“That’s not even to mention,” Emerson goes on, “how he’s kept me alive on a number of occasions.”
Felice stares at the wasp, refusing to say anything more about Derek. There’s something drugged about the stillness of the air: she can’t hear any road noise at all, just a white insect whir, a slush of fronds in the breeze. She unfolds, takes his hand, and leads him deeper into the palms, to the rope hammock. She’s so narrow she’s able to slip, eel-like, under his arm, and they swing, cradled in the braided rope, so quiet Felice can almost imagine it’s just the current of their breathing that’s moving them. She closes one hand around the curve of his wrist. For a while, neither of them speaks. She’s wet with sweat, glued to Emerson’s side. Overhead, a shelf of clouds has started to cover the sun.
“You feel like maple syrup,” he says.
Felice hoists herself up in the braid, slips a leg over Emerson’s, her hand swims over his chest. She kisses his shoulder, then his neck, and watches the blood rise beneath the surface of the skin. She kisses the outer rim of his jaw, the edge of his smile. She kisses his mouth, which is wonderfully soft, and her hand travels over the towel before he catches her hand. “Wait, Felice.”
She nuzzles the warm space behind his ear. “Wait for what?”
He puts her hand on his chest; it slides back down to his hip where he stops it. “You don’t have to do this.”
“As if.” She pulls in her chin. “You’re such a freak. Do you think I ever do anything I don’t want to?”
“Still.” He’s so serious it’s annoying.
She kisses him again. She feels his body warming with response. She finds that she’s giving herself over as well—just a bit, but more than ever happened before: in the clubs, on the dance floor, kissing whoever swirled an arm around her neck, and, often, moving into the plush, blurry hours that followed: feeling nothing. Now, hanging in the swing among tendrils of purple orchids, dots of moisture in the air like a sparse, suspended rain, it’s an infinity away from the rest of the world. Her hand roves over the cotton covering Emerson’s thigh and again he stops her. “It’s just sort of soon. Like, I don’t want to wreck it.”
“You’re so stupid. What a stupid movie thing to say.” Something about him is making her chest flutter with suppressed laughter. “You’re such a big fat baby.”
He holds her wrist, captured, up by his shoulder. “How many men have you been with?”
“Since when do you get to ask me that?”
He puts his hands up, lowers his head. “Sorry.”
“And ‘been with’? Been with? What are you now, Mr. Talking Bible?”
“No.”
There’s a low, thin grumbling in the eastern sky and a mass of clouds flash. Something hums past Felice’s ear. It occurs to her that her face is all sweaty. She hasn’t eaten enough and her breath must be tart: maybe she shouldn’t assume that Emerson finds her alluring. She twists away from him grumpily, onto her back, rocking the hammock.
“What? Where you going now?” he asks.
She closes her eyes, mentally toting: Frank, Ronald, Jorge, Raffy . . . who else? Anyone? Oh, what was his name? Wayne? Oh and that yucky Doyle. “Six,” she says grimly. “How about you, Mr. Bible? How many girls have you had fornication with?”
“Two.”
“Two? Jeez.” She fans at a mosquito. “That’s lame.”
“Not to me it wasn’t.”
“What, were you all in love or something?” She drags out the words, then looks over her shoulder at him.
“Well, a little maybe.” He gives her a subtle smile. “Nothing big.”
“Brother.”
“Are you jealous?”
“Eww!” she erupts. “Oh my God. You are just so queer and gross.” But she doesn’t leave the hammock. She remains, pressed shoulder to shoulder, side by side. It’s like catching a glimpse of something distant, to feel her body spark with attraction, and even better, to not have to act on it. They rock drowsily. The air smells of the ferns and dirt and stone, the before-rain. Her mother used to open the front door and ask, Smell the rain? She’d hold a conch shell to Felice’s ear and say, Hear the ocean? And Felice did, both her hands gripping the base of the whorl.
Without warning, Hannah Joseph comes into her mind. Felice turns her head as if she could brush the thoughts away, but it’s too late. She remembers how Hannah hated everything about Miami—even some of the best things, like the hooked-nosed white ibises roaming around in the grass and the flowers that blew up into winter foliage—a tree or bush opening overnight into flower like perfumed flames. All of it bothered Hannah, who’d walked around with her arms folded against her chest, complaining, “It isn’t like this in Connecticut. The grass is softer there. And the trees are normal and leafy.” At first everyone wanted to be like her. Felice and Bella and Yeni, the most popular girls, replicated even the way Hannah folded her arms.
Felice remembers Hannah saying, This isn’t even like America!
That’s what she’d say, in the cafeteria, at recess, in class. “You guys don’t realize how not-American you are . . .” she’d begin. Even the teachers would chuckle, a cowed, embarrassed look on their faces.
Pressing the heels of her palms against her closed eyes, Felice waits until the image of Hannah fades into the gray dissolve behind her eyes.
GRADUALLY THE RUMBLING comes closer and the humidity builds until Felice and Emerson are caught in a powdery, confectionery shower. They climb out of the hammock and run through the door to the kitchen. Derek is sitting at the table with a pad covered with columns of numbers. “Where you two been?” Derek mutters, not looking up.
Emerson walks past him into the guest bath, then returns with a big towel. He seats Felice at the table, chair turned out, and begins to run the towel along her arms and legs, rumpling it around her scalp. Felice doesn’t move while he does this, her back straight and head lifted. Even Derek is silent; he puts down his pen, as if a ceremony of some sort is taking place. No one has touched her like this since she was eight or so years old: she feels a fine, prickling heat on her skin as he finishes.
There’s a muffled snort: Derek, his tipped smile. “Nice.”
She turns away, infuriated—just another street kid, wrecking everything; acting as if some sort of performance has been staged for his pleasure. She wants Emerson to smash him, but he hangs back as if abashed. She stands. “I’m getting the fuck out of here. And you two homos can go fuck yourselves.”
“Woo-hoo!” Derek leers. “Nice mouth.” Emerson shoves him so hard his chair scrapes back a few inches. Derek grabs the arms of his chair. “The fuck, man?”
Felice goes to the living room, seizes her deck and her bag as Emerson runs after her. “Felice, what?” He follows her out the front door. “Hey, talk to me.”
It’s still sprinkling; her clothes wither with moisture. She tosses back the damp cables of her hair, ducks a branch of sea grape tree, then opens the iron gate. “You could’ve just told me you were gay.”
“Felice. Jesus. I’m not gay.”
Felice stops and slaps her deck on the street. “Then that just makes it worse, doesn’t it?” She’s yelling. She can’t help it. The feelings seem to come from outside of her body, possessing her, tightening her lungs, her rage like a screw tightening in her temples. So angry she’s crying, the tears nearly springing from the corners of her eyes. It doesn’t make sense; it’s like some feathery thing beating the air around her, all betrayal and humiliation. He puts his big, dumb hand on her, which enrages her more. She trips as she tries to kick away on her board, her vision speeding, unraveling. She trips again and nearly falls. Emerson follows her.
“Of course I want to—I want—Jesus . . . Please just listen for two seconds.” He trots in fronts of her, momentarily stopping her. She glares at his blond lashes and red cheeks. She thinks: Why do I even care?
“I want to be with you. Of course I want . . . you know. But I also want more than that. I don’t want to just . . .
screw around.” Now he’s blushing, his face a dark, bruised color. “We’re more than that, Felice—we’re for real. I’ll take care of you and we’ll watch each other’s backs.”
Felice can barely hear him, thinking, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . . a tattoo in her head. She doesn’t want to hear any more. She forces herself to lower her voice, to contain herself enough to say, “That’s just wonderful for you, Emerson.”
“Please, just, let’s try to—”
“No.” Her voice is scalding. Thoughts open in her mind, a thin white band, widening: he wants her to go backwards, to do things in that stupid, weak way. She will never be that way again. “No, Emerson. You aren’t listening right. I think you’re a big fake loser and Derek is a scumbag. Okay? Do you hear me yet? Are you getting that? That whole thing about Portland and strongman stuff—it’s never going to happen. We both know the reality. Just stay the fuck away from me.” She turns her back on his stricken face. Gets on her board and kicks away as hard as she can. A big silence behind her. She’s so furious she can’t tell the difference between the vibrations of her board and the powerful quaking that’s broken inside her body. As she rides, the unwanted image comes back to her: a girl’s face—streaked, hollowed out by shadow—she seemed to be crouching on the sidewalk. Even though Felice knows that isn’t right, it’s the way she remembers it.
FELICE FIRST NOTICED the starry spill of the girl’s hair when she appeared in French, the way it trembled with light when she answered questions or gave a toss of her head. The girl always had her hand up and knew more French than the rest of them—including Madame Cruz—actually correcting the teacher’s accent—“That’s tre-s”—gently crushing the r in the back of her throat. “Not ‘trres,’” a Catalan roll off the tip of her tongue. The rest of the class tittered but the girl stared at Madame Cruz because, Felice realized, she was simply right.
Hannah was a year and a half older than Felice, in ninth, but the eighth and ninth graders took electives together. Felice ran into her in the hallway. It was easy for her to be bold—she was so pretty everyone wanted to be Felice’s friend. But Hannah was shy and self-possessed and even a little stuck-up, which attracted Felice. Not as easy to conquer as the other kids. Felice started sitting in the front of French class as well. Afterward the two girls walked to lunch together and Felice asked questions which Hannah answered in a low voice—hard to hear over the din in the corridors, her head lowered, books hugged to her chest.
“Where did you come from?”
“Litchfield.”
Felice lifted her eyebrows: almost everyone in her school had started from someplace else—usually their parents’ country.
Hannah said, “Before Litchfield, other places.”
“What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a surgeon. My mom is an ophthalmologist.”
“Why did you move here?”
Hannah scrutinized Felice a moment before she replied, “Dad thought it was too white. In Litchfield.”
Hannah’s hair was lighter than Felice’s but her skin was dark, a deep, rosy tan. She had a softly curved nose and a sloping chin that almost spoiled her looks. But there were her lucid green eyes, pale as windowpanes, startling and ghostly in all that dark skin. After a week of hallway conversations, the girl entrusted Felice with the information that her real name wasn’t actually Hannah Joseph but Hanan Yusef. That she hadn’t been born in the States—her parents had moved them from Jerusalem when Hannah was two. That her father had changed her name when they moved to Miami because he was sick of putting up with anti-Arab bullshit.
A frisson ran through Felice’s arms and spine. Thrilled, she asked, “But don’t you hate that? Hanan sounds beautiful. Don’t you hate having a fake American name?”
“No, I was glad,” Hannah said curtly, and looked away.
Bella, Marisa, and Yeni made room for Hannah in their coterie, a little infatuated with her. “She just has this way about her,” Jacqueline said. “Yeah, like, she knows what’s cool and what isn’t without even trying,” Court said.
Felice also sensed an adult weariness about the girl—her comments adroit, funny, often bleak. She seemed to have a kind of cold insight verging on telepathy into people—especially adults—their lives like transparencies before her eyes. “Dottie over there?” she whispered to Felice. “She wants to get with Charleton Baker.” Felice cracked up, a hand cupped over her mouth. “No way!” Charleton was sweet and tall—a thyroid case, as Hannah put it. But he was twelve, stringy and chronically broken-voiced. She realized that a doting light came into the social studies teacher’s powdered face whenever she called on him: Dottie Horkheimer’s smile deepened and she looked, fleetingly, pretty. Knowing something forbidden about Ms. Horkheimer made social studies bearable.
All that fall, through Hannah’s funny, scorching way of looking at things, school itself seemed more tolerable. Hannah seemed to know a lot about other kids: she warned Felice that her friend Coco was a fake, jealous of Felice’s looks, that she whispered behind her back. Felice and her friends had known each other since kindergarten. As soon as Hannah told her this, Felice thought it must be true: she began to distance herself from Coco. Later she realized she wasn’t sure if it was true, or if it just seemed so because of the supremely certain way that Hannah said things.
Felice and Hannah fell into rituals of endless email and phone calls—messages raveling together, switching from one to the other at whim. By October, they snuck out of P.E. on a regular basis. They sprawled in the east field and watched the boys’ soccer team running wind sprints and snapping through calisthenics. Hannah would gossip with Felice about teachers and other kids for a while, but then she’d start to say things like, “Isn’t it weird that everyone has to die? Like, everyone on this field right now? Someday they’ll all be dead. Everyone in this whole school. Gone.”
“I guess.” Felice squinted so spangles of colored light glittered inside her eyelashes. Off in the distance, there were moving vistas of palms, their enormous shaggy fronds seemed to swim and undulate against the sky. Felice loved listening to Hannah say her crazy stuff. She had decided never to introduce her to her mother. Avis would come out—she always did—with plates of cherry cookies, their chocolate icing like lacquer, or lemon cream scones coruscated with sugar crystals—her friends fought for the morsels of her miniature éclairs. “Your mother is a god,” Bella once moaned.
Hannah didn’t like to talk about her parents either. “My dad is a big boring freak and for some reason my mom married him.” She flopped back in the grass, swishing her arms back and forth, the way Felice had seen kids make snow angels on TV. “I hate Arabs. I hate Israelis. I hate soldiers. I hate Saddam Hussein. I hate George Bush. I hate politics, I hate words that begin with p. So don’t ask me about any of it.”
“Fine,” Felice said, laughing and rolling her eyes. “I wasn’t going to.”
Felice could see the shapes of old shadows moving over Hannah’s eyes. Odd references came up all the time. A truck overturned a block away from the school and a brackish chemical exhaust hung in the air: Hannah said, “That smells exactly like a sulfur bomb.” Another time, when a jet clapped a sonic boom over the school, Hannah collapsed into a hunch on the floor, her face stark with shock. She recovered, brushing aside the teacher’s concern, but later went home without speaking to Felice.
Hannah made fun of Felice’s other friends behind their backs. She mimicked Yeni’s prissy Venezuelan accent, Bella’s slack, sweetly bovine expression. They sensed her disdain, as well as the way she claimed Felice all for herself, edging out a world in which she and Felice were the only ones who mattered: Felice was flattered and pleased. This was a new kind of friend.
SEVERAL BLOCKS LATER, Emerson and Derek receding into distance, Felice starts to relax. The streets widen and hiss with traffic, the air rain-pearled. There’s a burst of squawking in the air and she looks up to see a passing flock of sapphire-colored macaws with orange bellies. Stanley said
they were the prettiest animals with the ugliest voices. He’d told her how, after big hurricanes, wild birds escaped from the aviaries and zoos and from the metal cages people kept in their backyards. They returned to nature. “They’ll nip off your finger with that beak—like scissors. Snip!” he said. Felice was seven when Andrew hit, but she didn’t remember much of it beyond the fun of nightly picnics from their cooler and reading by flashlight and bathing in the swimming pool.
Felice admires the long blue tails of the birds just before they vanish into the trees. That’s the way to be, she thinks, kicking hard on her board, letting the wind stream through her hair—no plans, no fear, no expectations: never to be held in live captivity.
Avis
SHE DREAMS OF A LITTLE BOY: HIS HAIR SLOWLY rising and falling as he runs in long, slow arcs, up to kick the ball, the air filled with bright cries:
I’ve got it! I’ve got the ball!
Avis opens her eyes. For a moment, she waits, spooled in the sweetness of an after-dream. It seems to continue unfolding around her, her son still eight years old.
Consciousness emerges then, and Avis realizes she can still hear the cries, the child’s voice. Gradually she notices the hard repeating beat. The mynah. She lingers in bed with her eyes closed, marveling at the mimicry—the miracle of it—a bird, capturing the parabola of laughter so exactly. Who is the little boy, Avis wonders, this parrot listened to?
Glancing at the clock, she realizes, with a deep dismay, that it’s 6:30: she’s overslept by two hours: too late to fulfill the standing order for palmiers at the Anacapri and La Granada restaurants—she’ll probably lose their business. Usually she wakes on her own with no problem. She hears Brian’s familiar pace between bathroom and bedroom. Why didn’t he wake her? He hums and mutters, runs a brush through his hair. Because she’d been stood up, she thinks grimly. He felt sorry for her. Avis rises, ties back her hair; ignores the strands that slide free in her fingers, ignores its lighter mass. She brews strong black tea with cream and honey and goes to her desk in what she still thinks of as Stanley’s room, to email the restaurants. She struggles to construct an apology as the mynah shrieks through the window.
Birds of Paradise Page 16
