Exquisite Bird in a Hostile Land

CW: Animal cruelty

It was easy to remove the wedding ring. I slipped it into my pocket on a Friday after work and met a woman at a bar to dance.

She was gorgeous. She was petite, blue-eyed, with small breasts and red hair. She was an actor, I thought. I hummed inwardly as our bodies moved in sync to the music.

“There are many relationships to have, different kinds,” I told my therapist, just a day before. She agreed in her terse but kind way.

“Jess is intense,” I added. There was an awkward pause.

“She took up so much space, practically all the space.” I coughed and shifted my weight in the chair.

“But I’ll miss having someone to text.”

“I think you’re angry,” she said, holding up her bright face, Russian blonde features almost like my mother’s.

She asked me to elaborate.

Then the time was up.

I left to eat a deli sandwich on the street before heading back uptown: six slices of turkey, two of provolone, mustard spread thin.

—

“All things start and end, don't they?” I texted my mother, and she gave me a thumbs-up emoji as I rounded the corner to my apartment, coming up from the deepest subway station in the city.

My wife, Jess, was at home in Washington Heights, drinking by herself, when I came home from dancing. Soon-to-be ex-wife. We hadn’t separated our apartment belongings, so she was still here in the interim of our separation. I made a list of steps to take to get out of a marriage. The last thing to do at the bottom was to get individual streaming accounts.

She was watching the movie Moonstruck that night when I returned. Cher’s face splashed across the screen. My HBO account, likely.

Jess looked rounder, softer, as if she had formed into the couch. She was sitting almost meditatively, in a state of prayer.

“You took off your wedding ring,” she said, eating chunks of baguette and cheese with focus, propped up by pillows. The chunks were gigantic. She was chewing loudly.

She had eagle eyes.

“Yeah,” I was holding it in my hands like proof, up towards the yellow lights of our living room chandelier.

She shrugged, looked at me before returning to her movie. I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t know what to do with the ring. In a few weeks, I’d probably throw it into the Hudson.

She turned unexpectedly to point to the flyer on the Danish vintage dining table. It had a retro, clip-art feel, with the name of our curmudgeonly co-op board president at the bottom next to a zoomed-in pixelated photo of a large pet bird.

“There is a lost bird in the complex,” she offered, a slight turn to her head away from the screen.

Help Us Find Ruffles, the flyer read. The curmudgeon was always ranting about the newcomers in the building, turning our low-energy co-op meetings into an off-putting scene.

The bird looked expensive. Almost bizarrely ceremonial. An exquisite bird.

“It was fitting he had a weird pet,” I offered, lightening the situation.

“I hope they find him,” she offered, generously, I could hear in her voice.

“We should keep an eye out, I mean, he must be around.” As she spoke, she gestured with her arms, flinging tiny crumbs of bread that were collecting on our couch.

And I felt a strange, creeping possession of the white-feathered, exotic bird.

“If we find it, maybe we should set the bird free,” I offered.

“The bird is free,” she argued back. “But it won’t survive.”

“There are those parakeets in Greenwood Cemetery.” I countered.

“Well, this is a pretty large exotic bird.” Her eyebrows raised.

“Oh,” I let it go.

The movie continued. I retreated to my bedroom, our old bedroom, thumbing the missing bird hand out.

Ruffles’ white mohawk stared back at me.

—

I only learned Moonstruck was her favorite movie later, six months after she moved out finally, when I discovered that Jess had recently published a personal essay in a well-reviewed literary magazine. A friend of a friend mentioned it at a poetry reading.

“You know, Jess, she's really in her Loretta phase now.” When my face went blank, she kept going.

“Moonstruck!” the friend almost shrieked after my blank stare. “You know, the ’80s romance, it’s got Cher, and the guy with no hand!” She was searching for Nicolas Cage, I later pieced together.

We are all part of the same group of writers. We met at Sarah Lawrence, where we were both enrolled in our MFA program. I was a good writer, if you asked my high school English teacher. But I barely write anymore. I still attended the group, though.

“Oh, right, Moonstruck. She loved that one.” I sounded like my dad making small talk on topics he could barely hide his disdain for with his second wife.

I looked up Moonstruck alone later back in my apartment, watching clips of Nicolas Cage launching his hand in the air in the bakery basement. It was an iconic scene, they said. I didn’t watch the full movie after all the searching, but settled for a Reddit summary instead:

“Now you're afraid because you know the big part of you is a wolf that dares to bite off its own hand to save itself from the trap of the wrong love,” the review quoted Cher, in her triumphant scene confronting Nicolas Cage.

I gave in and watched the clip on YouTube before turning in bed, uninterested in the plot.

Underneath my laptop was the crumbled Help Us Find Ruffles flyer, still there all this time later.

—

Jess has cheated on me several times, the first a handful of years earlier than our split. The last time was during a period when we were debating whether to open our marriage or have children. Both choices felt like an ill-timed idea in retrospect. Time seemed to numb me to the reality of it, the ping-ponging of blame.

I had just been promoted to head of content at my start-up job when it happened, which had started as a side gig to writing but had now become the main event. Jess texted me that we had to talk in one of our later meetings. I felt a panic attack coming on after she texted me. I went into the bathroom to cry, but I composed myself afterwards—no one noticed, as I had standing meetings.

We met downtown in the East Village later, where Jess was hyperventilating in the streets about how our marriage was over. She said our hypothetical baby was gone, a phrase she’d used before. I didn’t know what to do, but I found an udon place on my phone while I held her with one hand. I ordered takeout for us to share.

“You ripped the band-aid off,” I told Jess when she asked how I was, a week after it was decided between us that we would divorce.

It was a relief. I felt the air coming back into my lungs, perhaps from the entirety of our relationship. I started using a clothing delivery service and joined a language immersion class. I wrote in a notebook, Find yourself.

Jess was in the living room, carrying a large Ikea bag to spend the night with her friend across town.

I was keeping our apartment, a pre-war co-op with Hudson views. We lived at the end of Manhattan, almost off the island.

She looked nice then, despite the emotional distance between us.

“You're beautiful,” I said, though I was mostly aware of her breasts beneath her shirt, the weight of them.

I had been listening to a podcast called Prioritizing Pleasure in Our Desires. It was probably better that I didn’t say it, in retrospect.

She looked at me, longer than usual, like she was taking visual notes. A small itch ran up my spine.

“I want the framed Matisse print,” was her only response. She gathered a rolled-up yoga mat for the weekend.

She insisted on it because she knew it was a gift.

“Put it in the divorce agreement.”

The door closed or maybe slammed shut.

—

On the day we finally moved her out, a shared task that should have felt more cathartic than it ultimately did, the curmudgeon was looking for his bird. There was a literal search party out front, trailing the blocks, looking up into the trees. They were making half-hearted bird calls. A young kid being pushed in a red wheelbarrow was screeching Ruffles up and down the block.

The complicated thing I wanted to tell them all was that the only remaining woods in Manhattan were up here, Cabrini Woods. It’s named after the relic of a saint, Mother Cabrini, lying oddly close to where we lived. The glass reliquary contains almost all of her remains.

The bird could be anywhere in there by now, possibly high up in trees we couldn’t reach, maybe even singing near our dead Mother Cabrini’s body.

Back at the search party, Jess, being able to talk to anyone, diverted from our shared task to strike up conversation.

“Have you found your dear bird?” she offered to the curmudgeon.

“No, unfortunately,” he offered back.

He liked Jess. I saw them interacting on the Facebook group for the building sometimes.

“It’s been spotted in the trees outside windows,” the older Polish super started telling me while I was waiting, hanging back a few steps.

“What kind of bird is it?” I asked, realizing I didn’t know.

“It’s an exquisite bird, I’ve heard. Something special,” he said.

“It’s an exotic, exquisite bird, alright, a large Cockatoo,” the curmudgeon owner chimed in, rounding back away from Jess to discuss with the super about the possibility of taking one of his ladders out to look up the large oak tree by the back of the building. There were unfounded rumors it was tapping on someone’s window.

“But it’s an exquisite bird now, in a hostile land!” The curmudgeon cried out. The emotion on his face turned me off.

Jess had moved on abruptly, waving down our friend’s truck into a parking spot to double park.

—

The short essay Jess wrote was doing better than I expected. Our mutual writing friend who secretly sided with me called it saccharine.

“It’s about mothers and daughters,” the same friend texted me later in our shameful group chat, criticizing it.

“Jess hated her mother” I texted back, confused.

“Her mother died,” the friend added, somber, for a change.

“Oh, that’s too bad.” I switched subjects quickly. I read the obituary, but decided not to mention it to Jess. We hardly know each other now, almost a year has passed, I reason.

The essay had been circulating with our group and then others, and was finally picked up by a newsletter of a well-respected writing coach upstate.

He called it fantastically brave, the friend joked again.

I googled Jess Walters, looking at a headshot of her on her website, set against the backdrop of Central Park's trees. She still had that secret smile way of posing.

—

I was taking out trash when I ran into the curmudgeon in the basement elevator vestibule.

“Did you ever find the bird?” I offered, nearly a year later. I had suspected no, but felt a call for closure.

The curmudgeon was carrying too many bags of groceries.

“Oh no, not yet,” he exclaimed. I worried a pack of mandarin oranges would plummet while we waited for the elevator together.

“But I am not going to lose hope,” he offered.

I thought of offering to help, but a pang of intense fear of the bird with this man, with his earnest plea and heavy brow, set me off in distaste.

“Maybe the bird wants to be free.”

“Ruffles needs me,” he countered back, disappointed, almost hurt. I hadn’t noticed how crooked his glasses were before, nearly tilting off his nose.

“The bird could be dead, too.” The words landed harder than I intended. The curmudgeon turned away, wounded. He averted his gaze.

We didn’t speak again until he got off on the second floor when I wished him a good day, unanswered.

I had hoped to avoid him anyway at the next co-op meeting, especially since I was voting against his proposal to limit bike storage.

—

My friend Eric sent me a video, an explainer titled “How to trap a bird,” because I mentioned to him that maybe I’d go and find the bird myself, trap it, and set it free somewhere else. Perhaps I’d ride all the way out to Greenwood Cemetery, set him free with parakeet cousins living up in the gothic arches of mausoleums.

“Maybe I’d kill the bird, " I texted back this time, in an act of bravery.

Then he’d never have to come back here, trapped. I reckoned internally.

“In the next life, he’d be a high-flying tropical bird,” Eric texted back, emojis punctuating his sentence perfectly.

After rolling around in bed, unable to sleep, I started searching: How to kill a bird humanely.

The step-by-step illustration I found would have me with a plastic bag, slowly approaching the bird and seeing him standing on the corner, waiting for me.

Hold the bird by the legs (or possibly around the body for small birds) in your weaker hand. Place the back of the bird's head in the crook between your thumb and fingers and hold firmly. Pull the neck sharply downwards, bringing the neck backwards at the same time by twisting your hand and pushing your knuckles into the bird's back.

—

In spring, I began seeing a new partner. She was a tenured faculty member, a few years older than I, at a college downtown. She’s a born and bred New Yorker from the Upper West Side.

When we see each other at yoga the following Saturday morning, we take a walk under the George Washington Bridge, then up the west side through Inwood Hill Park, skirting the density of Cabrini Woods. I picked up the flyer for Ruffles off the coffee table, where it migrated, my relic.

“Maybe we’ll even run into the mythical lost bird,” I joke, showing her the crumpled face of Ruffles. The sun has bleached the colors into a pastel collage of shapes.

“And I’ll catch him with my hands for you.”

She kissed me, laughing. We don’t see Ruffles, but we hold hands on the hike.

—

After New Year's, I get a notification on my phone that FedEx is delivering a package.

I’m not expecting the usual things I get this time of year for my birthday next week.

The intercom system dings. The part-time doorman calls up, twenty minutes later.

“There is an odd package for you, Mr. Judd,” he says.

“An odd package?” I ask over the humming of the system.

“I dunno man, it kinda smells?” he's nonchalant, but alarmed.

When I round the corner downstairs, I see him pushing the package to the edge of the check-in desk. I brush it off, taking the package. He’s right. It smells off.

Upstairs, I push the plastic bag open around the bathtub with my foot. That felt like the safest place for a biohazard.

With a box cutter, I open the medium shoebox-sized package, peeling back the tape on the cardboard gently. The opaque plastic bag inside reads Frozen Meat, Reptile Supplies, Flatbush, Brooklyn.

With the toilet brush, the only instrument I find in a moment of fear, I poke it open with a sudden burst. A defrosting beheaded bird flops out, with it a stench of wet grass and earth rushing into my nostrils. There is an icy trail of blood remaining in the plastic, now melting into the swirl of the drain.

It looks like a pigeon. Or a mourning dove. Familiar. Or not.

I call up my super in a panic. I didn’t know who to call with a dead bird, even if it’s somehow permissible. He tells me this is above his pay grade, but that we can call animal control.

“And don’t dispose of it in the trash,” he warns, worried about getting in trouble with the co op rules.

I discover a note under the bird while lifting the limp, half-feathered, plucked body with my kitchen cleaning gloves onto a weathered beach towel. I put animal control on the speaker. “Please hold,” the recording echoes back, with a digital jingle.

I pick up the note with my gloved hand instead, smearing it a bit :

Good luck. You exquisite bird.

You’re going to need it.