Birds of Paradise: A Novel (6 page)

Felice cringes. She’d thought the old woman was going to spit at them. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, man?” she snaps.

He quiets then, his smile diminished, and shrugs.

“I don’t know if you’re stupid or crazy or whatever you are.”

“Both maybe. I’m whatever,” he says lightly, but his head is ducked.

“Such stupid shit. Stupid fucking-ass thing to say. What are you, twelve years old?”

He doesn’t say anything. She wonders then if she should be more cautious: something comes back to her—something about Emerson being “away.” It occurs to Felice that Emerson was frequently absent from the Green House. Whenever he reappeared, the other skinheads made remarks about him
escaping,
escaping
that place
.

They cross the wide busy mess of Seventeenth Street, scrolls of driveways and entrances, pass girls in platform espadrilles, baby doll shirts, shirtless boys with cargo shorts like Emerson’s hanging loose around their hips; a couple pushing toddlers in a wide stroller; two ladies with big, ridged breast implants, Botox-sleek foreheads. Felice studies the women critically as they approach—one looks like she’s had a face-lift, a faintly demonic rise to the outer corners of the eyebrows; both of them are wearing halters and kick-pleat miniskirts; one has a quilted Chanel purse on a chain sinking into her shoulder. They cast intent glances at Felice as they pass and Felice looks away. Youth beats money.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Emerson says as they pass another clutch of tourists; a squat boy goes by on a skateboard wearing a T-shirt that says
Lost in Margaritaville
and nods at Felice, noticing her board. “Really. I’m not a skinhead. I’m not like that. I’m not a Hitler-guy or anything. I guess some of those guys might be, but they’re morons. I was just goofing around.” His voice lowers. “Stupid.”

“Fine,” Felice pulls the wind-pasted hair from her face. “Get a grip.”

They cross Lincoln Road where Felice recalls—swift drop—she’s supposed to meet her mother today.
Fuck
. Felice had called her, hadn’t she? What time was
that
supposed to happen? Noon? She tries to make out the time on a neon clock in one of the shopwindows, but it’s in the shape of a flamingo, impossible to read. They cross Sixteenth and almost get hit by a stretch jeep pulling into Lowe’s; a gang of teenyboppers standing in a Bentley convertible shriek at them, their voices like shredded ribbons. “I so hate this place,” Emerson says.

“It’s fun,” Felice says defensively. She shields her eyes, then relents: “It’s more fun if you don’t live here.”

He glances at her. “Yeah.”

They head back to the smooth brick boardwalk, cutting between hotels, the white cabanas and silver bellhop carts, past cheap jewelry vendors, soap bubbles spiriting over the walkway, to their right, sprinklings of salsa music, oiled bodies on massage tables. Prisms hang in a silvery mist from the hotel fountains. To their left, walls of jasmine and sea grape trees, the beach perimeter plumed and swaying with sawgrass and sea oats. They turn into the Fifteenth Street entrance, set off by keystone pillars, white ropes protecting the sparse patches of sea grass. In the distance, beyond the royal palms, blue umbrellas and awnings flap in the breeze; the sand is already scorching. She can feel it kicking up under her flip-flops. There are kids sprawled on towels all over the sand, listening to radios, drinking beer; a Frisbee arcs through the pale blue.

Turning north toward the Cove, they run into Reynaldo and Berry. They’re lying in a drifting spot of shade under a stand of palms, stretched out on smuggled hotel beach towels, a gold interlocked
DH
embroidered on the edge. Both of them are so diminutive, with the same blue-black eyes, they look like brother and sister. Sometimes they get hired to do gigs together—they did a series of TV commercials in Spanish for a local car dealer and Reynaldo had to teach Berry how to pronounce everything so she sounded like an authentic
chica,
not a Jewish girl from Rutherford. They probably spent most of the night there after the beach patrol slacked off. Berry gazes at them languidly, her hair spilling past her shoulders to her elbows. Scents of coconut and apricot drift over from one of the hotel spas. She props herself up on the towel, knobby legs glistening with oil. “Babe,” she says, “what’s going on?”

Reynaldo is yawning hugely; he shakes back his long black hair, catches it up in one hand, finger-combing. “Felix, you should’ve gone with us last night. You’ll never believe—we went to Tantra. Guess who was there. Calvin Klein. He looks like he’s made out of wax. Didn’t he?” He looks at Berry, who lies back on the towel and nods. “Just a teeny white man made of wax. He had slave boys with him. He took us to the Raleigh, then he wanted to go on his yucky boat.” He gives a horrified shudder. “Eugghh!”

Berry smiles again, eyes closed. “I don’t mind boats.”

“I do.” Reynaldo finally seems to notice Emerson. He looks at Felice. “Miss Kitty Cat, what’s going on? Where’d you get this big nasty thing?”

Emerson stares over Reynaldo’s head.

“That’s not nice,” Berry says placidly.

“I’m not a nice boy. I don’t care.”

Felice and Berry are narrow enough to share the board and Reynaldo and Emerson take the towels. Reynaldo produces a thick, half-smoked joint from his pocket, along with a silver lighter. He flicks it open and lights the joint, dragging delicately, then hands it to Felice. She tokes the earthy, grassy smoke, looks up through her exhale to watch a series of tourists filter onto the beach holding Starbucks cups like ritual offerings. A row of frat boys with beat-up surfboards. A young woman with a fat pug on a studded leash. The pug genuflects in the beach grass while the girl checks her cell phone: they stroll away, leaving the glistening droppings. Four girls come down the walkway as far as the line of sand, then stop. They are groomed and painted, hair ironed to surgical linearity, brows waxed clean. Not especially pretty, just beautifully kept.
College girls,
Felice thinks scornfully. She gazes after them.

Emerson refuses the joint, saying that he’s in training—he has to keep his
mind
clear—and Reynaldo starts to mock him again for being Mr. Muscle, but Berry and Felice both tell him to shut up. The pot tastes rancid and she doesn’t like the burn on the back of her throat. “No more.” She waves it away.

“Oh, bullshit, darling,” Reynaldo says. “That’ll be the day.” He turns away from her and takes another drag. Reynaldo’s neck and shoulders have a silky drape, his skin—like Berry’s—is tanned almond-dark and even in this light it’s hard to discern the coils of a mahogany-colored serpent that spirals over the upper quadrant of his chest, down the bicep, to the crook of an elbow. He and Berry have posed for
Tattoo
and
Skin Art
magazines, done party ads for local clubs, and worked as party-fillers. Felice thinks they’ve hired themselves out for other purposes at these events (they’re always broke, cadging drugs and drinks), but if she doesn’t ask, she doesn’t have to know. “Little Miss Innocent,” the outdoor kids call her. Berry smiles at her again, her mouth long, angular, and dimpled. “They’re doing go-sees for V.S. today over on Washington. You wanna go?”

“Like I’ve got the boobs for that.” Felice crosses her arms.

“Shut up. Like you never heard of airbrush,” Reynaldo says.

They seem to live on virtually nothing, yet Berry and Reynaldo are the most pretty and stylish of all the outdoor kids. Keep your little ear to the big ground, Reynaldo always tells her. They’re the ones Felice has admired, the ones she likes to be near. After Felice ran away, she tried to look older, more like a model. Like she belonged there. Out on the beach or in the clubs, it was all models and tourists. The kids who looked scared, their skinny shoulders tucked up, eyes searching, they were the ones who ended up with “boyfriends,” older guys who always needed money. At first Felice wore makeup and was careful with her hair and clothing. But she quickly realized that the outdoor kids saw prettiness as a kind of weakness—just the opposite of the way it was in school. In the rougher places like the Green House, her prettiness seemed excessive: she noticed kids watching her like she had cash spilling out of her pockets. They called her “Face” or “Girlface,” and stole her skateboard and clothes; one night some older girls pushed her down in a church parking lot, pulling her hair and tearing at her clothes until Felice screamed, swung back with all her might, kicking and shoving, slapping one girl across the eye and cheekbone, knocking the other one to the ground, breaking her nose.

Reynaldo and Berry showed her how to use her looks without attracting too much attention. The trick was to wear stovepipe jeans and T-shirts, nothing fancy or frilly, no jewelry, high heels, or purses. Black was best. “It’s the West Coast thing.” Berry showed off a chunky pair of black platforms. “It’s Seattle.”

Now Emerson sits with his feet gathered up, arms around his knees; neither he nor Reynaldo has anything to say to each other. After a few minutes, Emerson stands, whacks the sand off the back of his shorts and his palms. “I better get a move on.”

Who says that? Felice thinks—he sounds like a dad.

Reynaldo says something over his shoulder to Berry, possibly, “Nasty redneck.” Berry laughs, her mild, musical chuckle, her eyes filmed. Felice glances at Berry and there’s a bad moment where she wonders—as she has lately—if Berry and Reynaldo are all that wonderful. She gets to her feet.

“Where you going, Kitty?” Reynaldo asks, shielding his eyes with the flat of his palm. “That boy’s too ugly for you.”

“Don’t go, Felix,” Berry says. “Why?”

Emerson is already trudging away, head lowered. Felice hesitates, she looks past him, down the beach: tourists mill over the sand, the air sepia-toned: a sense of heat and distance cast over everything. This is the end place—where people go to get erased. “I don’t think there’s any work coming today,” Felice says.

“Good. Thank God.” Berry lets her head droop back against the towel. She closes her eyes and looks so lifeless that Felice just grabs her board and goes after Emerson.

FELICE AND EMERSON
walk along the surf. Emerson seems to understand that her presence at his side at this moment is something of a miracle, and he must not say a word against Reynaldo or Berry. Her board gets heavy after a while, so she hands it to him.

They pass topless girls in thongs, men in slacks and lace-up shoes, Jax with his pet iguana and straw hat; old guys covered in silvery flat chest and back hair sitting in lawn chairs with laptops or shouting into cells, trying to be heard above the surf. Just a few boys with dark, Caribbean faces and glassy hair are out in the water. The lifeguards drowse in their wooden shelters. Most people slumber or stare, beached on the sand under slices of umbrella shade—there’s hardly anyone near the waterline—and Felice plods through the wet, compacted sand in a state of relative contentment: it’s been ages since she’s touched the water. Occasionally Emerson will pick up and dispose of an empty coffee cup, broken comb, broken sunglasses—detritus swept in from cruise ships or left behind by sunbathers. Felice is barely able to contain her impatience with this pointless activity—appalled at the grossness of touching a sodden diaper.

They cut up the beach to a food stand. Emerson tells her to get anything—really. By now, her hunger pain has vaporized—as often happens, so she just orders a Diet Coke. Emerson gets her a cheeseburger anyway; he gets himself four burgers and an enormous chocolate shake. They find a place on the sand and this time Felice lets him squeeze partially onto the board, his body damp and hot beside hers. She eats slowly, but she is hungrier than she’d realized, studying the burger after each bite. Usually she subsists on cans of tuna, oranges, chocolate bars, and rum and Cokes. Sometimes she lets herself think about her mother’s crisp little pizzas, the salty pretzels, the croissants stuffed with Nutella and a thin layer of marzipan. After the burger, Emerson peels the orange Felice took from the Green House, pushes his thumbs into the center, and they split it. It’s shriveled but still sweet. She sips the diet soda but it burns the roots of her teeth, under her gums. She hasn’t seen a dentist since she left her parents’ home and sometimes she feels sharp spikes inside her molars. She tosses the soda and starts drinking Emerson’s milkshake.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

“What?” she asks crossly, frowning at two dimply, middle-aged women strolling past in bikinis.

Emerson eats another burger in a few bites, like a cookie. Then he gazes back at the stand. “I should be in the gym right now.”

“Hell, don’t let me stop you.” Instantly defensive. Why does she care? The burger sits in her stomach: she feels drugged and groggy and wipes a line of sweat from her hairline.

“I didn’t mean anything about you—I
like
being here. I don’t want to be anywhere else. Like, at all.”

“I know,” she says moodily. After a few more sips of milkshake, she starts to feel better. Felice squints at the water, which shimmers in bands of deep turquoise and cerulean. “It’s pretty nice here,” she offers.

“Oh. Well,” Emerson says. “I wasn’t thinking about the place, really.”

She slides a look at him, then stares at her feet in the sand.

He looks out at the water with her a moment. Without moving his eyes, he says, “I could take care of you, if you wanted.”

It feels like the blood in her veins speeds up. “What’re you talking about?” She tries to laugh. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He stays trained on the water, his face studious—something about him reminds her, oddly, of her brother. He isn’t turning out to be anything like the person she’d assumed he was. “I’m not trying to offend you or anything or say you aren’t doing great yourself. I’m just saying . . .” He shrugs.

“What?”

“Well, like—” He permits himself a half-glance in her direction. “What do you want to do with yourself, I mean.”

“I dunno. Be a model.” She can’t look at him as she says this.