The Girl in Times Square

by Paullina Simons

  “Never skipped a Monday.” He opened his hands. “What can I tell you? Appearances are everything. The appearance of seeming normal, of behaving normally is essential to continuing to drink. Because if you’re seen to be losing it, you will be asked to stop—by your family, your friends, your women, your employer. So you do everything to hide yourself, so that you’re never asked to.”

  Lily was thoughtful, alert, she sat up straighter, her body was hyper. He saw it; reaching for her, he carefully brought her down on top of him. He lay her down on top of him and, cupping her head, kissed her face gently, kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead. “Liliput, you are adorable. You want to help me? You want to help me overcome? I’m not saying you’re not admirable. You’re a rock. I used to be a normal drinker but now I’m hopeless. I’ve been drinking since my late teens. Whereas a few years back—when I thought I hit bottom—I needed one bottle of whisky a weekend, now I need two, maybe three, sometimes four, depending on how strong the Scotch is. I spent two fifty a week, twelve thousand a year on drink. I spend on drink nearly what I spend on my rent. I can’t afford a life even if I wanted one.”

  “You can afford me,” Lily said. “I won’t cost you a penny.”

  “You indeed are a powerful drug yourself,” he said, lowering his hands to her hips, squeezing her, opening her, not letting go, caressing her.

  Lily couldn’t concentrate on his words. “You’ve stood up admirably for me. You’ve always shown up. Nothing thin-lipped about you.”

  He kissed her. “Yes. I’ve shown up. Because I know it’s temporary. I’m always going back to my place. The drink is the forever thing.”

  “Is that why you haven’t lived with anyone?”

  “Yes. Can’t have anyone see me when I’m like that.”

  She was mulling. “Have you tried that twelve-step approach? My mother is trying it.”

  “Your mother is lying to you.”

  He said it so swiftly, so brutally. How did he know that? “No, no,” Lily protested, wanting to give him hope, even though she knew he was right. “She was very earnest. She saw her life flash before her. She lost a foot, Spencer. She wants to do everything she can to stop.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “You’re not my mother, you’re much stronger.”

  “No, Lily. I’m just as weak. It’s just that I drink differently than she does, because I have responsibilities, because I have a job. But tell me, if I didn’t have anything to do, like your mother, how long do you think the sober Sunday night would last? How many sober Mondays would there be?”

  “Spencer, don’t say that. You’re not like my mother.”

  “I am, Lily. I know you don’t want to believe it.”

  “Because it’s not true.”

  “It is true. Believe it.”

  “Well, my mother is going to AA.”

  “Then she is stronger than me.”

  That was the most absurd thing Lily had heard all evening. Her mother was so weak. She turned her face from him, tried to get herself together, but she was shaking uncontrollably now. Get it together, Lil, get yourself together. This is what it means to fail him. This is the definition of failing him. You pretend you love him? For God’s sake, raise your eyes to him and stop your nonsense. It’s not about you. This isn’t about you.

  “What if you try AA?” she got out, getting herself halfway together.

  “How do you think I’m able to lie here and tell you how much I drink? I tried. But I can’t go to AA. They demand total abstinence, and I abstain totally for four days. After several months they see through me. They know I’m a fake.”

  Still on top of him, her whole body continued to shake and he said, “Don’t cry for me, Lily”, and she wanted to say, “I’m not crying just for you, I’m crying for my mother, too” and he was quiet, and then she felt him getting hard, unquietly, and suddenly many things were forgotten, and anguished bliss severed the air again, and glued their hearts, and her breasts to him, and her hips and lips to him, and their ailing bodies. “Spencer Patrick O’Malley, you’re not a fake. You’re the realest thing I know,” she whispered.

  “I am disfigured,” he whispered to her. “Why can’t you see it?”

  “I see it. I see right through you. I know your crying room.”

  They lay side by side, face to face, panting in the sweltering night.

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Who said that? Him? Her?

  “Look, is this ideal?” she said. “No. Would I prefer it if it weren’t so? Yes. Would I prefer that my roommate and best friend hadn’t been involved with my only brother? Would I prefer she weren’t missing? Would you prefer I hadn’t been sick? But yet here it all is. I didn’t know how to live my life, and suddenly I was thrust into it and had no choice but to live it.”

  His hands on her hips, on her stomach, he observed her. “Have you been to see DiAngelo?” He was so quiet.

  “No. I have to go, I know,” Lily said just as quietly. We are thrust into our life, kicking, screaming, and we have no choice but to live it out to the bitter end.

  60

  John Doe

  Wednesday mid-morning, Spencer was—spectacularly!—still in her bed. He called in to work, said he was working in the field and would be coming in late.

  “Working in the field? Is that what you call it now?”

  Pulling her to him, he said, “I do call it that. Because you’re going to tell me about your accosting vagabond. Or did you make him up just to come in your little slip of a dress and make me crazy?”

  “Well, I’m not saying that was not a desired side benefit,” Lily said with delight. “But I didn’t make him up.”

  She told Spencer what happened. She told him about how silly she had felt about the slight anxiety that she was being watched, about the weekday morning hanging up yellow ribbons. “But that night, Spencer, his arm was around my elbow. He wasn’t helping me up. He wasn’t letting go. I know the difference. And he did whisper, Lily. I mean, did I imagine that? If a stranger hadn’t interfered, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “You’re unbelievable,” Spencer said, “walking through that place at night, despite all my warnings.”

  “Well, maybe if you had answered your doorbell, I wouldn’t have had to walk through Tompkins Square, said Lily.”

  “Yes, perhaps if I were a different man, none of this would be happening at all. But let’s just deal with realities, shall we? Can you remember what he looks like?”

  “I can. Unfortunately he is etched in my memory. I can draw him for you, if you like.”

  It took her an hour. She had to get out of bed to do it, because seeing his face, even with Spencer by her side, frightened her and she didn’t want her white and light fluffy comfy bed associated with such ominous portents. She drew him in her studio while Spencer showered and got ready for work.

  He looked at the face for a briefest instant, “Oh, fuck.”

  “What, you’ve seen him?”

  “Somewhere I’ve seen him.”

  “You think it could be Milo?”

  “I’ll check with Clive.” Spencer took the drawing from her hands. “When I saw him, he didn’t quite look like this. The memory of it is so vague. But I never forget. Let me see what I can find out. You go see your grandmother, go see DiAngelo, and I’ll take care of this.”

  “But Spencer…what could this person possibly have to do with Amy?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it be great to finally learn something, to finally know something.” The unspoken remained unspoken—to finally learn something that would push a missing Amy away from my brother.

  “Yes. In the meantime, do me and yourself a favor, promise me that under no circumstances will you walk out of your apartment in the evening.”

  “I promise,” Lily said. “But, what about that weekday at Second Avenue?”

  “That could
have just been your anxiety talking. This is real.”

  It could’ve been. For some reason Lily didn’t think so.

  As Spencer was strapping on his weapon, she asked him timidly what they were going to do about the thing that drove them apart—the essence of him and the essence of her clashing against each other, her brother, his work. Spencer took her into his arms. “I will advise you as I advise everybody who finds themselves in a similar situation. You have the right to remain silent.” He kissed her. “I suggest you avail yourself of it. I intend to avail myself of it.”

  Spencer spent the rest of the morning looking through mugshots for the years 2000, 1999, 1998. He buried himself in the evidence room, unreachable, as he pored over every face that had been photographed by the New York police after bookings. He found nothing, but he wasn’t getting discouraged yet. Because he knew the face that Lily drew. He knew it. He had been going through mug shots daily for five years. And if he had seen it, that meant that he would find it again. What did Clive tell him at the homeless shelter? He said when he first started running it, there was no Amy or Milo. They came after him, and then Milo disappeared for two years. So 1997.

  In February 1997, Spencer found him. It was a mugshot from one of the Bronx precincts. There were no bruises on the face, no tattoos, no goatee, the face was covered with hair, and his scalp was not clean shaven, as per Lily’s drawing, but the eyes were the same, the dead expression in them was the same. Before Spencer called the station that had booked him, he allowed himself a small swelling of astonishment that the girl had this gift in her—distilling on paper the very essence of what was true of life. Yet it had lain dormant until cancer woke it.

  He dragged Gabe to the South Bronx.

  Spencer asked for the original documents of the perp in question, and found out that this man was arrested in a drug bust of a crack den off Cortland Avenue, in February 1997, in a house that was full of addicts who were trying to stay warm. The man violently resisted arrest, and had to be physically subdued. After he was booked and fingerprinted, he refused to speak. Clearheaded or not, addicted or not, he did not open his mouth, he did not tell them his name, he did not volunteer who he was, not even after he had been very roughly interrogated. He simply never spoke, as if he knew no English. They had tried a Spanish interpreter, and German, and Greek, but there was no response.

  Spencer read on. Did he use his one phone call? He did not.

  Did he make bail? He did not. When he was arraigned he did not give his name, nor did he enter a plea. The Bronx Public Defender’s office entered one for him. Not guilty they said. He was charged with resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, possession, and illegal use of controlled substances.

  He refused to speak even to his public defender. He was detained for months, a psychiatrist was brought in, got no results, and even the threat of going to prison for ten years did not force him to say who he was. He was put in the Bronx House of Detention while the District Attorney’s office and the courts tried to figure out what to do with him. A judge finally allowed for him to be institutionalized pending a disposition of his case. The public defender’s office cried foul, the Bronx office being famous for vigorously defending those who could not defend themselves. Involuntary institutionalization was against the law. He was released and sent back to the Bronx House of Detention, where he kept to himself, ate little, bothered no one, and preferred solitary confinement to sharing a cell.

  They tried to threaten him with the loss of his few privileges, of books, of work in the cafeteria, if he didn’t give what they wanted in return for what he wanted—but not only did he refuse, but stopped eating, too. They went on like this for a little while, and then had to feed him intravenously. The public defender got an injunction against any unauthorized medical treatment or examination, saying it was an invasion of his privacy and a violation of his human rights. He was not allowed to be medicated, treated, examined, or tested. They were working on getting him released on the grounds of the Seventh Amendment clause against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment for due process. The Bronx ADA argued that giving due process to a man who refused to tell the courts even his name was impossible. Human beings had to participate at least superficially in their own rights of habeas corpus. “Monkeys don’t tell you their name. Dolphins don’t tell you their name. Human beings tell you their name!” In March 1999, as he was being transferred from the Bronx House of Detention for men where he had spent most of the previous two years to the Vernon Bain Center, a more secure barge prison facility, he escaped, jumping into the East River, but not before he bashed one of the guards transporting him with a lead pipe. Miraculously he did not kill him.

  His name was John Doe.

  61

  Olenka Pevny

  Lily went to Brooklyn to see her grandmother, as promised, to bring her some macadamia nuts, some Kona coffee beans, and some pictures of Allison without a foot.

  “Lil, how could you have gone to Maui only to come back so pale?” was the first thing her grandmother said to her.

  “I’m not pale, Grandma, I’m tanned.”

  “You’re pale. But also you’re smiling. Oh, no. You’re not back with that man again, are you?”

  “I am, Grandma.” She was smiling.

  Her grandmother snorted. “I don’t know why you’re not looking better then. Are you feeling well?”

  “I feel all right,” Lily said. But that was a lie. She did not feel all right.

  “Sit.”

  They sat on the Mylar couch with their cups of tea. They talked about Maui, about Andrew, about Grandma, and about Allison. There was one thing Lily wanted to ask her grandmother: to tell her about her mother’s crying room. Lily explained about the crying room and saw her grandmother’s cup tremble slightly, and Lily’s cup, at seeing that, trembled, too.

  Lily pressed and pressed. Oh, Claudia said, don’t you have to be somewhere?

  “Why are your hands shaking?”

  “Lily, what are you worrying your head for about these silly things? Don’t you have enough on your plate?”

  “Yes. No. I want to know. Tell me. Tell me about my mother.”

  Claudia was silent.

  “Grandma, please!”

  “Don’t yell at me, I’m your grandmother.” She sighed deeply. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Frankly, with the kinds of things I’ve heard in the last seven days, I can’t imagine how much worse it can get. Let’s have it.”

  Claudia finally spoke after a pause of several protracted minutes. “Well, you know Tomas and I got married in June 1939, and I became pregnant right away. My baby was due in March, exactly nine months and a day after our wedding. But then the war began in September, and Tomas and his three brothers went to the front. His mother and father were left behind, waiting for news of their sons. And I was next door with my family, waiting for news of Tomas. I was young, still working around the house, carrying heavy things, taking care of the goats, the cows, the chickens. I had a lot of anxiety about him. There were no letters from him, you see. I lost the baby that October, after there had been no news of him for five weeks.”

  “You lost what baby that October?” Lily said dumbly.

  “Lily. Listen. Do you want me to tell you or not?”

  “I’m suddenly thinking of reconsidering, Grandma.”

  Claudia continued. “The baby I lost that fall was Tomas’s baby, darling. Your mother wasn’t even born yet.”

  “Grandma…” whispered Lily. “You’re confusing me.”

  “Tomas’s mother was an exquisitely beautiful woman, in her early forties, but unbelievably as I watched her at the gate while we were both waiting for the postman, for our news, I saw that though she was painfully thin, she did have a belly on her. Tomas and his brothers were 18, 19, 20, 22, and suddenly their mother was pregnant again! Oh, what a scandal. No woman in her thirties got pregnant, much less in her forties.

  “The Germans came
to Skalka in December 1939. Our soldiers fought bravely, but we had horses and the Germans had tanks. Imagine the stupidity of standing in front of a tank on a horse. We fought, we weren’t going to go down without a fight, but after three days, Danzig fell and our village of Skalka with it. The Germans came into the huts, took our china, our dishes, then demanded food from us. They kicked several families out of their homes and quartered there. Not ours. Because we weren’t Jewish. But they did kick out Tomas’s mother and father, because they were.” Claudia sighed heavily.

  “Your Tomas was Jewish?”

  “He was. And the Jews all went to fight for Poland. Tomas’s father said he wasn’t leaving his home. The Germans beat him to death in it.”

  “Oh God.” Lily never heard this part of Grandma’s story before.

  “Tomas’s pregnant mother, because she had nowhere else to go, came to live with us. The Germans made her wear a yellow armband to distinguish her from the non-Jews.” Claudia coughed. “Because she was a Jew she never got any food, even though she was pregnant. We shared our food with her.”

  “Grandma, how come you never told me any of this? I’m twenty-five years old!”

  “You’re a young twenty-five.”

  “Do my sisters know this, my brother?”

  “They know.”

  Lily couldn’t believe it.

  “What can I tell you, Liliput. Sometimes people close to you, even people who love you, keep secrets.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Some things are too painful to tell.”

  “Are you going to tell me the rest of it? Because I have to go to the hospital soon.”

  “So why don’t you go?”

  “No, no. Go ahead. Continue. So Tomas’s mother lived with you through the whole war?”

  “She stayed with us as long as she could. She was a very sick woman, alone, depressed, and a desperate, irredeemable drinker to boot.”

  Lily groaned. Her head was in her hands.

  “We didn’t think she’d make it to the birth of the baby. She used to disappear for days even when pregnant, to go to Danzig. To beg for vodka on the streets. To offer herself on the streets for some vodka. But, somehow, in January 1940 she had the baby. And Lily—that baby is your mother.”