Birds of Paradise: A Novel (7 page)

“A model? Fuck.” He keeps staring at the water. “You’re too pretty. You’re beautiful.” He lowers his voice reverentially. “But mostly you’re too smart. Way too smart. If you want to do something like that—I don’t know—be an actress.”

Felice is silent, studying her wadded-up wrapper. He doesn’t know about the punishment. Emerson goes to get them more burgers, and when he comes back he’s animated with a new plan. “Listen, Felice,” he says quickly, “I’ve got some money saved up—nine hundred dollars—”

Her spine straightens.
“What?”

He smiles.

“Well, what the fuck?” she says quietly. “Where’d you get all that money?”

He brushes his hand over his head several times before looking up. “I’m pretty good at working, and, like, saving up. I bounce and mix drinks at a couple clubs.” He interlaces his fingers, straightening and closing, studying them. Everything about him so intent and serious. Like one of the old Jewish men set up on their folding chairs on their apartment balconies. Felice can see the ghost of his eighty-year-old self on his face—pouches and worry lines. She feels, weirdly, drawn to this, to his funny soberness. Every other kid she knows would’ve spent that money, dropped it on drugs, a new board, some shitty, stupid thing. She brushes elbows with wealth every week in the clubs; she even, on occasion, has picked up better gigs—like the swimsuit special for Australian
Elle
or the Nordstrom spring junior catalog—that paid $2,000 for a day’s work. But she currently has $7.50 in her pocket and she’s never so much as opened a checking account. Nine hundred seems like a staggering amount, especially for someone like Emerson—just a street kid—to have actually saved up.

A rose flush rises under his skin. He flashes another tentative look at her—smiling and not-smiling. Then he pulls something out of his side pocket, some striated shells, some shaped like little turbans. He puts them in Felice’s hand: miniature lightning whelk, sand dollar, and a ruffled conch. She admires them a moment, feels a smile come to her lips, then she drops them on the sand. “So?”

Emerson looks at the shells. “There’s this guy, Yann Hanran—he’s one of the really, really big-time strongmen? I met him at the Dixie Gym. He said he’d train me. I mean, he’s a real coach—not just some, you know . . . Like, just a really excellent guy. His gym is out in Portland.”

Felice’s stomach tightens: all this sincerity and weirdness. Her feelings oscillate toward and away from Emerson. “You’re going to move to California to go to a gym?” She nips at the side of a nail, wishing for a cigarette.

“Not California—
Oregon
.”

“So what, whatever, it’s retarded. You’re not going to
Oregon
—there’s nothing even out there.”

“Why not?” Emerson bounces a little on his haunches, shaking the skateboard. “Why not, why not?” It’s a bit of the frenetic energy she remembers from seeing him with the other shaved boys at the Green House. She inches away, calves flexing, ready to spring to her feet. “We can move wherever we want to,” he says. “
Why not?
Seriously. Let’s go see stuff.”

His shirt is wilting, collapsing like a tissue onto his skin. Sweat streaks his forehead, his skin looks tenderized—reminding her of the “white natives” she’d seen on a long-ago vacation with her family to Trinidad. Her father said they had lived on Trinidad for generations, migrating there from northern climates. But they all seemed to suffer from the sun; their skin gleaming red.

Felice has her mother’s sparkling, near-black hair, and a lighter version of her biscuit-colored skin. As far as she knows, they’re German and English, a little Scottish on her father’s side. Apparently there is also a grandmother in there from some biblical place, Bethlehem or Nazareth. Her mother had shown her the photo of a dreamy girl, elbow-propped on her bed. Avis turned the photo over, reading her name.

“Lamise,” her mother had said her name tentatively: the black-and-white snapshot was tucked in an envelope with old family photos. Felice held the photo by the edges.

Her mother wasn’t sure of her identity. “Maybe my great-
grandmother
.
Or maybe a great-aunt. You know how Grandma is about the past . . .” Avis smiled, referring to her own mother. Avis had the impression that Lamise had married into the family.

Felice couldn’t stop staring at the photo: Lamise’s soft expression was lost in a dream; she seemed to communicate with hidden traceries in the air. Felice saw clearly her mother’s face and her own face—right there—as if superimposed on top of each other’s. This old image seemed to describe all sorts of inner sensations, to show Felice the sorts of things her own face couldn’t reveal. She’d returned the photo to her mother, but later she’d crept back into her mother’s bedroom closet, taken the photo out of its box, and hidden it in her own dresser drawer.

EVEN THOUGH IT’S EXCITING
to hear someone talk about leaving—Miami is still the only home Felice has ever known. It’s never seriously occurred to her to really leave: the rest of the world, even New York and Paris, seems so dismal and drab, so far away. “I’m sorry.” She gathers her knees toward her chest, mirroring Emerson. “But that’s crazy. Moving to Oregon.”

“Why?”

“
’Cause it is, okay? You gonna move to the other end of the earth, just to go to a
gym
? We got fifty million gyms right here, right on South Beach. And,
Oregon
? It’s like, practically the North Pole.”

Emerson’s face brightens. “But it isn’t really. That’s just what they say to keep outsiders from coming there and wrecking it. I’ve been studying it on the Internet. Yann says it’s got the prettiest summer and fall of anywhere. It’d be so cool—real seasons.”

Felice looks back down the beach, over the miasma of shimmering bodies, slanting umbrellas, sunglasses. Even with his old-soul face, there’s something about Emerson, his excitement, that makes her tired. It’s not fair, how everyone else always gets to be the kid. She stands abruptly and glares at Emerson. “Off the deck.”

“What?” He stands slowly. “What I say?”

Felice stomps up her skateboard and turns away from Emerson, starts walking.

“What? All I said was there’s seasons.”

“There’s seasons in Oregon—big fucking deal!” she roars, wheeling on him. He actually flinches, which she likes. “You know what your problem is? It’s you don’t know when to shut the fuck up.” She walks faster: she doesn’t know exactly why she’s so angry. Maybe something to do with imagining Emerson fitting in so perfectly in a place called Oregon—or Nebraska—or Cali-fucking-fornia. All those places like those creepy towns in North Florida they used to stop in on their way to visit her grandmother. Everyone in those places as pale as Felice’s father and brother. She remembers their pink-rimmed gazes over their soda straws. The way everyone in the restaurant would study her. Her mother used to say:
You’re just so lovely:
people want to look at you; they’re a little afraid of beauty.

“You know,” Emerson goes on, doggedly keeping up with her. “Portland is full of skateboarders. And all sorts of special trails and like parks—places where they hang out.”

“Big deal,” she mutters, watching her language as they pass three old ladies in skirted swimsuits. “This is just for getting around,” she says, though she is still on foot, carrying the board. “Not a
lifestyle
or some crap like that.” Still, as they push through the hot sand—higher on the beach now, dodging garbage and beer cans—too much for Emerson to collect—she finds she likes the idea of a land of skateboarders and parks full of trails. “What else is there?” she asks irritably.

“All kinds of stuff! Like—like everyone there loves good coffee—”

She snorts. “Yay—a bunch of Starbucks yups.”

“No, no—better coffee than Starbucks—cooler.” His blunt hands circle in the air. “Like—European—or something?”

“Uck.”

“And special beer-making places. There’s a store there that just sells cupcakes—that’s all! And nice bakeries, and gardens and—and the people are super-super friendly. They’ve got statues of rabbits and beavers downtown!”

“Awesome,” she drones. She grew up in the greatest bakery in the world: nothing can impress her. “Sounds like South Beach, practically.” Though it doesn’t, really. Especially not the people and the statues. Felice and Emerson walk in silence. The faint give of the sand feels good under Felice’s feet as the sun’s shifted and sand has cooled a bit. They walk out onto one of the boardwalk benches and sit side by side listening to the white rumble of the surf. Enormous container ships ease past on the horizon; overhead, a yellow plane tows a banner:
2Nite At Nile!

Emerson looks at her once, quickly, a glance full of a furtive hope that Felice tries to ignore. He takes a deep breath. “There’s a river that goes through the city, and lots of nice bridges, and a mountain—Mount something. And the farmers—they come into the city and sell, like, flowers and carrots and eggs and—all kinds of farm stuff. I just really really like the idea of it all. The fresh stuff. I don’t know,” he adds a bit hopelessly.

Normally Felice would be groaning at the corniness, but on the hot beach afternoon, air stale with suntan lotion, she actually feels a twist of longing. “Peaches,” she says, remembering her parents’ table. “Probably plums.”

Emerson stares at her now. “Felice, listen—listen—if you would—if you’d consider it . . . We could go out there together, you know? I’ve got this money. And I—I wouldn’t expect like—like—anything.” He glares at his knees, his face and neck turning crimson, but he keeps going. (Sort of brave—Felice thinks.) “I—I know you don’t like me
in that way
. Whatever. I don’t even care. I mean, it would be just so fun—I think it would—to have you there.”

Felice doesn’t say anything. She just lets the salt spray rise over her legs, its gauzy vapor coating her skin. She’s disoriented by Emerson’s offer, a bit dazzled that this boy, whom she’s never really noticed before, has evidently imagined a whole world around her. She lets her head drop back, arms braced against the bench slats. Is there a time when she gets to hope for things again? Turning eighteen could be the moment you turn into a new person—from a kid to a grownup. Does the grownup have to keep paying for things that the kid did? “I dunno,” she says finally. “How could I?” She squints into the salty ocean sky. “When are you going to go, do you think? Supposedly.”

“We could go any minute of any day. We can go right now if you want!”

Felice snorts and bounces her fist off the big, wooden curve of his upper arm.

THEY WALK BACK
to
Collins then, which the yups have slowly been abandoning in favor of Lincoln Road. There used to be all sorts of forbidding little overpriced designer stores which, Felice has noticed, have started giving way to big mall-type places. And the more cranes and construction-site dump trucks that have clogged the streets, the more the people seem to change. There are still the elderly, trembling over walkers. There are still the crazy people, the wailers and lurchers, reeking drunks and meth-heads, the cadaverous, their skin shrunken to their bones. There are still people carrying animals—boas and cockatoos, Italian greyhounds, white roosters, fluffy coin-eyed monkeys, kittens in sailor suits. There are still middle-aged couples kissing on the street, still girls leading boys—or other girls—on leashes, exquisitely muscled, skin sparkling. But, increasingly, there are robust, generic “young people,” who might’ve grown up next door to Felice in the Gables or in Akron, Ohio, swarming to Sephora and Old Navy, elbowing away the ecosystem of marginalia. All connected somehow with the drone of construction, rumbling up from the waterfront.

Felice checks out a few of the prettier, sylphlike girls they pass. Even the models look different, weirder, with broad, bony foreheads and no eyebrows. It occurs to her that it might already be too late to become a “real” model. Over the past few years, her arms have started to look sinewy and there’s a hardness setting in along her jawline. And the razor-eyed scouts and art directors miss nothing. The last few gigs she’s taken—holiday catalogs—the photographers tilted her face up into the lights, begging her to relax her jaw, soften her pupils.

She and Emerson settle at the outdoor bar at El Tiki, a normally deserted place that only gets crowded after the cruise ships dock. Emerson buys her a margarita in a bowl-sized glass. He points out a rotating glass case of desserts, offers to get her something, but she says, “Ech. Look at the fondant on the layer cakes.” Besides, there’s a package of strawberry Twizzlers Emerson bought her at the 7-Eleven, now stashed in her rucksack. They joke around with each other, Felice twisting back and forth on her chair. She registers the dim, smiling faces around them at the bar—college kids from other cities. Emerson isn’t bad-looking, she decides as he tells her boyhood stories about swiping mangoes from the neighbors’ trees in Fort Lauderdale and selling them to spring-breakers.

“Yeah, so when we gonna go to Oregon?” she cracks during a pause in their conversation. And Emerson’s head lifts; he’s off on his ideas for a car, supplies, a place where they can stay when they get there. He seems to be improvising some of it on the spot—but much seems premeditated. (“This guy I know—Johnny—he comes to the beach every March, but he lives in Lawrence—which is maybe halfway. He said I could always crash at his place if I start traveling.”) She listens, chiming in with her own suggestions (“We could stop in Wyoming on the way, and look at, like ranches”)—all of it a kind of sport.

She can’t remember the last time she’s felt this good. Felice knows—it’s there like a bruise in the back of her mind—she can’t really go to Oregon, just as she knows the punishment doesn’t “run out.” And yet they linger at the bar through another round of drinks, talking. Emerson tells her about his terror of his childhood doctor and vaccinations. Felice volunteers a story about getting chicken pox, which fills her with strands of feelings she’d thought she’d shed a long time ago—the lost, unearthly sensations of being sick at home. As they talk, she gazes into the hotel courtyard beside the bar: a jumble of blue-glazed terracotta pots, sprawling aloes and ginger and birds-of-paradise, an assortment of cats skulking around the perimeters. The daylight has mellowed into pre-evening and in the distance, there is the mournful note of an ocean liner leaving port: a blue stain on the air.