Birds of Paradise: A Novel (5 page)

He chuckles, letting his hand fall off his head. “I know.”

“And the
toilet
—”

“I know.”

Felice drops her board to the pavement and rests one foot on it. “Hey man, I gotta be going now. I got stuff to get to.”

“Like what?” Emerson studies her face with interest.

“Like, I don’t know.” She almost says: Like, I got to go meet my mother and beg her for money. “I gotta see if I can scrounge work.” Also true. She pushes off on a slow spin, but he follows on foot. “Where do you work?”

“Off Seventeenth.”

“You’re a model, aren’t you? I knew it.”

She rolls her eyes and steers around a couple of men in business suits who turn when Emerson says
model
. “I’m not a
model
-model,” she drawls. “Obviously. I don’t stay in their little palaces. I model, like, tattoos. Or other crap—watches and sandals and shit.”

There’s a section toward the north end of Lummus Park called the Cove where Felice and Berry and Reynaldo and some of the other kids go. They’ll lie out or sit near the beach entrance with Frappuccinos and sometimes a gig will come along. Sometimes they won’t feel like doing anything. It gets so hot out there, the sun melting the thick bright air into orange honey, she just wants to curl up and sleep out her life. Exactly what Micah, one of the modeling scouts, is always harping on:
You want to throw it all away? That’s great, that’s your own damn choice.

When she was still at home, Felice ran around with boys and tried pot and stayed out late: she’d thought she was wild—but she’d had no idea what wild was. She knows that now. By the time she got to the beach, she was dried up inside like a cicada husk. The thing that happened to Hannah had done that to her. It was like there was nothing left of her; she slept outdoors all the time back then, with her legs cinched in a knot against her chest, like she’d dried in that position and one stiff breeze off the water would sweep her away.

Sometimes she can’t help it and she sees Hannah in the east field, sweeping her hand through the grass, saying, “Basically, your choices are you can be smart or pathetic. And you can be good or truly evil.”

“Then I want to be smart and good.” Felice sat cross-legged in the grass.

“Possible, but that hardly ever happens in nature.”

“So what are you?”

She smiled a long, slow, tipping smile. “Smart and evil. Like my dad. And my mother is pathetic but good. That happens to mothers a lot. Which is why you should never be one.”

“Not my mom,” Felice said. “She’s the least pathetic person I know.”

Hannah just kept looking at her with that subtle smile, her lips bitten and dark and her eyes like seawater.

Now Felice is almost eighteen, and she’s tried so hard to turn into something new. But every day there’s dancing and drugs spread hand to hand—silver pipes, tabs that melt away on the tongue, medical-looking hypodermics, capsules and all the names, letters—E, H, MDA . . . And Felice knows she’s lucky because she’s afraid of needles—fear like a part of her circulatory system—a source of shame and protection. She needs money now if she’s really going to get out of the Green House. So perhaps one of the stores on Lincoln Road, one of the blaring European boutiques, will need a website model, or possibly some people from Benetton, or Ton Sur Ton, or Boden will come out on the beach combing for their scruffier “real life” catalog models, and she’ll land a gig that pays $750, maybe a thousand bucks a day for a couple of days.

Maybe her mother will give her some cash. Maybe she’ll let herself ask this time.

“Really, I gotta get going,” she says to Emerson, though she stays at a slow roll.

“Can I come?”

She feels irritated again. “You want to come?”

He smiles again—the expression so restrained it’s almost conspiratorial—and says, “Yeah. Please. I’d really like that.”

SHE’S NOT WILLING
t
o admit that they’re together—even for a walk. He’s too big and odd and ungainly. So she stays onboard, skates at a crawl—which would’ve driven her crazy in the past. She abruptly cuts away from the crowds, veering right, passing the edifices of Eden Roc and the Fontainebleau, turning south on Collins’ coral-pink sidewalk. Across the street, the narrow blue cut of Indian Creek glows with a crinkled sheen. Felice tries to roll ahead of Emerson, but he’s surprisingly good at keeping up and apparently doesn’t mind breaking into a trot if she pushes it. “So like do you have a last name?” She doesn’t look at him when she asks, because nearly everything she says seems to make him smile, which seems like a sign of weakness or supplication. Instead she just stares down the pink sidewalk, the nostalgic white beach apartments on one side, an eternity of SUVs on the other.

“Officially or what?” He smiles and she looks away, glaring. “Lindemann, I guess. I don’t really use it so much. It’s not like my stage name or anything.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, rolling her eyes. Everyone in the whole world is in a band or trying to start one up. “So, fine, what is your stage name?” She sighs.

He speeds up, jogs backwards in front of Felice. “I’m just thinking something—just—shorter? Easier for announcers to say. Like, Lind. You know, like, Emerson Lind? And it doesn’t sound so
achtung
that way, you know, so
I’ll be back
.” He lowers his voice into a Schwarzenegger impression. Then, in the same round, guttural accent, he says, “Yah, der he is, ladies und gentlemen, Emerson Lindemann.”

Felice can’t help a burst of laughter. “What are you even talking about? What announcers?”

For a second, Emerson keeps smiling but doesn’t say anything, a red mottling appears in his skin (she feels sorry for him, he’s such a transparent, white-guy color). “I forgot I didn’t tell you yet.” He falls back to keep pace beside her. “I always feel like all of us from the House already know about each other.” He doesn’t seem to be willing to look at her now; instead he’s fixed on the sidewalk. He smiles again, more intensely, and Felice realizes that at least some of the smiling is nerves and she softens toward him a bit. “I-I’m in training,” he says in a lowered voice. “I’m going to enter strongman competitions.”

“You what now?”

“They’re these big contests—of strength. It’s always on TV—like a sporting event. You can make a lot of money if you get known. Caber toss, stone put? Started with the Scots. The Highland games?”

Felice slants a frowning glance at him.

“These days there’s usually a truck pull and a tire flip.”

Now, with her board rumbling easily along the cement, Felice gives him a long, frank look. “Are you kidding? You mean, like, those guys who drag around tree trunks and junk? That stuff?”

They pass two girls and a Pomeranian jittering like a windup toy. “I’m not saying I’m gonna walk right out there and pick up trophies. I know I don’t have the muscle mass yet. But I’m close. Training hard, almost every day. I jog and walk the boardwalk twice a day.”

“And I thought you’d followed me here,” she says, joking yet privately disappointed.

“They let me into the Gold’s on Fourteenth. Herman and Ileana—they’re trainers there. They’ve been helping me out. They say I’ve got natural explosive power. We’re keeping it totally pure—no juicing, no additives. I’m working out three, four hours a day—arms, back, grip strength, everything. The manager said if I pick up a trophy at the regionals this spring he’ll sponsor me. He says I could go national.”

Felice closes her eyes, just enjoying hearing about the future. It’s not like the kind of dreaming all those waste products at the House or the yuppie losers out on Cocowalk are always doing—fame and money—everyone hanging around at Mansion or Nikki Beach or Crobar, like dancing and shit was going to transform them into Paris or Lindsay or Britney. Famous girls were always hanging around, wearing their fedoras, giggling in a knot of stoned celebutante friends, kids waving cell cameras at them, so you felt like you really were one of them already. Except the truly famous girls stuck to the clubs’ VIP lounges and woke up in their suites at the Delano, and the beach kids woke up back on the sand or even worse places than that.

Felice quits kicking, lets her board slow, and closes her eyes again. Daring herself, she keeps them closed and lifts one hand; her fingers pat a series of curling palm fronds—tap, tap, tap, tap. She lets the board roll to a stop, cants back her head, evaluating him through lowered lids. “Prove it.”

“Prove it what? You mean, like what—”

“That you’re all strong, like you say.”

He lifts and drops his hands: Felice notes the way his shoulders flare behind his shirt. “I could take you to the gym . . .”

She presses her lips together skeptically and kicks off on her board again. “Ever you say, Chief.” They pass a bank of police cars parked half on the curb. Cops standing around in tight black uniforms, hands on their hips, narrowly eyeing Emerson and Felice. Once they’re well down the block, she tosses her head so her hair flips across her back. “No, fuck the gym. You strong guys supposedly drag anchors and crap around, right? Can’t you, like, break a branch in half with your bare hands or something?”

“Depends on the branch.”

“Okay.” She jumps off her board abruptly and stomps the end, flipping it into her hand. “So go pick up that car over there, how about?” She gestures to a Hummer that looks like it’s been dipped in black lacquer.

“
That
car? It weighs like five tons,” Emerson says. “Plus it’ll totally have a car alarm.” He gazes at her, her haughty chin. “Wait.” He heads toward the line of parallel parked cars and picks a rusting lime-green Impala convertible. “All right,” he says grimly. He stands in front of the car, rubs his hands together, huffing a little as if hyperventilating, and drops into a squat. “All right, all right,” he mutters.

Felice watches in silence as Emerson bends and the big muscles in his back fan out, and she sees—even before he’s fully gripped the car—that he really can do it, and then he’s lifting the front end of the car, one, two feet off the ground, up, holding it in place, then he or the car is making a deep, shuddering moan, lowering quickly. He lets go and the car falls, its frame bouncing with a crash. He turns, his face red. “Okay?” Then, gasping, “That—right there—called a power clean.”

Felice wasn’t aware of her hand drifting to her mouth, a flash of adrenaline.

He recovers sufficiently to smile, his face red. “You see that? Now you know. If that car there ran over you, I could save you. Nobody else could do that.”

Felice thinks of saying, Yeah, as long as it wasn’t a Hummer. Instead she nods. “Yeah, I guess.”

HE LIKES TO TALK
this Emerson, unlike pretty much any boy she’s ever met. The punks and skinheads Emerson hangs out with get drunk and loud, their shouting and cursing like smashing windows. Emerson talks like a boy who’s been stranded in his thoughts—coherent yet odd, twisted into abstract designs.

“Just, the way I look at it is I think the mind is like a muscle, too,” he’s saying, ducking under the crimson spray of a bottlebrush tree. They circle an elderly couple, shuffling, facing the ground, hand in hand. “You just got to train it—like any other part of your body. I mean, like, you have to, if you ever want the other muscles to respond.”

“You mean, like—” Felice scowls at the sidewalk. Somehow Emerson got her to get off her board and go on foot—her least favorite form of locomotion. She won’t let him carry her board. “Like, your actual brain is a muscle? Can you move it?”

Emerson stops on the sidewalk, then starts again. “I like that. I don’t know the answer, but I like the idea of it. Moving your brain. But no, I mean, more like, the
mind,
consciousness, thought.”

“How could thoughts be a
muscle
?”

He slides his hands into his pockets. “I
know,
but they are. And also, your muscles are a mind. Muscles feel stuff and think stuff and sense, all of that, and they, like communicate with the main mind and tell it stuff. So everything in you, every part of you is
mind
in the end.”

“And your mind is a muscle,” she repeats in a low inflection, not quite a question.

“That’s right.”

She glances uncertainly at Emerson’s smiling, preoccupied profile. Felice can’t tell if he’s a little bit scary and mental, or maybe a lot smarter than she’d thought. Back at the House, she’d seen him roaring with his stupid friends, ripping open beers and smashing cans on his head. “Where do you get this crap?” She is carefully dismissive.

He shrugs. “Everywhere. All that lifting gives you time to think about how things work. That’s when I do my best thinking. Picking up heavy stuff and putting it back down again? After a while it’s boring.”

Felice and Emerson enter the busier commercial area of South Beach: passing rows of pastel apartment buildings, hotels like old toys, glimpses of azure ocean floating in the distance, the sidewalk filled with tourists. Doddering elderly, like shipwreck survivors. “So . . . so,” Felice fumbles to redirect things, unwilling to try to keep up with Emerson in his
mind
terrain. “. . . So, if you’re thinking about all this smart crap, then why do you hang around with a bunch of skinhead losers?”

The hand returns to the top of his head. “Skinheads?”

“Duh, like Peckham, Earl, Moe,” she goes on in a pitiless, dry voice, surprised that she even cares. “Axe, Derek . . .”

Emerson frowns. “Naah. Skinheads are a bunch of jackasses—I’m not into that.”

Her laugh is bright. “Well duh that’s kind of exactly what you look like with your head all shaved—those guys in their stupid wife-beaters and tats and piercings and shit. Like a bunch of Hitler Youth assholes.”

He laughs too. “
Heil
. Right,
heil
.”

“You do!”

“Yeah,
Heil Hitler,
man,” he whoops. Two sunburnt tourists slide their eyes in his direction as they pass; one old woman in a floral top and skirt gives him a bright, venomous stare, her face hard as a walnut. “Whoa!” Emerson sputters.