Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

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.”