The Bird Market of Paris (18 page)

The audience gasped. It had seemed as if Bella was removing the dress, but instead she'd writhe her shoulders through the neck of the dress and tie the arms around her waist. This was one of the hundred ways. She'd swivel back down the catwalk, loosening her bun, her long, dark hair cascading over her back. As the drums thumped and everyone's pulse ignited, Bella would swirl in time with the music, changing the design of the dress over and over until she spun at the end of the catwalk, hair roping around her neck and covering her face, eyes closed, in rapture at the end of the song.

I'd stare up at her with envy. I could never do this dance. She was possessed, illuminated by a single spotlight, all eyes on her, everyone either wanting her or wanting to be her. Even at a young age, I knew there was something sexual to this dance, to this song, and it both excited and troubled me.

I enjoyed visiting Bella's home. She had a large pool with a diving board and a citrus grove in back of her house in Miami's horse country. She'd let me pick fruit, and I'd mill among the trees, alone in the shade, daydreaming, peeling oranges and eating them whole, sour juice pouring off my chin onto my shirt.

One day, when I was eleven, Poppy picked me up from summer day camp at the YMCA. He was red-faced, his lips drawn tightly into his mouth like they did when he was angry, and he grasped the steering wheel with white knuckles.

“Bella is marrying an eighteen-year-old boy,” he said to me through his teeth. “Can you believe that?”

Eighteen sounded old to me, and I didn't have a clue how old Bella was. She could have been twenty-five or a hundred.

“She is ridiculous,” he said. “She believes her own press. Never, ever, believe your own press. Do you know what that means,
Chérie
?”

I didn't understand what all the fury was about. I told him I didn't know what that meant.

“When we go places to show my fashions, they bring her roses, they tell her how beautiful she is, they write about her in the newspapers. But I made her. I created her, and she forgets that.”

I stared silently through the windshield as we drove.

“And now she is going to marry an eighteen-year-old boy.” He hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “She will fail, but I can never take her back.”

He wiped his eyes. “I do not want you to see your Poppy like this,” he said, his tone changing.

I didn't see what the big deal was, but Poppy was upset. His anger and sadness dominoed onto me, and I started to cry.

“No,
Chérie
, do not cry.” He patted my frizzy hair with one hand as he drove. “These are adult problems, not yours.”

Then he took me for ice cream at Swensen's. I stood in front of the cold ice cream display with Poppy's hand on my shoulder, both of us walking slowly down the row of colorful flavors.

Once we decided, Poppy opened his wallet and asked the lady loading our cones with mint chocolate chip, “Do you want to see a picture of my pride and joy?” She nodded, and he showed her the wallet-size photograph of the furniture wax and the dish soap.

After she laughed, he turned to the recent wallet-size school portrait of me and said, “That is my little girl.”

We licked our cones and I soon forgot about Bella and her impending marriage.

I turned the page of the red journal. Bella's handwriting was neat, cursive, and light, as if she hadn't pressed hard with the pen, or perhaps the ink had faded with time. The entire journal was filled with love poems, florid and clichéd verse about how she felt warm and womanly and on fire with Poppy. I read the next one, then the next.

Beneath green boughs

To lie awake

Rolling gently love to make

Beneath your back

Joining has become

An act sublime

And you are me

I am you

Oh tell me darling

Is this beauty true?

There were poems about Poppy's hands on her body: some explicit, some rambling and repetitive. I read halfway through the journal and couldn't continue. Why had he shown this to me? Did he understand what he was doing, or had the tumor affected his judgment? How had he saved this from the hurricane? What tall shelf had it been hiding on for all these years?

Folded between the pages of the book, there was a fourteen-page apology letter in the same handwriting on purple paper in blue ink:

My dearest beloved friend, it's nine o'clock Sunday night. The house is still and in this time I reflect on a day in which I loved poorly and with a mean spirit. You are more lovable than dreams I dreamed and so I have opened myself wide to you. It is very painful, for I burn with the nastiness and impetuosity of my twenty-five years to give and give madly, to fly and sail and soar. My personal spirit has gyrated to a compulsion in movement, grand scope. I shall endure with you until the drops become canyons and we are free without the confines of your world.

I put the book down and walked toward the bathroom. I wanted to take a long, hot shower, and scrub myself raw with a hard loofah. Poppy saw me as I passed his room.

“Did you read the book,
Chérie
?” he called out.

“I did,” I said, backing up and standing in his doorway.

“What did you think of it?”

I didn't like it. I didn't want to know that he had had transgressions. Poppy was my angel who could do no wrong.

“It's beautiful,” I said.

“You keep it. I want you to know how people felt about your Poppy.”

I stepped into the room and sat down beside him. He looked up at me with wet, cloudy eyes and reached for my hand.

“You are my BaaBaa,” he said.

I squeezed his soft hand. I wouldn't hold Bella against him. That was long ago. In my room, I fished a pair of scissors from a drawer and cut off a small piece of BaaBaa, now threadbare after a couple decades of security blanketing. I walked back into Poppy's room and pressed the raggedy square of blue fabric into his hand. He looked at it, turned it over in his hand a few times, and brought it to his face.

“This is the perfect gift,” he said.

*   *   *

When I was young, Poppy always had a Rhode Island Red chicken named Kiki, and it took me a long time to realize that “Kiki” wasn't the same Kiki she had been since I was two. I didn't know what had happened to the other Kikis, but I had the usual suspicions. The Kiki when I was nine, my favorite Kiki, laid the biggest eggs we'd ever seen, twice the size of our other hens.

One summer day, Poppy placed my favorite Kiki in my arms and asked me to follow him to the concrete slab in the shade at the far end of the yard. The chicken clucked as I rubbed my face on her neck. She was as gentle as a kitten, her orange feathers the softest material I'd ever touched, creamier than satin.

“Watch this,
Chérie
. I will show you something amazing.” He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and drew a thick, straight white line on the concrete, about a foot long. He took Kiki from my hands and placed her in front of the line.

“You want to learn how to hypnotize a chicken?”

He gently pressed Kiki's head to the concrete, lining her beak up with the line he had drawn. Kiki's head ricocheted off the cement. He pressed her head down a second time, and again she resisted. On the third try, Kiki's head stayed glued to the concrete, her beak aligned with the chalk stripe.

“When she sees the line, she thinks her beak is heavy,” he said, “and she cannot move.”

Kiki seemed helpless and I pitied her. I had thought of her as a creature similar to me, no more, no less; but there she stood, beguiled by a chalk line. It may have been the first time I distinguished any real difference between our animals and myself. I felt uncomfortable watching Kiki exposed; I didn't like being complicit in her humiliation, thinking she'd stay there forever, doomed to the misfire in her chicken brain that said she couldn't walk away.

Poppy waved his hand in front of Kiki's eyes and she clucked her way into the shrubs, her pointed orange chicken butt sluicing the green waters of our lawn. I ran my bare foot over the chalk line, blurring it into the concrete. Poppy and I fed Kiki and the other chickens leftover spaghetti, then sat in the screened patio watching our pigeons return to roost for the night. I didn't hypnotize Kiki again, but I did think of her differently from that day forward, the way something mythic diminishes the moment it becomes real.

 

Chapter 15

The day of Poppy's biopsy, we all woke up before dawn and drove him to the hospital. There were two ring-necked doves in the yard that morning, a male and female.

Nurses prepped Poppy, and the neurosurgeon reassured us that he would be OK. He leaned over Poppy's face and said, “Soli, we're going to fix you up. Don't worry, we're going to get you through this.”

I kissed Poppy good-bye as an orderly wheeled him toward the operating suite. We ate breakfast in the hospital cafeteria. Three hours later an orderly wheeled Poppy out of surgery and into recovery.

Poppy closed his eyes and grasped my dad's hand. His head was bandaged like a Civil War soldier's, with a spot of bright red blood in the place where they had opened his skull. It shocked me that the biopsy was this intrusive. He might as well have had the entire tumor removed. I stood over him and stroked his cheek.

“Monsieur Moustaki, how you feeling?” my dad asked.

*   *   *

When I was twenty-three, after the hurricane, and when my parents and Poppy and I were living in Fort Lauderdale, Poppy and I traversed the Las Olas Boulevard bridge to the beach every week to feed the pigeons and seagulls at the edge of the ocean. Parking was easy there, and the beach side of the road was for pedestrians, not for fancy hotels that blocked the public's view, as was the case on most South Florida beaches.

Poppy held my hand as we crossed State Road A1A toward the beach, the sand in front of us tattooed with spiky coconut palm shadows, like the print on a pair of board shorts. We might have looked like a scandalous item to passersby, a tan trophy girl in short-shorts and a baseball cap with a blonde fountain of ponytail cascading out the back, and a silver-haired man in white linen pants, a white button-down shirt, and a floppy white sun hat covering his ears and driving a shadow over his Greek face. I was a little hungover, as usual, but Poppy didn't know. I lagged behind him and he tightened his hand around mine. I held a plastic sack of stale bread in my other hand.

Down the beach I heard the slow rumble of an ATV, and I squinted to watch it dragging a grader over the sand, leveling millions of mini-dunes forged by the feet of tourists, moms and toddlers, and people who worked night shifts. At the shoreline it churned the seaweed under, making the terrain flat and artificial, but pretty, like a fresh snowfall. I had the urge to run behind it, my line of footprints the only human mark for miles.

Poppy had a favorite seat, a worn wrought iron bench facing the Atlantic. Bathers avoided the boxy shadows cast by low buildings blocking out the western sun; they floated on plastic rafts in the last of the sunlight before the lifeguards would lock away their surfboards and close their stands for the evening.

The pigeons crowded our feet the moment we sat. The seagulls noticed and hovered like noisy kites on strings, able to fix themselves in the air. There were black-hooded Laughing Gulls cawing and swooping, their red-lined beaks open and ready, and bold Herring Gulls, gray and white with red smudges on the bottom of their yellow mandibles, joined by a scavenge of Royal Terns with their pointed blonde beaks and tufts of black feathers like toupees on the backs of their heads.

I opened the sack of bread and placed it between us. Poppy reached into the bag and ground a stale dinner roll between his hands, scattering half of it on the ground and tossing the other half into the sky in front of us. I did the same. Gulls overhead careened into one another's airspace, banking off one another's bodies in a game of hungry, violent tag. Birds flew at us from every direction, from the sea in front and the city behind, the flock growing from dozens into hundreds.

“
Chérie
, have I told you about the pigeons in Paris?” Poppy said, tossing more bread to the pigeons, though the gulls commanded both ground and sky like feathered despots, taking more than their share of crumbs.

“I don't think so,” I said, though he had told me stories about pigeons in Paris as many times as there
were
pigeons in Paris. I tossed bread into the air one piece at a time, aiming for a particular Laughing Gull with each toss. He was quieter than the others, and I had a feeling he was hungrier, too.

“When your daddy and your Nona and I lived in Paris, there were ten thousand pigeons for every person. You cannot imagine how many pigeons. The facade of the Louvre museum was alive, gray with moving shapes, every crack filled with feathers, and when they flew, flocks of pigeons covered the sun like storm clouds.” He tossed more bread to the pigeons at our ankles, the underdogs in this ravenous scrim. I held some bread crust between my fingers, trying to lure them near, but they were too cautious.

“The buildings were being destroyed, beautiful artworks covered in pigeon poo poo.” Poppy talked with his hands, pantomiming statues of Greek mythological characters and antique building faces drenched in pigeon poop. “People in Paris did not like the pigeons, and the government had an idea how to get rid of them.”

“They didn't kill them, right?” I said. This was our ritual. He told stories; I pretended it was my first time hearing them.

“They put sedatives into pigeon food. Imagine the whole of Paris covered in sleeping pigeons. You could not walk down the street. People from the government picked up all of the pigeons and put them into trucks and drove them many hours away and released them into a forest.”