Newly showered, Brian smiles at Avis as he moves past the door. She still enjoys the sight of her husband undressed, his slightly bowlegged stance, the softening pouch of his middle, his penis, its innocent, leftward slump. Once Stanley was out of the house, she sometimes lured Brian back to bed in the morning, enjoying the coolness of his washed skin against her kitchen warmth. But she hasn’t been much interested in a while. She sighs, then twists around at the desk chair. “Do you hear that?”
Brian ruffles the back of his hair with a towel. “You mean the damn bird?”
“It always sounds a little different each time.”
He combs his hair before the full-length mirror, presenting his back and tidy buttocks. “Not to me it doesn’t.”
She rarely sees Brian in the morning—she’s usually in the middle of rushing out orders of fresh baguettes and scones. Avis abandons the desk and prepares Brian a plate of croissants, salted butter, a bowl of blackberry preserves she gets in trade from a local jams and jellies lady. Then she sits at the table with him, one hand knotting closed the placket of her chef’s jacket, the other hand running the length of Lamb’s slinking back.
“Parkhurst. Ugh. Wants to wrap up the contract on the Design District deal,” he mumbles, studying his BlackBerry. “He’s obsessed with that deal.”
“Design District’s supposed to be the hot place,” she says, watching him stare at the tiny screen. “I have a restaurant client there—their lines are out the door.”
“Except it’s not the Design District—not even close. I keep telling them.” He looks up at her. “I’m sorry—you were saying something—what were you saying?”
Avis considers the view through the French doors: in that pause, she feels herself telescoping backwards, out of their life. She watches him touch the rim of his plate with the edge of his knife, observes the striations of his knuckles, the ropy veins in the backs of his hands. She estimates that it’s been nearly six months since they last made love. The longest they’ve ever gone. Perhaps it has something to do with her mother’s passing last year. She wonders—the thought softly bursting in on her—if he’s in love with someone else.
He pauses before getting up. “That bird,” he says darkly. She becomes once again conscious of the parrot’s cry, now the quavering singsong of a madwoman. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “How’s anybody supposed to get any work done?”
“Most people around here commute to work.”
“You don’t.” He takes his plate to the kitchen sink. She hears him rummaging around. “I swear I’m going to call code enforcement.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Her hand slips to the base of her throat.
Brian stands in the doorway holding a banana. “But you’ve been struggling.” He stops short, the catch in his statement like a little gap between them, encompassing her stumblings and mistakes over the past year: miscalculating ingredient amounts for breads she’s made hundreds of times; forgetting orders, singeing entire sheets of the most delicate, time-consuming pastries: she’s mournfully discarded entire batches. Long sheaths of nothingness open in Avis’s days, inertia: she reports to the kitchen, picks up a spoon, then, quickly, it’s the end of the day and she’s done nothing. Sometimes the days dissolve between her fingers. They haven’t spoken of these things openly.
Avis named her business Paradise Pastry because she imagined cathedrals. She thought about the stonemasons, glassblowers, sculptors—who gave lifetimes to the creation of beauty. Every sugar crust she rolled, every simple tarte Tatin was a bit of a church. She consecrated herself to it: later, it became her tribute to her daughter and the unknown into which she’d disappeared. She had her cathedral to enter, to console her. Her friend Jean-Françoise, chef at Le Petit Choux, said that her pastries would be transcendent, if only she weren’t American.
BRIAN FLIPS OPEN his briefcase on the dining room table and places a waxed bag next to the sheaf of folders and his BlackBerry. “You remember the thing Barry told us . . .” One of the post-Felice family counselors—an earnest man with a habit of stroking his ponytail throughout the sessions.
“He told us a lot of things.”
“He said sometimes our partners know us even better than we know ourselves.”
Through the French doors, Avis watches wet black branches lit with buds, the Precambrian curves of the palm fronds. “Oh. Right. Okay.”
He doesn’t move for a moment. She turns and notices with a pang that he’s sneaked a bag of Florentine cookies into his briefcase. He says, “We can talk about it again later.”
“I’ve been thinking about the kids so much these days.”
“Stanley’s fantastic—he makes that place hop—no question about it.”
“Well, I just hope . . .” She watches Brian; it’s like speaking in code. “I want him to be happy is all. Do you think he is?”
“Well, I think he’s got a new girlfriend. He called me yesterday,” Brian says softly. He seems to be about to say more but stops.
Avis’s hand moves to her chest. “What happened to that other one?” During his high school years, Avis had watched Stanley cycle through one date after another—pretty, ephemeral young ladies like fireflies.
“Who knows—that lady killer,” Brian says, smiling. Avis remembers Brian at twenty-eight: narrow sea-blue eyes. Irish-handsome, her mother had said—untrustworthy. Brian’s good looks settled into a sort of normalness—he put on weight, his face broadened, and he started to look like everyone else: she found this calming. She doesn’t really want to ask about Stanley so much as she wants to ask about their own marriage—how happy are we? It seems they’ve lost the ability to speak to each other in such plain and direct words. “He’s always so busy,” she murmurs, examining the white flour crust under her nails.
“Hurricane season—it’s a scramble for them. They’ve got to lay in supplies.”
“Does Stan know that her birthday is next week?” She doesn’t look at Brian.
“Whose?”
She approximates a smile. “Her eighteenth. D-Day. I was thinking maybe we should do something—like a memorial—to commemorate it.”
Brian gives her a genuine smile. “She’s not dying. Far as we know. You ask me, if anything we ought to celebrate that she’s an adult now—free to torment whomever she likes.”
MINUTES AFTER SHE HEARS Brian’s car rolling from the driveway, Avis goes to the French doors. The parrot is warbling, back to the watery contralto, a low, inflected pulse that reminds her of her mother’s collection of scratched up LPs—Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday. She opens the door and slips outside to the flagstone patio. The sound draws her into the fringe of the bamboo and coconut palms. Avis can’t account for her change of heart. It reminds her of how Florida had slowly opened to her twenty years ago, how she began to see the differences in lizards, and petals, and tree trunks: bark swirling in a spiral; spreading gray roots like the tendrils of a beard; one peeling like paper; one fine-grained as skin. Avis peers through the branches, pushing them aside so they release scents of grass and lime. This is the time of year when mangoes hang from the boughs, soft as hips, each tree with its own flavor. An amber butterfly floats over the neighbor’s clothesline. Avis realizes that a wave of shadow at the far end of the yard is the woman she spoke to the other day. She stands with her arms lifted, pinning a pair of men’s boxer shorts to the clothesline, a basket of laundry beside her, a wooden clothespin in her teeth.
As the woman shuffles forward, Avis notices something at the woman’s feet: it’s the bird, about a foot high, oil-black with a blue sheen, a crimson spot on its beak. It toddles behind the woman and emits a chortling, purling sound like Avis’s cat. Avis stands still, her hands on the trees, scarcely breathing. The woman wears an emerald-colored head scarf knotted at the back of her head and another housedress, this one in a celadon color, ethereal against the darkness of her skin. About halfway through her basket of clothes the woman pauses. She takes the clothespins from her mouth and whistles. T
he bird twitches its wings and tail feathers. She whistles again and the bird responds with a burst of song.
HER MOTHER HAD WARNED HER: You aren’t suited to the kitchen—you’re too anxious: you’ll go mad from the isolation, the repetition. Can you stand to make croissants every day? What if you poison someone? Lose a walnut shell and someone chokes to death?
To placate her mother, she enrolled in college—the same school her mother had attended—in a hilly, gorge-cut town. She spent all her time in Risley Hall, drowsing over Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Woolf, the decrepit sunlight coming into the late-afternoon glass. Half attending to the lectures of her professors. Like the wonderful old Russian who spoke about Victorian novels and their “primitive coloration,” who set her imagination off in other directions for weeks. It seemed as if the life of the mind precluded the life of the body: poets were ascetic, hollowed-out by thinking; her professors seemed almost deliberately ugly—especially the women. Though her mother couldn’t help the lovely black drift of her own hair and eyes, she restricted herself to the bitterest little cups of coffee and lived on the biscotti Avis made for her—bone dry, barely enough sugar to matter.
Brian was her tutor. He’d taken her on after three other grad students at the study center had given up. He stuck with Avis, going over oligopolies and externalities, and never said, “But it’s so simple . . .” like the others.
He had a satisfying wholeness about him, American good looks like a baseball player’s—level shoulders, a pale shock of hair. A good mind and ethical nature: little gave him more pleasure than learning laws and governance—“It shows you the shape of your society.” But what drew the deepest sliver of her self toward him, toward love, was the weakness in his chin, his slightly disoriented air, like an injury he allowed only Avis to see. Brian was the opposite of her mother. There wasn’t a whiff of mystery about him: he was solid, entirely himself. Avis still cooked in those days and she invited him to her minuscule studio. She set a hibachi up on the fire escape and grilled him a marbled, crimson rib eye, crusty with salt and pepper, its interior brilliant with juices. Some garlicky green beans with pine nuts, rich red wine, mushrooms and onions sautéed in a nut-brown butter. She’d intuited his indifference to chocolate, so dessert was a velvety vanilla bean cake with a toasted almond frosting. It was a dark art: she knew what she was doing every step of the way, but she wanted him. She wanted children with him. By the end of the meal, he sat half sprawled beside her on the couch, crushing the hem of her skirt. He pulled her down on top of him, wouldn’t let her clear away the dishes: she heard his pulse through the thick wool of his sweater. He loved her, he’d said, his breath redolent of vanilla and almond. He loved her one hundred percent.
She’d smiled—guiltily conscious of having unbalanced him. “But do you love me 105 percent? How about 173 percent?”
He’d turned red and said, “Yes.” Then added politely, “Though those percentages aren’t possible.”
She told him then she hated school. She took him to the Moosewood Café, the Morritz Bakery, she showed him the way they folded cranberries into their Vacherin. She made him seven-layered strawberry pavé cakes. When she confessed, with a deep blush, her wish to attend the culinary institute, he encouraged her to apply. Told her there were loans and scholarships, that he would help her research these things. Excited and anxious, she felt an unraveling in herself, the disconnected threads reaching toward Brian.
THERE IS, IN THE BACK of Avis’s mind, the thought that now she’ll need to hire a new assistant. But for some reason she isn’t in a rush to do so. Delivery trucks rumble to and from the front step every day—two are refrigerated vans which pick up her pastries to ferry throughout the city—the others arrive with specialty items for her baking: lilac honey, a fine-milled pastry flour, a gelatin from Provence. The sound of an assistant speaking Spanish with a delivery driver limned the edges of her day. As she piped rosettes, docked a sheet of dough, or doused a tart with sanding sugar, another world occurred on the doorstep. Now Avis answers the door herself and leads surprised delivery people into the front entrance, across the living room, and through the heavy swinging door to her kitchen. She almost enjoys the contact with the outside world. On Monday, there is a Colombian man who delivers free-range eggs and unpasteurized milk that glows like satin. Tuesdays, a woman from Lima bring special concoctions of candied lilacs and fruit peels and gelées, and later a young boy comes with a box filled with dried starfruit and bananas and fresh tea, mint, and sage from his father’s botanical garden in the Redlands. She asks and forgets everyone’s names, but next week, she thinks, she’ll ask again. Some deliveries—like those from her son’s market—come every week, others—like the fig balsamic vinegar—were special-ordered to accompany a single chocolate strawberry ice cream cake.
On Wednesday, Avis stands at the window, peering through the latticework of leaves and spines at the neighbor pinning up her washing. The doorbell chimes startle her. She drapes a towel over a rising brioche dough, feeling newly capable, a tick of expectation as she goes to answer. When she opens the door, at first all she sees through the screen is a glint in someone’s hand. Pushing open the screen door, she realizes it’s Eduardo, one of Stanley’s delivery people, holding Avis’s antique silver tray. “This was propped against your front door.”
When she’d left the tray at the neighbor’s feet the other day it was etched with tarnish all along the swirls and the central silver coin. Now it gleams. Avis marvels, turning it over. Someone has polished every crevice, rubbed at every impossible edge and crook; not a speck on it. Eduardo carries his cooler into the kitchen, stacks tubs of strawberry purée in the freezer. There are almonds for her macarons, vanilla pods, raw cocoa. She follows him in, props the tray against the wall, staring at the gleam. After he finishes unloading, Eduardo stands, about to lift the cooler, then stops in place, looking out the back window. “Is she Haitian?”
Avis turns. Their backyard is framed in the wide window above the sink. “I don’t actually know.” She can see the woman shaking out a wet pink skirt. “We haven’t really talked.”
“Did you notice those?” He gestures up.
Avis is momentarily dazed by the bleached sky: a hawk of some sort floats by, wings glinting and flat. Something twinkles at the near corner of the neighbor’s yard, nearly hidden among the branches. “What is that?” Avis puts on her kitchen readers. She sees it now: small creatures fashioned out of straw and grass—a mouse and two small birds, swaying, suspended by invisible strings.
Eduardo stands beside her at the sink. He smells slightly sour, like physical labor. “Voodoo,” he says. “They’re some kind of little offerings.”
“Really? Voodoo?” She lifts the stem of her glasses. Once, while delivering some cakes with Carlita, another assistant, Avis spotted a dark knob of some sort in the street. She stared, unable to identify it until she was nearly standing over it: a dog’s paw, cleanly severed mid-leg. Carlita had grabbed her and pulled her away, muttering a Hail Mary under her breath.
“It’s just another religion,” he says dismissively, and turns back to study the kitchen. “So cool here. This place reminds me of Hansel and Gretel.”
Avis continues to stare at the bouncing straw mouse. “I wouldn’t let a gumdrop or candy cane within twenty feet of my kitchen.”
“Well, you’re not that kind of witch.” Eduardo squats over the cooler, stuffing plastic bags back into it and slapping the top shut again. He backs out of the kitchen holding his cooler; at the front, he opens the screen door with his shoulder. “According to Stan, you’re the real deal,” he says, starting down the front steps. “A real sugar artist.”
She stands in the doorway. “I’m just a worker bee.”
Eduardo opens the truck and slides in the cooler. “He says you’re a genius.”
“Stanley?” Her voice is quiet. “Really did he say that?” She averts her eyes. “About me?”
He shrugs. “You know, with the Haitians, there’s a
pretty interesting relationship to sugarcane—if you’re interested. It’s sacred to them.” He opens the van door and props his arm on it. “But it’s pretty horrible. They have to harvest it for other people and they starve. You and her should talk about sugar some time.”
When Avis returns to the house, the air inside feels like the bottom of a well. She browses through her work folder, stuffed with orders on slips and receipts: Monday—cinn. palmiers—the Morris Group. PI&B—mocha cr. puffs, 5 Saint-Honorés. Winslow Co. retreat 20 plum tarts . . . She tries to plan the day’s baking schedule but she keeps putting down her pen, returning to the French doors, cracking them, leaning out into the damp air. How still it is in the hottest part of the day! Just a minor insect whir, a few random bird notes—everything deadened by molten heat. She returns to the kitchen: the woman and her bird have gone in for the day. Why doesn’t she feel relieved?
FOR TWO DAYS, Avis sneaks out of the kitchen after she’s set out dough for the first rising, to climb into the densest section of overgrowth, among webs and rotting avocados and palmetto bugs—muck, spores, and tiny-legged things falling into her hair or down the back of her shirt. From there, she watches the neighbor pull what seem to be weeds, bundling them neatly in the lap of her apron. The woman wears a bib apron like the sort Avis’s grandmother wore—white, tied with strings behind the neck and waist. Under this, she wears a variety of simple housedresses in honeyed colors, turquoise, sea green, lavender, and pale rose, usually some sort of kerchief tied over her hair. From a distance, she looks delicate as a girl, but Avis suspects she is just a bit younger than herself. While she gardens or hangs laundry, she sings or murmurs to the mynah who waddles nearby and occasionally attempts to climb the fabric of her dresses. She speaks in a rapid, staccato language that Avis think must be Creole: the bird often responds in exactly her voice, mirroring each word: bonswa, bonswa, souple, pa fe sa . . . Watching this woman gives Avis such pleasure—the rhythm of the woman’s voice, the filigree of birdsong in the trees, the atlas of breezes carrying jasmine, vanilla, and gardenia—even the sweetness of the rotting mulch and briny air bewitches her.
Birds of Paradise Page 17
