Birds of Paradise: A Novel (4 page)

AVIS HAD AN ID
EA
of how things were going to be, of her and her daughter, their fingers in a
p
â
te sucr
é
e,
rolling, cutting out the shapes of cupids and sea horses and dragons. But Felice was uninterested. The blithe girl ran around the house, light-spirited as a firefly, calling her friends, lying out by the pool, or playing video games. It was Stanley who came into the kitchen to help Avis shell walnuts and separate eggs.

H
er own mother had openly disapproved when Avis had announced that, instead of college, she wanted to attend the culinary institute
to become a pastry chef.

“That’s a girls’ slum,” Geraldine had said. “All that sugar and decoration. Just a blue-collar job with a frilly apron. You’ll never get half the respect or the pay of a real chef. If you can’t be bothered with an education, at least learn to
cook
.”

Years later, Avis sat on the couch, her own daughter’s head in her lap, hair spilling like ink over her leg. They’d had a daylong immersion in shopping at the mall in Pinecrest, then tea cakes (crude, coarsely frosted) at the French-Cuban bakery on the Miracle Mile. Avis combed Felice’s hair with her fingers, murmuring, “Who’s my beautiful girl?”

Felice smiled at her mother, barely shifting her attention from the TV cartoons.

Stanley emerged from the kitchen; his arms like twigs in the oversized oven mitts. At twelve, his hair was glossy, his small face pale with thought. Oh, Avis loved him too, but she’d had other plans for her son: she tried to direct his attention toward his father—a
lawyer
—she murmured the word to him like an incantation. But Stanley persisted in the kitchen, performing the small yet demanding apprentice’s tasks she set for him—removing the skin from piles of almonds, grating snowy hills of lemon zest, the nightly sweeping of the kitchen floor and sponging of metal shelves. He didn’t seem to mind: every day after school, he’d lean over the counter, watching her experiment with combinations—shifting flavors like the beads in a kaleidoscope—burnt sugar, hibiscus, rum, espresso, pear: dessert as a metaphor for something unresolvable. It was nothing like the slapdashery of cooking. Baking, to Avis, was no less precise than chemistry: an exquisite transfiguration. Every night, she lingered in the kitchen, analyzing her work, jotting notes, describing the way ingredients nestled: a slim layer of black chocolate hidden at the bottom of a praline tart, the essence of lavender stirred into a bowl of preserved wild blueberries. Stanley listened to his mother think out loud: he asked her questions and made suggestions—like mounding lemon meringue between layers of crisp pecan wafers—such a success that her corporate customers ordered it for banquets and company retreats.

On the day Avis is thinking of, she sat in the den where they watched TV, letting her hand swim over the silk of her daughter’s hair, imagining a dessert
pistou
of blackberry,
cr
è
me fra
î
che,
and nutmeg, in which floated tiny vanilla croutons. Felice was her audience, Avis’s picky eater—difficult to please. Her “favorites” changed capriciously and at times, it seemed, deliberately, so that after Avis set out what once had been, in Felice’s words, “the best ever”—say, a miniature
roulade Pavlova
with billows of cream and fresh kumquat—Felice would announce that she was now “tired” of kumquats.

Felice sat up as Stanley approached. Avis had noted that Felice was always pleased to eat whatever her big brother offered. Stanley wasn’t looking at Felice, though, but at Avis. “It’s a
castagnaccio
—I found some stuff about it online. And I tried a few things . . .” His voice tapered off modestly. He held out a plate with a low, suede-gold cake. Avis had struggled to conjure up a lighter chestnut cake: she realized that—while they’d been shopping—Stanley had reconfigured the laborious recipe. She cut a sliver for Felice and herself and they ate with their fingers while Stanley watched.

The cake had a delicate, nearly vaporous texture that released a startling flavor. There was something, some ingredient, that tugged at the chestnut and lemon and opened the taste on her tongue—the chimera, as Avis thought of it—the secret in the maze of ingredients.

“Mmmm, Stanley—so good.” Felice was already cutting another piece.

Avis took another bite as Stanley waited. She could barely grasp her own response, the plummeting sensation that seemed to plunge through her. Why couldn’t the boy stay out of her kitchen? She wanted him to be more than a food worker. He didn’t realize what punishing work it could be—hot, monotonous, hazardous: it was true manual labor, but magazines and TV dressed it up in glamour. She wanted him to use his mind, not his back. “What is it?” she asked quietly. “A savory herb. Basil?”

“Some basil and some rosemary.” He averted his gaze, still too tentative to smile—as if he were afraid he’d done wrong. Felice was watching her.

Avis nodded, eyes closed. She wanted to praise his ingenuity, to say how proud she was. Why did that simple act elude her? She opened her mouth, struggling for words; she had said finally, “It’s fine, but it isn’t quite right.”

He took the rest of the cake back to the kitchen and disposed of it.

Five years later, after Felice was gone, Stanley built a raised bed in the backyard and grew herbs and vegetables. He worked in grocery stores. He cooked dinner for his parents—vegetable stews and roasted chicken—trying to make sure Avis in particular ate something beside cookies and tarts. He avoided sugar. He stopped baking.

THE CELL RINGS AGAIN
Nina. There is the time stamp: she has to read it twice before she understands: 2:53. She’s been waiting for three hours.

Avis lays her hands and phone flat on the iron-grid table, gazing forward like a woman at a séance, staring past the streetlamp post and the gang of stick-shouldered boys with skateboards and the enormous black-and-white mural for Abercrombie & Fitch. When she recognizes the dark bounce of Nina’s hair, she feels mostly numb. Nina is overbearing, even caustic and punitive, but she has never said—like several others, “Oh well! They all eventually leave home, anyway, don’t they?” (Once, at a dinner party, a snow bird from Cincinnati, upon hearing about Felice running away, remarked dryly, “Lucky you.”)

Avis can see her assistant composing herself, chin lifting. Nina approaches the table with one hand on her chest. “I’m so sorry, dear,” she says softly. “When you didn’t answer the phone, I just—I thought I’d better . . .”

“Oh, she didn’t come, I guess.” A tiny smile on her lips. “Oh well.”

“Ah, sweetie.” Nina touches her shoulder, but Avis stands.

“No, it’s . . . No—no. It’s nothing.” Avis glances around for the waiter. “I should have—I don’t know.” Evidently she’d outlasted his shift. She can’t remember if she’d paid for the tea. Avis refuses to say that perhaps her daughter forgot, she got busy. These were the things she’d said last time while Nina looked at her with those kind, terrible eyes. Brian refuses to go to these meetings at all. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, he says, voice bone-dry, desiccated by anger. So it’s been nearly five years since he’s last seen his daughter. Stanley hasn’t seen his sister in that time either, as far as she knows. And ten months, now, for Avis. Not so bad in comparison with five years. Really, not bad.

Ten months, she reflects as she follows Nina. For some reason this is all she can hold in her head, like the refrain to a song. Ten months, as they pass the French bakery franchise, ten months, as they cross the street by the theater. They enter the parking structure, the air dim as a chapel’s. Perhaps if she clings to this clot of thought, it will hold her. Not so bad. She climbs into Nina’s big, empty car. Beyond the open ramparts of the garage, Avis sees the sky lowering, the damp air growing heavier. She will try not to wonder where Felice is: where she goes when it rains. She can’t be that far away.

Felice

O
H FUCK THEM, WHAT DO THEY KNOW?

Felice is sick of the Green House, its stink of cat pee and old pot and cooking oil, and a kind of rot—as if losing youth or hope or just some idea of a future would have a smell. All the kids and bums and “musicians” who wander in and out of that place carry that odor somewhere on their clothes or hair. This morning when Felice wakes on the couch in the back bedroom, her stomach tightens and buckles at the smell.

She props herself up, surveying the room: two kids on the floor, another sleeping sitting up at her feet, his skinny neck tipped back against the cushion, mouth sloped open and a thread of saliva escaping from one corner—a skinhead in black jeans and lace-up boots. She’s awakened before to find other kids who’ve stumbled into the same room or corner as her: most of them are just looking for the comfort of another body: someone to crash next to, to feel a little safer through the night.

Some of them sit in circles at night, like around a campfire, in the immense, trashed living room (there’s even a big fireplace where they cook things sometimes, but eventually the room fills with smoke and they have to stop). Mostly they’re kids like Felice—a lot of them even younger—some like eleven and twelve years old. There are a few old people too—guys in their thirties—and those are the worst with all the psychologizing and talk, talk, talk. That’s all those guys like to do, suck on their wet joints, eyes watering, discussing their stupid ideas of how to take down the government or break into the mansions out on Star Island or Key Biscayne or South Gables. And Felice knows that some of them grew up in palatial homes on South Hibiscus Drive with private docks and gates and servants, and that many of the worst and dirtiest and smelliest kids will inherit enormous trust funds in five or ten years.

Not Felice.

She moves slowly, slipping on her backless sneakers, lifting her feet one at a time over the first skinhead, slumped on the floor beside the couch. But then she does something stupid—she knows it’s stupid even as she does it, yet she can’t resist lifting the half-pack of cigarettes from the lap of the propped-up sleeper. She doesn’t even smoke anymore, but it’s taken her longer to break the habit of stealing—every now and then she slips back into it—and smokes are useful and tradable among the street-poor. She might’ve gotten away with it too, but she’s hasty and the flimsy pack crackles in her hand. Instantly the skinhead seizes her hand—fingers, actually—crushing them together. Felice sucks a yelp back, furious with herself for getting caught.

“Look at you.” The skinhead’s name is Axe. These guys all have names like that—“Raver,” “Dread.” They hang out together—a tribe of thirty or forty massively stupid and destructive boys—Felice can’t keep track—their names and faces interchangeable. “So what the fuck is going on up in here?”

Pain knifes through the small bones in her fingers; it’s like one of those paper finger traps—the more she struggles, the more tightly he squeezes. “No.” She deliberately keeps her voice low. “Please, just . . . please, please . . .”

He pulls her closer, smiling to reveal gray translucence covering his teeth; she inhales an acrid effluvium—as if he’s been drinking vinegar. “You’re so fucking polite—
please, please,
” he minces. “Don’t you know not to steal, girlface? Someone might fucking tear your hand off.”

Felice does some brisk calculations: it’s possible he’ll just hassle her awhile if she plays along. But playing along carries its own risks. At that moment of hesitation, he gives a wild bark of laughter, grabs her free hand, and fake-bites it. She feels his teeth graze her knuckles, the slime of his tongue: she yanks her hand away. “My boyfriend won’t like that!” she says breathlessly, resisting the urge to wipe off her hand. Her heart pounds in her voice, but she keeps going. “He’s super jealous. He doesn’t like men touching me.” She used the word “men” deliberately, as a kind of flattery: she doesn’t know if Axe is smart enough to call her bluff or if he’ll just view this as a challenge. He seems to connect with some thought that lifts his features. His shredded lips part, and again, she sees the gray gleam. “What fucking bullshit boyfriend is that now?” he asks loudly enough that one of the other skinheads stirs and groans.

“Emerson,” she says quickly.

He scrutinizes her face for a long moment. “Emerson doesn’t have any girlfriends.” But his voice lowers. “Especially not
you
.” He releases her crushed hand. The cigarette pack bounces on the floor as she folds her hand against her chest, a furtive slide along her eyes. She backs away, stepping over a fat skinhead sacked out on the floor, his throat vibrating with a snore. She picks open the door and doesn’t look back as she slips out of the room.

Her mouth is dry, her stomach cramped with hunger, though she’s used to that old pain. She stops in the kitchen—more cigarette butts reeking in the sink, empty bottles with their own sour yeast stink—a few shriveled oranges in the fridge: she grabs one, unearths her board from its hiding place in one of the cavernous pieces of furniture—a carved mahogany armoire—too cumbersome to cart off and sell or someone would’ve done so years ago.

The outdoors kids told Felice that a wealthy family used to live in the Green House, back when rich people moved out to the beach to party. Supposedly it was one of the first houses ever constructed on the beach. The owners left it to their kids, it got passed down for, like, generations. It used to be full of priceless art and chandeliers. But then eventually, there was just one old lady living there—the Green House kids called her “Myra.” Hanging in the front entry was an oil painting of a fat, pink-cheeked lady in a blue dress. The canvas was streaked with grime, but it was still up there in its gold frame bristling with curlicues and rosettes, and might even be worth something. The kids said Myra had lived there all alone and one day the skate punks and street rats who’d been noticing the weeds and the St. Augustine grass getting wild in the big front yard and the scabby cats and the increasing chirr of bugs—they just tried the front door and the handle turned.

“She was probably about three-quarters crazy, sitting there, bunched up in that same old blue dress, watching TV right on that couch,” Douglas told her. He was seventeen with a narrow, handsome face and ghastly, rotten yellow teeth. “She saw those guys come in and she started screeching, Hey you kids get outta here! Get outta here!” He gulped with laughter, displaying those teeth.

“When was this? How long ago?” Felice asked. She was fifteen years old then, already skeptical of most stories like this.

“Fuck. I don’t know. Like back in the 1970s or something?”

“So what happened?” Felice folded her arms over her chest. “After the kids came in and she yelled and all?”

He smirked. “They ignored her. What was she gonna do? They moved in. She didn’t even have a phone anymore. She didn’t know anyone and no one wanted to know about her. I mean none of the neighbors or anybody. She was so fat, she couldn’t get out of her chair or anything.”

“Damn.” Felice stared at a big bald gray spot in the middle of the ratty Persian carpet. “Poor lady.”

It seemed to be a true story. More or less. The details changed depending on who told it. Some kids said that Myra lived upstairs on the third floor—where Felice liked to sleep—while the street rats lived downstairs. They said they brought in like squirrels and cats and slaughtered them on the hardwood floor in the living room, just for fun. They said there were all kinds of gangs that moved in and out, a meth lab in one of the parlors. Everything. Every surface of the house was scarred and rutted and burned as if a wagon train trail had rolled through. Even the police ignored it.

“What happened to Myra?” Felice asked.

“Oh.” Douglas shrugged. “They killed her.” He laughed his big galumphing laugh again. “No. They tried to be nice to her at first. They brought her food and shit. But they didn’t know what an old lady likes to eat. She probably needs stuff you don’t chew or something. And she just kept yelling at them to get the fuck out and shit. So after a while they killed her.”

Other kids said that wasn’t true at all. That social services finally showed up and carted her away and the kids just stayed, like they were her actual grandkids. But they all talked about hearing “Myra’s ghost” in certain rooms at night and some of them liked to touch the corner of her painting, “for good luck,” so that corner was smudged mossy and black. Felice liked that painting—old Myra with her sour purse-strings mouth, but something sweeter in her eyes—like a mother’s eyes.

Every time Felice comes back to the Green House, the painting looks less and less human and she finds fewer kids who’ve even heard of Myra. Once, she’d asked one of the thirty-year-olds about her, a spooky guy with matted hair and whirly blue eyes named Cartusia who slept up in the stifling attic. Some of the kids said that he’d inherited money, that he was the reason the Green House still had any electricity or running water. When Felice asked him, he’d hummed and smiled and said only, “Myra’s my mother.”

SHE SLAMS OPEN THE FRONT
door and, once again, Felice is free of the Green House. She drops her board and pushes off; the board is the best place for her to be, her head empty and clear and the only thing is tilting and steering, the air brushing her face and the street rumbling through the wheels under her feet. She will never go back there again. This time for real. Her eighteenth birthday is coming: time for things to be different.

She has to make a plan, she thinks. And she has to get money.

The air is sweeter than usual today, a rich, undulant, lanolin, heavy with ocean minerals; she’s not so anxious to work. Felice kicks and rolls to the raised, wooden boardwalk behind the mid-beach hotels; she passes joggers, strollers, people in workout clothes taking their power walks; some of them squint at her, hating skateboarders. She drifts past a homeless guy she knows named Ronnie. He looks, at first, with his long hair and cutoff jeans, like a regular person. But then you notice his too-dark tan, the way his eyes seem too pale for his skin, his face weathered, a desert nomad’s.

“Hey man,” she says, rolling by, slow as fog.

His eyes flicker at her, a dimensionless khaki color.

After rounding a bevy of plump women in petaled bathing caps, she stops to watch some children and a young woman playing in the skirt of the water. The woman could be a college-age nanny, but she has the same yellow hair as the children. The water is almost hot in August, and the children shriek and kick up a froth; their transparent laughter barely reaches Felice. She stands there, board under one arm, watching the play, feeling alone and sad and hopeful, when someone says, “Hi? Felice?”

“Felix,” she says automatically, annoyed. “Oh.” It’s one of the skinheads from the House—Emerson. She swallows her breath and steps back. “Hi.” Her voice sounds like an eight-year-old’s.

Emerson’s hair is so pale and close-cropped she can make out his scalp in the sunlight, prickling with sweat. The color in his face is high and pink, as if he’d been running. His mouth is small, possibly cold, but he’s so strong and healthy that he emits a natural attractiveness. She’s a bit afraid of him. On more than one occasion, she’s noticed his translucent eyes following her across the room: perhaps why she said his name to Axe. He places his hand on top of his head, then removes it. She remembers now—when he first appeared at the House, the other shaved boys made fun of his measured pace and demeanor. They sat around in the living room once, flicking cigarette butts at Emerson in improvised torment, until he burst up from his place on the carpet, upending the mahogany coffee table crammed with half-emptied beer bottles, crashing the whole foaming mess to the floor. He grabbed one of them—a vicious boy named Damon—and knocked his head against the floor so it made a hollow thump. For a while, the boy laid there without moving, eyes open, staring. Emerson tossed a cigarette butt at him and walked out. The next day the boy had an egg-sized lump on the side of his head. They treated Emerson differently after that.

Now Emerson stands in front of her, an obstacle, pink and glistening, his sheen of hair sparkles, and his gray T-shirt with the faded rock band is sweated onto his big chest. “I thought that was you,” he says.

Felice grips her skateboard and glances back toward the children in the surf. “Yeah, hey,” she says. “Who told you my old name?”

“I like Felice.” He smiles and his lower lip droops in a soft, unguarded way. “All those kids at the Green House—they know something about everyone.”

Felice snorts. “More like nothing about everyone.”

“Well, I just heard something about you and me.”

“Oh yeah?” Something trembles in the small of her back as if the temperature just dropped. She stares at him, determined not to look away. “Like what?”

He slides his hands into his pockets and his big, loose shorts slip. “Like, we’re getting it on, supposedly. Like, that’s according to
you
.”

“Someone told you that?” She widens her eyes; a pulse leaps in her temple.

“Axe and Dink.”

“What did you say?”

He turns to gaze at the little kids and huffs a laugh. “I guess I said it was true.”

Instead of feeling grateful, though, Felice is irritated: the way he’s standing there, those see-through eyes floating over her, like they really are together. “Fine. Whatever. I hate all those guys, I’m not going back there.” She doesn’t care what he thinks, hoping only to avoid the humiliation of explaining herself.

“What? Who you talking about?”

“The fucking Gross House. It’s disgusting. I can’t believe I ever stayed there.”

Emerson runs his hand over the brush of his hair. He swipes back and forth, color climbing into his face. “It’s nice—I think. It’s decent. You can hang. There’s cool people. People bring beer and food.”

“It’s gross,” she snaps. “Everyone steals everything—they’re all so annoying. And loud and stupid. And it’s fucking
hot
. Like a fucking jungle swamp.”