Birds of Paradise: A Novel (22 page)

“No—no—nothing like that.” Brian brings his hands together, trying to take hold of himself. He hadn’t prepared for this sort of confrontation, but suddenly it feels crucial. He’s had it with Parkhurst, his office with the elephant’s-foot wastebasket, the walrus-tusk letter opener. Sick to death of self-satisfied arrogance, the way he treats employees like possessions, his little insinuations that Brian
needs
him, strutting around as if his company were some version of the Isle of Dr. Moreau. “I was looking again at the neighborhood specs for the Little Haiti deal—there’s questions.”

Parkhurst stops mid-corridor. “Didn’t you sign off on it?”

“I did, sure, but new issues have come to light.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t think we did sufficient market feasibility study on the area.”

Parkhurst crosses his arms, tucks his spotty hands under his biceps—a thick-brained, obstinate gesture—preamble to one of his development pitches. “What issues? The whole Design District region is going insane, Brian. You can’t even get onto Northeast Fortieth anymore. I think Conrad put his finger right on it. All those nice fruity restaurants and furniture stores, a performing arts center—some fucking day. Stryker’s chomping to redev that Caribbean Marketplace. And city center, man—the midtown development deal is phase two now—all that new urbanism crap—two minutes’ walk to the dry cleaners. It’s gonna be the Italian fucking Renaissance around here in a few years.”

“Yes, yes. I’m not questioning any of that.”

“Didn’t even need a feasibility study, if you ask me—just look at it. And NoDo
North
is pre-gentrification—really young, super sexy. Our building’s gonna be red-hot—top architect, and Valente and his boys are laying the bricks for us. A big fat block of condo towers that’ll blow the place out of the water. Fifty stories, Venetian marble. Conrad wanted to call it the Tom Perdue. Dumb fucking name—after some nobody. I had to persuade him out of that. We’re calling it the Blue Topaz.”

When Jack gets excited about a project, it’s like watching kindling smoke: this is
the
deal. The one. Brian presses his hands into a kind of praying fold, lowers his face to his fingertips. His law school friend Dennis thought Brian was nuts taking a job with a developer, said that he was entering “the belly of the beast and taking an office in the colon.” Supposedly he’d be pushed into a servant’s position—devoting his energies to subverting contract wording, excavating loopholes, massaging bylaws, and generally clearing the path so his boss could proceed with the greatest of ease. But how was that different from any other corporate hired gun? He lifts his head. “Jack, I’m not sure we shouldn’t take a pass on this one.”

Parkhurst blinks slowly. The more their business has grown, the more Parkhurst likes to give outsiders the impression that his attorney lives next to his skin. Brian has never before tried to get in the way of a PI&B project, but he remembers vividly the night he’d visited that art gallery; the sound of neighbors talking in the night: a particular mood of serenity and contentment. He knows the essence of the city is its neighborhoods, most of which are being systematically broken into by developers—their constructions driving out the old homes and families, ushering in nonresident owner-investors, anti-communities made up of transients and tourists—no personal history or investment in the place where they’ve landed. He thinks of the little brown-faced doll on Fernanda’s desk. For all they know, her grandparents live on that very street. Now he takes a breath and begins listing worst-case scenarios. “It’s old, Jack, like historic old. The street in question doesn’t even border the District—it’s deep, old neighborhood. According to our new intelligence,” he lies, “there will be a citizens’ turnout that’ll make those hippie tree-huggers look like a tea party.” He shakes his head. “We could be tied up for years.” And you, he thinks, vain old man, do not always get want you want.

Parkhurst studies Brian’s face. Over the years, he’s come to rely increasingly on Brian to help guide projects. Still, the old man thrives on resistance, derives jolts of inspiration from roadblocks. “That could be fun,” he says. “Haven’t seen a goddamned crowded zoning meeting in years. ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.’ ”

Sun Tzu. One of Jack’s favorites. Brian nods. “Right, right. But then there’s plain bad decisions. Remember the publicity nightmare when they gutted Overtown to put in I-95?”

“Terrible move.”

“Disastrous.” Brian folds his arms as they stop before his office. “We’ve got to be smart about risk-reward ratio, take another look at cash flow. There’s no parking, no infrastructure, and frankly, I’m concerned that the downtown corridor is approaching saturation.”

The recessed lighting makes a nimbus of Parkhurst’s white comb-over. He looks down the hall past Brian for a long moment. “Brian, I hear you.” Parkhurst’s tone is modulated now; his white brows lower. “At this point, we’re more than three-quarters in. Tony Malio did beautiful work greasing the zoning board and we have an initial clearance there. I met with the Aguardiente group and shook on it.” He lets the glass corridor partition swing shut behind them as Brian turns. “So here’s what we’re gonna do: we’ll send Tony back out in the field—the Citizens’ Action Corps, is that it? Have him grab a paralegal, go visit the natives, shake some more hands, throw another third, up to double, onto the payouts. Make everybody happy.”

The two men gaze at each other a moment. Finally Brian lifts his chin, smiles. “Of course, Jack, excellent plan.”

Parkhurst slaps Brian on the arm. “Good man, Brian. Thanks for speaking up. Honestly. Solid gold.”

He watches Parkhurst turn back down the hall, lifting his eyes to the embedded ceiling lights as if gazing toward heaven. The glass partition whispers shut. Brian taps the glass corridor wall to his office, then lets his head tip forward, gently, until the top of his forehead touches the closed office door.

SLUMPED IN HIS CHAIR,
Brian coughs, tries to clear his head, his spiraling disappointment. He has hours yet to go: phone calls to the Latin Builders Association, the Planning and Zoning Board, and the Regional Planning Council; a polenta Bolognese from the executive dining room; a spirited visit from Javier, his voice booming over Brian’s desk, talk of another gloriously named project.

There’s a call from Stanley. He listens in the dilated office light as his son tells him about
difficulties, girlfriend, money
 . . . Stanley says he wants to arrange a
meeting
. Like a client. Brian’s concentration hazes into a reverie of throttling Parkhurst.

“So Dad?” his son is saying. “That okay? Yeah?”

“Did you talk to your mother?” he asks reflexively.

“Mom?” Stanley sounds irritated; then he sighs. “She’ll just say the same thing.”

Brian pushes his fingertips into his temples, rubbing.

“How about can we just agree on meeting at the house?” Stanley’s voice is rigid. Brian finally realizes that his son is under some sort of duress; he tries to pay attention. Brian must’ve said something appropriate or reassuring at last because Stanley sounds happier now. “So, cool. We’ll come over. It’ll be good.”

Brian spots Fernanda on her way out, a gray naiad rippling in the glass wall, and he’s struck by an ancient memory. Twelve years old, feeling dizzy and sick, stretched out on a pew in a tiny mission chapel. He had visited this place with his family. The church was white as snow, the ceiling ribbed with timber, and an immense golden Jesus was pinned to the wall above the altar. The church, the dry hot air, the smell of sage, the sight of a black-eyed girl with dimpled feet and a black velvet ribbon around her hair. It comes back to him in finely etched detail—the sweetness of mariachi ballads and Mexican Spanish and the clear air. Suddenly he is asking his son, “Stan—have you ever heard of such a thing as a mud cookie?”

There’s a brief silence, then breath—almost a laugh. “Well—yeah. I guess so.”

“What is it exactly?”

“If we’re talking about the same thing . . . it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Maybe they add some lard to hold it together, but it’s basically dirt. People live on them, in some countries.”

“God,” Brian murmurs.

“Well, if it’s that or starving to death? You take the cookie. Why you asking about that?”

There it is, Brian realizes, the reason he’d tried to deflect Parkhurst from the one neighborhood: he imagined telling the story to his son, how he’d stood up to that greedy Goliath, on behalf of all those poor and dispossessed. Score for the other side. He’d imagined the approval in his son’s face, at last. “Oh, just something I saw,” Brian murmurs. “Nothing important.”

Avis

A
VIS RUNS HER HANDS OVER THE UPHOLSTERY
on her chair arms. Back and forth. New girlfriend: her husband had tried to warn her. She registers, in her peripheral vision, the girl, this Nieves, gazing around her dining room, tipping her drained Villeroy & Boch cup—peeking at the manufacturer. Brian sits in the matching arm chair to her right, Stanley sits at one end of the couch, oriented toward them, watching Nieves—
awaiting her command
. Normally Stanley comes to their house only on the holidays. Avoiding his sister’s ghost, Avis supposes. And herself.

Avis pours a half-refill of tea for the girl. “Did you inherit your china?” Nieves asks. Acquisitive thing. “It looks valuable.”

The girl really is quite striking. She has the translucent face of that starlet . . . The actress’s name has flown right out of Avis’s head, but she can’t help noticing the way the girl wears her dark hair in similar long, smooth twists. Her skin is a satiny caramel with notes of mocha and chocolate, her eyes black almonds. Avis wonders if growing up with such a cinematically beautiful sister has made Stanley too vulnerable to beauty. The young woman leans back, still clutching her cup, and Avis notes the fullness of her breasts and a certain thickness about the girl’s body, as if she were older than Avis initially thought. She stretches, bending slightly, then finally smiles. Stanley says, “Mom bought it on a trip we took to Germany. Years ago.”

Avis is pleased that Stanley would remember—they were on a sort of family vacation. While Brian attended a contract law conference in Frankfurt, Avis had taken the kids on a day trip to a medieval town in Bavaria, its narrow streets crowded with porcelain shops. The children helped Avis pick out the paper-fine china, its intricate webbing of cracked glaze, a sprinkling of rosebuds along the rim of the saucers. Now she smiles thinly at Nieves, thinking about the pieces she’d smashed on the patio after Felice had left for good. Avis had worked methodically, a piece or two a day, destroying her prized possessions, the satisfying crunch, like flinging robin’s eggs. Until Brian quietly suggested that Stanley might like to have them someday. She stopped in time to save the cups and saucers.

“I like old things,” Nieves says. She contemplates the cup again. “But these are lovely.”

“I’m so glad you approve,” Avis says.

Nieves looks up at her as Brian and Stanley rush to interrupt, Brian saying, “This tea is from—” just as Stanley says, “Mother made these meringues.”
Mother
—not Mom—Avis catches the remonstrance and she knots her hands together:
Behave
. Nieves puts the meringue in her mouth, as if to stop herself from speaking, and Avis knows what she’s tasting: a crisp folding air, then melting bits of shaved chocolate. Nieves’s mouth softens into a sigh. “Oh,” she says quietly, as if talking to herself. “Wonderful.”

Avis stands, her eyes hot, and hurries into the kitchen.

THE OTHER DAY,
Avis had been in the kitchen preparing a batter when Stanley’s deliveryman had come to the door. Along with her usual baking supplies, Eduardo carried a cooler full of organic produce. She followed him back into the kitchen and watched him remove chilies, onions, garlic, and tomatoes from the cooler. A whole chicken. He opened the refrigerator and slid in cartons of milk and eggs, a wedge of lemon-colored cheese, bunches of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower. He closed the fridge, then flipped the cooler shut. “Your son doesn’t approve of your eating habits.”

“No kidding.” Avis sighed as she filled a pastry bag. Once or twice a month a supply of unasked-for items.

“Risky, though—giving someone a bunch of food they don’t like.”

“He knows I won’t be able to let it go to waste.”

The mynah started its shrieking: a fierce, shattering
braaaah
. He swiveled toward the window. “Wow. What the hell.”

Avis piped tiny
quenelles
of tea cake dough onto a cookie tray. “He’ll settle down in a second.” She slipped the tray into the oven, then looked over Eduardo’s shoulder: they watched Solange walk down the steps, hair tied in a faded turquoise scarf, a teal dress fluttering with the air.

“What’s the deal with her?” Eduardo asked. “She the housekeeper?”

“Of course not.” Avis pulled out a tray of scallop-shaped molds for madeleines. “I don’t think,” she added quietly, pouring batter into her molds.

Eduardo didn’t speak for a long moment. “Haitians were the first ones—you know—to throw a revolution, kick out the colonizers.” He lifted his chin, apparently at the neighbor. “Those kidnapped Africans—they’d adapted to Haiti but they never forgot who they were—they knew they were free people.”

She slammed the cookie molds on the counter, settling the dough. “Huh.” She set those aside, then stooped to pull a ring of strawberry
génoise
from the lower oven.

“Though, of course, it’s kind of funny . . .”

She glanced over, took in the slight asymmetry to his face, flattened lower lip, shadowy outlines of the tear troughs beneath his eyes. “What?”

“Well. Just. Here you are, still a slave to the French.”

Avis straightened, hands on her hips. “I work for myself. That’s hardly slavery.”

“Hey, we all choose our own masters.” He turned to the window. “Have you seen anything magic going on over there yet?”

She laughed and placed the springform pans into the cooling rack, bits of parchment lining jutting up like feathers around the edges. On the top rack is a cooled and decorated seven-layered
opéra
cake. Her client—the Peruvian ambassador—had requested a “tropical” theme for a dinner party dessert. Avis had based the decoration on the view through the kitchen window, re-creating in lime, lemongrass, and mint frostings the curling backyard flora, curving foliage shaped like tongues and hearts, fat spines bisecting the leaves.

Eduardo edged closer. “You don’t believe it?”

She began pouring chocolate
pastilles
into the bowl of her double boiler. “I thought you said voodoo was just another type of religion.”

“It is. Religion with extenuating circumstances.” He leaned over the stove.

“Uh-huh.” Avis adjusted the flame.

Eduardo moved to another corner, trying to get out of the way. “Let me tell you something. About ten years ago? I was a production assistant for a crew that was filming on Haiti. It was supposed to be a documentary called
Flowering Heaven
—about home gardens in the Caribbean. I just went to hang out on the beach. Anyway, when we were there, we met all kinds of people who went to witches—like, instead of doctors? They had curses broken and got cured from all kinds of weird diseases and problems. We met people who used those little dolls, and spell-casters . . .”

Avis hummed and stirred the melting chocolate, watching it turn black and glossy as it liquefied, seeding it with bits of chopped
pastilles
. “Oh right,” she murmured. “And the people they cursed, they’d get weird aches and pains, right?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Hey, you really think there’s an explanation for everything?” His voice was intent and confiding. “You think the world is only what you can see and feel?”

Avis dipped the tip of her spatula into the melted chocolate and brought it close to her lips, checking the heat. “Our senses tell a lot more than we realize.”

“All I know is we saw things there . . .” He shakes his head. “All kinds of people said they’d attracted their husbands and wives with charms.”

“Sure, love potions.” She scraped a few more bits of chopped chocolate into the liquid to bring down the temperature. “Do you know what I do for a living?”

“One man told me he woke up in the morning with this woman’s face in his mind. He’d never seen her before in his life, but he became obsessed with finding her. It turned out she lived miles away, in another town. She’d seen him once, at a market, and made a love charm to call him to her. A few days later, he was knocking at her door.”

Avis looked up at the wobbly reflections in the stainless steel cabinets lining the walls. Sometimes when she baked, she thought she caught sight of some odd movement in the corner of her eyes—but it was always this reflection flashing from surface to surface. “So how did this guy feel about that? About the fact that she’d used a charm and tricked him into it?”

Eduardo shrugged. “They got married. He loved her. I don’t think anyone particularly cared how it happened.”

STANLEY IS GOING ON
about work, how they might have to expand—the property developers circling Homestead like vultures—a reproachful look at his father. She observes the formal way he holds his cup on a saucer—letting everyone know that he too is a guest in this house. His voice has a buzzing tonality that irritates her. Makes it hard to listen to him: buzz, buzz, buzz. Whenever they visit him at the market, she’s noticed his customers and employees hang on his words as if he were some sort of saint or the head of a cult. People tell her: “Your son is amazing, Mrs. Muir. How did you do it?” She rubs her thumb over her knuckles, listening to Brian making chitchat, quizzing them gently. Nieves crosses her arms, lets her head tip back, watching Brian.

“When did you two start seeing each other?” Brian asks.

The girl smiles. “Seeing each other?”

Stanley takes her hand. “Actually, Dad, Nieves and I are living together.”

Brian gives a sort of huff at the same time that Avis feels something tighten, a bone pressing against her heart. “You’re
living
together?” he asks.

Nieves’s crossed leg bobs up and down. Stanley has an odd, guilty expression now, his cheeks flushed. “She just moved in. This month.”

“To your apartment?” Brian is openly astonished. Stanley lives above the market in a bleak one-bedroom in downtown Homestead. Attached to the apartment is a small studio he uses as overflow for the market’s storeroom. Brian and Avis used to joke about Stanley being married to his work. How quickly things change, Avis thinks. Brian squeezes her limp hand. “Now, but don’t you think you kids—”

“We’re having a baby,” Nieves interrupts.

“What?” Avis is breathless. “You mean
someday
?” But of course—it rushes in on Avis—she doesn’t mean “someday.” At last Avis understands what she’s been seeing all along—the blue shadows under the girl’s eyes and her puffy face. Avis turns to Stanley—who is staring at Nieves—and it’s like peeling back a series of transparencies. There are the sloping bones of his adult face; there is the sugar-milk skin of Stanley at four. “Stanley?”

Stanley lowers his gaze to the floor, forearms balanced on his knees. He’s the picture of remorse and Avis feels an almost pleasurable impulse to scold him. She reminds herself, he isn’t much younger than she’d been, barely twenty-seven, pregnant with him. “Obviously the timing isn’t the greatest,” Stanley mutters. “With the business taking on all this new debt, plus the tax hike . . .”

“How pregnant, or, I mean—far along—are you?” Brian asks Nieves. Avis hears a bounce in his voice. “Are you taking folic acid? Have you seen a doctor?”

Folic acid! Now Avis reaches for her husband’s hand. She wants to protect him. Nieves looks at him warily. She’s dressed in low-rise jeans, shiny sandals with just a filament of leather over the toes, a satiny, clinging top that looks like underwear, and a pair of sparkling loop earrings. “I’m probably due in the winter I guess.”

“It was pretty, you know, unexpected,” says Stanley, as if he’s learning all of this for the first time. “We’re still figuring things out.”

“It’s marvelous!” Brian blurts; he turns to Avis: his eyes are damp. “We think it’s wonderful, of course,” he says. “Congratulations, you two.”

“But we need money,” Nieves says. “Stanley was supposed to tell you? We really do. Right away.”

Stanley’s face is a dark putty-color.

“Oh. Yes,” Brian says.

“You already knew about this?” Avis releases his hand.

“No, no—not the baby! Nothing about the baby.”

The baby
.

“Stanley was supposed to tell you,” Nieves says.

“What?” Avis’s voice wobbles; her neck feels hot.

Brian puts his hand on Avis’s arm while addressing Nieves. “Remind me—”

“One hundred twenty-six thousand dollars,” Nieves says. “We have to get that much, or it won’t work.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Avis says. She doesn’t care for this girl. She places her hands square on her knees—they feel knobby; the bones in her back feel sharp as piano keys. Already a querulous old lady. “A hundred twenty-six
thousand
? My God, how do you expect
us
to come up with that sort of money?”

Stanley starts shaking his head heavily. They’ve bailed him out a number of times in the past with small gifts, disbursements, a few thousand here and there; one loan of twenty-five thousand, which he’d partially paid off and they’d forgiven the remaining seventeen. But this sounds like extortion to Avis—this dreadful girl, using the threat of a grandchild. Another thought comes to her: could they even be sure that the child is Stanley’s? She must discuss this with Stanley in private. But he’s looking at her now as if he were embarrassed or disappointed. “Mom, I talked with Dad—I mean we thought we could get away with eighty thousand before but our other investors—their money’s tied up—”

“It’s true, dear,” Brian interrupts, his hand curved around her forearm. “We did discuss this—Stan and me. I’d been meaning to talk it over with you—well, we’ve both been so busy.” He lowers his head, touches the back of his neck reflectively. “It’s hard to know exactly the best moment for these things.”

“Stanley—
tell
them,” the girl says.

Stanley’s gaze rests a beat too long on Avis. “I didn’t want to worry either of you.” He rolls forward to put down his cup. “The thing is . . . the owner of my property keeps getting approached by commercial developers—I guess Homestead is getting kind of hot all of a sudden.”

“I knew it,” Brian bursts out. “Dammit. Goddamn gold-diggers.”