Birds of Paradise: A Novel (21 page)

Finally the woman consents to look in the box. Avis can smell the sparkling
fraise des bois
essence. She sees a lilt, like sadness, in the woman’s face as she touches the box. “These are marzipan petits fours?” She lowers her face, inhaling. “The lady who owned the house where my mother worked—almost every day she ate these. This style. My mother smelled like these berries. Every day, the cook made twenty petits fours.”

“That would have kept her busy!” Avis smiles carefully.

The woman gives her a cool look. “Yes. The lady ate two, the son ate four, and the husband possibly one or none. They threw the rest to the pigs. All the food in that house was so beautiful. The house was like something from heaven—much grander than these around here.” She looks up and Avis senses something conjured, shifting between them. “I learned to mistrust beautiful things.”

“Your yard is beautiful,” Avis says softly.

She looks around, both of them taking in the orchids in the trees, the fountains of greenery, creamy blooms of gardenia and emerald shrubs that seem to Avis to have sprung up in a matter of days.

“It doesn’t belong to me,” the woman says. But something in her has relented. “
You
were the one who made those black cookies? With your own hands?”

Avis holds the box in her left hand and lifts her right. The woman studies it, as does Avis: the skin thickened and dry and loose as a work glove, the fingers crosshatched with fine white scars from nicks, thicker pink and red scars from varying degrees of burns, white crusts of flour along the nails and knuckles, the powerful wrist, the wiry, defined muscles of her forearm. “Not a white woman’s hands,” she says slyly. “Do your neighbors know you have hands like these?”

“I have no interest in the opinions of my neighbors.”

“In that case . . .” She places her hands on the bottom and closed lid of the box. “I shall accept your beautiful things. Perhaps even eat one or two.” She looks up from the corner of her eyes. “I won’t throw any to the pigs.”

She begins to move back toward the house and Avis follows, reluctant to lose her so quickly. “May I ask—”

The woman sighs, turns, mouth downturned, eyes liquid disapproval.

“What is your name?”

She lifts her black eyes. “What is
yours
?”

“Avis. Avis Muir.”

“Then I am Solange.”

“Solange.” It’s not as musical when Avis says it. Her breath is high and thin: she wants to ask where she came from, if she will stay, why she is here in this neighborhood. But the woman’s face recedes into a powerful remoteness, dismissing Avis. She waits another long moment and notices a flutter of red: a cardinal quivers in the bushes against the woman’s house. Avis wants something from her. There’s a space inside of Avis like a cookie form, which seems to be the very shape of the thing she wants from this woman. Heaven is the un-haveable, her mother said. She remembers Geraldine’s soaps that looked and smelled just like caramel cakes. Avis ate one when she was very small—then, aghast, spat it out. Her mother had said, That’s what make them so delightful—you want to eat them, but you
can’t
.

Still, Avis refuses to believe that she only wants to want: that was her mother’s illness, not hers. She rubs her knuckles over her lips thoughtfully and finally says, “I’d like—I would hope—we can be friends.”

The woman laughs, revealing beautiful, bright teeth. “Hope all you like, but I may not feel the same.”

Brian

A
T THE INTERSECTION OF BIRD AND U.S. 1, BENEATH
the shadow of the Tri Rail overpass, the Dominican woman in the peaked straw hat sits on the concrete divider beside her little array of mangoes and string bags of some sort of nut or pod. She also has a carton filled with bunches of small purple flowers. Brian waves a few bucks out his window as he pulls up to the light. The regular homeless man, skin burnt beyond race, is there as well, on the other side of the street. He notices Brian’s gesture and starts to move toward him, but the woman hustles over. They make the exchange and Brian is out of there—pulling into the stream of Benzes and junkers and Hondas—before the homeless man can come close.

At the Ekers Building entrance, Brian notes the way Rufus averts his gaze from the bouquet (he feels conspicuous, with a leather briefcase in one hand and the flowers—so small they’re almost a corsage—in the other). “Hello, Rufus,” Brian says as he enters.

“Hello, Mr. Muir.”

It’s a relief to have the elevator to himself: he and his flowers might just escape further scrutiny. Several mornings in a row now, he’s awakened with an uncanny sensation, as if he is turning into another person: an old, well-loved, and polished carapace breaking open, odd imaginings seeping in. He wakes from dreams of fighting with his son who becomes Brian’s old man. Or nightmares in which he wanders unlit marble corridors, footsteps in a dusting of powder, searching for something. He thinks again of how numb and distracted Avis has seemed this week. It’s Felice, of course. The missed meeting. Just days before her eighteenth birthday. He’d awakened early that morning to a metallic sound—swishing and clicking—through the bathroom door. When he went in, later, to take a shower, he found a dark swath of hair in the bathroom trash bin. He’d lifted it out of the trash, held it for a moment in the palm of his hand, some lost, tender thing. Quietly, he stole some thread from the sewing kit, tied up a lock, and slid it into his briefcase. What does he suppose a lousy bouquet can achieve in the face of this—slippage? He senses a kind of global slide, as if the material nature of his world is losing its integrity. The sight of his wife’s discarded hair was so painful in the moment, almost nightmarish: like a dream of spitting teeth into the sink.

Up to 32 he glides, ears popping. He starts to regret the flowers. Old-lady flowers, the sort his grandmother would’ve cultivated in her wheelbarrow planter. Dark lavender petals and bright yellow centers. It occurs to him that he should at least have waited to buy them on the way home. Now he will have to keep them fresh somehow. As he nears his office, there’s a sound of voices: Fernanda and Javier round the corner laughing, Javier’s hand slipping over the curve of Fernanda’s shoulder.

Javier spots Brian first. “Here’s the man now!”

“How are you, Brian?” Fernanda asks. He sees them both notice the bouquet; Javier’s forehead ticks back. Fernanda glances at her Cartier. “You know, I think I really can’t spare the coffee break right now, Javier. Rain check?”

Javier’s face darkens. “Fine,” he says coolly, already en route to the elevator. “I’ve got to get back to it myself.”

Brian watches him go. “That Javy,” he shoots for a humorously deprecating tone.

She glances at him, then laughs and says, “Oh, I know.”

Brian walks her to the door of her office, holds it open, and she looks at him over her shoulder. “Will you come sit for a few minutes?”

A little twist in his heart, he follows her in. The office smells different. Gone is the executive mosaic of leather, metal, and aftershave. He thinks he identifies gardenia and dendrobium—their neighbors
the Regales grow them. He takes in the redecorated room: there is a journal bound in a speckled coral cover; a languorous yellow ceramic mug; a small jade ring. On the desk, beside the computer, he spots a figurine and a stone-colored disk. Fernanda sees him looking and picks up the figurine. “It’s Erzulie?” She turns the piece in her fingertips: beads and bits of feather and cloth. “She’s very powerful, this lady. A force of nature. My grandmother was from the Islands—she gave her to me. Erzulie was supposed to help me with my grades. Ha.”

“Like a saint?” Brian glances at Fernanda. “But I thought you were—”

“Jewish?” She smiles. “Don’t you think you can be more than one thing?”

“Oh, I, of
course
—”

She waves it away. “And of course, this is the
other
thing my grandmother gave me.” She holds up the white disk. “It’s a mud cookie. She said to remind me where I come from. Sort of a
Don’t get too big for your britches
,
missy
.” Brian had been about to reach for it, but she slides it to the edge of her computer. “I grew up in a very modest home. I like to think of it as a reminder of what I’m never going back to.”

She looks so self-possessed, Brian can’t help but admire her: the secrecy, the flecks like gold leaf in her irises—old bloodlines. It seems to Brian there is an untouchable quality to her. A veil laid over her features. As with Avis. He glances at the goddess. “Your grandmother sounds like a genius.”

“That would be the nicest way of putting it.” Fernanda laughs softly. “Listen, I wanted to thank you—again—for the other day. Javier can be a bit, well . . .” She lifts her eyebrows. “
You
know.” She taps a sky-blue pencil against the edge of her desk. “Ever since I moved into this office, he’s been coming around. The way he stares . . . Like I’m a penthouse unit and he can’t wait to make the sale.”

“I’ll have a word with him.” Brian glares at the view through the swooping glass wall. Beyond the glass, the ocean looks like molten nickel. “It’s unprofessional. Javier has no business coming around, pestering you when you’re trying to do your job.”

“Oh, please don’t.” Fernanda hunches forward. “You’ve been so kind—terribly kind. You’re the only one who—the others—” Then Brian watches, dumbfounded, as Fernanda lowers her head and starts to cry. Her breath catches and she hides her face in her hands.

He is paralyzed. The last real tears he remembers seeing were from his daughter, the long nights after her returns: how she’d sob in her room, while Brian hung back in like ghost in the corridor, bewildered and angry. He feels impossibly clumsy: he tries to behave—as best he can—in the manner he thinks a compassionate person would. He bends toward Fernanda, placing one hand on her shoulder, and says, almost inaudibly, “Oh, my dear . . .”

She sniffles and lifts her face to him: her eyes and nostrils are barely inflamed, rimmed faintly pink. “I’m in a . . . some kind of situation . . . I don’t have anyone to tell.”

“Well.” He hesitates. “Can you tell me?”

She shakes her head, then looks at him, smearing away tears with her fingers. “How could I? I wouldn’t want to burden you—of all people. You’re overloaded as it is.”

He draws himself up, making fun of himself. “If it helps at all, I am a lawyer. I’m a professional at keeping secrets.”

She laughs and sniffles again. “Well . . . maybe . . . if you swear . . .”

He draws an
X
over the front of his suit jacket.

She nods and lowers her head, then murmurs something so quietly he has to ask her to repeat it: “I’m seeing Jack.”

“Jack?” he echoes, so relieved that she stopped crying that he barely registers her confession.

“You know.
Jack
.”

Brian smiles apologetically: it sounds like the name of some kid at UM.

“Parkhurst.”

He stares, still uncomprehending.

“Jack Parkhurst.”

Suddenly it feels as if his heart is swelling beyond its natural dimensions: it’s difficult to breathe.
What?
“How did you—” He doesn’t know what to ask. He shakes his head dumbly, an empty, horselike motion. Jack Parkhurst, company president and CEO, head of his own pseudo-dynasty of developers, free-trade cronies, and rich, Old Florida Bubbas. But even so—even considering the flotilla of wealth and influence—change-jingling, seventy-four-year-old neglector of wife and children—
that
Jack Parkhurst? “How did—how could—”

“He was very attentive,” Fernanda says stiffly.

“I’m sure he was—is?” Brian amends. “Are you still . . . ?”

“Is—I suppose. I want to end it, though. It’s not right for either of us.”

“
No,
well . . .”

“I’m sure I sound awful. It’s so hard to explain about Jack . . . He can be so charming.”

Brian has been upper management too long to be surprised at the hidden seams of the business world. Still. He can hardly believe that Jack Parkhurst has laid his crepuscular hand on
Fernanda,
caressed her shoulders, that his cottony mouth has gone anywhere near her neck. “Oh, my dear.” Outside the window, a replica of his own office view—a perpetual motion of cars, chips of light flowing along the causeway a mile away, heading out over the water—now sapphire brilliance under a break in the clouds.

Fernanda seizes his hands. “I feel like, sometimes, more than anything I just need a really, really good—I mean, a wonderful
friend,
you know? The sort of person who’s so close to you that you can say anything.” A shadowy dimple appears at her left jawline. “Brian. You’re just—you’re a real guy. The old-fashioned kind—like Jack likes to think he is.”

Brian lowers his head. He notices her glance fall on the violets again and he stares at them a moment himself. Slowly, he lays them on her desk. “For you.”

“Oh Brian.” She holds them to her nose. “They’re just . . . they’re lovely.” Leaning forward, she slips them into the carafe of water on the corner of her desk, and Brian notes, with embarrassment, that the flowers are dwarfed by the container.

“I must—I should get back to the millstone—” He half rises, half bows out of his seat, and eases out of the office.

THE TELEPHONE;
the glass walls; the gray condition of office light. The day has passed into afternoon and outside Miami is burning like a scarlet orchid, bursting into flame. Brian sits motionless at his desk. If he turns to the west, he will see at least thirty-eight cranes and rigs grinding away, and almost all have some connection to PI&B. A stack of ever-renewing contracts to review and assign to his underlings; proposals for still more deals, piled in folders a foot high. He picks up a folder labeled
Bonsai Towers
and attempts to browse through it, but the pages smear into each other. He attempts to stack them, tapping the pages against the desktop, but they splay against the glass. He drops the paper:
Who does he think he is?

Randy old Parkhurst. Past company rumors—insinuations of sexual
bullying, intimidation, advances—rise to the surface of his memory. It’s one of Brian’s tasks to make bad things go away, and he usually shuffles these cases to his underlings, each of whom is authorized to bestow modest settlements and severance packages. As Jack’s counsel, he thinks, he should personally warn him away from Fernanda. He winces again at the thought of them together. Jack, he will say, the liability exposure—it’s not worth it. What if things go sour? How can they not, eventually? Thus saving both the company and Fernanda much unhappiness. Win-win. He stares at the slippery image in the darkened screen.
Remember where you come from.
He imagines the young Fernanda, her hair in two braids, a wise grandmother from a Caribbean place.

He decides to take a break, wanders down to the lobby and finds himself in the gift shop, chatting with the high school kid about Stanley and Felice as if they both still lived at home: “I can’t believe where the time has gone. My boy Stan’s got a serious girlfriend now. And it’s going to be my daughter’s eighteenth birthday . . . big one, right? What do you get for an eighteen-year-old girl?”

As he strolls back toward the elevators, the lobby doors open and a phalanx of upper-mid management enter, fresh from a four-
cocktail
investors’ meeting, heels clicking on the marble. Brian halts as if pelted by buckshot. There’s Parkhurst blowing hot air while the others double over with laughter. Esmeralda is stationed at his side, aloof as Eva Perón. “So Warren calls me—” Parkhurst’s voice booms all over the lobby. “Fella brings me out in the jet to
Omaha
—have you ever been to Omaha? God-forsaken place. Middle of nowhere—to a restaurant with animal heads, all staring down at us. Steaks as thick as my arm—they’re hanging off the plate—lying right on the goddamn table. And Warren leans over and says to me, I bet you don’t get that in Miami!” The last line is delivered in a thrombotic bellow and everyone around him breaks up.

Brian considers escaping with the elevator, but Parkhurst spies him, calling out, a feeble old bleat, “Brian, hang on!” Brian’s gluteus locks up. In the past, he would have asked Jack how the Bentley was handling. How Jack Jr. was making out at Penn. Parkhurst moves his soft body in its Armani threads onto the elevator, eschewing the separate penthouse car: he enjoys riding with the “people.”

“Counselor. How in the hell are you?” He slaps Brian on the back.

“Jack. How’s this weekend looking? Gonna get out on the links at all?”

The elevator stops and opens. It’s two stops before Parkhurst’s floor but all three of them exit.

“Brilliant weekend, really, really brilliant,” Parkhurst mutters as Esmeralda walks off headed east. As Brian watches Esmeralda’s receding back, Parkhurst leans into him. “Stay tuned—there’s a sweet little old deal coming up I want to get your eyes on.
Real
nice, Old Florida real estate. It’s in this spot downtown—we’re gonna call the whole area NoDo. Like it? North of Design District.”

Brian jams his hands into his pockets; he’s wobbling inside himself. His head gets heavy and suddenly he’s watching himself and Parkhurst from twenty feet down the corridor, saying, “Yeah, Jack—I’ve been wanting to talk to you about one of those projects myself. Northeast Fifty-sixth Street? I think there’s issues.”

His employer turns his big, white-haired head in his direction. “Don’t tell me—it’s the hippies again? Goddamn freaks—what’re they doing in Florida? Let them go hump the trees in California.”