Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He is paralyzed. The last real tears he remembers seeing were from his daughter, the long nights after her returns: how she’d sob in her room, while Brian hung back in like ghost in the corridor, bewildered and angry. He feels impossibly clumsy: he tries to behave—as best he can—in the manner he thinks a compassionate person would. He bends toward Fernanda, placing one hand on her shoulder, and says, almost inaudibly, “Oh, my dear . . .”

  She sniffles and lifts her face to him: her eyes and nostrils are barely inflamed, rimmed faintly pink. “I’m in a . . . some kind of situation . . . I don’t have anyone to tell.”

  “Well.” He hesitates. “Can you tell me?”

  She shakes her head, then looks at him, smearing away tears with her fingers. “How could I? I wouldn’t want to burden you—of all people. You’re overloaded as it is.”

  He draws himself up, making fun of himself. “If it helps at all, I am a lawyer. I’m a professional at keeping secrets.”

  She laughs and sniffles again. “Well . . . maybe . . . if you swear . . .”

  He draws an X over the front of his suit jacket.

  She nods and lowers her head, then murmurs something so quietly he has to ask her to repeat it: “I’m seeing Jack.”

  “Jack?” he echoes, so relieved that she stopped crying that he barely registers her confession.

  “You know. Jack.”

  Brian smiles apologetically: it sounds like the name of some kid at UM.

  “Parkhurst.”

  He stares, still uncomprehending.

  “Jack Parkhurst.”

  Suddenly it feels as if his heart is swelling beyond its natural dimensions: it’s difficult to breathe. What? “How did you—” He doesn’t know what to ask. He shakes his head dumbly, an empty, horselike motion. Jack Parkhurst, company president and CEO, head of his own pseudo-dynasty of developers, free-trade cronies, and rich, Old Florida Bubbas. But even so—even considering the flotilla of wealth and influence—change-jingling, seventy-four-year-old neglector of wife and children—that Jack Parkhurst? “How did—how could—”

  “He was very attentive,” Fernanda says stiffly.

  “I’m sure he was—is?” Brian amends. “Are you still . . . ?”

  “Is—I suppose. I want to end it, though. It’s not right for either of us.”

  “No, well . . .”

  “I’m sure I sound awful. It’s so hard to explain about Jack . . . He can be so charming.”

  Brian has been upper management too long to be surprised at the hidden seams of the business world. Still. He can hardly believe that Jack Parkhurst has laid his crepuscular hand on Fernanda, caressed her shoulders, that his cottony mouth has gone anywhere near her neck. “Oh, my dear.” Outside the window, a replica of his own office view—a perpetual motion of cars, chips of light flowing along the causeway a mile away, heading out over the water—now sapphire brilliance under a break in the clouds.

  Fernanda seizes his hands. “I feel like, sometimes, more than anything I just need a really, really good—I mean, a wonderful friend, you know? The sort of person who’s so close to you that you can say anything.” A shadowy dimple appears at her left jawline. “Brian. You’re just—you’re a real guy. The old-fashioned kind—like Jack likes to think he is.”

  Brian lowers his head. He notices her glance fall on the violets again and he stares at them a moment himself. Slowly, he lays them on her desk. “For you.”

  “Oh Brian.” She holds them to her nose. “They’re just . . . they’re lovely.” Leaning forward, she slips them into the carafe of water on the corner of her desk, and Brian notes, with embarrassment, that the flowers are dwarfed by the container.

  “I must—I should get back to the millstone—” He half rises, half bows out of his seat, and eases out of the office.

  THE TELEPHONE; the glass walls; the gray condition of office light. The day has passed into afternoon and outside Miami is burning like a scarlet orchid, bursting into flame. Brian sits motionless at his desk. If he turns to the west, he will see at least thirty-eight cranes and rigs grinding away, and almost all have some connection to PI&B. A stack of ever-renewing contracts to review and assign to his underlings; proposals for still more deals, piled in folders a foot high. He picks up a folder labeled Bonsai Towers and attempts to browse through it, but the pages smear into each other. He attempts to stack them, tapping the pages against the desktop, but they splay against the glass. He drops the paper: Who does he think he is?

  Randy old Parkhurst. Past company rumors—insinuations of sexual bullying, intimidation, advances—rise to the surface of his memory. It’s one of Brian’s tasks to make bad things go away, and he usually shuffles these cases to his underlings, each of whom is authorized to bestow modest settlements and severance packages. As Jack’s counsel, he thinks, he should personally warn him away from Fernanda. He winces again at the thought of them together. Jack, he will say, the liability exposure—it’s not worth it. What if things go sour? How can they not, eventually? Thus saving both the company and Fernanda much unhappiness. Win-win. He stares at the slippery image in the darkened screen. Remember where you come from. He imagines the young Fernanda, her hair in two braids, a wise grandmother from a Caribbean place.

  He decides to take a break, wanders down to the lobby and finds himself in the gift shop, chatting with the high school kid about Stanley and Felice as if they both still lived at home: “I can’t believe where the time has gone. My boy Stan’s got a serious girlfriend now. And it’s going to be my daughter’s eighteenth birthday . . . big one, right? What do you get for an eighteen-year-old girl?”

  As he strolls back toward the elevators, the lobby doors open and a phalanx of upper-mid management enter, fresh from a four-cocktail investors’ meeting, heels clicking on the marble. Brian halts as if pelted by buckshot. There’s Parkhurst blowing hot air while the others double over with laughter. Esmeralda is stationed at his side, aloof as Eva Perón. “So Warren calls me—” Parkhurst’s voice booms all over the lobby. “Fella brings me out in the jet to Omaha—have you ever been to Omaha? God-forsaken place. Middle of nowhere—to a restaurant with animal heads, all staring down at us. Steaks as thick as my arm—they’re hanging off the plate—lying right on the goddamn table. And Warren leans over and says to me, I bet you don’t get that in Miami!” The last line is delivered in a thrombotic bellow and everyone around him breaks up.

  Brian considers escaping with the elevator, but Parkhurst spies him, calling out, a feeble old bleat, “Brian, hang on!” Brian’s gluteus locks up. In the past, he would have asked Jack how the Bentley was handling. How Jack Jr. was making out at Penn. Parkhurst moves his soft body in its Armani threads onto the elevator, eschewing the separate penthouse car: he enjoys riding with the “people.”

  “Counselor. How in the hell are you?” He slaps Brian on the back.

  “Jack. How’s this weekend looking? Gonna get out on the links at all?”

  The elevator stops and opens. It’s two stops before Parkhurst’s floor but all three of them exit.

  “Brilliant weekend, really, really brilliant,” Parkhurst mutters as Esmeralda walks off headed east. As Brian watches Esmeralda’s receding back, Parkhurst leans into him. “Stay tuned—there’s a sweet little old deal coming up I want to get your eyes on. Real nice, Old Florida real estate. It’s in this spot downtown—we’re gonna call the whole area NoDo. Like it? North of Design District.”

  Brian jams his hands into his pockets; he’s wobbling inside himself. His head gets heavy and suddenly he’s watching himself and Parkhurst from twenty feet down the corridor, saying, “Yeah, Jack—I’ve been wanting to talk to you about one of those projects myself. Northeast Fifty-sixth Street? I think there’s issues.”

  His employer turns his big, white-haired head in his direction. “Don’t tell me—it’s the hippies again? Goddamn freaks—what’re they doing in Florida? Let them go hump the trees in California.”

  “No—no—nothing like that.”
Brian brings his hands together, trying to take hold of himself. He hadn’t prepared for this sort of confrontation, but suddenly it feels crucial. He’s had it with Parkhurst, his office with the elephant’s-foot wastebasket, the walrus-tusk letter opener. Sick to death of self-satisfied arrogance, the way he treats employees like possessions, his little insinuations that Brian needs him, strutting around as if his company were some version of the Isle of Dr. Moreau. “I was looking again at the neighborhood specs for the Little Haiti deal—there’s questions.”

  Parkhurst stops mid-corridor. “Didn’t you sign off on it?”

  “I did, sure, but new issues have come to light.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I don’t think we did sufficient market feasibility study on the area.”

  Parkhurst crosses his arms, tucks his spotty hands under his biceps—a thick-brained, obstinate gesture—preamble to one of his development pitches. “What issues? The whole Design District region is going insane, Brian. You can’t even get onto Northeast Fortieth anymore. I think Conrad put his finger right on it. All those nice fruity restaurants and furniture stores, a performing arts center—some fucking day. Stryker’s chomping to redev that Caribbean Marketplace. And city center, man—the midtown development deal is phase two now—all that new urbanism crap—two minutes’ walk to the dry cleaners. It’s gonna be the Italian fucking Renaissance around here in a few years.”

  “Yes, yes. I’m not questioning any of that.”

  “Didn’t even need a feasibility study, if you ask me—just look at it. And NoDo North is pre-gentrification—really young, super sexy. Our building’s gonna be red-hot—top architect, and Valente and his boys are laying the bricks for us. A big fat block of condo towers that’ll blow the place out of the water. Fifty stories, Venetian marble. Conrad wanted to call it the Tom Perdue. Dumb fucking name—after some nobody. I had to persuade him out of that. We’re calling it the Blue Topaz.”

  When Jack gets excited about a project, it’s like watching kindling smoke: this is the deal. The one. Brian presses his hands into a kind of praying fold, lowers his face to his fingertips. His law school friend Dennis thought Brian was nuts taking a job with a developer, said that he was entering “the belly of the beast and taking an office in the colon.” Supposedly he’d be pushed into a servant’s position—devoting his energies to subverting contract wording, excavating loopholes, massaging bylaws, and generally clearing the path so his boss could proceed with the greatest of ease. But how was that different from any other corporate hired gun? He lifts his head. “Jack, I’m not sure we shouldn’t take a pass on this one.”

  Parkhurst blinks slowly. The more their business has grown, the more Parkhurst likes to give outsiders the impression that his attorney lives next to his skin. Brian has never before tried to get in the way of a PI&B project, but he remembers vividly the night he’d visited that art gallery; the sound of neighbors talking in the night: a particular mood of serenity and contentment. He knows the essence of the city is its neighborhoods, most of which are being systematically broken into by developers—their constructions driving out the old homes and families, ushering in nonresident owner-investors, anti-communities made up of transients and tourists—no personal history or investment in the place where they’ve landed. He thinks of the little brown-faced doll on Fernanda’s desk. For all they know, her grandparents live on that very street. Now he takes a breath and begins listing worst-case scenarios. “It’s old, Jack, like historic old. The street in question doesn’t even border the District—it’s deep, old neighborhood. According to our new intelligence,” he lies, “there will be a citizens’ turnout that’ll make those hippie tree-huggers look like a tea party.” He shakes his head. “We could be tied up for years.” And you, he thinks, vain old man, do not always get want you want.

  Parkhurst studies Brian’s face. Over the years, he’s come to rely increasingly on Brian to help guide projects. Still, the old man thrives on resistance, derives jolts of inspiration from roadblocks. “That could be fun,” he says. “Haven’t seen a goddamned crowded zoning meeting in years. ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.’ ”

  Sun Tzu. One of Jack’s favorites. Brian nods. “Right, right. But then there’s plain bad decisions. Remember the publicity nightmare when they gutted Overtown to put in I-95?”

  “Terrible move.”

  “Disastrous.” Brian folds his arms as they stop before his office. “We’ve got to be smart about risk-reward ratio, take another look at cash flow. There’s no parking, no infrastructure, and frankly, I’m concerned that the downtown corridor is approaching saturation.”

  The recessed lighting makes a nimbus of Parkhurst’s white comb-over. He looks down the hall past Brian for a long moment. “Brian, I hear you.” Parkhurst’s tone is modulated now; his white brows lower. “At this point, we’re more than three-quarters in. Tony Malio did beautiful work greasing the zoning board and we have an initial clearance there. I met with the Aguardiente group and shook on it.” He lets the glass corridor partition swing shut behind them as Brian turns. “So here’s what we’re gonna do: we’ll send Tony back out in the field—the Citizens’ Action Corps, is that it? Have him grab a paralegal, go visit the natives, shake some more hands, throw another third, up to double, onto the payouts. Make everybody happy.”

  The two men gaze at each other a moment. Finally Brian lifts his chin, smiles. “Of course, Jack, excellent plan.”

  Parkhurst slaps Brian on the arm. “Good man, Brian. Thanks for speaking up. Honestly. Solid gold.”

  He watches Parkhurst turn back down the hall, lifting his eyes to the embedded ceiling lights as if gazing toward heaven. The glass partition whispers shut. Brian taps the glass corridor wall to his office, then lets his head tip forward, gently, until the top of his forehead touches the closed office door.

  SLUMPED IN HIS CHAIR, Brian coughs, tries to clear his head, his spiraling disappointment. He has hours yet to go: phone calls to the Latin Builders Association, the Planning and Zoning Board, and the Regional Planning Council; a polenta Bolognese from the executive dining room; a spirited visit from Javier, his voice booming over Brian’s desk, talk of another gloriously named project.

  There’s a call from Stanley. He listens in the dilated office light as his son tells him about difficulties, girlfriend, money . . . Stanley says he wants to arrange a meeting. Like a client. Brian’s concentration hazes into a reverie of throttling Parkhurst.

  “So Dad?” his son is saying. “That okay? Yeah?”

  “Did you talk to your mother?” he asks reflexively.

  “Mom?” Stanley sounds irritated; then he sighs. “She’ll just say the same thing.”

  Brian pushes his fingertips into his temples, rubbing.

  “How about can we just agree on meeting at the house?” Stanley’s voice is rigid. Brian finally realizes that his son is under some sort of duress; he tries to pay attention. Brian must’ve said something appropriate or reassuring at last because Stanley sounds happier now. “So, cool. We’ll come over. It’ll be good.”

  Brian spots Fernanda on her way out, a gray naiad rippling in the glass wall, and he’s struck by an ancient memory. Twelve years old, feeling dizzy and sick, stretched out on a pew in a tiny mission chapel. He had visited this place with his family. The church was white as snow, the ceiling ribbed with timber, and an immense golden Jesus was pinned to the wall above the altar. The church, the dry hot air, the smell of sage, the sight of a black-eyed girl with dimpled feet and a black velvet ribbon around her hair. It comes back to him in finely etched detail—the sweetness of mariachi ballads and Mexican Spanish and the clear air. Suddenly he is asking his son, “Stan—have you ever heard of such a thing as a mud cookie?”

  There’s a brief silence, then breath—almost a laugh. “Well—yeah. I guess so.”

  “What is it exactly?”

  “If we’re talking about the same thing . . . it�
��s pretty much what it sounds like. Maybe they add some lard to hold it together, but it’s basically dirt. People live on them, in some countries.”

  “God,” Brian murmurs.

  “Well, if it’s that or starving to death? You take the cookie. Why you asking about that?”

  There it is, Brian realizes, the reason he’d tried to deflect Parkhurst from the one neighborhood: he imagined telling the story to his son, how he’d stood up to that greedy Goliath, on behalf of all those poor and dispossessed. Score for the other side. He’d imagined the approval in his son’s face, at last. “Oh, just something I saw,” Brian murmurs. “Nothing important.”

  Avis

  AVIS RUNS HER HANDS OVER THE UPHOLSTERY on her chair arms. Back and forth. New girlfriend: her husband had tried to warn her. She registers, in her peripheral vision, the girl, this Nieves, gazing around her dining room, tipping her drained Villeroy & Boch cup—peeking at the manufacturer. Brian sits in the matching arm chair to her right, Stanley sits at one end of the couch, oriented toward them, watching Nieves—awaiting her command. Normally Stanley comes to their house only on the holidays. Avoiding his sister’s ghost, Avis supposes. And herself.

  Avis pours a half-refill of tea for the girl. “Did you inherit your china?” Nieves asks. Acquisitive thing. “It looks valuable.”

  The girl really is quite striking. She has the translucent face of that starlet . . . The actress’s name has flown right out of Avis’s head, but she can’t help noticing the way the girl wears her dark hair in similar long, smooth twists. Her skin is a satiny caramel with notes of mocha and chocolate, her eyes black almonds. Avis wonders if growing up with such a cinematically beautiful sister has made Stanley too vulnerable to beauty. The young woman leans back, still clutching her cup, and Avis notes the fullness of her breasts and a certain thickness about the girl’s body, as if she were older than Avis initially thought. She stretches, bending slightly, then finally smiles. Stanley says, “Mom bought it on a trip we took to Germany. Years ago.”