Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

“I’m sure they are.”

“Now, why are you so — what is it? Is it that bird?”

“Brian, it’s nothing.”

“It’s nothing,” he echoes. “Well, I have to take you at your word.”

Long pause, then, “Yes — consider it an oral contract, okay?”

He winces, places his hand on his head. “Okay, well. I guess I’ll call later, okay?”

No signal. He snaps the phone cover closed. Indicted, found guilty. He crosses his arms and blots his hands on his sleeves.

“How’s the wife?” Javier jingles the change in his pockets.

Brian makes a waving-off gesture, but Javier claps a hand on Brian’s shoulder and says, “Hey man, really.”

“What?”

“Honestly, how’s things. How’s the niño ? He doing okay?”

Little boy. The same thing Javier calls his twenty-two- and twenty-five-year-old sons. “As far as I can divine.” Brian laughs softly; he can’t meet Javier’s eyes. Javier talks to his children every day — his married daughters live down the street from him. He never asks about Felice.

“I meant what I said before. You know what we should do? We should take Javito and Juanchi and Stanny out bonefishing on the boat again, like the old days.”

The old days. They went fishing exactly once. Juan hooked a rock and snapped his line. Stanley was so sun-scorched the skin across his nose and forehead turned purple. Still, it was a good trip — they drank beer with lime — even fifteen-year-old Stanley — and ended up going out for grilled mahi since they hadn’t caught anything. “I don’t know, Jav — Stan works through the weekends these days. He’s doesn’t get a lot of time off.”

“See, that’s your problem — you guys working nonstop like robots. Is that what life’s for? You really want to work so much you don’t enjoy the being alive part?”

Brian smiles through an internal sag: Javier sees no divisions between himself and his kids. He eyes the rectangular suit backs of his exiting associates, gauges the tenor of their laughter. They’re not laughing at him: he knows this. As an attorney, there’s little he finds more tiresome than paranoia. What’s that joke? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t laughing at you? He touches his eyes with his fingertips. When he looks up again, he notices Javier watching him. “Where were you today, man?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“No, no.” Javier looks around impatiently. “I know you, man. You weren’t there . Not in the car, not at lunch. You were”—he flits his fingers in the air—“all gone.”

Brian is struck by his certainty: does Javier know him? A fishtail of fear slips through him. “It’s been a hard time. With Avis. This year, it’s…”

“I knew it.” Javier’s hands drop loosely against his sides. “When is it not the woman? I get it. But you got to draw that line, right? It’s interfering with your superb concentration, man. Maybe you’re fooling the others, hombre, you’re not fooling your old partner here. Take that beautiful girl out to dinner. Enjoy each other. You’re letting things get to you. Listen to me — you can’t let them get you. Keep it light, right?”

“Light,” Brian repeats, checking his Blackberry. “Yeah — I don’t know if that’s on the agenda.”

Javier slaps him on the shoulder. “Sure it is, buddy. Easiest thing in the world.”

BACK AT HIS DESK, Brian jots notes to himself: research — NE 56th? Ask Agathe to look up precedents. Neighborhood Associations. He’s got an idea for the in-house newsletter’s “Legal Eye” column — Considerations of the Ethical Developer: Established Neighborhood Fabric Vis-à-Vis New Development. Brian types bullet points on the computer: Quality of Life; Family and Friend Connections; Sense of History and Stability; Connection to Place. Parkhurst loves it when Brian “talks ethics,” which Jack believes is more compelling coming from legal counsel than from “some fairy PR guy.” “Proof we’re not one hundred percent bastard,” Parkhurst cracked. Now that Brian has a staff of associates, paralegals, and clerks, he has more time to construct a conscience for PI&B. His argument with Avis lingers, a sooty dankness in the office, behind his eyes. Brake noise and car horns slice through the window. His hand slips over the mouse when a fragrance reaches him. It’s familiar, yet he can’t place it: barely sweet, like funeral orchids, the earth of geraniums. For some reason he thinks again of Felice — sprawled on the living room floor, mouth pursed, removing toenail polish, her narrow back hunched over her work, purple-stained cotton balls all around, black hair scooped over one shoulder. An entire summer of polish remover and stained cotton balls. That sweetish acetone reek. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he’d asked Avis — always so particular about keeping the house “clear.” “Of course.” She’d held up her own trimmed hands. “But she’s that kind of girl.”

A voice behind him says, “Brian? Am I disturbing you?”

Fernanda is leaning in his office door. He sits back in his chair open-eyed. She enters, takes the leather guest chair, and lets the seat glide back, then forward. “I’m sorry to interrupt.” Her voice a soft undertow. “I wanted to thank you for helping me earlier.”

“Helping?”

Her smile tilts, half-bitten. “Well, Javier,” she says. “He keeps ‘dropping by.’ ” She curls her fingers into quotation marks. “And there’s nowhere to hide in these glass offices up here. I don’t know how you guys get anything done in these fish tanks.”

“Christ, that Javier,” he says, feeling disloyal. “A little too hands-on, sometimes.”

“That’s one way to put it.” She leans over and picks up the framed photo on his desk. “Aha.” She tilts it, a sliver of light in her palms. He has a funny impulse to reach forward, slide it gently from her fingers. “Is this your family?”

Javier took it. The photo shows Brian with his arm around Avis’s shoulders, and Stanley, inches away, holding up a fish, tail lifted, he’d just caught in the Sebastian Inlet. It was a year after Felice had run away for good, the summer before Stanley left for college. A good trip. Still, the three of them look gaunt, their smiles vaporous — all photos post-Felice looked like this. “Yeah,” Brian says. “That’s them.” Them?

“They’re charming. How old is your son?”

Brian clears his throat. “Well, he’s twenty-three now. I guess he was almost eighteen in that shot.”

“And this is your wife? She’s lovely.”

Brian lowers his eyes: Avis is lovely. Her face now not so different from when they first met: the ice tones beneath her brow, the soft corners of her lips, her skin lit like a Baroque portrait. Fernanda replaces the photo but her hand lingers a moment, hovering over his desk. He notices a dot of silver glinting at her clavicle. “I love that you have them here.” She doesn’t look at him but at the photograph.

When the phone rings, he glances at the phone, line two, Agathe. He presses Off .

Fernanda lifts her chin, puts her hands on the chair arms. “I should let you get back to it.”

“No, please don’t.” He lifts his hand. “It’ll stop.” He waves at the phone. “I mean — it’s probably just one of the clerks. Research reports. I can get those later.”

“Oh, is that all?” She smiles archly. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”

He rubs the back of his neck, squeezes it, smiling and disoriented. The city is full of such young women: they exist in a world separate and apart from his. They speak to him in a deferential way, as if he were a kindly old uncle. He recalls then the first instant of seeing Avis — seated in a college seminar — the back of her hand curled under her chin. He inhales, startled by a hit of the agitation and confusion of twenty-five years ago, as if time could dilate and collapse into a crystallized…