Birds of Paradise: A Novel (38 page)

“Huh.”

Stanley walks out to the edge of the platform and sits and then Felice comes and sits beside him. The sun softens under high clouds, far away, a sound of thunder—some hope of rain. They stay out there, waiting and not speaking, watching the roll and zip of the skateboarders.

Avis

A
T MIDDAY, AVIS WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE,
switching on lights. She moves from the rectangular windows in the living room to the windows in her study, to the small panes of the French doors, each time turning away from the dark glass, the reflected oval of her own face, her eyes fretful and shadowy. She hasn’t heard from Brian since his abrupt departure for work that morning. After watching for hours, she had to turn off the Weather Channel as their predictions and graphs—something resembling a fireball hurtling toward the peninsula—grew unbearably ominous. By late afternoon, the storm’s outer bands have started to lash the house with dark, heavy rain. She shivers, drawing her arms in close to her body, drifting to the front door to watch the rain sweep up the street. Lamb slinks under the couch and yowls softly. Outside of the kitchen and her normal work rhythms, Avis feels the strangeness of the house without Brian, its emptiness intensified. In the past, he’d always hired someone to cover the windows before a big storm. He made up checklists, tested the flashlights, and monitored the bottled water: they spent the hurricanes together, watching forecasts as long as the electricity held, then listening to the wilderness of wind. How did this happen? She used to live with husband and children. How does life dwindle to such a place in which one is boxed up alone? Had she truly dreamed of a private cottage? Now she listens in misery to the drumming rain and tries not to let herself imagine Brian stranded, stuck in a highway wreck, or worse.

The longer he doesn’t answer the phone, the more she feels a pressure in her chest, as if a hand were softly closing around her heart. As she watches from a front window, the sky goes from a bruised green to a deep eggplant, enormous columnar clouds wall off the sun, and the rain rises, slits sideways, slicing at the roof. Where is he? She goes into the kitchen, hoping that a bit of work will calm her, but her hands tremble as she tries to roll out baguette dough, and for once her mind will not be subdued by her hands. She worries over Stanley, aware that a storm this intense could destroy his entire market; the thought tears at her that their last real interaction consisted of her denying him money. And there is also, of course, the transparency underlining all her fears: her anxiety for Felice. Where on earth could her daughter be in this weather?

As the day goes on and the storm grows, her concerns melt into one steady pulse of fear for her husband. Twice she picks up the phone, about to call the highway patrol, but such a call seems like an admission that things have gone too horribly wrong. She feels the sheen of dread, a petrification, as if her insides might turn to stone: the sense that Avis could not survive—not as a whole person—without him. The fear of losing Brian subsumes and encapsulates all the rest, spelling out her world, her understanding of loss. She sits on the edge of the living room couch staring at the black street, and the feeling of it spills through her, thoughts disjointed and dark as syllables.

This hurricane seems worse than any she can remember—even Andrew, which they’d lived through as a family. The thunder sounds as if it caroms inside a metal barrel—the house shakes from its force. The hurricane wind, which usually drives against the south end of the house, seems wily and demonic, coming from one, then another direction. Power lines sway and snap free and rain skirts the street forming a minor river. The wind masks all other sounds as Avis calls Brian’s cell again: its unanswered ring like a stone’s echo in a well. The wind starts to drive needles of rain through the window seams and under the front door. Avis grabs bath towels and a bucket but she can’t stay ahead of it. She blames herself for the mess of rain-water: she’d repeatedly complained to Brian that she hated the idea of encasing their house in shutters, “closeting” themselves in darkness: now the floor and carpets along the south side of the house are soaked. This happened in much the same way, she senses, that she’s brought this isolation on herself—her chronic retreat, training him, in essence, to leave her.

Late in the afternoon, Avis sees a watery flash of headlights out front: standing quickly, she is almost faint with relief. Brian straggles in the door, rain streaming from his face and collar. He’d had to park in the driveway—the garage opener shorted out. “I tried to call—the cells are useless. Oh my God—you wouldn’t believe—”

She wraps her arms around the compass of his back, filled with joy. He presses his cold face into her neck, then looks at her, his hair dripping. “I thought I’d left the office with plenty of time but the storm came up so fast it was like a bomb. Traffic was dead in the street. I’ve been stuck on the Dixie seems like days.” Avis smells dampness on him all the way to the silk lining of his jacket. She peels off his jacket and shirt and drapes these over the shower door. She sits him on the couch and rumples a towel on his dripping hair: his face has that long, earnest sweetness she remembers from their lovestruck college days. Her thoughts flicker to the long-ago tutoring sessions in her apartment on North Aurora Street—how she tried to get Brian to kiss her, how he was so concerned that she master the principles of economic theory. An emotional history like a fire they’d carried between them, seeming to dwindle, then rekindling and leaping, all the gas rings on the stove turned up high.

Brian reaches up to her hands as she dries his hair: she bends and kisses the top of his head. They remain together on the couch as the lights flicker off, then on, then finally go out for the night. The terrible hollow booming and shaking goes on; at one point the door and windows rattle insanely, as if some gigantic force were trying to invade. Avis sits with her head tilted low against Brian’s chest and listens to the storm within the walls of his body.

AVIS WALKS IN THE
gray dawn an
d studies Brian, his face mild in sleep. She rises, dresses for work, makes her determined way to the kitchen, wondering again how her children fared in the storm. The windows seem to be washed in green light, glittering with heat. The hurricane knocked down enormous fronds, spilled the stripling palms over, punched open new holes in the canopy; sunlight pours through in solid cylinders. She scans the treetops, the delicate, rummaging fingers of palm leaflets—everything heat-stunned. In the emptied backyard, the iron cage is lying on its side, door flapped open, a body with its soul turned loose. She thinks again of Solange. The world seems filled with the beloved missing. Inside the marble kitchen, she closes her eyes and can almost imagine knocks on a chapel door in Haiti, the child’s voice. Her skin is covered in dots of ice. A swirl of vertigo. She would have torn the planks off the doors, torn off her own skin. She would have murdered the man in his sleep to have answered that cry. With shaking hands, she moves away from her view of the cage, calls Stanley and leaves a message. She tries to suppress the pleading in her voice: “Let me know how you came through? Just a quick call. Anything. Your father and I want to know.”

Now she rolls the waistband of her apron over, hitches her hands at her hips. There’s a backup generator designated specifically for her kitchen—the stove and refrigerator hum in their stations, still alive. She begins to call customers, but half don’t answer. From those that do, Avis hears of more power outages, learns that restaurants and stores will be closed for the rest of the week. Her fingers curl, riffling through her folder: the largest current order—
ficelles
with a core of nutmeg and chopped bittersweet—bread and chocolate—is for the Marine Academy on Virginia Key. But the schools are closed. A distraught woman at Endographics (bimonthly
dulce de leche macarons
) tells her, voice shaking, that a bougainvillea fell through the window, throwing purple-budded branches across her desk, destroying her computer and files. Everyone sounds stunned, in post-hurricane shock. Avis reaches her friend, the chef in Coconut Grove: he says he plans to set up his kettle grill on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant and cook the contents of his freezers for the locals: all contributions welcome.

Brian hovers near the door, dressed in his soft weekend clothes, and he gestures toward the front. “Up for taking a look?” They leave the house, stepping over branches, staring at their lawn and the broken trees. They walk down their street past the big intersection with LeJeune, scanning the neighborhoods. Miami appears to be shut down—the traffic lights are out, the storm drains matted with debris, the avenues swamped. There are heaps of wet branches blocking the streets, beautiful old trees split into pieces or just overturned, root ends up. Neighbors move slowly across their lawns, dazed. Blooms and fruits and leaves are stripped away, a kind of dense black vegetal and bark matter sprayed across lawns and sidewalks.

After an hour or so of wandering through the streets, they return to the house to escape the sun’s blare. Their own yard is covered with bramble but neither of them feels ready to take that on just yet. “How would you feel about doing a little something in the kitchen?” Avis asks tentatively. Brian laughs. He used to assist her before they had children, before she hired helpers, but she was impatient with him: he made mistakes—forgot to time the roasting almonds, or failed to sift the cake flour, or let the chocolate seize. Still, he accepts an apron and ties it on, smiling at the sense of occasion. He rests his knuckles on his hips. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The first recipe is ancient, written on a card in her mother’s sloping hand—though her mother never actually made it. A list: eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, flour, chocolate chips. Over the course of the day, Avis and Brian fill the cooling racks with cookies: oatmeal raisin, molasses, butterscotch, peanut butter, and chocolate chip. Humble, crude, lightly crisp and filigreed at the edges, butter, salt, and sweetness at the centers. Avis samples batches with Brian. They stand near each other, immersed in the good, clean silence of work.

That afternoon, as the sun points low, potent rays across the yards, Avis and Brian pack the cookies into bakery boxes, stack them on the backseat and floor of the SUV, and set off. The traffic lights are still out and intersections are chaotic, drivers interpreting traffic protocol at will. Even though it’s barely a mile away, the narrow, rustic lanes of the Grove are even more backed up and flooded than the streets in the Gables: they have to reverse several times and hunt for a passable route. There’s been a storm of mosquitoes since the hurricane, and the heat makes everything seem slow and elastic, like a recording played at the wrong speed. Several times, they roll down the windows and give cookies wrapped in napkins to people dragging shrubs and limbs, raking lawns, sweeping sidewalks, slicing and sawing through piles of stumps, vines, brackish rafts of debris. A man in a sweat-stained T-shirt drops his garden hose and accepts the cookie, looking as if he might cry. When they finally get to Commodore Plaza, they spot Jean-Françoise in a white butcher’s jacket tending a series of smoking grills in the middle of the street. Before him, a subdued group waits with paper plates, humble as a soup line. People sit on the curb and in battered aluminum lawn chairs. Waiters hand out dinner rolls, assemble small salads, grill fingerling potatoes, onions, and artichokes. The marrow scent of grilling meat mingles with billows of wet leaves, hot tar—someone’s half-finished roof roasting. A glass pitcher is on the pavement, stuffed with curling twenties and fifties and personal checks. Jean-Françoise’s smile is a white spark in his silhouette; he raises the flat of his spatula in a kind of martial greeting. “She arrives!” The late sun fills the street, a translucent mesh of light. He looks almost devilish in the yellow light, turning steaks and guzzling wine from a spotted water glass.

The people waiting on line murmur, excited by her white boxes. Brian and Avis deliver their stacks and try to refuse dinner, but the waiters bring them glasses of burgundy, porcelain plates with thin, peppery steaks redolent of garlic, scoops of buttery grilled Brussels sprouts, and a salad of beets, walnuts, and Roquefort. They drag a couple of lawn chairs to a quiet spot on the street and they balance the plates on their laps. Some ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trips they used to make to the Keys. Ten years after they’d moved to Miami they’d left Stanley and Felice with family friends and Avis and Brian drove to Key West on a sort of second honeymoon. She remembers how the land dropped back into distance: wetlands, marsh, lazy-legged egrets flapping over the highway, tangled, sulfurous mangroves. And water. Steel-blue plains, celadon translucence.

She and Brian had rented a vacation cottage in Old Town, ate small meals of fruit, cheese, olives, and crackers, swam in the warm, folding water. Each day stirring into the next, talking about nothing more complicated than the weather, spotting a shark off the pier, a mysterious constellation lowering in the west. Brian sheltered under a celery-green umbrella while Avis swam: the water formed pearls on the film of her sunscreen. They watched the night’s rise, an immense black curtain from the ocean. Up and down the beach they heard the sounds of the outdoor bars, sandy patios switching on, distant strains of laughter, bursts of music. Someone played an instrument—quick runs of notes, arpeggios floating in soft ovals like soap bubbles over the darkening water.

Now the wind comes up, fanning them with music, laughter carried up from the street, then washing them with silence again. The stars are very gentle, faraway as old thoughts.

“Good God,” Brian says faintly. He sounds like he’s just reached the life raft, climbed out of a cold sea. He takes a gulp of wine, then rubs at the inner crease of his arm. “I don’t know how you do that. That kind of exertion. And every single day—my God.”

It had been a long and intense workday, but there was something more to it, Avis thinks—the strain of the day itself, the aftermath of the storm. She’s so tired she feels as if she’s floating just above the chair. “Trust me—not typical. I didn’t even know if I could still push like that.”

“You are something else, kid,” Brian says. “But as for me. Boy, you never really expect it. I mean, getting older. It almost seems like you ought to be able to imagine your way out of it. Do something.”