He handed me my drink. Then he reached into the cooler and, before I could protest, slid a pastel pink plastic cup my way. It was spilling over with lush cream all dotted with fleshy cherries, spring green pistachios, and chunks of chocolate that matched his eyes. “Here you go, darling,” he said. “Spumoni.” He winked. “That one’s on me.”
“He’s not one of us,” Bumble said, nodding vehemently, when five minutes later, upstairs at our usual meeting table, I proposed recruiting Jack Dolce as an Operation H.E.A.R.T. crew member. Simon had not yet arrived. The untouched cup of gelato melted into a pool before me.
“He’s a rogue,” Bear mumbled, pulling the petals from the flower in her hair with what struck me as unaccountable bitterness.
“He’s so … coarse,” said Ptarmigan, with lips pinched and eyes squinched behind his glasses.
“We’re talking about the kind of guy who lives to ‘eat, drink and be merry,’ ” added Orca. “Doesn’t he even have that tattooed on his arm?”
“He has no ambition.” Raven wrinkled her nose. “He doesn’t care about anything. All he does with himself is work at this place.”
Simon slid into a chair beside me and we all fell silent. The subject of the coarse rogue coiled into the ether with the smoke of our captain’s Camel. “What is that?” he asked, eyeing the ice cream. But later that night, after our meeting was done
and we disbanded downstairs, I saw Jack Dolce—finished with his shift—don a holey sweater, mount a rusty red bicycle, and pedal into the moonlight. He was alone, and he was singing to himself in a surprisingly pliant and pretty voice. I sensed that underneath all of his seductive mannerisms, but not too deeply buried, there was an absolutely singular personality, a subterranean richness and complexity of character. Yes, there was something about him I vaguely feared and almost recognized, but couldn’t define.
In an effort to solve the bothersome mystery of who or what he was, I dismissed the crew’s views and began a sort of surreptitious study of Jack Dolce. I visited Gelato Amore for nearly an hour every afternoon. Always Alone. Pretending to pen that week’s batch of Operation H.E.A.R.T. propaganda, I occupied a downstairs table where I had a good view of him. I learned a lot by eavesdropping on the conversations he had with customers over the music he played at a loud volume (almost always warbly songs by someone I had never heard of, a Cherokee folk singer he professed to worship named Karen Dalton). I discovered:
he had, in childhood, been an altar boy and attended Our Lady of the Sea Catholic High School, but, judging by the tattoo of a faceless Virgin Mary on his left forearm, he was even more of a lapsed Catholic than I, who had not attended Mass for well over a year;
he had, as the crew had so judgmentally noted, no career or worldly ambitions to speak of, and planned to continue working at Gelato Amore, he said, for as long as his boss and coworkers would tolerate his clumsiness (he sometimes slid the gelato cooler doors open with too much bangy zest and repeatedly knocked over a large canister crammed with hundreds of teensy tasting spoons, scattering them all over the sticky floor and rendering them instantly useless), his laziness (he often arrived to work late, with sleep still crackling in the corners of his eyes and the red
kiss-prints of one or more admirers on his neck), and his taste in music;
he refused to drive a car because he thought it was unnatural and, he said, practically a guarantee of premature death, and got every place he needed to go on his crimson cruiser (paradoxically, without a helmet);
he was, as his last name more than hinted, Italian, and though his family had lived in San Diego for two generations, he was descended from a long line of Tuscan dairy farmers;
he had many girlfriends, or, as he called them, “ladyfriends,” all of them cutely tattooed about the ankles and shoulder blades and succulently shaped;
he regularly gave the entire contents of his overflowing tip jar to a homeless man named Baby Joe who often came into the café slurring, “Hey, Dolce, loan me some change?”;
he was absolutely free of guile, still had a little boy’s smile, was always kind to ice-cream-craving children, and only wanted to gulp from what he termed “the good cup of life” for as long as he could;
he embodied the earthy essence of those ancestral Tuscan dairymen who spent all day walking in fields among long-lashed milk cows and all night rolling with pretty peasant girls in the grass;
and (this last characteristic I noted with delighted downcast eyes), he liked me.
“Look at Margie Fitzgerald sitting over there, pretending not to hear me,” he would say to one of the regulars. “Isn’t she something? The cutest, the kindest. Hey, Curly, look up! Let me see those eyes.” But I would only sort through my stack of Operation H.E.A.R.T. flyers (“A Dirty Business: The Tragic Truth About Greyhound Racing”) and try to appear occupied.
After a couple weeks of this, I asked Jack Dolce in a very serious tone, frowning my smile into submission, if he would ever consider joining Operation H.E.A.R.T.—
if
, I added, we were to
make him a formal offer. I pushed the disapproving faces of the crew out of my mind. Jack Dolce gave me his guileless smile. “No way!” he said, and then added, as if attempting to be more polite, “I’m way too out of shape for that sort of thing.” He patted his very slightly protuberant belly. I reminded him that one of our most effective members was in a wheelchair, but he didn’t seem to hear. “I’ve got a question for
you
,” he said. “What’s the story with your boyfriend?”
I swallowed. “Excuse me?”
“The old guy with the beat-up Beemer and dark glasses.”
I was disconcerted to hear Simon referred to as “the old guy.” Tongue-tied, I blinked.
“When I go upstairs to clean tables and you’re having your meetings, he’s always looking around at everyone to make sure they aren’t looking at you. And if it wasn’t for the way he looks
at
you, I’d’ve figured he was your dad.” Jack Dolce cleared his throat and wiped an imaginary crumb off the countertop. “Forgive me for saying so, but it’s kind of strange,” he said.
He was the first outsider to comment on Simon and me, and I wanted to say, “It’s neither strange
nor
any business of yours!” But I couldn’t get the words out. All the protective pity I felt for Simon came flowering up.
Still silent, I stood and began to gather my things. Jack Dolce coaxed a napkin from a snugly stuffed dispenser. “I didn’t mean any offense,” he said in a gentle voice. He wrote something down. “This is where I live.” He handed the napkin to me. “When you’re ready, come find me.”
I rolled my eyes. I crumpled the napkin into a ball and shoved it into my pocket. But I checked it with my fingertips for the remainder of the day, finding it a soft sort of charm, one with no sharp edges.
• • •
I STOPPED VISITING GELATO AMORE ALONE
and tried to cease contemplating the curious creature that was Jack Dolce. The Operation was more active than ever. Each week, we celebrated another victory against animal exploiters, and we began making headlines among the modest-but-still-worth-mentioning news tucked within the middle pages of the
San Diego Sun
. In just one month, we:
effectively canceled a rodeo in Ramona by stealing each and every bucking strap on the premises (
BUCKING STRAP BURGLARY, RODEO RUINED, OPERATION H.E.A.R.T. SUSPECTED
);
decreased attendance at the Del Mar Racetrack by approximately 15 percent when we intercepted visitors between the parking lot and the entry turnstiles and horrified them with flyers featuring disturbing behind-the-scenes photographs we had taken on the sly (
SECRET WORLD OF HORSE RACING “HORRIFIC,” SAY FORMER FANS. OPERATION H.E.A.R.T.’S INFLUENCE?
);
snuck into a foul-smelling fur farm full of chinchillas, all of whom we captured and left on the front stoop of the local Humane Society under cover of night (
RODENT OVERLOAD: HUMANE SOCIETY GLUTTED WITH MYSTERIOUSLY ABANDONED CHINCHILLAS, OPERATION H.E.A.R.T. AT WORK?
);
and, at a particularly offensive booth at a craft fair in Vista, we smashed fifty glass shadow boxes featuring captured rare butterflies pinned into permanent submission, which were for sale at a hundred dollars each (
“BRATS WITH BASEBALL BATS,” VENDOR SAYS, DESTROY BUTTERFLY ART AT COUNTY FAIR, OPERATION H.E.A.R.T. AGAIN?
).
The
Sun
had fallen in love with us, it seemed. Still, while the headlines always held back from declaring us unequivocally responsible for the acts of derring-do that brought, as Ptarmigan put, so much “pizzazz” to the paper, they did bring us a certain degree of notoriety. This, coupled with the fact that the police evidently had more pressing concerns (understandable in a
crime-ridden county of three million people) than the shenanigans of a small group of college kids obsessed with animal rights, enveloped the crew in a kind of heady haze—one in which it seemed the only consequences of our actions were the flickering beginnings of fame and, of course, happier animals. “Good work, crew. We are
on track
,” Simon said.
The others were gratified by the glory of being mentioned in the paper. Bear even created an elaborate scrapbook comprised of all our clippings. Bumble, shaking his head at what he called Bear’s “archaic habits,” scanned the clippings into his computer. But I appeared, much to their perplexity, insufficiently excited. “Can you believe this?” Raven said, shaking another edition of the
Sun
in front of my face. I offered a slight sort of smile.
The truth was, a new desire had welled up in me, one that I couldn’t bring myself to articulate to the crew, or even to Simon. It had happened gradually over the last several months, and now, I feared, it set me apart. Maybe, I worried, I had spent too much of my free time reading animal books—not just nonfiction treatises like the ones Simon had given me, but novels, and even children’s books I’d purloined from Annette’s room (
Misty of Chincoteague, Where the Red Fern Grows, Penguins!, Pat the Bunny
). Maybe my left ovary had twinged far too many times during our campaigns, leaving me in a permanent state of oversensitivity. Or maybe I had, a couple of years earlier, taken too many drives up to the hill houses to capture an ever-elusive feeling of closeness that I constantly craved. Whatever the cause, animals, the idea of animals, the feeling of animals—not just the physical fact of their existence or their suffering—had sunk straight into my soul.
I wanted to hold them all in my hands, to know their little touches, to press my fingers into the fleshy cushions of their paws, to hear the clacking hardness of their hooves. I wanted to grow goosebumps from the ribbons of air they exhaled against
my cheek and into my ear, and to be softly sniffed by them, and tickled by wiry, weird whiskers. I wanted to be bitten, scratched, to have my blood drawn one droplet at a time by fangs and claws, and I wanted to sleep among them in a sighing, smelly pile. I wanted to tuck my beak into my feathered chest and fall asleep to my own breast’s rising and falling, to warm myself, to make sad shrill songs in the night, to be a soloist. I wanted to smell every feeling before it was felt, to run, to dig, to dive, to breathe underwater, to open and close my silken gills without trying. I wanted to frighten, to surprise, to wiggle my antennae, to let my hair grow matted, to exude strange perfumes, to buck, bellow, bugle, and bray, to low, to preen, to stot, to trot. I wanted to bear young and lick them clean, to usher them forward on their wobbly legs, to nose the ground in search of the finest-tasting grasses and flowers, to live and move according to the seasons. I wanted to love because my body and biology willed it, to love without any threat or presentiment of loss, without any ladybug wandering behind my eyes. It was no longer enough to just help them. I wanted to be among them.
Among them, I knew, loneliness was an impossibility. I could feel that all of them, every species, even those carnivorous ones who hunted and ate others, were part of a community from which I and every person I knew were excluded. But I didn’t know why we were excluded, always outsiders, and always manipulating a realm of which we were not even a part
—their
realm.
I wondered why there was a separation, and how people had ended up in a position that was so harmful to animals, and then in a position to try to undo the harm. The situation seemed artificial, somehow—that we must be “us” and they must be “them.” I was troubled, a little, and so was my sleep.
One night, several weeks after he’d written his address on the napkin, I had a dream about Jack Dolce. In the dream, he stood
beside the cooler at Gelato Amore. I approached him and said, “One small spumoni, please.” He dropped his ice cream scooper and lifted up his T-shirt, and I saw that he had the proud, bulging, red-feathered breast of a bird. When he reached toward me, I saw that the back of his hand was covered in a thick, furry pelt, while his palm was soft, pink, and puffy. He was careful with his claws when he clasped my fingers. As he bowed his head and pressed his lips to my knuckles I saw, tucked beneath the dark waves of his mussed hair, two curved horns, like those of a goat. And when he slipped off his shoes, I noticed that his feet were webbed. Something in the way he smiled, lifting his long tiger’s whiskers skyward when he did, told me that he was the happiest man I had ever seen. I awoke from the dream slick from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. My sweat-soaked nightgown formed a fine film on my skin, and, thus cocooned, I remembered that once, only once, I had looked up when I felt Jack Dolce looking at me, and allowed him to peer into my eyes. I rolled over and clung to Simon in fear, Simon, my Simon, my miller, Simon Melnikov of the silver hair and the nineteenth-century Russian army.
“A dream,” I mumbled into his neck, searching for a hint of hyacinths. “Oh, a dream.” I tugged at the plump lobe of his ear.
Simon stirred irritably and with a sudden sniff. Half asleep, he slurred, “Are you still worrying about that lovebird?” and then immediately started to snore, and I was left with nothing to do but press myself as close as I could against his hard back.