Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

“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.

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.