Birds of Paradise: A Novel (14 page)

Her smile tilts, half-bitten. “Well, Javier,” she says. “He keeps ‘dropping by.’ ” She curls her fingers into quotation marks. “And there’s nowhere to hide in these glass offices up here. I don’t know how you guys get anything done in these fish tanks.”

“Christ, that Javier,” he says, feeling disloyal. “A little too hands-on, sometimes.”

“That’s one way to put it.” She leans over and picks up the framed photo on his desk. “Aha.” She tilts it, a sliver of light in her palms. He has a funny impulse to reach forward, slide it gently from her fingers. “Is this your family?”

Javier took it. The photo shows Brian with his arm around Avis’s shoulders, and Stanley, inches away, holding up a fish, tail lifted, he’d just caught in the Sebastian Inlet. It was a year after Felice had run away for good, the summer before Stanley left for college. A good trip. Still, the three of them look gaunt, their smiles vaporous—all photos post-Felice looked like this. “Yeah,” Brian says. “That’s them.”
Them?

“They’re charming. How old is your son?”

Brian clears his throat. “Well, he’s twenty-three now. I guess he was almost eighteen in that shot.”

“And this is your wife? She’s lovely.”

Brian lowers his eyes: Avis
is
lovely. Her face now not so different from when they first met: the ice tones beneath her brow, the soft corners of her lips, her skin lit like a Baroque portrait. Fernanda replaces the photo but her hand lingers a moment, hovering over his desk. He notices a dot of silver glinting at her clavicle. “I love that you have them here.” She doesn’t look at him but at the photograph.

When the phone rings, he glances at the phone, line two, Agathe. He presses
Off
.

Fernanda lifts her chin, puts her hands on the chair arms. “I should let you get back to it.”

“No, please don’t.” He lifts his hand. “It’ll stop.” He waves at the phone. “I mean—it’s probably just one of the clerks. Research reports. I can get those later.”

“Oh, is that all?” She smiles archly. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”

He rubs the back of his neck, squeezes it, smiling and disoriented. The city is full of such young women: they exist in a world separate and apart from his. They speak to him in a deferential way, as if he were a kindly old uncle. He recalls then the first instant of seeing Avis—seated in a college seminar—the back of her hand curled under her chin. He inhales, startled by a hit of the agitation and confusion of twenty-five years ago, as if time could dilate and collapse into a crystallized . . .

His BlackBerry starts to buzz, vibrating an obscene spin on his desk.

“Let me let you . . .” She’s pushing out of her chair. “Somebody really wants you.”

He stands also as he grabs the phone. “Give me two seconds. It’s just—Agathe knows I’m not answering.” He keeps one hand in midair, as if holding Fernanda in place, presses the speaker phone on with his other. “This is Muir.” In his peripheral vision, he sees Fernanda give a wave and back out of the office. Brian opens his hand—
Stay!
He lets go a sigh then, rakes one hand through his hair, settling back in the chair, watching through the glass as a city worker installs a new billboard:
Can you say Beer-veza? Se habla CHILL?
Image of a bottle of beer and an edge of lime.

“Dad?” Laughter. “That your Donald Rumsfeld impersonation?”

Brian sits up. “You got me,” he says, withered. “Want to hear Karl Rove?”

“Got your calls—what’s up? I’ve got a hundred cases of plantains I’ve got to cope with here.” Stanley has managed, once again, to flip their positions, so he is the harried overseer and Brian’s the needy old dad.

“No, no, nothing—it’s just—” Now he feels uncertain—is it even worth mentioning that strange girl? “Have you heard this singer on the radio? I think her name is Nelly? I noticed this. Is it that there are
two
Nellys and one is a rapper and one is a regular singer?”

“Dad—” Stanley breaks off; there’s some scuffling and a thin stream of voices in the background.

“Are they singing? Is that considered
singing
?” Suddenly he wants to know. Stanley is the authority on all such matters by virtue of being young: musicians give steel drum demonstrations in his parking lot; he has a sale bin at the front of the store,
Music of Indigenous Uprising
.

“I don’t know, Dad.” Another pause in which Stanley might be muttering instructions to someone. “Sure, yeah, it’s singing, why not?”

“Oh.” Brian falls silent. Even though Brian’s son is often remote and very busy, he’s also dutiful: the child they could count on. Brian presses, angling to keep his son on a little longer: “It just sounds like a mess.”

“It’s protest—like reggae,” Stanley says peevishly. “They’re angry. It’s a sign of sanity.”

“Yeah. Probably.” Brian sighs.

“Dad, is—are you okay?” More voices blur in the background, a small shuffling crash and distant laughter. Always this mesh of noise at the market.

“No, no, yeah. I’m fine,” Brian waves one hand in his empty office. “Um. Your mother was—she was going to meet with Felice today.”

“Oh.”

Brian rubs at the underside of his jaw for a moment:
mistake
.

Stan asks, “Why does she bother?”

“I’m sorry?” Brian massages his knuckles into an aching spot between his ribs. At four, Stanley was smitten, practically in tears at the sight of his newborn sister. Even in those first hours, before Felice’s beauty was apparent—her iridescent eyes, the numina of her skin—Stanley was devoted. He held his sister in his lap, her tiny hands fused into fists, her face purplish with crying. He kissed her head and murmured into her damp hair.

“No, nothing.”

“Yeah. Well, hey son, I got this call . . .” Staring out the window, he sees a rope of lightning flash over the skyline.

“You got what?”

“This
girl
—” Brian chuckles, embarrassed. “She called my cell and said she’s your girlfriend?” He chuckles again, wishing he could stop. “She told me not to worry.”

“Shit.”

“Stan?” Brian presses the phone to his right ear. “What’s the deal?”

“Gimme a minute here. Fuck.” He hears his son’s voice muffled, away from the phone, shouting something like
Nevis!
Then, “Fuck.”

“Stanley, what the hell is going on?”

“It’s just—she’s my goddamn girlfriend.”

Brian lifts an eyebrow—the last girl Stanley was seeing was not someone that a person would apply the word “goddamn” to in a million years. “What happened to—”

“Nieves!”
Stanley is shouting, away from the phone again. He returns. “I’m sorry about that, Dad. I can’t control her.”

“So you know her?”

A long hot sigh. “Yeah. She must’ve gotten your number from my cell phone. She does stuff like that.”

“Stan. This is someone—you’re seeing? You’re involved with?”

Pause. “Dad, listen. Can you just sort of—can you pretend like you never got that call?”

“Stan—really. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just. We’ve had some money issues.”

“Money issues.”

“Nothing really. Goddamn Citizen’s finally denied our claim for the refrigerated cases.”

“Oh, jeez.” Last summer, Hurricane Charley took out the electricity—both mainframe and backup generator—at Freshly Grown, and three of their industrial freezers were ruined, along with extensive wind damage to the exterior of the building. The case investigator, a crimson-faced woman, kept dropping in at the store, writing reports and gazing at Stan. Brian knew his son had encouraged her—inviting her to wine and cheese tastings and baking sessions at the store; he’d given her an “appreciation basket” filled with organic pears and apples and chocolates from Vermont. Stanley can be a bit obtuse that way, Brian thinks—so focused on business that he never realizes there are other motives at work. She’d strung the investigation out for months, continually remembering some new piece of “evidence” she needed to collect or some bit of damage that needed to be photographed. She’d been encouraging about their chances, but then Stan demurred from her invitation to a home-cooked dinner.

“I had a bad feeling about that one.” Brian tips the remote at the office climate controls.

“Yeah, so did we all,” Stanley says morosely. He’d refused to let his father intercede in the case: Brian swallows the impulse to point that out. “And then there was all that water damage. And we’ve been dealing with the shoplifting thing.”

“It’s the local kids, isn’t it?” Brian thinks but does not say,
Those Mexicans.

“Actually, it seems to be in-house. One—or more—of my trusty staff—someone with access to the books, inventory sheets.”

“Oh, Stan.” Brian rubs his temples, then lifts his head. “Does that girl—that—Neeva? She have access?”

“Dad, no. It’s not Nieves.”

“How do you know? You said she was crazy. She
sounded
—”

“Dad, trust me.”

“Why was she calling me in the first place? She made it sound like there’s something—”

“What?” Stanley’s tone is abrupt—tinged with the anger Brian remembers from Stanley’s high school years.

Brian inhales, considers pushing back, asserting his paternal rights. “Well.”

“Nieves just has some issues right now,” Stanley says. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. Really.”

“Hey—whatever you say.” He feels an ache at the back of his throat. The desire to set things right. The inability to do so. He can’t get his mind to clear: the old bits of memory are there: a fog of late days at work, entire months where he didn’t cross paths with his son, saw his wife only when she lay across the bed, released into a long twist of sleep. They were living in a state of hibernation—that’s what it’d felt like at the time. Outside of work, every encounter and every conversation felt like a swipe of sandpaper. Now Brian suspects that what he did was worse than neglect—it was abandonment—precisely when his son needed him most. He’d thought he was gently leaving him alone—that it was what he assumed adolescence required. Brian’s hand lingers a moment after he’s hung up; he sits very still, his body humming with the frequency of far-off traffic.

BRIAN AND STANLEY NEVER
found their way back to that early closeness, the time of the gingerbread house. Felice was born, a Miami angel: it was as if the perfumed air and sifting fronds had pervaded his and Avis’s genes and given them this unbearably lovely, worthless child. Is that what he really believes? Brian rubs at his jaw. Yes:
worthless
. His son’s presence had a heaviness, an unasked question. There was usually a dusting of flour in Stanley’s hair, along the ridges of his knuckles. If Brian offered to take him fishing, Stanley was always game. They went on day excursions to Key Largo,
Lauderdale-By-The-Sea. But he’d head right back to the kitchen when they got home, saying, “I’d better check on the starter,” or slap on the hot water and start loading the heap of pots and pans into the washer.

Neither of them had interest in organized sports. Brian grieved over this: sports gave men a way to talk to one another: a language to smooth one’s path through life. Brian had suffered without that language. He’d imagined taking his son to soccer practice, baseball tryouts; he’d planned to cultivate an interest in whatever activity his son took up. He hadn’t counted on the son he got. After Felice left home, Stanley moved outdoors as well. He started an herb garden, then expanded, building raised beds with clean blond planks of wood, planting stringbeans, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. He dug up swathes of the backyard for leafy greens and purples and reds, and grew a type of lettuce that was filigreed in blood-red, as if a circulatory system ran through it.

He rarely spoke to his parents—perhaps he’d blamed them for Felice’s disappearance. Brian recalls one early evening, home from work, when he’d gone to the kitchen for a snack (they no longer ate together) and he found Stanley with his arms immersed in suds, the air smudged with mist. Stanley looked almost beatific, his eyes like glass, as if he’d been at prayer. Brian hesitated just as Stanley turned.

“Hey—uh—just thought I’d grab myself something.”

“Let me.” Stanley withdrew from the sink, shaking off his hands. “I haven’t been to the store yet—there isn’t much.” By the time he was seventeen, Stanley had taken on the grocery shopping and food preparation. He made them stews, pastas, salads filled with the crisp vegetables from his garden. Brian was surprised that such tomatoes and onions grew in the dirt behind his house—that his son would know what to do with them. Stanley heated some refried beans, dropped a scoop of butter into a skillet and let it foam. He cracked eggs into a bowl, whisked in a dollop of heavy cream. “So, Dad.” Stanley spilled the eggs into the sizzling butter. “Something I’d wanted to talk to you about.”

Brian pulled up one of the tall stools by the counter. “All ears. What’s up?”

Stanley gave him a bright, alert glance. “Nothing bad. It’s just—you know I got into UM, right?”

Brian nodded, avoiding Stanley’s eyes. Brian had attended Brown and Cornell Law. As had his own father. But Stanley’s grades were mediocre, his attendance sporadic. And Avis wanted to keep him close; neither Brian nor Avis had encouraged Stanley to apply out of state or given him advice on other schools. It was this—the lack of ambition for his son—that deviled Brian even more than their lack of time together. “Yeah—it’s great, Stan. I’m proud of you,” Brian said. “That’s a very solid school.”

“Well, I hope you’ll still be—because the thing is, I decided I don’t actually want to go to college.”

Brian stiffened. “Oh?”

“I mean—I think I really want to start a business.” Stanley stirred the eggs, the wooden spoon tilted in his hand, a steady oval of motion. “I don’t need school.”

Brian’s eyes ticked up at the kitchen: Brazilian hardwood floors, counters reflecting tiny, embedded ceiling lights, sleek white porcelain cake pedestals with thick glass covers. They’d poured nearly $200,000 into the remodel, retrofitting Avis’s kitchen to professional grade. Stanley thinks
this
is what it means—what running a business is. “The grocery store?” Brian tried to sound sincere and neutral.