the university, which he promptly joined.