Birds of Paradise: A Novel (19 page)

She turns away, infuriated—just another street kid, wrecking everything; acting as if some sort of performance has been staged for his pleasure. She wants Emerson to smash him, but he hangs back as if abashed. She stands. “I’m getting the fuck out of here. And you two homos can go fuck yourselves.”

“Woo-hoo!” Derek leers. “Nice mouth.” Emerson shoves him so hard his chair scrapes back a few inches. Derek grabs the arms of his chair. “The fuck, man?”

Felice goes to the living room, seizes her deck and her bag as Emerson runs after her. “Felice, what?” He follows her out the front door. “Hey, talk to me.”

It’s still sprinkling; her clothes wither with moisture. She tosses back the damp cables of her hair, ducks a branch of sea grape tree, then opens the iron gate. “You could’ve just
told
me you were gay.”

“Felice. Jesus. I’m not gay.”

Felice stops and slaps her deck on the street. “Then that just makes it worse, doesn’t it?” She’s yelling. She can’t help it. The feelings seem to come from outside of her body, possessing her, tightening her lungs, her rage like a screw tightening in her temples. So angry she’s crying, the tears nearly springing from the corners of her eyes. It doesn’t make sense; it’s like some feathery thing beating the air around her, all betrayal and humiliation. He puts his big, dumb hand on her, which enrages her more. She trips as she tries to kick away on her board, her vision speeding, unraveling. She trips again and nearly falls. Emerson follows her.

“Of course I want to—I want—Jesus . . . Please just listen for two seconds.” He trots in fronts of her, momentarily stopping her. She glares at his blond lashes and red cheeks. She thinks: Why do I even care?

“I want to be
with
you. Of course I want . . . you know. But I also want more than that. I don’t want to just . . . screw around.” Now he’s blushing, his face a dark, bruised color. “We’re more than that, Felice—we’re for real. I’ll take care of you and we’ll watch each other’s backs.”

Felice can barely hear him, thinking, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . . a tattoo in her head. She doesn’t want to hear any more. She forces herself to lower her voice, to contain herself enough to say, “That’s just wonderful for you, Emerson.”

“Please, just, let’s try to—”

“No.” Her voice is scalding. Thoughts open in her mind, a thin white band, widening: he wants her to go backwards, to do things in that stupid, weak way. She will never be that way again. “No,
Emerson
. You aren’t listening right. I think you’re a big fake loser and Derek is a scumbag. Okay? Do you hear me yet? Are you getting that? That whole thing about Portland and strongman stuff—it’s never going to happen. We both know the reality. Just stay the fuck away from me.” She turns her back on his stricken face. Gets on her board and kicks away as hard as she can. A big silence behind her. She’s so furious she can’t tell the difference between the vibrations of her board and the powerful quaking that’s broken inside her body. As she rides, the unwanted image comes back to her: a girl’s face—streaked, hollowed out by shadow—she seemed to be crouching on the sidewalk. Even though Felice knows that isn’t right, it’s the way she remembers it.

FELICE FIRST NOTICED
the starry spill of the girl’s hair when she appeared in French, the way it trembled with light when she answered questions or gave a toss of her head. The girl always had her hand up and knew more French than the rest of them—including Madame Cruz—actually correcting the teacher’s accent—“That’s
tre-s
”—gently crushing the
r
in the back of her throat.
“Not ‘trres,
’
”
a Catalan roll off the tip of her tongue. The rest of the class tittered but the girl stared at Madame Cruz because, Felice realized, she was simply right.

Hannah was a year and a half older than Felice, in ninth, but the eighth and ninth graders took electives together. Felice ran into her in the hallway. It was easy for her to be bold—she was so pretty everyone wanted to be Felice’s friend. But Hannah was shy and self-possessed and even a little stuck-up, which attracted Felice. Not as easy to conquer as the other kids. Felice started sitting in the front of French class as well. Afterward the two girls walked to lunch together and Felice asked questions which Hannah answered in a low voice—hard to hear over the din in the corridors, her head lowered, books hugged to her chest.

“Where did you come from?”

“Litchfield.”

Felice lifted her eyebrows: almost everyone in her school had started from someplace else—usually their parents’ country.

Hannah said, “Before Litchfield, other places.”

“What do your parents do?”

“My dad’s a surgeon. My mom is an ophthalmologist.”

“Why did you move here?”

Hannah scrutinized Felice a moment before she replied, “Dad thought it was too white. In Litchfield.”

Hannah’s hair was lighter than Felice’s but her skin was dark, a deep, rosy tan. She had a softly curved nose and a sloping chin that almost spoiled her looks. But there were her lucid green eyes, pale as windowpanes, startling and ghostly in all that dark skin. After a week of hallway conversations, the girl entrusted Felice with the information that her real name wasn’t actually Hannah Joseph but Hanan Yusef. That she hadn’t been born in the States—her parents had moved them from Jerusalem when Hannah was two. That her father had changed her name when they moved to Miami because he was sick of putting up with anti-Arab bullshit.

A frisson ran through Felice’s arms and spine. Thrilled, she asked, “But don’t you hate that? Hanan sounds beautiful. Don’t you hate having a fake American name?”

“No, I was glad,” Hannah said curtly, and looked away.

Bella, Marisa, and Yeni made room for Hannah in their coterie, a little infatuated with her. “She just has this way about her,” Jacqueline said. “Yeah, like, she knows what’s cool and what isn’t without even trying,” Court said.

Felice also sensed an adult weariness about the girl—her comments adroit, funny, often bleak. She seemed to have a kind of cold insight verging on telepathy into people—especially adults—their lives like transparencies before her eyes. “Dottie over there?” she whispered to Felice. “She wants to get with Charleton Baker.” Felice cracked up, a hand cupped over her mouth. “No way!” Charleton was sweet and tall—a thyroid case, as Hannah put it. But he was twelve, stringy and chronically broken-voiced. She realized that a doting light came into the social studies teacher’s powdered face whenever she called on him: Dottie Horkheimer’s smile deepened and she looked, fleetingly, pretty. Knowing something forbidden about Ms. Horkheimer made social studies bearable.

All that fall, through Hannah’s funny, scorching way of looking at things, school itself seemed more tolerable. Hannah seemed to know a lot about other kids: she warned Felice that her friend Coco was a fake, jealous of Felice’s looks, that she whispered behind her back. Felice and her friends had known each other since kindergarten. As soon as Hannah told her this, Felice thought it must be true: she began to distance herself from Coco. Later she realized she wasn’t sure if it was true, or if it just seemed so because of the supremely certain way that Hannah said things.

Felice and Hannah fell into rituals of endless email and phone calls—messages raveling together, switching from one to the other at whim. By October, they snuck out of P.E. on a regular basis. They sprawled in the east field and watched the boys’ soccer team running wind sprints and snapping through calisthenics. Hannah would gossip with Felice about teachers and other kids for a while, but then she’d start to say things like, “Isn’t it weird that everyone has to die? Like, everyone on this field right now? Someday they’ll all be dead. Everyone in this whole school. Gone.”

“I guess.” Felice squinted so spangles of colored light glittered inside her eyelashes. Off in the distance, there were moving vistas of palms, their enormous shaggy fronds seemed to swim and undulate against the sky. Felice loved listening to Hannah say her crazy stuff. She had decided never to introduce her to her mother. Avis would come out—she always did—with plates of cherry cookies, their chocolate icing like lacquer, or lemon cream scones coruscated with sugar crystals—her friends fought for the morsels of her miniature éclairs. “Your mother is a
god,
” Bella once moaned.

Hannah didn’t like to talk about her parents either. “My dad is a big boring freak and for some reason my mom married him.” She flopped back in the grass, swishing her arms back and forth, the way Felice had seen kids make snow angels on TV. “I hate Arabs. I hate Israelis. I hate soldiers. I hate Saddam Hussein. I hate George Bush. I hate politics, I hate words that begin with
p
. So don’t ask me about any of it.”

“Fine,” Felice said, laughing and rolling her eyes. “I wasn’t
going
to.”

Felice could see the shapes of old shadows moving over Hannah’s eyes. Odd references came up all the time. A truck overturned a block away from the school and a brackish chemical exhaust hung in the air: Hannah said, “That smells exactly like a sulfur bomb.” Another time, when a jet clapped a sonic boom over the school, Hannah collapsed into a hunch on the floor, her face stark with shock. She recovered, brushing aside the teacher’s concern, but later went home without speaking to Felice.

Hannah made fun of Felice’s other friends behind their backs. She mimicked Yeni’s prissy Venezuelan accent, Bella’s slack, sweetly bovine expression. They sensed her disdain, as well as the way she claimed Felice all for herself, edging out a world in which she and Felice were the only ones who mattered: Felice was flattered and pleased. This was a new kind of friend.

SEVERAL BLOCKS LATER,
Emerson and Derek receding into distance, Felice starts to relax. The streets widen and hiss with traffic, the air rain-pearled. There’s a burst of squawking in the air and she looks up to see a passing flock of sapphire-colored macaws with orange bellies. Stanley said they were the prettiest animals with the ugliest voices. He’d told her how, after big hurricanes, wild birds escaped from the aviaries and zoos and from the metal cages people kept in their backyards. They returned to nature. “They’ll nip off your finger with that beak—like scissors. Snip!” he said. Felice was seven when Andrew hit, but she didn’t remember much of it beyond the fun of nightly picnics from their cooler and reading by flashlight and bathing in the swimming pool.

Felice admires the long blue tails of the birds just before they vanish into the trees. That’s the way to be, she thinks, kicking hard on her board, letting the wind stream through her hair—no plans, no fear, no expectations: never to be held in live captivity.

Avis

S
HE DREAMS OF A LITTLE BOY: HIS HAIR SLOWLY
rising and falling as he runs in long, slow arcs, up to kick the ball, the air filled with bright cries:

I’ve got it! I’ve got the ball!

Avis opens her eyes. For a moment, she waits, spooled in the sweetness of an after-dream. It seems to continue unfolding around her, her son still eight years old.

Consciousness emerges then, and Avis realizes she can still hear the cries, the child’s voice. Gradually she notices the hard repeating beat. The mynah. She lingers in bed with her eyes closed, marveling at the mimicry—the miracle of it—a bird, capturing the parabola of laughter so exactly. Who is the little boy, Avis wonders, this parrot listened to?

Glancing at the clock, she realizes, with a deep dismay, that it’s 6:30: she’s overslept by two hours: too late to fulfill the standing order for palmiers at the Anacapri and La Granada restaurants—she’ll probably lose their business. Usually she wakes on her own with no problem. She hears Brian’s familiar pace between bathroom and bedroom. Why didn’t he wake her? He hums and mutters, runs a brush through his hair. Because she’d been stood up, she thinks grimly. He felt sorry for her. Avis rises, ties back her hair; ignores the strands that slide free in her fingers, ignores its lighter mass. She brews strong black tea with cream and honey and goes to her desk in what she still thinks of as Stanley’s room, to email the restaurants. She struggles to construct an apology as the mynah shrieks through the window.

Newly showered, Brian smiles at Avis as he moves past the door. She still enjoys the sight of her husband undressed, his slightly bowlegged stance, the softening pouch of his middle, his penis, its innocent, leftward slump. Once Stanley was out of the house, she sometimes lured Brian back to bed in the morning, enjoying the coolness of his washed skin against her kitchen warmth. But she hasn’t been much interested in a while. She sighs, then twists around at the desk chair. “Do you hear that?”

Brian ruffles the back of his hair with a towel. “You mean the damn bird?”

“It always sounds a little different each time.”

He combs his hair before the full-length mirror, presenting his back and tidy buttocks. “Not to me it doesn’t.”

She rarely sees Brian in the morning—she’s usually in the middle of rushing out orders of fresh baguettes and scones. Avis abandons the desk and prepares Brian a plate of croissants, salted butter, a bowl of blackberry preserves she gets in trade from a local jams and jellies lady. Then she sits at the table with him, one hand knotting closed the placket of her chef’s jacket, the other hand running the length of Lamb’s slinking back.

“Parkhurst. Ugh. Wants to wrap up the contract on the Design District deal,” he mumbles, studying his BlackBerry. “He’s obsessed with that deal.”

“Design District’s supposed to be the hot place,” she says, watching him stare at the tiny screen. “I have a restaurant client there—their lines are out the door.”

“Except it’s not the Design District—not even close. I keep telling them.” He looks up at her. “I’m sorry—you were saying something—what were you saying?”

Avis considers the view through the French doors: in that pause, she feels herself telescoping backwards, out of their life. She watches him touch the rim of his plate with the edge of his knife, observes the striations of his knuckles, the ropy veins in the backs of his hands. She estimates that it’s been nearly six months since they last made love. The longest they’ve ever gone. Perhaps it has something to do with her mother’s passing last year. She wonders—the thought softly bursting in on her—if he’s in love with someone else.

He pauses before getting up. “That bird,” he says darkly. She becomes once again conscious of the parrot’s cry, now the quavering singsong of a madwoman. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “How’s anybody supposed to get any work done?”

“Most people around here commute to work.”

“
You
don’t.” He takes his plate to the kitchen sink. She hears him rummaging around. “I swear I’m going to call code enforcement.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Her hand slips to the base of her throat.

Brian stands in the doorway holding a banana. “But you’ve been struggling.” He stops short, the catch in his statement like a little gap between them, encompassing her stumblings and mistakes over the past year: miscalculating ingredient amounts for breads she’s made hundreds of times; forgetting orders, singeing entire sheets of the most delicate, time-consuming pastries: she’s mournfully discarded entire batches. Long sheaths of nothingness open in Avis’s days, inertia: she reports to the kitchen, picks up a spoon, then, quickly, it’s the end of the day and she’s done nothing. Sometimes the days dissolve between her fingers. They haven’t spoken of these things openly.

Avis named her business Paradise Pastry because she imagined cathedrals. She thought about the stonemasons, glassblowers, sculptors—who gave lifetimes to the creation of beauty. Every sugar crust she rolled, every simple
tarte Tatin
was a bit of a church. She consecrated herself to it: later, it became her tribute to her daughter and the unknown into which she’d disappeared. She had her cathedral to enter, to console her. Her friend Jean-Françoise, chef at Le Petit Choux, said that her pastries would be transcendent, if only she weren’t American.

BRIAN FLIPS OPEN
his briefcase on the dining room table and places a waxed bag next to the sheaf of folders and his BlackBerry. “You remember the thing Barry told us . . .” One of the post-Felice family counselors—an earnest man with a habit of stroking his ponytail throughout the sessions.

“He told us a lot of things.”

“He said sometimes our partners know us even better than we know ourselves.”

Through the French doors, Avis watches wet black branches lit with buds, the Precambrian curves of the palm fronds. “Oh. Right. Okay.”

He doesn’t move for a moment. She turns and notices with a pang that he’s sneaked a bag of Florentine cookies into his briefcase. He says, “We can talk about it again later.”

“I’ve been thinking about the kids so much these days.”

“Stanley’s fantastic—he makes that place hop—no question about it.”

“Well, I just hope . . .” She watches Brian; it’s like speaking in code. “I want him to be happy is all. Do you think he is?”

“Well, I think he’s got a new girlfriend. He called me yesterday,” Brian says softly. He seems to be about to say more but stops.

Avis’s hand moves to her chest. “What happened to that other one?” During his high school years, Avis had watched Stanley cycle through one date after another—pretty, ephemeral young ladies like fireflies.

“Who knows—that lady killer,” Brian says, smiling. Avis remembers Brian at twenty-eight: narrow sea-blue eyes. Irish-handsome, her mother had said—untrustworthy. Brian’s good looks settled into a sort of normalness—he put on weight, his face broadened, and he started to look like everyone else: she found this calming. She doesn’t really want to ask about Stanley so much as she wants to ask about their own marriage—how happy are
we
? It seems they’ve lost the ability to speak to each other in such plain and direct words. “He’s always so busy,” she murmurs, examining the white flour crust under her nails.

“Hurricane season—it’s a scramble for them. They’ve got to lay in supplies.”

“Does Stan know that her birthday is next week?” She doesn’t look at Brian.

“Whose?”

She approximates a smile. “Her eighteenth. D-Day. I was thinking maybe we should do something—like a memorial—to commemorate it.”

Brian gives her a genuine smile. “She’s not dying. Far as we know. You ask me, if anything we ought to celebrate that she’s an adult now—free to torment whomever she likes.”

MINUTES AFTER SHE HEARS
Brian’s car rolling from the driveway, Avis goes to the French doors. The parrot is warbling, back to the watery contralto, a low, inflected pulse that reminds her of her mother’s collection of scratched up LPs—Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday. She opens the door and slips outside to the flagstone patio. The sound draws her into the fringe of the bamboo and coconut palms. Avis can’t account for her change of heart. It reminds her of how Florida had slowly opened to her twenty years ago, how she began to see the differences in lizards, and petals, and tree trunks: bark swirling in a spiral; spreading gray roots like the tendrils of a beard; one peeling like paper; one fine-grained as skin. Avis peers through the branches, pushing them aside so they release scents of grass and lime. This is the time of year when mangoes hang from the boughs, soft as hips, each tree with its own flavor. An amber butterfly floats over the neighbor’s clothesline. Avis realizes that a wave of shadow at the far end of the yard is the woman she spoke to the other day. She stands with her arms lifted, pinning a pair of men’s boxer shorts to the clothesline, a basket of laundry beside her, a wooden clothespin in her teeth.

As the woman shuffles forward, Avis notices something at the woman’s feet: it’s the bird, about a foot high, oil-black with a blue sheen, a crimson spot on its beak. It toddles behind the woman and emits a chortling, purling sound like Avis’s cat. Avis stands still, her hands on the trees, scarcely breathing. The woman wears an
emerald
-colored head scarf knotted at the back of her head and another housedress, this one in a celadon color, ethereal against the darkness of her skin. About halfway through her basket of clothes the woman pauses. She takes the clothespins from her mouth and whistles. The bird twitches its wings and tail feathers. She whistles again and the bird responds with a burst of song.

HER MOTHER HAD WARNED HER:
You aren’t suited to the kitchen—you’re too anxious: you’ll go mad from the isolation, the repetition. Can you stand to make croissants every day? What if you poison someone? Lose a walnut shell and someone chokes to death?

To placate her mother, she enrolled in college—the same school her mother had attended—in a hilly, gorge-cut town. She spent all her time in Risley Hall, drowsing over Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Woolf, the decrepit sunlight coming into the late-afternoon glass. Half attending to the lectures of her professors. Like the wonderful old Russian who spoke about Victorian novels and their “primitive coloration,” who set her imagination off in other directions for weeks. It seemed as if the life of the mind precluded the life of the body: poets were ascetic, hollowed-out by thinking; her professors seemed almost deliberately ugly—especially the women. Though her mother couldn’t help the lovely black drift of her own hair and eyes, she restricted herself to the bitterest little cups of coffee and lived on the biscotti Avis made for her—bone dry, barely enough sugar to matter.

Brian was her tutor. He’d taken her on after three other grad students at the study center had given up. He stuck with Avis, going over
oligopolies
and
externalities,
and never said, “But it’s so
simple
 . . .” like the others.

He had a satisfying wholeness about him, American good looks like a baseball player’s—level shoulders, a pale shock of hair. A good mind and ethical nature: little gave him more pleasure than learning laws and governance—“It shows you the shape of your society.” But what drew the deepest sliver of her self toward him, toward love, was the weakness in his chin, his slightly disoriented air, like an injury he allowed only Avis to see. Brian was the opposite of her mother. There wasn’t a whiff of mystery about him: he was solid, entirely himself. Avis still cooked in those days and she invited him to her minuscule studio. She set a hibachi up on the fire escape and grilled him a marbled, crimson rib eye, crusty with salt and pepper, its interior brilliant with juices. Some garlicky green beans with pine nuts, rich red wine, mushrooms and onions sautéed in a nut-brown butter. She’d intuited his indifference to chocolate, so dessert was a velvety
vanilla bean cake with a toasted almond frosting. It was a dark art: she knew what she was doing every step of the way, but she wanted him. She wanted children with him. By the end of the meal, he sat half sprawled beside her on the couch, crushing the hem of her skirt. He pulled her down on top of him, wouldn’t let her clear away the dishes: she heard his pulse through the thick wool of his sweater. He loved her, he’d said, his breath redolent of vanilla and almond. He loved her one hundred percent.

She’d smiled—guiltily conscious of having unbalanced him. “But do you love me 105 percent? How about 173 percent?”

He’d turned red and said, “Yes.” Then added politely, “Though those percentages aren’t possible.”

She told him then she hated school. She took him to the Moosewood Café, the Morritz Bakery, she showed him the way they folded cranberries into their
Vacherin
. She made him seven-layered straw
berry
pavé
cakes. When she confessed, with a deep blush, her wish to attend the culinary institute, he encouraged her to apply. Told her there were loans and scholarships, that he would help her research these things. Excited and anxious, she felt an unraveling in herself, the disconnected threads reaching toward Brian.

THERE IS, IN THE BACK
of Avis’s mind, the thought that now she’ll need to hire a new assistant. But for some reason she isn’t in a rush to do so. Delivery trucks rumble to and from the front step every day—two are refrigerated vans which pick up her pastries to ferry throughout the city—the others arrive with specialty items for her baking: lilac honey, a fine-milled pastry flour, a gelatin from Provence. The
sound of an assistant speaking Spanish with a delivery driver limned the edges of her day. As she piped rosettes, docked a sheet of dough, or doused a tart with sanding sugar, another world occurred on the doorstep. Now Avis answers the door herself and leads surprised delivery people into the front entrance, across the living room, and through the heavy swinging door to her kitchen. She almost enjoys the contact with the outside world. On Monday, there is a Colombian man who delivers free-range eggs and unpasteurized milk that glows like satin. Tuesdays, a woman from Lima bring special concoctions of candied lilacs and fruit peels and
gelées,
and later a young boy comes with a box filled with dried starfruit and bananas and fresh tea, mint, and sage from his father’s botanical garden in the Redlands. She asks and forgets everyone’s names, but next week, she thinks, she’ll ask again. Some deliveries—like those from her son’s market—come every week, others—like the fig balsamic vinegar—were special-ordered to accompany a single chocolate strawberry ice cream cake.