The Lovebird Read Online Free PDF Page A

respond, our waitress came. Simon ordered for himself and, just before I was able to tell her what I wanted, he ordered for me, too.
    “How did you know I wanted the potato taquitos?” I asked. Warmth suffused my limbs, and my feet throbbed in their snug shoes. Simon shrugged, grinned, fiddled with the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Our waitress is so beautiful,” I said.
    “She’s probably a vegan. It’s amazing how a woman can glow when she decides to stop consuming the products of cruelty.”
    “Hmm.” I nodded. Again, my gaze drifted toward the wall decor, and Simon, growing more relaxed, went on.
    “The Zapatistas. These were members of a guerrilla movement that formed during the Mexican Revolution almost a century ago. They fought for the rights of the Indians who had lost so much of their land. Brave people.” My eyes landed on an electrifying portrait of a young woman soldier dressed in men’sclothing. She stood with one hand resting sassily on her hip. In her other hand, she held an enormous rifle. “There were female Zapatistas, too,” Simon said. “One of them was even a commander in the movement,” he added. “A true warrioress.”
    The tortilla chips in a basket between us were warm and fragrant, and their bready scent—so wholesome, safe, right, and good—hovered over our table, creating a kind of enchantment. “It’s one thing to have beliefs,” Simon continued. He crunched a chip between his teeth, swallowed, and lifted a napkin to his lips. “It’s another to actually act on them, fearlessly and passionately.”
    I HAD BEEN TOO EXCITED TO EAT much during our date. But from that night on, Simon sought to nourish me, in his way. “I feel like you’re starved,” he said one night as we lay beneath his cool bedsheet. “Not so much foodwise,” he said, “but starved”—he rested his hand on my chest, where my heartbeat sped up slightly—“here”—then grazed the crooks of each of my elbows, which had so infrequently touched another body in an embrace—“and here”—then laid a palm on my womb, where my left ovary hummed—“and here.”
    All the characteristics over which I had swooned as a shy smitten student—the dry jokes, the secret Russian surname, the parking tickets, the accent with its promise of mischievous midnight murmurs—came together in one multifaceted and radiant whole, and now that I was close enough, I could actually see them all, shining sharply like cut gemstones, when I stared into Simon’s eyes.
    He hardly had to coax me to leave Amy, Winnie, and the gerbil to join him and Annette in their labyrinthine house in La Jolla. La Jolla was a quiet seaside town where none of the houses looked anything like the two-story rancher—which, inits pre-decay days, might have had an aesthetic best described as pseudo-Southwestern—that Dad and I had shared in the Tierra de Flores tract. They were sleek and shone like brand-new coins, and even the slightly shabby abodes among them looked as though their shabbiness was cultivated and carefully maintained, not a consequence of sadness. On the sidewalks, wealthy ladies walked little lapdogs with rhinestone-encrusted leashes. There were art galleries specializing in dewy oil renderings of dolphins, and breakfast cafés with offerings like brie-and-wild-blueberry-stuffed pancakes. In spite of my delight at being taken in by Simon, I felt alien as a desert flower in that moist and misty enclave.
    Simon’s shadowy dwelling was tucked away behind two doors: a heavy, dark outer door, which faced the sidewalk and opened to a courtyard, and an inner door, which opened to the house. Everything about the place was, as he termed it, “green.” There were energy-efficient bulbs in each lamp, and the heating and cooling systems were powered by the sun. The various trash cans were all individually designated for different kinds of waste: aluminum, glass, paper, compost. The linens were organic cotton and laundered