Birds of Paradise: A Novel (20 page)

On Wednesday, Avis stands at the window, peering through the latticework of leaves and spines at the neighbor pinning up her washing. The doorbell chimes startle her. She drapes a towel over a rising brioche dough, feeling newly capable, a tick of expectation as she goes to answer. When she opens the door, at first all she sees through the screen is a glint in someone’s hand. Pushing open the screen door, she realizes it’s Eduardo, one of Stanley’s delivery people, holding Avis’s antique silver tray. “This was propped against your front door.”

When she’d left the tray at the neighbor’s feet the other day it was etched with tarnish all along the swirls and the central silver coin. Now it gleams. Avis marvels, turning it over. Someone has polished every crevice, rubbed at every impossible edge and crook; not a speck on it. Eduardo carries his cooler into the kitchen, stacks tubs of strawberry purée in the freezer. There are almonds for her
macarons,
vanilla pods, raw cocoa. She follows him in, props the tray against the wall, staring at the gleam. After he finishes unloading, Eduardo stands, about to lift the cooler, then stops in place, looking out the back window. “Is she Haitian?”

Avis turns. Their backyard is framed in the wide window above the sink. “I don’t actually know.” She can see the woman shaking out a wet pink skirt. “We haven’t really talked.”

“Did you notice those?” He gestures up.

Avis is momentarily dazed by the bleached sky: a hawk of some sort floats by, wings glinting and flat. Something twinkles at the near corner of the neighbor’s yard, nearly hidden among the branches. “What is that?” Avis puts on her kitchen readers. She sees it now: small creatures fashioned out of straw and grass—a mouse and two small birds, swaying, suspended by invisible strings.

Eduardo stands beside her at the sink. He smells slightly sour, like physical labor. “Voodoo,” he says. “They’re some kind of little offerings.”

“Really? Voodoo?” She lifts the stem of her glasses. Once, while delivering some cakes with Carlita, another assistant, Avis spotted a dark knob of some sort in the street. She stared, unable to identify it until she was nearly standing over it: a dog’s paw, cleanly severed mid-leg. Carlita had grabbed her and pulled her away, muttering a Hail Mary under her breath.

“It’s just another religion,” he says dismissively, and turns back to study the kitchen. “So cool here. This place reminds me of Hansel and Gretel.”

Avis continues to stare at the bouncing straw mouse. “I wouldn’t let a gumdrop or candy cane within twenty feet of my kitchen.”

“Well, you’re not that kind of witch.” Eduardo squats over the cooler, stuffing plastic bags back into it and slapping the top shut again. He backs out of the kitchen holding his cooler; at the front, he opens the screen door with his shoulder. “According to Stan, you’re the real deal,” he says, starting down the front steps. “A real sugar artist.”

She stands in the doorway. “I’m just a worker bee.”

Eduardo opens the truck and slides in the cooler. “He says you’re a genius.”

“Stanley?” Her voice is quiet. “Really did he say that?” She averts her eyes. “About me?”

He shrugs. “You know, with the Haitians, there’s a pretty interesting relationship to sugarcane—if you’re interested. It’s sacred to them.” He opens the van door and props his arm on it. “But it’s pretty horrible. They have to harvest it for other people and they starve. You and her should talk about sugar some time.”

When Avis returns to the house, the air inside feels like the bottom of a well. She browses through her work folder, stuffed with orders on slips and receipts:
Monday—cinn. palmiers—the Morris Group. PI&B—mocha cr. puffs, 5 Saint-Honorés. Winslow Co. retreat 20 plum tarts . . .
She tries to plan the day’s baking schedule but she keeps putting down her pen, returning to the French doors, cracking them, leaning out into the damp air. How still it is in the hottest part of the day! Just a minor insect whir, a few random bird notes—everything deadened by molten heat. She returns to the kitchen: the woman and her bird have gone in for the day. Why doesn’t she feel relieved?

FOR TWO DAYS,
Avis sneaks out of the kitchen after she’s set out dough for the first rising, to climb into the densest section of overgrowth, among webs and rotting avocados and palmetto bugs—muck, spores, and tiny-legged things falling into her hair or down the back of her shirt. From there, she watches the neighbor pull what seem to be weeds, bundling them neatly in the lap of her apron. The woman wears a bib apron like the sort Avis’s grandmother wore—white, tied with strings behind the neck and waist. Under this, she wears a variety of simple housedresses in honeyed colors, turquoise, sea green, lavender, and pale rose, usually some sort of kerchief tied over her hair. From a distance, she looks delicate as a girl, but Avis suspects she is just a bit younger than herself. While she gardens or hangs laundry, she sings or murmurs to the mynah who waddles nearby and occasionally attempts to climb the fabric of her dresses. She speaks in a rapid, staccato language that Avis think must be Creole: the bird often responds in exactly her voice, mirroring each word:
bonswa, bonswa, souple, pa fe sa
 . . . Watching this woman gives Avis such pleasure—the rhythm of the woman’s voice, the filigree of birdsong in the trees, the atlas of breezes carrying jasmine, vanilla, and gardenia—even the sweetness of the rotting mulch and briny air bewitches her.

That Thursday, Avis leaves the kitchen the moment Brian departs, wiping her hands on her apron, and goes to the place in the fronds. She presses against the avocado trunk, hidden under a screen of leaves. Rain begins misting through the fronds: the cloud cover turns the morning sky into a emerald post-dusk hue, mixing things up. Soon she sees the back door nudged open by a brown foot, a flicker of pink toenails: the woman emerges in an old lemon-colored shift—bateau neck, sleeveless—beneath an apron. She places a metal pot on the ground, then sits beside it on the cement step, just under the eave of the house. There’s a pile of leaves in her apron, as usual, and she sets to work, stripping pieces of greenery, tossing part, throwing the rest in the pot. After she has worked methodically for some minutes, the woman begins to sing. Avis strains to hear: it’s a syrupy old tune she’s heard somewhere before.
Mon amour, je t’attendrai toute ma vie . . . Oh mon amour, ne me quitte pas
. Her voice is thin but on-key. Avis releases a breath and the fragile sounds of air and insects are part of that diastole. She is so relaxed she is almost drowsing.

Out of the corner of her eye then, just breaching her peripheral vision, she spots a movement like a brush of premonition. Lamb’s orange form creeps past her, belly low, warbling and chirping—his gray eyes on the mynah.

The woman spots Lamb nearly at the same time and gets to her feet. “Hsst. Bad, bad!” She kicks in Lamb’s direction, the cat flattening but not retreating. The mynah releases a piercing
awgh
and lifts its black wings like a villain’s cape. Lamb freezes in mid-stalk, the bird puffs up larger, hopping forward, shrieking
aawgh, aawgh!
Certain her cat—which had once belonged to Felice—is about to be eviscerated, Avis bounds from her hiding place, fronds and leaves flying, into the neighbor’s yard and scoops up the tabby, simultaneously catching flashes of the flapping bird, the woman’s hand fanned at her throat. Avis hurries back through the leaves, across the yard, through the French doors, and tosses the cat so it yowls, midair, and falls on the couch.

Avis stands with her back to the French doors, shaking and out of breath. Slowly, she risks a glance and sees the woman has followed her through the palms and now stands in Avis’s yard. She is rigidly furious, arms akimbo, fists balled. “You are watching us!” the woman shouts, her voice elongated. Avis wavers in the door, her hand trembling on the frame. “I’m terribly sorry,” she mumbles. “I’d swear I’d pulled that door shut—they swell up in the rainy season . . .”

“Who are you, lady?” The woman is implacable. “What do you want?”

Avis takes a few meek steps outside. She clasps her hands at her waist. “Oh, I’m so—I was just—I was doing some—I was in my garden—and—I heard some voices. I heard you, I think—and I—and I—”

The woman’s eyes dart around the overgrown yard. She squints at Avis, chin forward. “How long you been watching me?”

Avis lowers her head. She feels breathless and woozy. “A while.”

“
A while
,” the woman says in her contrapuntal way. “A while, yes.” Something relaxes in the filament of the woman’s eyes. “You aren’t altogether in possession of yourself, are you?”

She looks different here, in another context. Avis sees she is very small—a good head shorter, possibly thirty pounds lighter than Avis. Her yellow dress, kerchief, and gold-beaded earrings glow as if absorbing energy from her body. The woman’s eyes tick over her, inventorying, then she turns her head slightly and backs away. She moves toward the palms, shoves them aside, and walks through.

THE NEXT MORNING,
Avis draws a comb through her wet hair and the tines fill with strands. Under the bathroom light, she stares at her reflection; her skin looks depleted and she believes she can divine the round shape of her skull through the hair. A dermatologist had told her last month that her hair would quit falling eventually. Probably hormonal, she’d said, adding with the condescension of the young: Our bodies change. Her mother had warned that Avis would get fat from baking. Now Avis looks at her hard little wire of a smile: Geraldine had said nothing about going bald. Avis scoops her remaining hair in one hand, tilts the scissors in the other, and snaps away furiously. “Here you go!” she says to the mirror with a big smile. “Happy Birthday, Felice! Happy Birthday to you!” It takes just a few minutes to lop it all off, so what remains—about two to four inches—juts from her head in a tufted silver and brown corona. She pushes it back and tucks what she can behind her ears before tying a slim silk band around her hairline—loose hairs a disaster for baking. She sweeps the bathroom floor and wipes the sink, listening to the neighbor’s bird chatter in the other yard.

Avis returns to her desk, skin still humid from the shower, her left hand combing the blunt ends of her hair. With her right hand, she browses through the rest of the day’s orders:
cinnamon palmiers; pistachio-cocoa 12-layer torte
 . . . She gazes at this order a moment, her pulse elevated, as if she’s been drinking too much coffee, and she begins jotting notes on a new pastry:
For this cake, I want to mingle the womanly and masculine foods—sugars and meats in particular. The walls must come down. Must temper, must balance. Add the leeks to the chocolate, vanilla to the turnip. Tear away the sacred walls between the sweet and savory worlds
. She stops and rereads what she’s written: what does it mean? Again she hears the mynah singing in the neighbor’s yard.

Avis lowers her head, runs her fingers into the new perimeter of her hair. She tries to think her way through this: the link between death and sugar. Stanley sends her nutrition newsletters with reports on diabetes and obesity. It seems to her that sugar is a metaphysical problem: each occasion of eating asserts its own needs. Her fingers wait on the keyboard as her vision glazes out the east windows, unfocused. All the glorious pastries of the world are baked and eaten and gone forever, and there is only the fiery moment of the
now
. Minds and bodies tell one story: I tasted; I loved; I was young. But the
now
burns everything in its oven. Her mother said that heaven was “the unattainable.” The mynah’s cry tears at the air, sailing over the trees and hedges and songbirds. She thinks: Perhaps the neighbor hates me because I work with sugar.

Suddenly it simply isn’t a choice: Avis feels she must explain herself to the neighbor—it’s unbearable that the woman might think Avis a fool or insane or not “in possession” of herself.

The grass feels hard against her bare feet and she pushes through the thicket of the palms, scraping her arms, the fronds like pastry knives. The bird in its cage becomes agitated when it sees her, and Avis nearly stops, startled by its keening. The sun is up, but the woman hasn’t come out yet. She taps, then raps her knuckles against the wood-framed screen door: the back door is open. “Hello in there!”

A shape emerges behind the dark screen.
“Dieu.”
Pure exasperation. She tilts open the door. “You are here again?”

Avis tries to smile, her lips tremble. “I brought you . . .” She holds out the white bakery box.

The neighbor steps outside and gives her a long look—less caustic than before, but still full of irony. Finally she says, in that contrapuntal accent, “So I am never going to be rid of you.”

Avis touches the lid of the box. “Do you like chocolate and hazelnut? They’re petits fours. They have a little layer of marzipan and a layer of meringue. Some berry.” As long as she stays focused on the box her voice is steady. “I wanted to apologize.”

“You did, did you.”

“I wanted—” Avis turns slightly, gestures toward the trees. “I was just peeking,” she says hopelessly.

“Yes, like a spy.”

“No, no, please. The—your bird was—singing—making its sounds. And I just came to see. I work at home. I’m a baker.” The woman’s face registers nothing. Avis soldiers on. “And I came—just to look. And you looked so pretty and the bird was so sweet with you, and so . . .” She trails off.

The woman’s obsidian eyes are pitiless. “How many times you watch me? More than one?”

Avis clears her throat lightly.

“Spying,” the woman says matter-of-factly. “Where I come from, you know what happens to spies?”

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” Avis mumbles.

Then she seems to think of something. “You know how long it took me to polish that tray? An hour and a half. Just to get it clean.”

Avis almost says: You’re not supposed to clean it. Instead she opens the box and offers it again. “Please. If you would accept these? It’s just something small.”