Birdcage Open

Rosaline got there twenty minutes early, which was stupid, because now she had to stand around looking like she wasn't standing around waiting for a stranger. The flea market filled the old slaughterhouse on the edge of town, all concrete floors and iron hooks still dangling from the ceiling beams like nobody had ever bothered to take them down. She'd treated a farmer's goat out this way on Thursday and thought, why not come early, look around, get a coffee in her before the whole thing.

Forty-four years old and she was nervous about a blind date. Funny, that.

Mireille had set it up, of course. Mireille set up everything for everybody. "He's very clever," she'd said on the phone Tuesday. "He checks facts for a living, can you imagine? He'll catch you in any lie you tell him. And he sells antiques on weekends at the market. You'll know him by the birdcage."

"The birdcage," Rosaline had repeated.

"He collects them. Don't ask me why, men are strange. He'll be at the far end near the coffee stand."

So Rosaline got a coffee and walked the hall, past tables of chipped Limoges and old tools and a guy selling nothing but buttons, and she was halfway through her second lap when she saw the booth.

And the man behind it.

And the birdcage.

Clark.

She stopped so fast the coffee nearly went over the rim of the cup. There was no mistaking him, five years later or not. Forty-two now, shoulders broader than she remembered, hair shorter, a faded flannel over a t-shirt with some band she couldn't read from here. He was writing something in a ledger with that same bent-over concentration he used to have over his laptop, tongue just at the corner of his mouth.

Her stomach did a full drop, like an elevator with a cut cable.

Because here was the thing she had never told a living soul. The blind date was with Clark. The man she'd dated for three years and dumped in a parking lot in the rain. The man she'd flinched away from in bed more than once, near the end, because she was scared and stupid and didn't know how to say what she actually wanted, and he, a trans man who had spent half his life hearing that his body was a debate, had read every flinch like a verdict on it. They'd been apart five years and she'd spent all five regretting it, and she still thought about him more than she'd ever admit to Mireille, who set up blind dates apparently without checking whether the two people already knew each other.

Did Mireille not know? Or had Mireille done this on purpose? Rosaline stared at him and genuinely could not decide which possibility was worse.

The birdcage sat on the table between a brass telescope and a stack of old postcards. Heavy thing, black iron, big enough for a crow maybe, door hanging wide open. Empty. It caught the gray light coming through the high windows and just sat there, being a dare.

She could walk away. That was an option. She could finish her coffee, text Mireille some lie about a sick dog, and drive home to her apartment and her cat and her safe little life.

She walked over.

"Clark," she said.

He looked up, and she watched it hit him, watched his whole face go through about four expressions in two seconds before landing somewhere guarded. "Rosaline."

"Mireille said to look for a birdcage." Her voice came out higher than she wanted. "She didn't say it would be you."

"Small world," he said. Flat. He set the pen down, though, and turned the ledger over, which meant he wasn't going to keep pretending to work. "You look good."

"You look different. Good different." God, she was bad at this. She'd once talked a frantic man through birthing twin lambs over the phone at two in the morning and she could not manage a sentence to her ex. "How long has it been? Five years?"

"Five in March." He leaned back against the shelf behind him. Around them the market roared on, somebody haggling over a dresser, a kid crying about a waffle, and the two of them standing in the middle of it like statues. "So Mireille doesn't know."

"Clearly not."

"Or she does and she's evil."

"She's not evil. She's just thorough. She probably met you through Sophie's book club and met me through the stable and never once thought to compare calendars."

He almost smiled. She caught it, the almost. That was familiar too, that almost.

"So," she said, and gestured at the birdcage, because she had to gesture at something. "You collect these now?"

"It's a display piece. It sells the booth. People see a big iron cage and they stop, and when they stop, I get to talk them into buying a hundred-euro telescope." He paused. "It belonged to a hotel in Lyon, allegedly. I'm still verifying that. Allegedly is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

"That's very you."

"What's very me?"

"Verifying a hotel's birdcage." She wrapped both hands around her cup. It had gone cold anyway. "You fact-checked everything. Even me, sometimes. I always figured."

"Figured what?"

"That you were checking me. Waiting for me to be a lie."

That landed harder than she meant it to. His face closed up a little, the almost-smile gone.

"Rosaline." He said her name carefully, like handling glass. "I need to tell you something before this goes any further, because if I don't I'll feel like a fraud, and fraud is basically my religion's only sin."

"Okay?"

"Mireille didn't set this up blind. Not on my end." He pushed off the shelf and stood up straight. "I knew it was you from the start. I told her I'd meet a friend of a friend Saturday morning, and I let her believe I didn't know who you were, because I wanted to see if you'd actually come. And when you did, I wanted to see if you'd walk away when you recognized me."

She stared at him. Somewhere behind her a man shouted ten euros, final offer, and a woman told him he was a thief and a poet both.

"You wanted to see if I'd walk away," Rosaline repeated.

"Yeah."

"And if I had?"

"Then I'd have my answer, and we'd both save ourselves the ugly conversation." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the ledger. "Four and a half years is a long time to wonder. I got tired of wondering."

"You could have just called me. Like a person. With a phone."

"Would you have picked up?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was no, she would have stared at his name on her screen for a full day and then told herself she'd been too busy at the clinic.

"No," she admitted. "I wouldn't have."

"There it is." He spread his hands. "So. You didn't walk away. That's something. What does that mean?"

What did it mean? It meant she'd been thinking about him on and off for five years. It meant she'd broken up with him over things she'd been too chicken to say out loud, and she'd spent the time since regretting it in a low constant way, like a headache you stop noticing. It meant she'd read an article last spring about people who stay curious about an ex and she'd read it three times and then deleted it from her browser history like a coward.

"It means," she said slowly, "I have some things to say. And I think you do too."

"I do."

"Somewhere that isn't next to a telescope full of strangers?"

He looked at her for a moment, and then glanced past her shoulder, and she turned to follow his look. At the edge of the hall, through a big roll-up door left open for the dealers, sat a white panel van with the side door slid halfway open, boxes of inventory stacked inside.

"That's mine," he said. "It's not exactly a café, but nobody bothers it. Dealers nap in their vans all day here. It's practically a tradition."

"Clark." She laughed, short and disbelieving. "You're inviting me into your van."

"You invited yourself into my booth."

"That's true. That's fair." She looked at the van, then back at him, heart going loud enough she could hear it. Five years of not saying things had gotten her exactly nowhere. "Okay. But I'm going first with what I have to say, because I've been rehearsing it since the parking lot of the vet school and if I don't go first I'll lose my nerve."

"Deal." He pulled his coat off the chairback. "Marcel! Watch the booth, back in twenty!"

An old man at the next table raised a hand without looking up from his sandwich.

They walked toward the van together through the crowd, not touching, not quite side by side either. It was cold in the hall and colder outside the big door, gray sky pressing down on the whole market, and Rosaline thought, wildly, that of all the Saturday mornings she'd planned, this was both the worst and the best one she'd ever had.

Halfway across the hall they passed his table again. Clark stopped, put one hand on the black iron birdcage, and swung the little door wide open with a finger. It clicked against the frame.

"You see this?" he said. "Big enough for a crow. Door's been open since I set up at seven. Nothing to catch. You can leave or stay."

"Is that a metaphor or are you just proud of the cage?"

"Both. I paid forty euros for it and I'd like it to mean something."

"It means something," Rosaline said. "I'm staying."

"Good." He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and kept walking. "Because Marcel won't feed it anyway. He'd lose the bird in an hour." He lifted the cage off the table by its ring. "It's coming with us. I don't trust Marcel with a crime scene."

Outside the roll-up door the cold hit her like a bucket of water. Gray sky, gravel lot, a row of vans and battered cars with their wipers half up. Her breath came out in white puffs. She had worn the nice scarf, the wool one she'd bought in Lyon two winters ago, and she was suddenly glad of it and suddenly aware she might be taking it off shortly, which was a ridiculous thought to have in a parking lot.

Clark's van sat at the end of the row, white, a little rusty along the wheel arches, side door already slid open a foot. He pulled it wider and climbed in first, shifting a box of brass candlesticks out of the way.

"Watch the postcards," he said. "Sit anywhere that isn't breakage."

The back of the van had a blanket over the wheel well and smelled like old newspaper and cold metal. Rosaline sat on the blanket and pulled her knees up and looked at him.

"Okay," she said. "Me first. Like I said."

"Go."

"I rehearsed this. So bear with me." She held up a hand and counted off on her fingers. "One. I dumped you in a parking lot in the rain because I was scared, and I dressed it up as being sure, and it wasn't sure, it was scared. Two. I flinched. In bed, near the end there. You know exactly what I mean and I will not act as if I do not. I flinched and then I made it your problem instead of mine, and that was a filthy thing to do to you, Clark, and I've known it was filthy for about four and a half of the five years since."

He didn't say anything. His jaw moved once, like he was biting down on a reply and spitting it out.

"Three," she went on, because she'd promised herself she would. "Three is that I've been curious. This whole time. About the things you wanted that I wouldn't even let myself look at. The cage stuff, the being-told stuff, all of it. I read about it. At night. Like a pervert with a library card. And I never called because I figured I'd forfeited the right."

The van was quiet. Somewhere out in the lot a gull screamed at another gull about something.

"Say something," she said. "You're making me nervous and I've already said the hard part."

"You called yourself a pervert with a library card. That's going in my ledger."

"Clark!"

"Sorry. Sorry." He laughed, but it came out rough. "It's just, I spent five years thinking you regarded me as a problem to be solved and then reclassified. And here you are, in my van, doing the thing you wouldn't do then. Saying it out loud. I don't know what to do with that except want it, honestly."

"Want it?"

"All of it. You. This. Whatever this turns into." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at her straight on. "But I'm not doing anything you haven't asked for. Not this time. That's the rule now. So."

"So ask."

"Can I kiss you?"

She'd expected it to be harder than that, or easier, and it was both. Her whole chest did something stupid.

"Yes," she said. "God, yes, obviously, I didn't ride two buses to a slaughterhouse to discuss ironwork."

He came across the van fast and took her face in both hands and kissed her, and it was nothing like the careful goodbye kiss in that parking lot five years ago. This one was teeth and cold nose and his hand sliding into her hair, and she made a noise into his mouth that embarrassed her immediately and that she did not take back. His coat smelled like wool and dust from the market. Her hands found the front of his jacket and hung on.

"Wait," he pulled back a few centimeters, breathing hard. "Wait, okay, the door's still open, anyone could..."

"Close it then."