Her mouth is dry, her stomach cramped with hunger, though she’s used to that old pain. She stops in the kitchen—more cigarette butts reeking in the sink, empty bottles with their own sour yeast stink—a few shriveled oranges in the fridge: she grabs one, unearths her board from its hiding place in one of the cavernous pieces of furniture—a carved mahogany armoire—too cumbersome to cart off and sell or someone would’ve done so years ago.
The outdoors kids told Felice that a wealthy family used to live in the Green House, back when rich people moved out to the beach to party. Supposedly it was one of the first houses ever constructed on the beach. The owners left it to their kids, it got passed down for, like, generations. It used to be full of priceless art and chandeliers. But then eventually, there was just one old lady living there—the Green House kids called her “Myra.” Hanging in the front entry was an oil painting of a fat, pink-cheeked lady in a blue dress. The canvas was streaked with grime, but it was still up there in its gold frame bristling with curlicues and rosettes, and might even be worth something. The kids said Myra had lived there all alone and one day the skate punks and street rats who’d been noticing the weeds and the St. Augustine grass getting wild in the big front yard and the scabby cats and the increasing chirr of bugs—they just tried the front door and the handle turned.
“She was probably about three-quarters crazy, sitting there, bunched up in that same old blue dress, watching TV right on that couch,” Douglas told her. He was seventeen with a narrow, handsome face and ghastly, rotten yellow teeth. “She saw those guys come in and she started screeching, Hey you kids get outta here! Get outta here!” He gulped with laughter, displaying those teeth.
“When was this? How long ago?” Felice asked. She was fifteen years old then, already skeptical of most stories like this.
“Fuck. I don’t know. Like back in the 1970s or something?”
“So what happened?” Felice folded her arms over her chest. “After the kids came in and she yelled and all?”
He smirked. “They ignored her. What was she gonna do? They moved in. She didn’t even have a phone anymore. She didn’t know anyone and no one wanted to know about her. I mean none of the neighbors or anybody. She was so fat, she couldn’t get out of her chair or anything.”
“Damn.” Felice stared at a big bald gray spot in the middle of the ratty Persian carpet. “Poor lady.”
It seemed to be a true story. More or less. The details changed depending on who told it. Some kids said that Myra lived upstairs on the third floor—where Felice liked to sleep—while the street rats lived downstairs. They said they brought in like squirrels and cats and slaughtered them on the hardwood floor in the living room, just for fun. They said there were all kinds of gangs that moved in and out, a meth lab in one of the parlors. Everything. Every surface of the house was scarred and rutted and burned as if a wagon train trail had rolled through. Even the police ignored it.
“What happened to Myra?” Felice asked.
“Oh.” Douglas shrugged. “They killed her.” He laughed his big galumphing laugh again. “No. They tried to be nice to her at first. They brought her food and shit. But they didn’t know what an old lady likes to eat. She probably needs stuff you don’t chew or something. And she just kept yelling at them to get the fuck out and shit. So after a while they killed her.”
Other kids said that wasn’t true at all. That social services finally showed up and carted her away and the kids just stayed, like they were her actual grandkids. But they all talked about hearing “Myra’s ghost” in certain rooms at night and some of them liked to touch the corner of her painting, “for good luck,” so that corner was smudged mossy and black. Felice liked that painting—old Myra with her sour purse-strings mouth, but something sweeter in her eyes—like a mother’s eyes.
Every time Felice comes back to the Green House, the painting looks less and less human and she finds fewer kids who’ve even heard of Myra. Once, she’d asked one of the thirty-year-olds about her, a spooky guy with matted hair and whirly blue eyes named Cartusia who slept up in the stifling attic. Some of the kids said that he’d inherited money, that he was the reason the Green House still had any electricity or running water. When Felice asked him, he’d hummed and smiled and said only, “Myra’s my mother.”
SHE SLAMS OPEN THE FRONT door and, once again, Felice is free of the Green House. She drops her board and pushes off; the board is the best place for her to be, her head empty and clear and the only thing is tilting and steering, the air brushing her face and the street rumbling through the wheels under her feet. She will never go back there again. This time for real. Her eighteenth birthday is coming: time for things to be different.
She has to make a plan, she thinks. And she has to get money.
The air is sweeter than usual today, a rich, undulant, lanolin, heavy with ocean minerals; she’s not so anxious to work. Felice kicks and rolls to the raised, wooden boardwalk behind the mid-beach hotels; she passes joggers, strollers, people in workout clothes taking their power walks; some of them squint at her, hating skateboarders. She drifts past a homeless guy she knows named Ronnie. He looks, at first, with his long hair and cutoff jeans, like a regular person. But then you notice his too-dark tan, the way his eyes seem too pale for his skin, his face weathered, a desert nomad’s.
“Hey man,” she says, rolling by, slow as fog.
His eyes flicker at her, a dimensionless khaki color.
After rounding a bevy of plump women in petaled bathing caps, she stops to watch some children and a young woman playing in the skirt of the water. The woman could be a college-age nanny, but she has the same yellow hair as the children. The water is almost hot in August, and the children shriek and kick up a froth; their transparent laughter barely reaches Felice. She stands there, board under one arm, watching the play, feeling alone and sad and hopeful, when someone says, “Hi? Felice?”
“Felix,” she says automatically, annoyed. “Oh.” It’s one of the skinheads from the House—Emerson. She swallows her breath and steps back. “Hi.” Her voice sounds like an eight-year-old’s.
Emerson’s hair is so pale and close-cropped she can make out his scalp in the sunlight, prickling with sweat. The color in his face is high and pink, as if he’d been running. His mouth is small, possibly cold, but he’s so strong and healthy that he emits a natural attractiveness. She’s a bit afraid of him. On more than one occasion, she’s noticed his translucent eyes following her across the room: perhaps why she said his name to Axe. He places his hand on top of his head, then removes it. She remembers now—when he first appeared at the House, the other shaved boys made fun of his measured pace and demeanor. They sat around in the living room once, flicking cigarette butts at Emerson in improvised torment, until he burst up from his place on the carpet, upending the mahogany coffee table crammed with half-emptied beer bottles, crashing the whole foaming mess to the floor. He grabbed one of them—a vicious boy named Damon—and knocked his head against the floor so it made a hollow thump. For a while, the boy laid there without moving, eyes open, staring. Emerson tossed a cigarette butt at him and walked out. The next day the boy had an egg-sized lump on the side of his head. They treated Emerson differently after that.
Now Emerson stands in front of her, an obstacle, pink and glistening, his sheen of hair sparkles, and his gray T-shirt with the faded rock band is sweated onto his big chest. “I thought that was you,” he says.
Felice grips her skateboard and glances back toward the children in the surf. “Yeah, hey,” she says. “Who told you my old name?”
“I like Felice.” He smiles and his lower lip droops in a soft, unguarded way. “All those kids at the Green House—they know something about everyone.”
Felice snorts. “More like nothing about everyone.”
“Well, I just heard something about you and me.”
“Oh yeah?” Something trembles in the small of her back as if the temperature just dropped. She stares at him, determined not
to look away. “Like what?”
He slides his hands into his pockets and his big, loose shorts slip. “Like, we’re getting it on, supposedly. Like, that’s according to you.”
“Someone told you that?” She widens her eyes; a pulse leaps in her temple.
“Axe and Dink.”
“What did you say?”
He turns to gaze at the little kids and huffs a laugh. “I guess I said it was true.”
Instead of feeling grateful, though, Felice is irritated: the way he’s standing there, those see-through eyes floating over her, like they really are together. “Fine. Whatever. I hate all those guys, I’m not going back there.” She doesn’t care what he thinks, hoping only to avoid the humiliation of explaining herself.
“What? Who you talking about?”
“The fucking Gross House. It’s disgusting. I can’t believe I ever stayed there.”
Emerson runs his hand over the brush of his hair. He swipes back and forth, color climbing into his face. “It’s nice—I think. It’s decent. You can hang. There’s cool people. People bring beer and food.”
“It’s gross,” she snaps. “Everyone steals everything—they’re all so annoying. And loud and stupid. And it’s fucking hot. Like a fucking jungle swamp.”
He chuckles, letting his hand fall off his head. “I know.”
“And the toilet—”
“I know.”
Felice drops her board to the pavement and rests one foot on it. “Hey man, I gotta be going now. I got stuff to get to.”
“Like what?” Emerson studies her face with interest.
“Like, I don’t know.” She almost says: Like, I got to go meet my mother and beg her for money. “I gotta see if I can scrounge work.” Also true. She pushes off on a slow spin, but he follows on foot. “Where do you work?”
“Off Seventeenth.”
“You’re a model, aren’t you? I knew it.”
She rolls her eyes and steers around a couple of men in business suits who turn when Emerson says model. “I’m not a model-model,” she drawls. “Obviously. I don’t stay in their little palaces. I model, like, tattoos. Or other crap—watches and sandals and shit.”
There’s a section toward the north end of Lummus Park called the Cove where Felice and Berry and Reynaldo and some of the other kids go. They’ll lie out or sit near the beach entrance with Frappuccinos and sometimes a gig will come along. Sometimes they won’t feel like doing anything. It gets so hot out there, the sun melting the thick bright air into orange honey, she just wants to curl up and sleep out her life. Exactly what Micah, one of the modeling scouts, is always harping on: You want to throw it all away? That’s great, that’s your own damn choice.
When she was still at home, Felice ran around with boys and tried pot and stayed out late: she’d thought she was wild—but she’d had no idea what wild was. She knows that now. By the time she got to the beach, she was dried up inside like a cicada husk. The thing that happened to Hannah had done that to her. It was like there was nothing left of her; she slept outdoors all the time back then, with her legs cinched in a knot against her chest, like she’d dried in that position and one stiff breeze off the water would sweep her away.
Sometimes she can’t help it and she sees Hannah in the east field, sweeping her hand through the grass, saying, “Basically, your choices are you can be smart or pathetic. And you can be good or truly evil.”
“Then I want to be smart and good.” Felice sat cross-legged in the grass.
“Possible, but that hardly ever happens in nature.”
“So what are you?”
She smiled a long, slow, tipping smile. “Smart and evil. Like my dad. And my mother is pathetic but good. That happens to mothers a lot. Which is why you should never be one.”
“Not my mom,” Felice said. “She’s the least pathetic person I know.”
Hannah just kept looking at her with that subtle smile, her lips bitten and dark and her eyes like seawater.
Now Felice is almost eighteen, and she’s tried so hard to turn into something new. But every day there’s dancing and drugs spread hand to hand—silver pipes, tabs that melt away on the tongue, medical-looking hypodermics, capsules and all the names, letters—E, H, MDA . . . And Felice knows she’s lucky because she’s afraid of needles—fear like a part of her circulatory system—a source of shame and protection. She needs money now if she’s really going to get out of the Green House. So perhaps one of the stores on Lincoln Road, one of the blaring European boutiques, will need a website model, or possibly some people from Benetton, or Ton Sur Ton, or Boden will come out on the beach combing for their scruffier “real life” catalog models, and she’ll land a gig that pays $750, maybe a thousand bucks a day for a couple of days.
Maybe her mother will give her some cash. Maybe she’ll let herself ask this time.
“Really, I gotta get going,” she says to Emerson, though she stays at a slow roll.
“Can I come?”
She feels irritated again. “You want to come?”
He smiles again—the expression so restrained it’s almost conspiratorial—and says, “Yeah. Please. I’d really like that.”
SHE’S NOT WILLING to admit that they’re together—even for a walk. He’s too big and odd and ungainly. So she stays onboard, skates at a crawl—which would’ve driven her crazy in the past. She abruptly cuts away from the crowds, veering right, passing the edifices of Eden Roc and the Fontainebleau, turning south on Collins’ coral-pink sidewalk. Across the street, the narrow blue cut of Indian Creek glows with a crinkled sheen. Felice tries to roll ahead of Emerson, but he’s surprisingly good at keeping up and apparently doesn’t mind breaking into a trot if she pushes it. “So like do you have a last name?” She doesn’t look at him when she asks, because nearly everything she says seems to make him smile, which seems like a sign of weakness or supplication. Instead she just stares down the pink sidewalk, the nostalgic white beach apartments on one side, an eternity of SUVs on the other.
“Officially or what?” He smiles and she looks away, glaring. “Lindemann, I guess. I don’t really use it so much. It’s not like my stage name or anything.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, rolling her eyes. Everyone in the whole world is in a band or trying to start one up. “So, fine, what is your stage name?” She sighs.
He speeds up, jogs backwards in front of Felice. “I’m just thinking something—just—shorter? Easier for announcers to say. Like, Lind. You know, like, Emerson Lind? And it doesn’t sound so achtung that way, you know, so I’ll be back.” He lowers his voice into a Schwarzenegger impression. Then, in the same round, guttural accent, he says, “Yah, der he is, ladies und gentlemen, Emerson Lindemann.”
Felice can’t help a burst of laughter. “What are you even talking about? What announcers?”
For a second, Emerson keeps smiling but doesn’t say anything, a red mottling appears in his skin (she feels sorry for him, he’s such a transparent, white-guy color). “I forgot I didn’t tell you yet.” He falls back to keep pace beside her. “I always feel like all of us from the House already know about each other.” He doesn’t seem to be willing to look at her now; instead he’s fixed on the sidewalk. He smiles again, more intensely, and Felice realizes that at least some of the smiling is nerves and she softens toward him a bit. “I-I’m in training,” he says in a lowered voice. “I’m going to enter strongman competitions.”
“You what now?”
“They’re these big contests—of strength. It’s always on TV—like a sporting event. You can make a lot of money if you get known. Caber toss, stone put? Started with the Scots. The Highland games?”
Felice slants a frowning glance at him.
“These days there’s usually a truck pull and a tire flip.”
Now, with her board rumbling easily along the cement, Felice gives him a long, frank look. “Are you kidding? You mean, like, those guys who drag around tree trunks and junk? That stuff?”
They pass
two girls and a Pomeranian jittering like a windup toy. “I’m not saying I’m gonna walk right out there and pick up trophies. I know I don’t have the muscle mass yet. But I’m close. Training hard, almost every day. I jog and walk the boardwalk twice a day.”
“And I thought you’d followed me here,” she says, joking yet privately disappointed.
“They let me into the Gold’s on Fourteenth. Herman and Ileana—they’re trainers there. They’ve been helping me out. They say I’ve got natural explosive power. We’re keeping it totally pure—no juicing, no additives. I’m working out three, four hours a day—arms, back, grip strength, everything. The manager said if I pick up a trophy at the regionals this spring he’ll sponsor me. He says I could go national.”
Felice closes her eyes, just enjoying hearing about the future. It’s not like the kind of dreaming all those waste products at the House or the yuppie losers out on Cocowalk are always doing—fame and money—everyone hanging around at Mansion or Nikki Beach or Crobar, like dancing and shit was going to transform them into Paris or Lindsay or Britney. Famous girls were always hanging around, wearing their fedoras, giggling in a knot of stoned celebutante friends, kids waving cell cameras at them, so you felt like you really were one of them already. Except the truly famous girls stuck to the clubs’ VIP lounges and woke up in their suites at the Delano, and the beach kids woke up back on the sand or even worse places than that.
Felice quits kicking, lets her board slow, and closes her eyes again. Daring herself, she keeps them closed and lifts one hand; her fingers pat a series of curling palm fronds—tap, tap, tap, tap. She lets the board roll to a stop, cants back her head, evaluating him through lowered lids. “Prove it.”
“Prove it what? You mean, like what—”
“That you’re all strong, like you say.”
Birds of Paradise Page 4