Birds of Paradise: A Novel (9 page)

Brian squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. The newspaper lies on his desk, his other hand flat on the paper. For a moment, it seems that he can feel something insectival rattling around inside his body.

Juban
.

This term, which he has heard bandied about Miami for years, now strikes him as somehow distasteful, impertinent even. He can clearly make out Javier’s gestures: the whisk of hand through air as he laughs. Brian imagines Javier sliding his eyes in Brian’s direction, whispering, “Our office Anglo.” The thought causes him to shove himself away from his desk, his legs lifting his weight from his chair. He pushes through his office door. Passing the corridor’s glass wall, he spots the skeleton of the Metro Building going up just two blocks from the Ekers Building, one hastily constructed story at a time. These days, Miami is a skyline of towering developers’ cranes operating in varying degrees of legality. Beyond that, filling the view, floats the striated, Caribbean blue of Biscayne Bay. By noon each day, three-quarters of each window glow like mercury.

As he moves down the glassy corridor, more reflections flicker before him; they glide sideways then and Javier is leaning out, holding open the door to Fernanda’s office. “The man himself! We were just talking about you.”

The air around him shimmers for an instant, like heat rising off blacktop. Brian closes his eyes, opens them, follows Javier into the office. “Here he is—here’s the man,” Javier says again. “Resident legal evil genius.”

Brian gives Javier a thin smile. “Don’t you have units to go sell?”

“You looking to invest?”

He realizes peripherally that Fernanda does not seem to be amused. There’s a pliancy to her shoulders, a pretty girl’s receding from attention. This had been one of Felice’s habits as she began to edge toward young womanhood. Fernanda’s eyes are sable black, so dark they seem to float slightly apart from the rest of her features. She has a funny, petal-shaped mouth—too much humor—or cunning—to be considered a real beauty. He smiles broadly. “I haven’t wanted to bother you while you were settling in—Investor Relations must be in chaos with the remodel.”

“We are.” She reveals a row of even white teeth. “It’s been insane, trying to stay on top of anything—I feel lost without my little nest.”

“Look at her smile,” Javier comments. “She was just being polite to me before. She didn’t give me any kind of smile like
that
. Where you been keeping that smile?”

To Brian’s gratification, Fernanda’s smile hardens in place. “I know it’s silly.”

“
Ya,
what’s silly?” Javier ticks back his head. “Good Cuban girl needs
su familia
.”

Watching them, Brian feels a jealous pang: it’s the trace of collusion he seems to sense in the air around him—not only between Cubans but between the hip young African-American women buying tabouli and the languid Arab men at the counter at Daily Bread, between the Italian models at South Beach and the Swedish au pair girls sauntering around Cocowalk. Javier says that Brian suffers from Anglo paranoia. So many people seem to know something that they’re not sharing with Brian. Everyone flirting, accents magnetically attracted to accents: everyone dusky, sexy, Spanish-speaking. Brian slips his hand to the back of his neck, trying to collect his wits, wishing for Javier’s dragonfly quickness. “I can understand—” he begins, just as the door flashes and Agathe pokes her head in, a bolt of gray pageboy swings forward.

“Mr. Muir? I’m terribly sorry—someone’s been waiting on line 2?”

Irked, Brian twists toward her, about to bark,
So
take a message—
but Fernanda is listening. He flips a hand in Javier’s direction. “Duty calls.”

“
YEAH, HI, UM, THIS IS NIEVES
?” a young voice says.

“Excuse me?”

“
Nieves
. Stanley’s girlfriend?”

There’s a minor ringing in his ears. “Um. I—I don’t—” He plunks back into his office chair. “I’m sorry—
who
is this?”

“Oh.” There’s a long pause. Then: “Did he not
tell
you about me?”

“I don’t know.” Brian places one hand on his desk. “He might have. What can I do for you?”

“It’s concerning—well—I just thought—I just wanted to make contact, you know? Only you don’t know about me. So, okay. This is weird now.”

“Excuse me, I—” He pats his keyboard very lightly with his open hand. Over his shoulder there are dark files of clouds reflected in the interior glass wall; it looks as if he is caught between cloud banks. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“I think I goofed here.”

Another pause. This time he can hear a swipe like a hand being squashed over the receiver, muffled voices in the background. “Hey—hello—is Stanley there?” He raises his voice. “I’d like to speak to my son.”

A muffled squeak. “I’m sorry—what?”

“I want to speak to Stanley.”

“Ha—me too.” Her voice is lightly serrated. “I can’t believe he—well, I’m embarrassed now. I’m sorry for troubling you.”

“That’s all right, dear. Why don’t you have Stan call me when he gets in?”

There’s a pause in which she seems to be weighing her answer. “Look, it’s—everything’s okay,” she says at last. “We’ll get back to you.” Then she hangs up.

BRIAN’S CALLS TO STANLEY’S
cell and office number go unanswered; he leaves messages at both:
Call your father
. Stanley is a bit of a local celebrity: the girl was probably some sort of crank. Brian sits back and stares at the bay that fills his windows. He thinks of a time, an hour like a silver-blue membrane, that covered him and his infant son, tucked into the crook of his arm, sitting in the creaking leather rocker. They were still in Ithaca and Stanley was six months old when Avis went back to work at the Demitasse Pâtisserie. She had to be at work each morning by 4:30, so Brian took over the early feedings with Stanley, then dropped him at day care on the way to his own job. Those recalled mornings possess a quality of translucence: Stanley’s bare shoulders, his curved fingers touching Brian’s lips, his gray eyes fixed on his father over the curve of the bottle. They breathed together into the slow drinking, Stanley’s body flung across Brian’s legs, his tiny arm flung back, his hand rhythmically crushing and releasing a lock of his own hair. Brian memorized the globe of his son’s forehead, the silk of his eyebrows, the frog-crouch of his legs. Avis was always bringing work home: their counters, refrigerator, and freezer were filled with boxes of danishes, layer cakes, and cookies, the kitchen was crowded with cake pans and rollers and an enormous, hunched-over Hobart; the whole house had the pink scent of sugar. He read to Stanley (reaching for the book with groping, swimmer’s fingers) about a witch who baked a gingerbread house to lure children. Brian felt as if he and Stanley were the children in this story and Avis the good witch who baked the house they all lived in.

Brian couldn’t imagine that things would ever be otherwise. But then somehow he lost his job. Dan, one of the partners at the firm in Syracuse, kindly made a few calls on his behalf, and Brian was able to tell Avis he’d been made a better offer, pure opportunity—perfect for their growing family. It was the truth: he just didn’t tell her that he’d been “laid off.” Didn’t mention that Dan had first expressed the feeling during an early performance review that Brian wasn’t sufficiently “tuned in” to their office “culture.” With her baker’s hours and physical work, she slept instantly and deeply and had no idea that Brian no longer slept well at night, his dreams laced with shreds of morning meetings, the dread of unmanageable research, massive client folders, the creak of his hated office chair. He’d finally drop off around two each night, then drag himself stupefied and shivering from the bed when the alarm went off at five.

Fortunately, business at Parkhurst, Irvington & Benstock was exploding, the
WSJ
filled with their ads luring land investors to South Florida. Back then, Miami seemed to drowse in a heat stupor; the highways were wide, gray, and quiet. The Everglades encroached on the roads—Brian could smell the swamp air and sulfurous mangroves—and every winter, black motes of vultures spun high overhead like genies. The city was lonely then, populated mostly by old folks. God’s waiting room. Yet, to his surprise, Brian loved the sun-soaked landscape.

His father, a litigation expert, had told Brian he was a fool to take the job—that he was trading earning potential for the security of a retainer. “You’ll be a kept man,” he insisted. “You’re too young to be playing it so safe. Hang up a shingle, take divorces. A little malpractice—just to get going. You’ll bag ten times as much inside of two years and have all the security you please. It’s billable hours, Bry, that’s all it comes down to. The hours.”—his father scratched at the loose skin under his neck—“What’s in Miami? The dying and the dead.”

Still, Parkhurst offered Brian enough that Avis could afford to start her at-home business. PI&B were her first clients: she supplied the Austrian chef at their executive dining hall with linzer tortes,
lebkuchen,
strudel, Black Forest cakes. Gradually other corporations and local businesses began to request her goods for retreats, conferences, and boardroom lunches. At the same time, Brian found he enjoyed working for a big developer. They hired brilliant architects and contractors; their buildings became part of the sharp, pale skyline. Brian believed he and Avis were helping to build an actual city—food and shelter—inside and outside. Unlike New York or Boston, Miami was a place you could go to and really create something new. Best of all, its boom-or-bust energy, a penchant for dreaming: a dream of a city in a dream of a state.

Avis hired assistants; they hosted dinner parties, bought a 34-foot Sea Ray, a twelfth-floor getaway on Marco Island. There were season tickets, box tickets: they joined the board of the Fairchild Garden; contributed to the Deering Estate.

Avis and Brian had lived in Miami for about ten years when the father of one of Stanley’s classmates invited Brian to an art opening. Brian wondered if there was something prohibitive in the nature of practicing law—he found it difficult and frequently stressful to connect with other men—at least to the point of real friendship. But there was something easy and agreeable about Albert. A publicity rep for the Miami Symphony, he was the sort of cultivated person Brian had tried to emulate as a student. Albert talked about opera and dance and “performance.” He saw hidden meanings in films and books—what he called the “layers” in things; he brought up the uses of symbolism in theater and music.

The opening was in one of the neighborhoods on the northwest outskirts of downtown—territory Brian had never ventured into before. The local denizens kept muscular, flat-headed dogs tied to ropes in the yards and each house was ringed by a chain-link fence. Albert parked on the street and they walked by a group of men with bandannas tied on their heads. One yelled at Brian, “Yo,
suit
! What up, homes?” The “gallery” turned out to be a private home—the owner, a Haitian-American collector—had bought and connected several little cottages, making a rambling, warren-like space, every wall covered with canvases. Brian had expected to be bored, but he was electrified by the work: seven- and ten-foot-high canvases of nudes—their faces torn at and broken with slashes of paint, their eyes like open wounds. They stopped in front of one canvas—an image of a woman with a rippling chest and blotted black eyes.

“What do you think about that?” Albert asked.

Brian was startled, disoriented by how deeply the work affected him. There didn’t seem to be any meaningful way for him to put words to what he was experiencing.

Albert stood next to him, nodding. “Strong, isn’t it? The image has depth and dimensions. Makes you feel there’s an actual presence here. Maybe even like she’s angry with us.”

“I suppose so—that’s it,” Brian said.

“I think that challenging work—it kind of takes your words away.” Albert nudged his glasses with a knuckle. “Not everyone really lets the experience in—I mean, like you are now. People love to try to talk over everything.” Albert engaged a woman in a sinuous dress in bantering conversation and rattled off the names of prominent Haitian and Cuban artists: Brian had heard of none. Apparently the artist whose work they were viewing was from a town called Gonaïves, on the northern coast of Haiti. “Of course there’s plenty for this artist to be angry about,” Albert said. “Before he became famous, he had to rely on missionaries for art supplies. He would go without food so that he could buy paints. And the political situation there, well . . .”

When Brian and Albert left the gallery, Brian was buoyed by the images he’d seen—the deep slashes through the paint, the skin rippling with sinew, and sudden, unearthly glimpses of bone. He felt vividly how his young son would love this sort of thing—the outlaw gallery and humble neighborhood.

It had grown darker. Brian looked around at the still street: a streetlamp burned out at the corner, the shrunken houses and ragged patches of grass, gray in the low light. On the way to the car, he heard voices—people gathered in a front yard, a burst of laughter, the quiet slap and tick of dominoes. There was a scrabbling movement along the gutter: rats? At the end of the block, something fetid and black pooled in the center of the street. A gray scarf of smoke rose from a bonfire—children tossing in sticks and bits of trash: the air was thick and watery, as if the convergence of shared history had a visible weight. It occurred to Brian that the people on this street were from the same island the artist had come from. He stared at the reflections sparkling in the passenger window and didn’t speak for the rest of the ride back.

BRIAN PUSHES AWAY
from the desk. The phone is silent for once, emails blink on the screen. He regards the crowded sky high above the horizon, filled with thunderheads and a silken light the same shade of gray as the lining of his grandfather’s coat. The forecasters are merrily predicting an “active season.” His thoughts leap to the house, the weight in the halls, the unlit rooms he’ll come home to if—as he expects—Avis returns without having seen Felice. He checks his watch: 12:37. He closes his eyes with a brief fervent wish that his wife isn’t waiting alone at some café table.