Birds of Paradise: A Novel (26 page)

“But you shouldn’t!” He tries again. “I’m
glad
you told me. I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“Oh, please don’t,” she says with a laugh. She glances at him from the corners of her eyes. “It’s all fine. I’m learning a lot from Jack—we’re having a great time together. We get each other. It’s a very simple relationship.”

He frowns at the road. “I don’t see how you can say that.”

“Why not?”

“Why not!” He lifts his hands from the wheel. “The power dynamics. He’s too old and rich and you’re too smart for this kind of thing.”

He turns into the South Miami shopping district: UM students jaywalk in front of the SUV, apparently convinced of their immortality. Brian turns down a side street and pulls into one of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the Whip ’n Dip. This was the place his children had wanted to go when they tired of pastries.

Fernanda’s eyes darken with laughter. “Ice cream?”

He feels the back of his neck grow hot and wonders if he should pretend to be making a joke. But she’s already pushing open the passenger door.

Fernanda orders a small cup of vanilla and Brian asks for a black coffee. They walk down the block to the small park and settle on a wooden bench She smiles and faces him. “I’m flattered that you’ve been worried for me. Really. But things are good. I don’t want to change any of it. And I don’t want to leave my job.”

“Oh, I don’t think that you—”

Fernanda sighs, a subtle lilt, instantly raising apprehension in Brian. “Do you remember Vicky Asafi? She used to work in H.R.? Really cute blonde, late twenties?”

Brian watches her a moment, nods slowly. “Her husband got transferred someplace. To Atlanta?”

“Did you ever meet Vicky’s husband?”

Brian doesn’t answer. He studies Fernanda’s eyes.

“Because, you know what, she didn’t have a husband,” Fernanda continues. “That was just a story they cooked up. She was having an affair with Jack and when she decided to break things off, she was ‘let go.’ ”

He lowers his eyes. Of course. “She could’ve brought charges against him.”

Fernanda shifts back on the bench and gazes into her ice cream. “Yes, gone through an ugly, protracted sexual harassment trial, the full legal weight of PI&B, leading to uncertain results: no job references, that’s for sure. Or she could just start her life over somewhere.” She tucks the spoon in her cup. “Be done with it.” Her voice, in trying to sound untroubled, seems to trip. “Thanks but no thanks, Brian. I need my job. More than that, I
like
my job.”

Brian takes a sip of coffee but it’s sour. He walks to the wire trash container and tosses the Styrofoam cup. His head is filled with coppery echoes. He gazes at her as he returns to the bench: her eyes seem heavier, like a sleepy child’s, her lips are plum-colored, sulky. She places one hand on the elbow of his jacket, an infinitesimally delicate touch. He inhales strands of perfume and vanilla ice cream and recalls the Regaleses’ yard—the white adobe house, its front lawn filled with waxy starfruits, their sweet, sweat-ish funk, and the nodding gardenia blooms. She frowns and looks patient and sympathetic. “Brian, if it makes you feel any better—I do think you care about me and are trying to protect me.”

There’s a flicker of warmth at the base of his chest as he watches her. “But you see—you understand—” He opens his hands. “That story you just told me? That’s exactly why all of this—with Jack—it has to end. It just—it isn’t right for you.”

Her smile is almost transparent. She looks different out in the natural light—younger and plainer and more lovely. “How exactly do you know what is good for me? What do you suppose you know about me?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I know what isn’t good for you.” Brian lowers his gaze.

She sits back against the bench, a honeycomb of tree-filtered light illuminating her hair, the dot of silver sparkling at the center of her clavicle. “My father says, To know the person you have to know the tribe.”

“So he’d say I have to know your family? To give you advice?”

“Something like that.” She lifts her face: the day is mild. Overhead, white smudges of cloud drift past, bits of steam from a teakettle. “My grandparents and my mother left Cuba with nearly their whole synagogue. My mother—for years, she told me—she used to cry over the little group that stayed behind—always worrying would they ever survive. Afraid Castro would just—” She lifted the flat of one hand, her fingers straightened, nearly curved backwards, her head slowly shaking in a kind of denial. “Mother used to think in ten or twenty years that there wouldn’t be any of us—any Jews at all left in Cuba.”

Emboldened by this bit of personal information, Brian asks, “And your father? Did he come with them?”

She drops her hand. “
Papi?
He’s just Catholic. That’s what he liked to say, just-Catholic. He came here before my mother did—with his family. My parents made a big scandal when they fell in love—mixing religions.
Papi
said—first my mother’s people survive the Pharaoh, then Hitler, then they have to go out and find Castro—that’s professional suffering.” She smiles at her scraped-out cup of ice cream. “The truth is—my parents went through so much just to be together, I think it burned most of the religious feeling out of them. We didn’t go to any services when I was growing up. There were just a few things—the silver candlestick holders. Sometimes my mother lit them and said the Friday blessing. Sometimes, braided bread—challah. A pewter mezuzah by the door—I thought it had special powers. That’s all. Oh, and
Papi
said he gave me his Catholic guilt.”

“So if you weren’t raised in a traditionally—”

She’s already shaking her head. “There are some things that—go deeper. More than prayers. There’s a way of seeing who you are that remains—after everything else.” She says this delicately, like a doctor delivering complicated news.

Her clean hair falling forward and her back so straight and brave, Fernanda looks to Brian as if she could be twelve years old. He feels another twist of protectiveness toward her. Leaning closer . . . Ah yes. The silver sparkle is a tiny Star of David on a short silver chain. It rests there like an amulet, investing her with layers of private history. He should, he thinks, be able to draw on his education and experience—all those years of helping others in their restless goals, years of observing ambition and power—in order to help Fernanda. Did he learn nothing from losing his daughter? “I’m not like him,” he blurts. “I’d never try to take anything from you.”

“I know that!” Fernanda presses his hand between both of hers. “And I’m grateful for your friendship. Honestly, you have no idea. But, Brian, you know what? I’m
happy
.” An indentation forms on the verge of her left jaw. She smiles, brushing away a wisp of hair. “I love adventures. I love men. All kinds,” she says with a little laugh that stabs him to the quick. “I’ve learned from my parents that this world—well—amazing, impossible things can happen out of the clear blue sky. Dictators, pogroms. I don’t want to marry Jaime Roth, who took me to my high school prom, and lead a pure, holy, traditional life keeping house and producing babies—as my mother would like. Oh, it doesn’t matter that she didn’t do it—that only makes her want it all the more for
me
 . . . I want to have another kind of life. A life like my mother’s.” She pauses, scrutinizing him: Brian notices the lilac tint of her lids and looks down at his lap, subtle emotion moving in him, a roll of smoke inside a glass bottle. “It’s very basic,” she says. “Don’t expect your kids to want the things that
you
didn’t want.”

Avis

A
VIS PRESSES THE PHONE AGAINST HER EAR HARD
enough to leave an impression. The sun is barely up, but Stanley has always been an early riser like his father. He answers on the fifth ring, “Yes, Mother?” He responds to her questions with one-word snippets—terse, but unable even now to cut her off entirely. So she learns: the baby is due late November, they don’t and won’t know the gender (Nieves doesn’t want to know), Nieves feels
hurt
and
disappointed
in Avis. Stanley feels
whatever
.

She walks through the house with the phone as she humbly receives these tiny, wounding words. She fingers her chopped hair; peers through the French doors to the back. As Stanley confirms that, yes, they need the money, yes, the market really
is
in danger, Avis flicks on the TV, volume low. On the Weather Channel, a fleecy mass hovers due east of the Turks and Caicos, about to head for South Florida; an announcer mutters predictions in a dire tone:
wind speeds, organized system, making landfall
 . . . Avis sits heavily on the couch only half hearing her son, imagining the food- and water-hoarding scene at Publix. It’s been several years since the last real hurricane came through, but she remembers it well: the shuddering “outer bands” of rain, the hollow clap of the silver palms, the susurration of the fronds, archways of blowing branches.

“So if there’s nothing else, Mom . . .”

Already dismissing her. She holds the phone with both hands. “You do know there’s a hurricane coming? Thursday? It’s on the TV right now. It looks big.”

There’s a pause just long enough for a muted sigh. “You’ll be fine, Mom.”

“No—I know, but I’d like
you
to come. Or—or at least—” she stammers. “Please—just be careful,” she finishes in desperation.

THE SPIKING HUMIDITY
is a disaster for her baking. She has to discard two batches of meringues that turn soft. She’d abandon puff pastry for the whole summer if she could, but the customers want their crisp, light crusts. Avis sets up her usual stations of flours and spices. At 7 a.m. it’s already so hot she assumes Solange won’t come out. But a half hour later, as Avis is stirring cocoa nibs into a vanilla batter, she glances at the window and spots her neighbor squatting at the edge of her yard. “Not in your usual place,” she calls from the door.

Solange stands nimbly, and Avis sees her apron contains dark strips. “There are interesting things in your yard.” She leads Avis to the stubby bushes in the far corner, a place their landscapers have elected to prune and ignore, instead of doing the more surgical work of weeding. “Here’s a plant going to waste.” Solange strokes the long, spiny branches between her fingers. “This is good medicine. You boil it for tea, for restorative properties.” She picks the quills, adding them to her apron. “This is granny bush—you use it for women’s trouble—pain and bleeding.”

Avis looks around at the land she’s inhabited for nearly thirty years. Years ago, when she’d studied the constructions of stem, blade, stamen, ovule, she loved the infinite possibilities of the plant kingdom—but she had been interested in color, scent, presentation: the beautiful names—cloth-of-gold crocus; ash-leaved trumpet, star-of-Bethlehem; meadow saffron—the loveliness of a blown field of asters or irises, a ring of roses to bed a wedding cake, the careful depiction of a peony in cross section on the page, a gentian constructed in icing. She knew all about beauty and almost nothing of utility. “All kinds of good things here,” Solange says again, her fingers combing the weeds. “You boil that thistle to cure asthma—its sap will take away warts. The leaves of that lime tree are fine for the skin, the guava calms the stomach and nerves. Over there? The bark on your lignum vitae regulates the system.” She stands, one hand holding up the pouch of stems, the other pointing out plants.

Avis plucks a stem of a pointed, glossy leaf that’s established itself in that far corner. Solange says, Wild coffee. Avis holds it under her nose, studying the musty green fragrance. “Could I bake with this?”

“You roast the seeds, to make a brew.”

Avis smiles, twirling the bit of twig. “My son would love this.”

Solange lifts her head so the sun turns her dark irises amber. “I told my son that there used to be one flavor only. Everything was pressed together. The universe, the people, animals, vegetables, dirt, water—everything—in the smallest seed. That’s what people try to do—eat and touch small pieces of the world to try and get back into the whole thing again. Sweet and sour. That is how bush medicine works.”

Surprised to hear about a son, Avis glances at her. Solange lifts her fingers to Avis’s hair, a spidery touch at the side of her head. “Come here.” She leads her to the step to the French doors. Just beside the step is a squat weed. Solange touches Avis’s head again—it’s almost painful, the shame of her thinning hair. “This . . .” Solange bends and pinches the shoots between her fingertips. “It’s called Braziletto. You boil the leaves and sip the tea. It fortifies the blood. Your hair will stop falling.” She places the leaf in Avis’s palm. “Will calm your pulse as well.”

Avis stares at it. Then she notices Solange’s stillness. She follows her gaze to the empty windows of the house, the black reflections, as if the building were filled with stormwater. She picks some of the little shoots. “Where is your son now?”

Solange smiles, her eyes untouched. “I had to leave him. He’s back home there.”

Avis needs to creep into some shade, out of the blistering heat, but now she can’t move; the breath rushes in and out of her. “How old is he? Is he with family?”

“Yes. All the family is there.” Solange sorts through the herbs in her apron, running the twigs between her fingers. “His name is Antoine and he’s the very best in his class. He is wonderful with a soccer ball too, but he can’t keep hold on it.” Her lips part. “He’s too softhearted and he gives the ball away. He’s the fastest and strongest, but no one wants him on their team.”

“That must have been so hard.” Avis’s voice is low. “For you and your husband—not to be able to bring him with you.” Solange closes her fingers around another sprig and doesn’t say anything. Avis says, “I have a daughter who—she doesn’t live with us. She hasn’t, for years. It breaks my heart, every day.”

Solange looks up from her sorting. “Oh yes.” It seems she doesn’t say this so much in sympathy as in acknowledgment of a basic truth. “Of course.”

“Is there a remedy for that?” She means to say this lightly but she sounds serious.

Solange’s eyes flicker to her face, examining and curious. Then her thin fingers wrap around Avis’s wrist. “I don’t know. We’ll see about it.”

Avis follows Solange across the yard, following the path she’d taken on the day she’d felt so furious about a noisy bird. Weeks ago: it seems like years. They go up the rough cement step and enter an enclosed back porch which contains another birdcage: this one is smaller, made of silvery metal; it hangs from a hook in the ceiling. The bird rests there purring as the women enter. Avis glances around as they go into the house, but the shades and curtains are drawn and the windows behind them are open, so the interior is dark and sleekly sultry. The kitchen seems to be the only room lit with natural brightness: the slats of the blinds are turned open, so the room has a clear, marine light. Solange seats Avis at a table on metal pipe legs with a Formica top and Avis cannot help an evaluative scan of the kitchen: no appliances beyond an enamel refrigerator and stove—small and clean. The dainty refrigerator like an old-fashioned icebox.

Solange holds a cast-iron pan under the tap, then places it on the stove’s coil. “There are varieties of pain . . .” She begins removing jars from the cupboard. “It’s simple fact, not sorcery. I don’t believe in spells—I only know in some way the idea of a spell is powerful. You have to be careful—that kind of stuff leaves a residue behind.”

Avis holds her forearms propped on the table. On the counter across from her, tiny green chilies float in a clear liquid, as if suspended in light. Stacked beside the jar there are bundles of sprigs and leaves bound together with a kind of raffia. The unfamiliarity of these objects give them an allure, a glistening touch of the unknowable. On the opposite counter, Avis notices several small woven grass effigies—birds and squirrels—of the sort that were tied to the trees. Solange plucks one up and places it before Avis. “These are just things that I make. Ideas. You may have this if you like.”

Avis picks it up. Woven entirely from waxy green blades of grass, its upper half appears to be that of a woman, her arms outstretched in a U-shape, as if calling to someone, her lower half tapering into a fishtail. “You made this? It’s beautiful.”

“Avis,” Solange pronounces her name with sharp emphasis on the second syllable,
Ah-vees
. “It’s only grass.” She pours a steaming pale yellow tea into two strained mugs, then she places a mug before Avis and sits in the other chair, its cracked vinyl back patched with cellophane tape. “The lady of our house had me baptized and raised me with Catholic instruction. My mother taught me that the world is crowded with gods—they live in all kinds of places and you can call on them. It seemed to me that both systems believed in slicing through.” She moves the edge of her hand through the air. “To reach worlds beyond the world. Using prayers to carry us.”

Avis lifts the hot mug, enjoying the sensation of heat in her palm, thinking of her mother’s heaven of completion and return. “What do you believe?”

Solange inclines her face toward the surface of her tea. “I try never to believe anything at all. If I start believing things, I might believe that the universe is a dead door, that we all get crushed.”

Avis thinks of her mother’s last days in the hospital: a shared room with a plastic room divider, a scrape of dry coughing on the other side of the divider. She felt brutal as a captor, refusing to bring her mother home to die. In her last days, her mother wouldn’t eat anything more than ice chips. She railed in one of her old languages, muttering over and over some sort of imprecation, something that sounded like
haya kharra
. When Avis noticed the way a young orderly turned his face away from Geraldine’s ranting, Avis stopped him, “You understand her, don’t you. What is she saying?” The young man hesitated. When Avis pressed him, he finally said, “Life is shit.”

Solange’s hand sweeps across the Formica as if straightening a tablecloth. “I believe in small rituals: cleaning dishes, minding the plants. Other such processes.”

Red-black petals, a wooden pencil case, a small purple satin sash, a string of beads with a delicate white cross. Solange moves around the house collecting and placing these items in a canvas bag. She asks Avis to take her to her own kitchen. They cross the yard again; Avis shyly leads Solange through the French doors and then the door to the right. She feels self-conscious over the cool beauty of the room, afraid she’ll be offended by such a display of wealth, and watches Solange as she turns, looking, not touching anything. But she simply asks, “Where are your husband and son? This would work better if they were with us.”

Avis imagines their reactions to Solange and her spell-casting—if that’s what this is. Brian, she’s fairly certain, would be mortified. And Stanley, it seems, would be curious, polite, and distracted. She extracts an old photo of herself, Brian, and Stanley on some sort of excursion. Solange studies it a moment, then includes it with the other items. “Now, what would you make for your daughter—if she were to come home tomorrow? What would it be?”

For a moment, Avis is motionless, intimidated, studying the cold tang of the stainless bowls, their perfect emptiness. Solange picks a small bowl out of its nest of bowls and hands this to Avis. “Don’t think so much,” she says—the voice of someone used to ordering a staff.

Avis takes the bowl, coolness on her fingertips. She has no
mise,
no utensils; she reaches into the flour and sugar with clean hands,
running her fingers through powder. Her palm warms the butter; she pours in a drop of almond extract, then splits a vanilla pod with her paring knife, scraping in the seed caviar. One of the simplest cakes that she knows. Solange leans against the counter as Avis stirs wet ingredients into the dry, making the batter. “Where I grew up,” she says, “sugar is a luxury. Though I didn’t know this until I left the great house. Then I discovered—the people where I’m from, they live and die in these magnificent cane fields.” She idly turns one of the bowls on the counter. “Sugar is like a compass. It points to trouble. My husband used to travel to plantations across the border—the other side of the island. Until the new man came to power and then people began to find the cutters’ bodies hacked into pieces.”

Avis is afraid to look at Solange: the air is tinted with sugar vapor: it is, of course, the one irreducible element in her work—no matter what else is added or taken away. “Which is what makes it such a strong thing.” Solange’s tone is almost conversational. “Sweet in the mouth, terrible to the body. The cane cutters never get to taste it. Never like this.” She draws one finger through the sparkling crystals in the bin.

As she works, Avis feels as if the woman’s voice has set something loose in her, a private mourning. Her spoon turns a long, continuous ribbon through the batter: heavier and heavier. Avis’s private tragedy with all its pain seems to shrink. She begins to wonder if there’s any point at all to pastry work—it’s irrelevant, even absurd. Ease and comfort: lotus-eating, Stanley called it. Escapism, gluttony, corruption, self-indulgence. He never adds sugar to his coffee. Avis isn’t stirring correctly; her hands feel weak. Finally Solange takes the bowl and pours it into the cake pan. She slides it into the hot oven and lets the heavy door rumble shut.

when the cake is
cool enough to box, they take it to Avis’s car, Solange on the passenger side. She says, “Where is the last place you saw her?”

Avis places her hands on the bottom of the steering wheel. The first time she saw her daughter after she’d run away for good, Felice was taller and slimmer, her hair longer: she’d been away from home for six months, long enough to be physically changed. A deep shaking began in the quick of Avis’s bones. She was torn between the need to touch her daughter, to hold her tightly, and the sense that even the lightest touch might cause her to flee back to her underworld. There was a new downturned shadow to Felice’s mouth and her lowered eyelashes cast crescents of shadow on her cheeks: she had a faintly exhausted quality which trickled through her posture. She could have been fourteen or twenty-eight—she was poised, self-possessed. As soon as she folded her long limbs onto the café chair across from Avis, she’d said, “I’d like to make a deal with you.”