That Thursday, Avis leaves the kitchen the moment Brian departs, wiping her hands on her apron, and goes to the place in the fronds. She presses against the avocado trunk, hidden under a screen of leaves. Rain begins misting through the fronds: the cloud cover turns the morning sky into a emerald post-dusk hue, mixing things up. Soon she sees the back door nudged open by a brown foot, a flicker of pink toenails: the woman emerges in an old lemon-colored shift—bateau neck, sleeveless—beneath an apron. She places a metal pot on the ground, then sits beside it on the cement step, just under the eave of the house. There’s a pile of leaves in her apron, as usual, and she sets to work, stripping pieces of greenery, tossing part, throwing the rest in the pot. After she has worked methodically for some minutes, the woman begins to sing. Avis strains to hear: it’s a syrupy old tune she’s heard somewhere before. Mon amour, je t’attendrai toute ma vie . . . Oh mon amour, ne me quitte pas. Her voice is thin but on-key. Avis releases a breath and the fragile sounds of air and insects are part of that diastole. She is so relaxed she is almost drowsing.
Out of the corner of her eye then, just breaching her peripheral vision, she spots a movement like a brush of premonition. Lamb’s orange form creeps past her, belly low, warbling and chirping—his gray eyes on the mynah.
The woman spots Lamb nearly at the same time and gets to her feet. “Hsst. Bad, bad!” She kicks in Lamb’s direction, the cat flattening but not retreating. The mynah releases a piercing awgh and lifts its black wings like a villain’s cape. Lamb freezes in mid-stalk, the bird puffs up larger, hopping forward, shrieking aawgh, aawgh! Certain her cat—which had once belonged to Felice—is about to be eviscerated, Avis bounds from her hiding place, fronds and leaves flying, into the neighbor’s yard and scoops up the tabby, simultaneously catching flashes of the flapping bird, the woman’s hand fanned at her throat. Avis hurries back through the leaves, across the yard, through the French doors, and tosses the cat so it yowls, midair, and falls on the couch.
Avis stands with her back to the French doors, shaking and out of breath. Slowly, she risks a glance and sees the woman has followed her through the palms and now stands in Avis’s yard. She is rigidly furious, arms akimbo, fists balled. “You are watching us!” the woman shouts, her voice elongated. Avis wavers in the door, her hand trembling on the frame. “I’m terribly sorry,” she mumbles. “I’d swear I’d pulled that door shut—they swell up in the rainy season . . .”
“Who are you, lady?” The woman is implacable. “What do you want?”
Avis takes a few meek steps outside. She clasps her hands at her waist. “Oh, I’m so—I was just—I was doing some—I was in my garden—and—I heard some voices. I heard you, I think—and I—and I—”
The woman’s eyes dart around the overgrown yard. She squints at Avis, chin forward. “How long you been watching me?”
Avis lowers her head. She feels breathless and woozy. “A while.”
“A while,” the woman says in her contrapuntal way. “A while, yes.” Something relaxes in the filament of the woman’s eyes. “You aren’t altogether in possession of yourself, are you?”
She looks different here, in another context. Avis sees she is very small—a good head shorter, possibly thirty pounds lighter than Avis. Her yellow dress, kerchief, and gold-beaded earrings glow as if absorbing energy from her body. The woman’s eyes tick over her, inventorying, then she turns her head slightly and backs away. She moves toward the palms, shoves them aside, and walks through.
THE NEXT MORNING, Avis draws a comb through her wet hair and the tines fill with strands. Under the bathroom light, she stares at her reflection; her skin looks depleted and she believes she can divine the round shape of her skull through the hair. A dermatologist had told her last month that her hair would quit falling eventually. Probably hormonal, she’d said, adding with the condescension of the young: Our bodies change. Her mother had warned that Avis would get fat from baking. Now Avis looks at her hard little wire of a smile: Geraldine had said nothing about going bald. Avis scoops her remaining hair in one hand, tilts the scissors in the other, and snaps away furiously. “Here you go!” she says to the mirror with a big smile. “Happy Birthday, Felice! Happy Birthday to you!” It takes just a few minutes to lop it all off, so what remains—about two to four inches—juts from her head in a tufted silver and brown corona. She pushes it back and tucks what she can behind her ears before tying a slim silk band around her hairline—loose hairs a disaster for baking. She sweeps the bathroom floor and wipes the sink, listening to the neighbor’s bird chatter in the other yard.
Avis returns to her desk, skin still humid from the shower, her left hand combing the blunt ends of her hair. With her right hand, she browses through the rest of the day’s orders: cinnamon palmiers; pistachio-cocoa 12-layer torte . . . She gazes at this order a moment, her pulse elevated, as if she’s been drinking too much coffee, and she begins jotting notes on a new pastry: For this cake, I want to mingle the womanly and masculine foods—sugars and meats in particular. The walls must come down. Must temper, must balance. Add the leeks to the chocolate, vanilla to the turnip. Tear away the sacred walls between the sweet and savory worlds. She stops and rereads what she’s written: what does it mean? Again she hears the mynah singing in the neighbor’s yard.
Avis lowers her head, runs her fingers into the new perimeter of her hair. She tries to think her way through this: the link between death and sugar. Stanley sends her nutrition newsletters with reports on diabetes and obesity. It seems to her that sugar is a metaphysical problem: each occasion of eating asserts its own needs. Her fingers wait on the keyboard as her vision glazes out the east windows, unfocused. All the glorious pastries of the world are baked and eaten and gone forever, and there is only the fiery moment of the now. Minds and bodies tell one story: I tasted; I loved; I was young. But the now burns everything in its oven. Her mother said that heaven was “the unattainable.” The mynah’s cry tears at the air, sailing over the trees and hedges and songbirds. She thinks: Perhaps the neighbor hates me because I work with sugar.
Suddenly it simply isn’t a choice: Avis feels she must explain herself to the neighbor—it’s unbearable that the woman might think Avis a fool or insane or not “in possession” of herself.
The grass feels hard against her bare feet and she pushes through the thicket of the palms, scraping her arms, the fronds like pastry knives. The bird in its cage becomes agitated when it sees her, and Avis nearly stops, startled by its keening. The sun is up, but the woman hasn’t come out yet. She taps, then raps her knuckles against the wood-framed screen door: the back door is open. “Hello in there!”
A shape emerges behind the dark screen. “Dieu.” Pure exasperation. She tilts open the door. “You are here again?”
Avis tries to smile, her lips tremble. “I brought you . . .” She holds out the white bakery box.
The neighbor steps outside and gives her a long look—less caustic than before, but still full of irony. Finally she says, in that contrapuntal accent, “So I am never going to be rid of you.”
Avis touches the lid of the box. “Do you like chocolate and hazelnut? They’re petits fours. They have a little layer of marzipan and a layer of meringue. Some berry.” As long as she stays focused on the box her voice is steady. “I wanted to apologize.”
“You did, did you.”
“I wanted—” Avis turns slightly, gestures toward the trees. “I was just peeking,” she says hopelessly.
“Yes, like a spy.”
“No, no, please. The—your bird was—singing—making its sounds. And I just came to see. I work at home. I’m a baker.” The woman’s face registers nothing. Avis soldiers on. “And I came—just to look. And you looked so pretty and the bird was so sweet with you, and so . . .” She trails off.
The woman’s obsidian eyes are pitiless. “How many times you watch me? More than one?”
Avis clears her throat lightly.
“Spying,” the woman says matter-of-factly
. “Where I come from, you know what happens to spies?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure,” Avis mumbles.
Then she seems to think of something. “You know how long it took me to polish that tray? An hour and a half. Just to get it clean.”
Avis almost says: You’re not supposed to clean it. Instead she opens the box and offers it again. “Please. If you would accept these? It’s just something small.”
Finally the woman consents to look in the box. Avis can smell the sparkling fraise des bois essence. She sees a lilt, like sadness, in the woman’s face as she touches the box. “These are marzipan petits fours?” She lowers her face, inhaling. “The lady who owned the house where my mother worked—almost every day she ate these. This style. My mother smelled like these berries. Every day, the cook made twenty petits fours.”
“That would have kept her busy!” Avis smiles carefully.
The woman gives her a cool look. “Yes. The lady ate two, the son ate four, and the husband possibly one or none. They threw the rest to the pigs. All the food in that house was so beautiful. The house was like something from heaven—much grander than these around here.” She looks up and Avis senses something conjured, shifting between them. “I learned to mistrust beautiful things.”
“Your yard is beautiful,” Avis says softly.
She looks around, both of them taking in the orchids in the trees, the fountains of greenery, creamy blooms of gardenia and emerald shrubs that seem to Avis to have sprung up in a matter of days.
“It doesn’t belong to me,” the woman says. But something in her has relented. “You were the one who made those black cookies? With your own hands?”
Avis holds the box in her left hand and lifts her right. The woman studies it, as does Avis: the skin thickened and dry and loose as a work glove, the fingers crosshatched with fine white scars from nicks, thicker pink and red scars from varying degrees of burns, white crusts of flour along the nails and knuckles, the powerful wrist, the wiry, defined muscles of her forearm. “Not a white woman’s hands,” she says slyly. “Do your neighbors know you have hands like these?”
“I have no interest in the opinions of my neighbors.”
“In that case . . .” She places her hands on the bottom and closed lid of the box. “I shall accept your beautiful things. Perhaps even eat one or two.” She looks up from the corner of her eyes. “I won’t throw any to the pigs.”
She begins to move back toward the house and Avis follows, reluctant to lose her so quickly. “May I ask—”
The woman sighs, turns, mouth downturned, eyes liquid disapproval.
“What is your name?”
She lifts her black eyes. “What is yours?”
“Avis. Avis Muir.”
“Then I am Solange.”
“Solange.” It’s not as musical when Avis says it. Her breath is high and thin: she wants to ask where she came from, if she will stay, why she is here in this neighborhood. But the woman’s face recedes into a powerful remoteness, dismissing Avis. She waits another long moment and notices a flutter of red: a cardinal quivers in the bushes against the woman’s house. Avis wants something from her. There’s a space inside of Avis like a cookie form, which seems to be the very shape of the thing she wants from this woman. Heaven is the un-haveable, her mother said. She remembers Geraldine’s soaps that looked and smelled just like caramel cakes. Avis ate one when she was very small—then, aghast, spat it out. Her mother had said, That’s what make them so delightful—you want to eat them, but you can’t.
Still, Avis refuses to believe that she only wants to want: that was her mother’s illness, not hers. She rubs her knuckles over her lips thoughtfully and finally says, “I’d like—I would hope—we can be friends.”
The woman laughs, revealing beautiful, bright teeth. “Hope all you like, but I may not feel the same.”
Brian
AT THE INTERSECTION OF BIRD AND U.S. 1, BENEATH the shadow of the Tri Rail overpass, the Dominican woman in the peaked straw hat sits on the concrete divider beside her little array of mangoes and string bags of some sort of nut or pod. She also has a carton filled with bunches of small purple flowers. Brian waves a few bucks out his window as he pulls up to the light. The regular homeless man, skin burnt beyond race, is there as well, on the other side of the street. He notices Brian’s gesture and starts to move toward him, but the woman hustles over. They make the exchange and Brian is out of there—pulling into the stream of Benzes and junkers and Hondas—before the homeless man can come close.
At the Ekers Building entrance, Brian notes the way Rufus averts his gaze from the bouquet (he feels conspicuous, with a leather briefcase in one hand and the flowers—so small they’re almost a corsage—in the other). “Hello, Rufus,” Brian says as he enters.
“Hello, Mr. Muir.”
It’s a relief to have the elevator to himself: he and his flowers might just escape further scrutiny. Several mornings in a row now, he’s awakened with an uncanny sensation, as if he is turning into another person: an old, well-loved, and polished carapace breaking open, odd imaginings seeping in. He wakes from dreams of fighting with his son who becomes Brian’s old man. Or nightmares in which he wanders unlit marble corridors, footsteps in a dusting of powder, searching for something. He thinks again of how numb and distracted Avis has seemed this week. It’s Felice, of course. The missed meeting. Just days before her eighteenth birthday. He’d awakened early that morning to a metallic sound—swishing and clicking—through the bathroom door. When he went in, later, to take a shower, he found a dark swath of hair in the bathroom trash bin. He’d lifted it out of the trash, held it for a moment in the palm of his hand, some lost, tender thing. Quietly, he stole some thread from the sewing kit, tied up a lock, and slid it into his briefcase. What does he suppose a lousy bouquet can achieve in the face of this—slippage? He senses a kind of global slide, as if the material nature of his world is losing its integrity. The sight of his wife’s discarded hair was so painful in the moment, almost nightmarish: like a dream of spitting teeth into the sink.
Up to 32 he glides, ears popping. He starts to regret the flowers. Old-lady flowers, the sort his grandmother would’ve cultivated in her wheelbarrow planter. Dark lavender petals and bright yellow centers. It occurs to him that he should at least have waited to buy them on the way home. Now he will have to keep them fresh somehow. As he nears his office, there’s a sound of voices: Fernanda and Javier round the corner laughing, Javier’s hand slipping over the curve of Fernanda’s shoulder.
Javier spots Brian first. “Here’s the man now!”
“How are you, Brian?” Fernanda asks. He sees them both notice the bouquet; Javier’s forehead ticks back. Fernanda glances at her Cartier. “You know, I think I really can’t spare the coffee break right now, Javier. Rain check?”
Javier’s face darkens. “Fine,” he says coolly, already en route to the elevator. “I’ve got to get back to it myself.”
Brian watches him go. “That Javy,” he shoots for a humorously deprecating tone.
She glances at him, then laughs and says, “Oh, I know.”
Brian walks her to the door of her office, holds it open, and she looks at him over her shoulder. “Will you come sit for a few minutes?”
A little twist in his heart, he follows her in. The office smells different. Gone is the executive mosaic of leather, metal, and aftershave. He thinks he identifies gardenia and dendrobium—their neighbors the Regales grow them. He takes in the redecorated room: there is a journal bound in a speckled coral cover; a languorous yellow ceramic mug; a small jade ring. On the desk, beside the computer, he spots a figurine and a stone-colored disk. Fernanda sees him looking and picks up the figurine. “It’s Erzulie?” She turns the piece in her fingertips: beads and bits of feather and cloth. “She’s very powerful, this lady. A force of nature. My grandmother was from the Islands—she gave her to me. Erzulie was supposed to help me with my grades. Ha.”
“Like a saint?” Brian
glances at Fernanda. “But I thought you were—”
“Jewish?” She smiles. “Don’t you think you can be more than one thing?”
“Oh, I, of course—”
She waves it away. “And of course, this is the other thing my grandmother gave me.” She holds up the white disk. “It’s a mud cookie. She said to remind me where I come from. Sort of a Don’t get too big for your britches, missy.” Brian had been about to reach for it, but she slides it to the edge of her computer. “I grew up in a very modest home. I like to think of it as a reminder of what I’m never going back to.”
She looks so self-possessed, Brian can’t help but admire her: the secrecy, the flecks like gold leaf in her irises—old bloodlines. It seems to Brian there is an untouchable quality to her. A veil laid over her features. As with Avis. He glances at the goddess. “Your grandmother sounds like a genius.”
“That would be the nicest way of putting it.” Fernanda laughs softly. “Listen, I wanted to thank you—again—for the other day. Javier can be a bit, well . . .” She lifts her eyebrows. “You know.” She taps a sky-blue pencil against the edge of her desk. “Ever since I moved into this office, he’s been coming around. The way he stares . . . Like I’m a penthouse unit and he can’t wait to make the sale.”
“I’ll have a word with him.” Brian glares at the view through the swooping glass wall. Beyond the glass, the ocean looks like molten nickel. “It’s unprofessional. Javier has no business coming around, pestering you when you’re trying to do your job.”
“Oh, please don’t.” Fernanda hunches forward. “You’ve been so kind—terribly kind. You’re the only one who—the others—” Then Brian watches, dumbfounded, as Fernanda lowers her head and starts to cry. Her breath catches and she hides her face in her hands.
Birds of Paradise Page 18
