Birds of Paradise: A Novel

Also by Diana Abu-Jaber

ORIGIN

THE LANGUAGE OF BAKLAVA

CRESCENT

ARABIAN JAZZ

For Scotty and Gracie

CONTENTS

Begin Reading

A
COOKIE, AVIS TOLD HER CHILDREN
, is a soul. She held up the wafer, its edges shimmering with ruby-dark sugar. “You think it looks like a tiny thing, right? Just a little nothing. But then you take a bite.”

Four-year-old Felice lifted her face. Avis fanned her daughter’s eyes closed with her fingertips and placed it in Felice’s mouth. Felice opened her sheer eyes. Lamb slid his orange length against her ankles. Avis handed a cookie to eight-year-old Stanley, who held it up to his nose. “Does that taste good?” she asked. Felice nodded and opened her mouth again.

“It smells like flowers,” Stanley said.

“Yes.”
Avis paused, a cookie balanced on her spatula. “That’s the rosewater. Good palate, darling.”

“Mermaids eat roses,” Felice said. “Then they melt.”

THIS MORNING’S PASTRY
poses challenges. To assemble the tiny mosaic disks of chocolate flake and candied ginger, Avis must execute a number of discrete, ritualistic steps: scraping the chocolate with a fine grater, rolling the dough cylinder in large-grain sanding sugar, and assembling the ingredients atop each hand-cut disk of dough in a pointillist collage. Her husband wavers near the counter, watching. “They’re like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one.”

“I thought she was more interested in cake,” Avis says, she tilts her narrow shoulders, veers around him to stack dishes in the sink.

“But really—look at this.” Brian holds one on the palm of his hand; i
t twinkles with the kitchen light. “Shame to eat them.”

Avis had shopped for the ingredients two days earlier, driving to Fort Lauderdale, to an Italian import store, to buy the rock sugar and flour. The outlying regions of downtown Miami, Hallandale, Hollywood, seemed esoteric, scribbled over—inscrutable as an ancient desert. She was offended by the ads painted on the sides of warehouses, hawking lamps and furniture, medical treatments and ice cream, a thirty-foot naked man reclining, selling God-knows-what.

Yesterday she crystallized the ginger, then mixed the ingredients slowly, not to disturb the dough. But even after one full day’s work, there were still more steps to complete this morning, including baking and cooling. Avis had hurried, not wanting Brian to notice how much labor has gone into this. Her assistant won’t be in for another hour and there’s a tower in the sink, open bins of pastry flour, the hair dryer on the counter (just a blast of cool air, to ward off the humidity, before slipping the cookies into tins). Brian slips one of the half-dollar-sized pastries into his mouth. Avis knows it will dissolve mid-chew, fleeting as a wink. “Have I had these before? Do you sell them?”

“Not for years.” Avis can’t help boasting a little, “Last time I made these, Neiman’s sold them for $4.95 apiece in their case.”

Brian eyes the three remaining on his plate. “We should stick them in a safe.”

Avis admits, “A little labor-intensive.”
Gingembre en cristal
was Felice’s favorite cookie; Stanley’s were homely, proletarian Toll Houses. Avis remembers toiling over the delicate ginger coins for Felice’s tenth birthday, only for her daughter to thank her politely and then refuse to eat them. She’d said, “I just like the way they look.”

Avis had felt singed by the rejection. Yet there was also a pang of admiration: the purity of Felice’s desires—preferring beauty to sugar!

Avis had started baking because there was never anything to eat when she was a child. Her mother—head lowered over Dante, Hegel, C. S. Lewis, reading Voltaire, Bakhtin, Avicenna, in French, Russian, Arabic—would murmur, “Go get yourself something.” Avis would hang on the refrigerator door, staring at cans of tomato juice, sticks of butter, bags of coffee. She went for days at a time eating only jam and slices of bread. The women at the Redbird Bakery on the next block gave her free muffins and scones whenever she came in. Her mother was busy: she taught and wrote about private and cultural representations of Heaven, the phoenix, the transformation of base materials into gold. Instead of reading storybooks, Avis stood in the kitchen studying the pictures in cookbooks, a more immediate form of alchemy.

Avis asked about the identity of her father when she was ten: Geraldine waved her off, saying, “Oh, who keeps track?” When Avis persisted, she shook her head: “No, no—don’t be tedious, dear.”

The first time Avis knelt on a chair and stirred eggs into flour to make a vanilla cake, she had an inkling of how higher orders of meaning encircle the chaos of life. Where philosophy, she already intuited, created only thought—no beds made, no children fed—in other rooms there were good things like measuring spoons, thermometers, and recipes, with their lovely, interwoven systems and codes. Avis labored over her pastries: her ingredient base grew, combining worlds: preserved lemons from Morocco in a Provençal tart; Syrian olive oil in Neapolitan
cantuccini;
salt combed from English marshes and filaments of Kashmiri saffron secreted within a Swedish cream. By the time Avis was in college, her baking had evolved to a level of exquisite accomplishment: each pastry as unique as a snowflake, just as fleeting on the tongue: pellucid jams colored cobalt and lavender, biscuits light as eiderdown.

Brian edges in front of the sink, trying to stay out of her way. “Like you don’t have enough to worry about today.”

“Yes, yes.” She glances at him: he’s holding the counter as if it were keeping him steady. He’s in the kitchen, she knows, because they’d fought earlier—or had what passes for a fight between them—the dart of words: Why are you still doing this? I just don’t think . . .

I’m aware of what you think.

Now he looms, big as an obstacle. Not sure where to put himself. She doesn’t like having people in her kitchen, but she does feel a lilt toward him, grateful that he hasn’t run out yet. They’re trying to stop fighting, but can’t quite leave each other alone.

“That kid never ate anything anyway,” he says darkly.

Avis begins the cautious and deliberate transfer of cookies to tin, using just the tips of her fingers. “Yes, and I’m crazy to go meet her.”

“Now you’re angry again.”

“No I’m not.” Avis places the cookies in concentric rings on parchment layers inside the tin. “I know just what my husband thinks, thank you very much, and I’m not angry. I’m fine.”

Brian crosses his arms, the suit fabric bunching in fine soft ripples. She knows he can’t stop himself. “But, please,
admit it
. It’s what? The first time all
year
we hear from that girl? Light of our lives. You’re already exhausted, at your wits’ end. Finally you’ll see her—
if
she comes. I don’t get why you knock yourself out even
more
—making some impossible dessert that—I’m sorry, but she probably won’t even eat. Am I wrong?”

Avis touches the sides of the tin. Her ribs feel compressed, like a whalebone corset. “No. No. You’re right.”

He stares at her, a weight in his gaze. He turns and his eyes fall on the Audubon calendar hanging near the door—the only ornamentation in Avis’s kitchen. The month of August, Snowy Egret. He looks away.

Avis sees this and smiles. Her hands are steady and cool as she lays down another round of parchment. “Felice never liked cakes,” she says. “Even for birthdays.”

He tucks in his chin, silent.

Avis finishes the layer and fits the lid on the tin, inhales the kitchen’s gingered air. Flour and yolk and cream are all coarse—of the earth. But sugar and air and vanilla are elements of the firmament. Avis used to tell her kids: Sweets should be an evanescence: cakes and pies represent minutes, cookies and
mille-feuilles
are seconds, meringues are moments. “I actually haven’t made these since she left,” Avis says. If a voice could be inspected under a lens, the first tiny crack of the day would be detectable. “I thought these might be—” She’s gone too far—pretending to be braver than she can manage right now—and there’s no good way to complete the sentence.

“Never mind,” Brian murmurs. “It’ll be fine today.” He touches the ridge at the back of her neck, just under her twist of hair. But she is so light-boned, he feels clumsy and lifts his hand. “I have to get to work,” he says like it’s an apology.

She lifts her head, offering him a temple to kiss goodbye.

THE SUN IS RIPER,
more golden and potent as Avis stands in the
driveway, trying not to show impatience as her assistant roots through her purse, hunting for her keys—first, without looking, just feeling, then plopping the bag on the hood of her car and examining its contents. From over the tiled eave of her house comes a bird cry, so close, deep, and staccato it startles Avis. It’s a new song that she’s been hearing over the past few mornings. Chortling followed by a long whistle, like a dove’s three-note gurgle, then a low-level, agitated squeak—a funny extended song. Catbird? It starts sweetly, then sharpens and escalates: Brian’s complained about the noise waking him, threatens to call Animal Control.

“Listen to that.”

“What?” Nina pulls out her handful of keys. “Hooray already.”

“You didn’t hear that?” Avis asks as she slides into the car. “The loud, angry one? The bird?”

Nina pulls her door shut, adjusts the rearview mirror. She laughs through her nose. “A loud angry bird? Okay, let’s focus. Now, we’re going to the usual place?”

“Please.” Avis stares out the window, trying to find the bird. The flickering bamboo along the perimeter of the drive seems to correspond to her own internal state, a flickering grief or rawness, left over from that morning’s argument with Brian. “You’re just causing yourself pain,” he’d said, several times. “It’s like you’re doing it deliberately.”

Did she love him still?
Persist
in loving him, her mother would have said. “Oh, don’t marry a lawyer, my dear,” she’d cried. “They’re horrible. They’re venal. At least accountants say what they are. They make no bones about it.”

Was it possible to still love someone when she fantasizes about solitude? She can see the state of separateness so clearly: a house without Brian. A cottage with a fireplace and thatched roof, a morning sky like opal; every inch of the place a kitchen, a bakery. Where would she sleep if she didn’t have Brian to make the bed for? Would she sleep at all? She’s read that the unhappiest, loneliest writers write the sweetest poems. Still, she loves their house, a wonderful old Spanish-style with plaster moldings, fireplace framed with blue mosaic, rooms that flow like river water into each other, a generous, high-ceilinged living room that opens into a dining room, an office, a Florida room, all imbued with subtle lights from a row of French doors that lead to the backyard and pool. She could never give up her house or kitchen.

Nina and Avis pull out onto Vizcaya. They pass through the vault of old black olive trees, the pale houses in ocher, terracotta, and sienna—light-stained, rippling tile rooftops. The neighborhood is filled with key-shaped doors, arches, brick drives, Moorish tiles, round windows, sly turrets and gables, windows in triangles and trapezoids glinting from hidden corners. And this is a restrained, middle-to-upper area. Just a few blocks to the south, Coral Gables unfurls into immense estates, manicured lawns, private docks, the winter homes of czars. Avis has taken strolls past the study of Thomas Edison, an orchard where barefooted Alexander Graham Bell picked mangoes, beyond languid botanical gardens that hug the shore, copses of banyan trees with their preternatural dangling limbs and silvery flesh.

At a cocktail party she’d overheard a realtor referring to Avis’s neighborhood as “the ghetto of the Gables.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” she’d edged into the conversation while cutting a baguette on a sharp bias. “A
ghetto
?”

The realtor, a woman with a long, corded neck, had seemed to barely register Avis, glancing at her hands on the cutting board. Avis wasn’t the caterer—she merely disliked the way the hostess ripped her loaves into chunks. “It’s silly,” the woman had answered, mainly addressing the man across from her. “Just, you know, four bedrooms instead of eight, balconies but no tennis courts, no servants’ quarters. That sort of thing.”

Avis had coolly revealed her address to the realtor and the woman had replied, “Goodness. Well, at least you’re to the west of LeJeune.”

The scent of jasmine drifts into the windows. Songbird season is over. No more gardenias: hurricane season. The trees have grown dense as rooftops; the plumeria hold their flower-tipped branches up like brides with golden corsages. Avis sits hunched forward, clinging to her tin: she can feel the metal chill through her blouse, all the way to the pit of her stomach. She’d forgotten to eat again. She flips down the mirror in the car visor, batting at her hair—lately it’s started thinning but there’s still enough to twirl into a twist—a smear of chocolate on her cheek. She rubs at it, then slaps the visor back. Her breath gets shallower as they drive, and there seems to be a lump forming in her throat. By the time they’ve reached the Alton Road exit ramp, heading up the spine of the beach to their meeting place, her arms feel rubbery with fear. A small unwelcome voice returns to the back of her head:
Please forgive me, please forgive me
.

Avis stiffens as they pull over at the corner, pressing herself into the seat. Five months ago: Avis had received one of her daughter’s random calls to meet, and off she’d gone to the appointed place—always against Brian’s wishes—clutching money, a shopping bag of gifts—expensive shampoo, a new sweater, and an iPod—and sat alone for over two hours, suffering miserably through suspense and, finally, disappointment. Today she brings nothing but a wallet stuffed with crisp fifties and the tin of cookies.

Nina waits a moment, engine idling, watching Avis’s profile. After a few long moments, she says, “Hang on.” Nina pulls out her thermos, pours an inch of inky coffee in the bottom of two waxed paper cups—
cortaditos
. She touches her cup to Avis’s, toasts,
“Salud, amor, y pesetas.”
Avis can barely return Nina’s smile. She closes her eyes to drink. The richly black liquid tastes of smoke, like the pot of Turkish coffee she stood over throughout her childhood, stirring and watching and stirring. When Avis brought it to her mother, she would take a sip, close her eyes, and mutter, “It takes like dirt.”