Lovebird Flew Away
Yesterday a letter came from my old buddy, Frank Costello. It was his usual Christmas newsletter, except for two things. One, it was mailed on May 4th. Two, he waited until the end of the letter to reveal that Felicity, his wife of 13 years and the mother of his three children, had gone away.
“She left each of us a long note with a clue,” he explained, “And when we put the clues together, we found a little treasure chest just chock full of memorable goodies: a CD sampler of her favorite songs, a hundred rocks and shells, some of her old sketchbooks, and a little bandanna-wrapped bundle which turned out to be Dickie, our little lost budgie. At least we think it’s Dickie.” He concluded, “Things just aren’t the same around here. And maybe that’s good.”
I’ve known Frank for about ten years. We used to write for the same magazine in Chicago. He kept a picture of Felicity on his desk, and it was my first impression of her. She was on a brass bed in a plum room, propped up on pink and blue pillows, with a quilt and a large open book covering the main event of her obviously bare breasts. She wore rose-colored spectacles and a large feathered hat that looked like a sleeping peacock. Her eyes looked up, probably at a Tiffany chandelier, and she bit her lower lip as if she were trying to think of the answer to a question, like “Why is the checkbook in the freezer?” or “What did you do with the children?”
She wasn’t beautiful, if you isolated each feature. Her nose had a bump, her hair was just brown, and she had a decided overbite. But the sum of Filicity was more than beautiful. She was bright and kind and naughty, soft as a featherbed, and always, always funny.
Frank’s desk and mine sat head to head, so we spent a lot of time staring at each other without really meaning to. Writers do that. It’s nothing personal. When we were procrastinating — an essential gestation period in the reproductive cycle of a writer — we’d tell stories. Fishermen tell fish stories, but the rest of us talk about women. In my case it was waitresses… and bartenders and nurses and landladies and landladies’ daughters.
Frank’s were better, and they were all about Felicity, lush, wry and loving. I still have a scrapbook of her in my mind.
He met her outside of Avalon on the Bay, in Ohio. He was on a two-week driving holiday, and she was running away from Aunt Peg, extreme executor of her deceased parents’ estate. Frank had just crested a hill and there was Felicity, in a long lavender gown and flip flops, sitting by the side of the road on an old two-toned leather suitcase, with a black and white spotted kitten in her arms, and a lovebird in a cage at her feet.
The kitten was supposed to stay in a picnic basket with a hinged wooden lid, but Frank said it preferred the carpeted area beneath the accelerator. Felicity made him sing along with her (and Joan and Joanie and Buffy) and stop at yard sales and lemonade stands. By the time they reached Illinois, he knew he had to keep her. They made Cissy, got married, bought a house, and then concentrated on the menagerie.
One Friday, two weeks before I left the magazine for a job at the LA Times, Frank’s eyes were vivid red, as if they were rimmed with lipstick. When I commented, he smiled really wide and said it was because of the “Card Party.” I didn’t ask, but Frank kept smiling and told me anyway.
He always left early on Thursdays to pick up Cissy from school. It was Felicity’s Day, he explained, the day she did whatever she needed to do. On that particular Thursday, as father and daughter pulled out of the school’s circular drive, Cissy turned and whispered, “I know a secret.”
She directed Frank to a gravel road behind the back woods that bordered the soccer field. “Stop here,” she ordered, and they got out of the car and walked up a wooded hill to a small clearing, next to a cornfield.
He saw just a bloom of color at first, like an enormous pink hibiscus with a white center. Then it came into focus — the pink bedspread from the guest room, and the white back of his naked wife, sitting cross-legged, reading the tarot to Cissy’s naked principal.
Frank didn’t talk much after that day, except to tell me that Felicity had released all the animals. Luckily, most of them stayed around for the food. But the lovebird flew away.
