Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

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. The bird twitches its wings and tail feathers. She whistles again and the bird responds with a burst of song.