The Bird Market of Paris (22 page)

Walden stood up and brushed himself off. “I'm going to the meeting now.”

“You're taking Guthrie with you?”

“They don't mind. It's a nice bunch of people. You're welcome to come with me, or we can go another time. Call me if you want to talk about these things.”

Walden walked away and I shuffled home, feeling exposed. What had just happened?

Walden and I met at the park often with Guthrie and Jesse to give them some sun and chat about his fun alcohol meetings and all the friendly people there. I told him I was happy he had a place to go to talk about his issues. It wasn't for me.

As the months passed, Walden became a bit of a nag, all happy and ebullient about this special anti-alcohol club, trying to lure me there with the promise of coffee and cookies, so I told him I'd stopped drinking. He saw me once through the plate glass window of my corner bar, knocked on the glass, smiled and shook his finger, but he didn't judge.

I had no friends in New York except Walden. Even my closest friend from Miami, Richard Blanco, who had visited me a few months before, told me he couldn't speak to me anymore. Richard had made appointments with people in New York and had included me in his plans, and I had made him late for every meeting, crying because I was too fat and ugly to leave the house, drinking from a bottle of vodka as I stripped to my underwear, over and over, standing ankle-deep in a puddle of wrinkled secondhand pants and dresses, unable to find an outfit I wasn't embarrassed to wear. Once, he left for dinner without me. He needed space, he said, and then he disappeared from my world.

I blacked out nightly, waking to find my towel rack broken; my teapot melted on a hot stove; my cheap coffee table missing a leg; silk flowers plucked of their petals, strewn across the apartment in a tempest of pinks and reds; my hair cut with office scissors into an uneven bob—never knowing how any of it had happened. I drunk-dialed Walden one night to tell him I was naked except for my vomit-soaked socks, and that I was invisible, begging him to make me real again.

The next evening, he sat on my couch and told me he didn't want me calling him in the middle of the night anymore. I wept and told him about the blackouts: waking to find my futon stabbed with kitchen shears, bleeding cotton fluff; finding knives under my pillow and the phone in the toilet; the unanswered drunken prayers to end my misery uttered before passing out on my hardwood floor.

Walden sat quietly for a long time.

“You sure you don't want to go to a meeting with me?” he said. “It can get worse than this, and this is pretty bad.”

His meetings would mean the end of my drinking. I needed to drink, and was positive the people in the meetings wouldn't understand what alcohol meant for me: pain management. Physical pain, psychic pain, I had it all, and alcohol usually took it away, though, lately, alcohol had amplified the pain, too, and I needed
more
booze to scrub the widening stain of discomfort and isolation it created. Alcohol had turned on me, pulled a bait-and-switch routine, roped me into a cruel shell game where there was no pea under any of the walnuts.

Walden observed Jesse strutting around on the top of his cage.

“I like Jesse,” he said, pointing to the little parrot. “Do you think he and Guthrie could be roommates? They love each other and I'll take good care of him.”

“Take him,” I said.

“Are you sure? You can have him back any time.”

Jesse furiously clanged one of his bell toys, stretched his head toward the ceiling, and whistled. I didn't deserve to have anything around that loved me. I picked Jesse up and kissed him. He stepped dutifully from my hand onto Walden's shoulder.

With Jesse clinging to the back of Walden's shirt, we rolled his metal birdcage from my apartment into the breezeless summer dusk. The wheels rattled over Hell's Kitchen's uneven sidewalks as we passed a couple of high-heeled working girls, who nodded as we struggled the block and a half to Walden's walk-up.

We began the awkward ascent up three flights of stairs, stopping at each landing to breathe and swab sweat from our faces. The wooden tenement stairs had been painted blue many years ago, each step worn and concave in the middle, where millions of footfalls had landed since the nineteenth century.

As Walden keyed into the apartment, Guthrie watched us from a large cage in the corner. He was a gentlemanly bird, quiet, somewhat docile. Jesse had more bite in him: a miniature Napoléon, always placing one zygodactyl foot in front of the other in a deliberate march, searching for books to chew and demanding that someone scratch his head.

Walden placed Jesse onto the play stand on the top of the cage. Jesse perched at the edge and leaned precariously toward me, uttering his typical earsplitting complaint. I turned away.

“He'll be fine here,” Walden said.

We stared at each other for a moment, then I stared at the bare wooden floor. Jesse had been a part of my life for over nine years.

“I'll take good care of him,” Walden repeated.

I turned and left. My last avian responsibility had rolled down the block into someone else's life. No more birds.

I felt heavy, as if someone had just clipped my wings.

On my way home, I stopped at the corner liquor store for a gold bottle of cream sherry and a bottle of Lillet, and there I was: a girl and her bottles.

I opened the gold bottle, the too-yellow color of little-girl's jewelry, in the cool of the rattling air conditioner, and poured a glass of the amber liquid over ice. It tasted vaguely of cough syrup. I had two. Three. I opened the Lillet and had a glass. I liked it because I had read that Lillet was Truman Capote's favorite drink. I sat on my couch in my underwear and tinkled the ice in the glass, a sound that could put wings on angels.

I felt loose and social, so I decided to foray into the outside world. I did my makeup by rote—it's hard to see with the mirror wavering. For months I had written myself notes on pieces of blank printer paper in Sharpie strokes that read
Do Not Go Out
. I'd tape the note over the crack in the door at eye level, and sometimes the note still hung there in the morning, but other mornings the paper was crumpled on the floor or torn into uneven thirds, and I didn't recall how that had happened. This night, I remembered ripping the note from the door's seam, the crackling tape unsticking itself like a Band-Aid exposing an invisible wound. I crushed the paper into a tight wad, then unlocked the door and exited.

I walked down my crowded Hell's Kitchen street, past prostitutes I recognized, and the gang members with their sweet Boxer dog disguised as a killer in a studded leather harness. I chose a bar on Ninth Avenue and inhaled the pacifying scent of beer, sweat, and cigarettes. The place was crowded, as usual, with skinny girls clad in backless tank tops and jocks wearing Levis and long-sleeved, button-down cotton shirts. I glanced across the bar, recognized someone, and squinted to see her better. The chubby girl stared at me, too, slumped like a frumpy burlap sack of potatoes that had fallen off a truck. She had sad eyes. I squinted harder, trying to remember her face—she looked so familiar—and realized I was staring into a sepia-tinted mirror.

I mounted a barstool, ordered a martini, and tried to bury the last few seconds. The drink couldn't come quickly enough. I ordered another, and ferried it with me toward the back of the bar.

A group of young guys and girls sat around a table in a semi-circle near the fire exit. The group looked safe and professional—all suits and power ties and shiny black shoes.

“Have you seen a tall blonde girl and a shorter guy with glasses?” I asked a guy at the table, leaning into his ear and pointing into the crowd as I shouted over the jukebox streaming “Kryptonite” by 3 Doors Down through speakers on the ceiling. I stood on tiptoes and scanned the smoky room for my imaginary friends.

“I haven't,” the guy said, his arm around a pretty brunette, curls hanging over her shoulders.

“My friends aren't here yet. Can I sit with you while I wait?”

The semicircle of bodies skooched and I sat on the end of the booth. We introduced ourselves. I sat with them for another drink and small talk as the songs on the juke cruised from decade to decade, “Disco Inferno” to “Jesse's Girl.” After Santana's “Oye Como Va,” the guy said, “You don't have friends coming, do you?”

“I do,” I insisted. “Maybe they went to another place.”

One of the guys at the table brought a round of pink shots on a tray. The drink tasted like liquid Fruity Pebbles cereal.

That's the last memory I have of the night.

I woke the next afternoon in bed, confused, naked, and covered in vomit. Who had vomited on me? I hazily recalled walking down Ninth Avenue with one of the guys from the table, bright lights and snatches of green eyes and a hand around my waist. Maybe
he
had vomited on me. I couldn't have vomited on myself.

I climbed down from my loft to find a yellow screwdriver on the floor next to my stereo, its innards strewn like bullets at a crime scene—circuit boards, metal tubes, and arterial wires—adding to the debris field of broken glass across my living room's hardwood floor.

There had been a struggle. The toilet was filled with toilet paper and overflowing slowly, water half an inch deep on the floor. Who had done that?

The guy from the bar must have brought me home. He came inside and tried to get physical and I resisted, which explained the broken glass and stereo. He raped me, crawled into my loft bed, and vomited on me. Then he cleaned himself off from the rape and clogged my toilet.

Oh, my God. I was a rape victim.

The chain was locked on the inside of my front door. How could he have exited then chained the door from the inside? After the rape and the vomiting, I must have waited until he left and locked the door behind him.

If he had raped me, he likely hadn't used a condom and he probably had AIDS. Now I would contract AIDS.

Still drunk, sweating slicks of alcohol, I dressed myself in jeans and a hoodie and walked to St. Clare's Hospital emergency room. Ninth Avenue was so different in daylight, pigeons and sparrows gathering outside the pet shop, where the employees had tossed old seed onto the sidewalk, and the Italian ice vendor handing a lady a cup of raspberry that would turn her tongue bright blue. On Fifty-Second Street, a few cops stood outside talking to paramedics. I gestured to one of the cops and he approached.

“Something bad happened to me last night,” I confided in a whisper. “I was raped.”

I wanted to say something else, a phrase he wouldn't have understood:
I have no more birds
. The officer sprang into cop mode and escorted me inside the hospital. I followed him as we bypassed the other people sitting in the emergency room's waiting area. He approached the nurse's station and whispered to them, and he and a nurse led me to a curtained cubby where the nurse instructed me to change into a gown.

The cop and another police officer, along with two nurses, came to take my statement. I told them about the struggle, the items broken in the apartment, and the vomit.

“What did he look like?” one cop asked, pen poised above his pad of paper.

I waited a long time to answer, trying to access memories from the night before. I pictured the guy walking beside me, the lights bright on Ninth Avenue.

“Brown hair?”

“Tell us this story again,” said the cop.

I filled in the gaps, telling them about the pink drink, the guys at the table, someone's brother and a girl in a tank top.

“You smell like alcohol,” said a nurse. “How much did you drink?”

“I don't know. No more than usual.”

A doctor walked into the curtained cubby, followed by another nurse holding a box with capital letters spelling “RAPE KIT” on it. He asked me what had happened and I repeated the story, realizing that if I was the one who put the chain on the door, I might have been the one who destroyed the stereo with a screwdriver and vomited on myself during the night.

The doctor examined me and took swabs away with him to the lab. He told me to wait. I sat there shivering, drunkenness turning into a hangover, still not sure what had happened the night before, but starting to grasp that I had fabricated the story to fill in time that had slipped past me like a ghost.

The doctor returned with the two nurses, one still holding the rape kit.

“You haven't had sex,” the doctor said.

I contemplated my bare feet and squelched a dry heave, the stench of bleach sending my stomach into a lurch.

“Do you want to continue with this rape kit?” the doctor asked. “It doesn't seem like anything has happened to you.”

One of the nurses huffed. I looked at the box and told them I wanted to leave. The nurse rolled her eyes and walked out of the cubby.

At home, I threw my purse down and called Walden.

“What was up with you last night?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You called me all night. You said you were with some guy from a bar and he didn't want to hang out with you, so you freaked out and it sounded like you were breaking things. I told you to sleep it off, but you kept calling, so I took the phone off the hook. I'm sorry, it was late, and I told you not to call me in the middle of the night anymore.”

“I don't remember any of that.” I slumped on the couch, listening to Walden's breathing, and to Jesse and Guthrie whistling in the background.

“Walden? Can you take me to a meeting?”