“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.
HER MOTHER HAD WARNED HER: You aren’t suited to the kitchen — you’re too anxious: you’ll go mad from the isolation, the repetition. Can you stand to make croissants every day? What if you poison someone? Lose a walnut shell and someone chokes to death?
To placate her mother, she enrolled in college — the same school her mother had attended — in a hilly, gorge-cut town. She spent all her time in Risley Hall, drowsing over Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Woolf, the decrepit sunlight coming into the late-afternoon glass. Half attending to the lectures of her professors. Like the wonderful old Russian who spoke about Victorian novels and their “primitive coloration,” who set her imagination off in other directions for weeks. It seemed as if the life of the mind precluded the life of the body: poets were ascetic, hollowed-out by thinking; her professors seemed almost deliberately ugly — especially the women. Though her mother couldn’t help the lovely black drift of her own hair and eyes, she restricted herself to the bitterest little cups of coffee and lived on the biscotti Avis made for her — bone dry, barely enough sugar to matter.
Brian was her tutor. He’d taken her on after three other grad students at the study center had given up. He stuck with Avis, going over oligopolies and externalities, and never said, “But it’s so simple…” like the others.
He had a satisfying wholeness about him, American good looks like a baseball player’s — level shoulders, a pale shock of hair. A good mind and ethical nature: little gave him more pleasure than learning laws and governance—“It shows you the shape of your society.” But what drew the deepest sliver of her self toward him, toward love, was the weakness in his chin, his slightly disoriented air, like an injury he allowed only Avis to see. Brian was the opposite of her mother. There wasn’t a whiff of mystery about him: he was solid, entirely himself. Avis still cooked in those days and she invited him to her minuscule studio. She set a hibachi up on the fire escape and grilled him a marbled, crimson rib eye, crusty with salt and pepper, its interior brilliant with juices. Some garlicky green beans with pine nuts, rich red wine, mushrooms and onions sautéed in a nut-brown butter. She’d intuited his indifference to chocolate, so dessert was a velvety vanilla bean cake with a toasted almond frosting. It was a dark art: she knew what she was doing every step of the way, but she wanted him. She wanted children with him. By the end of the meal, he sat half sprawled beside her on the couch, crushing the hem of her skirt. He pulled her down on top of him, wouldn’t let her clear away the dishes: she heard his pulse through the thick wool of his sweater. He loved her, he’d said, his breath redolent of vanilla and almond. He loved her one hundred percent.
She’d smiled — guiltily conscious of having unbalanced him. “But do you love me 105 percent? How about 173 percent?”
He’d turned red and said, “Yes.” Then added politely, “Though those percentages aren’t possible.”
She told him then she hated school. She took him to the Moosewood Café, the Morritz Bakery, she showed him the way they folded cranberries into their Vacherin. She made him seven-layered strawberry pavé cakes. When she confessed, with a deep blush, her wish to attend the culinary institute, he encouraged her to apply. Told her there were loans and scholarships, that he would help her research these things. Excited and anxious, she felt an unraveling in herself, the disconnected threads reaching toward Brian.
THERE IS, IN THE BACK of Avis’s mind, the thought that now she’ll need to hire a new assistant. But for some reason she isn’t in a rush to do so. Delivery trucks rumble to and from the front step every day — two are refrigerated vans which pick up her pastries to ferry throughout the city — the others arrive with specialty items for her baking: lilac honey, a fine-milled pastry flour, a gelatin from Provence. The sound of an assistant speaking Spanish with a delivery driver limned the edges of her day. As she piped rosettes, docked a sheet of dough, or doused a tart with sanding sugar, another world occurred on the doorstep. Now Avis answers the door herself and leads surprised delivery people into the front entrance, across the living room, and through the heavy swinging door to her kitchen. She almost enjoys the contact with the outside world. On Monday, there is a Colombian man who delivers free-range eggs and unpasteurized milk that glows like satin. Tuesdays, a woman from Lima bring special concoctions of candied lilacs and fruit peels and gelées, and later a young boy comes with a box filled with dried starfruit and bananas and fresh tea, mint, and sage from his father’s botanical garden in the Redlands. She asks and forgets everyone’s names, but next week, she thinks, she’ll ask again. Some deliveries — like those from her son’s market — come every week, others — like the fig balsamic vinegar — were special-ordered to accompany a single chocolate strawberry ice cream cake.