Still, Parkhurst offered Brian enough that Avis could afford to start her at-home business. PI&B were her first clients: she supplied the Austrian chef at their executive dining hall with linzer tortes, lebkuchen, strudel, Black Forest cakes. Gradually other corporations and local businesses began to request her goods for retreats, conferences, and boardroom lunches. At the same time, Brian found he enjoyed working for a big developer. They hired brilliant architects and contractors; their buildings became part of the sharp, pale skyline. Brian believed he and Avis were helping to build an actual city — food and shelter — inside and outside. Unlike New York or Boston, Miami was a place you could go to and really create something new. Best of all, its boom-or-bust energy, a penchant for dreaming: a dream of a city in a dream of a state.
Avis hired assistants; they hosted dinner parties, bought a 34-foot Sea Ray, a twelfth-floor getaway on Marco Island. There were season tickets, box tickets: they joined the board of the Fairchild Garden; contributed to the Deering Estate.
Avis and Brian had lived in Miami for about ten years when the father of one of Stanley’s classmates invited Brian to an art opening. Brian wondered if there was something prohibitive in the nature of practicing law — he found it difficult and frequently stressful to connect with other men — at least to the point of real friendship. But there was something easy and agreeable about Albert. A publicity rep for the Miami Symphony, he was the sort of cultivated person Brian had tried to emulate as a student. Albert talked about opera and dance and “performance.” He saw hidden meanings in films and books — what he called the “layers” in things; he brought up the uses of symbolism in theater and music.
The opening was in one of the neighborhoods on the northwest outskirts of downtown — territory Brian had never ventured into before. The local denizens kept muscular, flat-headed dogs tied to ropes in the yards and each house was ringed by a chain-link fence. Albert parked on the street and they walked by a group of men with bandannas tied on their heads. One yelled at Brian, “Yo, suit! What up, homes?” The “gallery” turned out to be a private home — the owner, a Haitian-American collector — had bought and connected several little cottages, making a rambling, warren-like space, every wall covered with canvases. Brian had expected to be bored, but he was electrified by the work: seven- and ten-foot-high canvases of nudes — their faces torn at and broken with slashes of paint, their eyes like open wounds. They stopped in front of one canvas — an image of a woman with a rippling chest and blotted black eyes.
“What do you think about that?” Albert asked.
Brian was startled, disoriented by how deeply the work affected him. There didn’t seem to be any meaningful way for him to put words to what he was experiencing.
Albert stood next to him, nodding. “Strong, isn’t it? The image has depth and dimensions. Makes you feel there’s an actual presence here. Maybe even like she’s angry with us.”
“I suppose so — that’s it,” Brian said.
“I think that challenging work — it kind of takes your words away.” Albert nudged his glasses with a knuckle. “Not everyone really lets the experience in — I mean, like you are now. People love to try to talk over everything.” Albert engaged a woman in a sinuous dress in bantering conversation and rattled off the names of prominent Haitian and Cuban artists: Brian had heard of none. Apparently the artist whose work they were viewing was from a town called Gonaïves, on the northern coast of Haiti. “Of course there’s plenty for this artist to be angry about,” Albert said. “Before he became famous, he had to rely on missionaries for art supplies. He would go without food so that he could buy paints. And the political situation there, well…”
When Brian and Albert left the gallery, Brian was buoyed by the images he’d seen — the deep slashes through the paint, the skin rippling with sinew, and sudden, unearthly glimpses of bone. He felt vividly how his young son would love this sort of thing — the outlaw gallery and humble neighborhood.
It had grown darker. Brian looked around at the still street: a streetlamp burned out at the corner, the shrunken houses and ragged patches of grass, gray in the low light. On the way to the car, he heard voices — people gathered in a front yard, a burst of laughter, the quiet slap and tick of dominoes. There was a scrabbling movement along the gutter: rats? At the end of the block, something fetid and black pooled in the center of the street. A gray scarf of smoke rose from a bonfire — children tossing in sticks and bits of trash: the air was thick and watery, as if the convergence of shared history had a visible weight. It occurred to Brian that the people on this street were from the same island the artist had come from. He stared at the reflections sparkling in the passenger window and didn’t speak for the rest of the ride back.
BRIAN PUSHES AWAY from the desk. The phone is silent for once, emails blink on the screen. He regards the crowded sky high above the horizon, filled with thunderheads and a silken light the same shade of gray as the lining of his grandfather’s coat. The forecasters are merrily predicting an “active season.” His thoughts leap to the house, the weight in the halls, the unlit rooms he’ll come home to if — as he expects — Avis returns without having seen Felice. He checks his watch: 12:37. He closes his eyes with a brief fervent wish that his wife isn’t waiting alone at some café table.
His window faces south and east. If only he had strong enough binoculars he might be able to locate his family. The city spreads its cantons over endless miles. Little Haiti must be somewhere behind him: one of those places where you should never run out of gas. And Haiti itself is somewhere before him, beyond the barrier island of Miami Beach, a slender nation tucked within the horizon, Edenic and rife with turmoil and poverty. There but for the grace of God, his father liked to say. As if his own life had descended to him straight from heaven itself.
Now the gray light evinces the lowering of Stanley’s stern gaze, his disapprovaclass="underline" how he would scorn this latest condo project! Brian can almost hear his son’s voice, taking up his favorite topics — the preservation of neighborhood fabric, cultural history and community. Brian admires his son, but sometimes he reminds Brian, oddly, of his righteous old dad. He turns from window to desk — his two poles — with a sense of facing something. He picks up his handset, preferring its shape to the cold chip of the cell, and makes a call. “Tony — yeah — tell me again where we’re at with Little Haiti?”
Avis
AVIS LOOKS WITH BLANK EYES AT THE ONRUSHING freeway. The air smells of tar and cement, as if the city has turned into a smoking construction pit. She curls into herself, trying not to touch the sides of the car, trying not to speak or brush up against anything.
Miami seems as frightening to Avis now as it had when they’d first arrived — a lawless land where cabbies kidnapped young coeds on spring break, German tourists were shot in broad daylight, gangs of young black and brown men roved around in their thin white tanks, long baggy jeans, hands jammed in their pockets. There were “home invasions,” in which thieves would simply rampage into houses and murder the inhabitants at their dinner tables. She’d seen a fistfight break out at the local video store, twice watched police run across neighbors’ lawns with guns drawn, and — too many times to count — she’s had to slam on her brakes to avoid a careening drunken driver — her heart seized up, throbbing in her chest. One day Avis cut short a phone conversation because of a racket outside. She went out to the front lawn to see a police helicopter hovering almost directly over her house: some neighbors told her that a “fugitive” was on the loose: she and the children stayed inside, doors locked for hours, waiting for an all-clear. After Felice had left, Avis had to stop watching the local news because it was too awful, more than she could stand. Her teenage daughter was out there.