The Bird Market of Paris

  “Poppy, do you want to go to the movies with me, or maybe get some ice cream?” I asked one drizzly afternoon, standing in the doorway of his room.

  “Not now, Chérie.”

  I stared at him from the doorway. He gazed at the television. I charged across the house to my room and slammed the door. He had to have heard it. I paced the room, reeling from the dismissal by the one person in the world I thought would never reject me.

  Two days before I left for New York, I cajoled Poppy into a walk around the block. Two Rottweilers in a backyard attacked their side of a fence as we crossed the street. They barked and snarled, and Poppy was so startled that he fell down and hit his head on the sidewalk. I rushed to grab his arm and pick him up, but he was seizing, his eyes blank, jaw clenched. Within a few seconds he blinked, his body relaxed, and he sat up.

  He brushed himself off, looking dazed. I took his hands and pulled him to his feet.

  “Those bloody sycamores,” he growled, wiping his hands on his pants, squinting at the dogs, which were panting and wagging their stubby tails behind the fence.

  “What just happened, Poppy?”

  “I fell.”

  “Yes, but you blacked out or something, like a seizure.”

  “I am fine,” he said, rubbing his head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I am sure. Do you believe your Poppy?”

  “I do, but that didn’t look normal.”

  He stared at the dogs and limped a few feet away from them. “Those are bad dogs.”

  We ambled home, his hand on my shoulder, my arm around his waist.

  At dinner, Poppy relayed to my parents the story of the dogs barking and him falling, but he left out the part about the seizure. I took his lead, thinking that if he didn’t think it was a big deal, I wouldn’t bring it up, either. I agreed the dogs were bad, and offered that the owners probably were, too, though I didn’t believe so about either.

  The next day, my parents left for the Bahamas on a work trip to sell T-shirts to a resort there, leaving Poppy and me alone. I found him in his bedroom in the afternoon seizing on the bed, froth around his mouth, eyes rolled into their sockets so that only the whites showed. I called 911.

  In the emergency room, they took him for an MRI. A young doctor showed up several hours later and told us there was something on the scan—he wasn’t sure what it was, but it was likely the cause of the seizures. He gave us a business card for a neurologist and told us to call the doctor on Monday.

  I reached my parents and they ditched their trip and rushed home, and I postponed my travel back to New York a few days. They took Poppy to the doctor. My mom found me in my room and motioned for me to sit on the bed.

  “Your grandfather is very sick,” she said. “He has a tumor in his brain.”

  I waited for her to explain, but she paused and we both looked at each other. Was she waiting for me to speak? What could I add to this terrible news?

  “A tumor,” she said again.

  “They can fix it.” I knew sometimes these conditions were treatable.

  “We’re going to try. Talk to him. Be positive.”

  I padded over the cold tile floor to Poppy’s room.

  “Chérie, come here,” he said. I sat on the edge of his bed and took his hand.

  “Poppy, are you OK?”

  “I am OK, Chérie. You are not allowed to worry. Promise me.”

  “What’s going on?” I said, thinking I’d hear a more favorable answer from him.

  “The doctors found something, but I am fine. How are you, Chérie?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  He touched my cheek and smiled, and I felt better.

  “You are my hope,” he said.

  “You are my hope,” I said back.

  My dad told me later that Poppy had been having seizures for several weeks but hadn’t told anyone. It started when he brushed his teeth one morning—his jaw clenched around his toothbrush—and instead of investigating it, he just stopped brushing his teeth. Maybe he was embarrassed. He mistrusted doctors. When he was in the army in Egypt, he had been diagnosed with a spot on his lung and given six weeks to live. He left the doctor’s office and decided to heal himself, eating oranges and fresh fish and indulging in fresh air and sunshine. That was more than forty years ago. He’d had a mistrust of doctors ever since.

  A few days later, while I was packing my suitcase for the trip back to school in New York—Bonk on my shoulder, jumping into my suitcase to inspect my clothes—Poppy appeared in the doorway.

  “Do you have to go now, Chérie?” he said as I zipped my suitcase. “You can take some extra time?”

  “If I don’t go back, I’ll be in big trouble,” I told him. “I’m already here longer than I was supposed to be.”

  Poppy’s face was drawn. “Be careful, Chérie. I worry about you. Call me every day.”

  A few days after my classes resumed, my mom called with news. The tumor was growing. Poppy had seizures daily. My mom said the doctors were figuring out their next move. Poppy was only seventy-eight years old, and people lived to be over a hundred. Why not Poppy?

  My mom put Poppy on the phone. He said, “Chérie, tell me something good.”

  “I’m making a lot of friends.” I muffled my mouth with my old blue blanket, BaaBaa, so he couldn’t hear me crying. The heat kicked in from my floorboard radiator and I flinched at the sound, a loud tick and a hiss. Bonk and the other lovebirds chirped inside the long pause on the phone.

  “Where there is life, there is hope,” Poppy said.

  * * *

  In the three weeks I was in New York, my parents closed on a house in an upscale neighborhood in south Fort Lauderdale, a three-bedroom split-level situated on one of dozens of canals spidering through Lauderdale Isles, inland enough to be safe from a storm surge in a hurricane, but still with ocean access. Their garment business had taken off, and they were doing well. The house was bordered on the sides with pink bougainvillea and a sloping front lawn lush with St. Augustine grass. Royal and cabbage palms lined the quiet neighborhood, and many of the neighbors had xeriscaped the fronts of their houses, landscaping them with native trees and plants, banyan trees hanging with Spanish moss and large air plants growing in the y-shapes where the branches met the trunks.

  My mom picked me up from the train station.

  “Don’t be surprised by your grandfather,” she said in the car. “I’m warning you. Poppy has changed a lot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t have drinking glasses because he broke them all,” my mom said. “We had to buy plastic tumblers.”

  I tried to imagine Poppy flinging glasses across the room.

  “He can’t hold anything in his hands anymore. And don’t be shocked at how he eats. The food falls out of his mouth.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You will. Another thing.” She paused and sighed.

  “What?”

  “The neighbors down the street have a big white dog, and I guess Paisley got into their yard and the dog disemboweled her. They found pieces of her.”

  “Way to break that to me gently.” I had picked Paisley the cat from a Dumpster when I was fifteen, her eyes barely open, and nursed her with a tiny bottle and canned milk from the pet store.

  “I know you and your grandfather have the superstition about an animal dying to save a person. Maybe Paisley died for Poppy. I thought about that when it happened.”

  I stared out the window at the palm trees in the road’s median. “Could be,” I said, but I thought, “Yes, that’s it. Paisley traded her place in the world for Poppy to stay. Merci, mon Dieu, thanks to God.”

  I walked into the cool house, with its white tile floor and huge sliding glass door overlooking a sailboat across the canal. The house had vaulted wooden ceilings and a covered patio deck for the birds. Gladys and Emmeline greeted me at the door, Emme swiveling through my calves, Gladys yowling for head r
ubs in her characteristic Burmese fashion. I wondered if they understood that Paisley was gone.

  Poppy was resting in his new room at the top of the stairs. He sat in bed, propped up with pillows, staring into space.

  “Chérie, you are home!” he said when he saw me, reaching out his right hand.

  I hugged him and sat on the bed. The left side of his face drooped and he was unshaven.

  “I am better now that you are here.”

  I held his hand and tried to think of something to say. I was angry. I wanted to run downstairs and lambast my parents for not taking better care of him. Instead I told him about my trip and my imaginary friends at school. He smiled and seemed relieved to know I was happy. But I wasn’t happy—I was furious. I know now that some people hide their elderly away in nursing homes, send their sick grandparents to care facilities where they die alone, that it’s hard to watch a loved one disintegrate, and that’s what my parents had chosen to do—the hard thing. But not having witnessed his gradual dismantling, I thought Poppy’s condition was borne of neglect.

  Before dinner, my dad helped Poppy down the stairs and into a chair at the dining room table. My mom filled up his plate. He held his fork in his fist like a shovel. Most of the food slipped off his fork before it reached his mouth. When it landed, he chewed awkwardly, and most of the food fell back onto the plate. It was ghastly to watch. My parents went on eating as if this weren’t happening.

  After dinner, as my dad helped Poppy up to bed, I cornered my mom in the kitchen. “How can you sit there and watch him eat like that?”

  “He doesn’t want help. We tried. Your grandfather is a proud, independent man.”

  “You can make the decision to help him. He has a brain tumor. Don’t you think that’s affecting his decision-making process?”

  “You act like we’re not doing anything.” She was rinsing dishes and placing them into the dishwasher, the plates clanging against one another like cymbals.

  “Fix this.”

  “How do you want us to fix it, Nicole?”

  I wanted to say that we should take him to Dr. Z, a doctor I trusted. But Poppy wasn’t a bird.

  * * *

  The next day we drove Poppy to a neurosurgeon’s office. We sat in a small, sterile room while the doctor examined Poppy’s MRI, then examined Poppy. He told us that the MRI showed a large tumor, about the size of a tennis ball.

  “We have two choices,” the doctor said. “We can be aggressive and operate to try to remove the tumor, or we can do a biopsy and use a new laser knife technology to blast the tumor, depending on what kind of tumor it is. I can’t know the nature of the tumor, benign or malignant, until I either perform surgery or a biopsy. I’ll leave the room so you can discuss it.”

  “I will not be butchered,” Poppy said as the door closed behind the doctor.

  “I vote for removing the tumor,” I said, holding up my hand.

  Poppy and my dad started speaking French, something about doctors always wanting to cut. When they launched into English again, Poppy said he would concede to the biopsy. He didn’t even want to do that, but we all felt he needed to take an action.

  After we returned home, Poppy called me into his room. “Chérie, please open the top drawer,” he said, gesturing to his nightstand. “There is a book I want you to read.”

  I pulled out a small red-and-black hardcover journal with the word Record written on the cover, and showed it to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I want you to read it all. Someone wrote it for me. It is about me, and I want you to come back and tell me what you think. Can you do that for your Poppy, Chérie?”

  I told him I would.

  I opened the little red journal in my room. The inscription on the first page read “To my dear friend, I dedicate the following: Let me wish you beauty, joy, and peace, victories that will everyday increase. Love, Bella.”

  * * *

  When I was little, up to my preteens, Poppy’s assistant and primary model, Bella, had traveled with him to out-of-town events and spent hours with him at his design studio. She was a tall beauty with long, silky auburn hair, porcelain skin, and high cheekbones. Poppy had choreographed a dance for her on the catwalk to Ravel’s Boléro, a fifteen-minute orchestral piece that began at a torpid pace, marching drums thumping, and rose in tempo and volume to an ecstatic climax. Bella would end each fashion show with the Boléro dance, wearing Poppy’s famous “M” dress that could be worn a hundred ways.

  With no embellishments, the slinky knit jersey dress looked elegant but safe, with its long sleeves and modest hemline hitting at the knee. On Bella, the dress appeared dangerous. She’d slither onto the catwalk in impossibly high heels, without a bra, hips swaying to the music, her arms in the sleeves of the dress and her hair in a neat bun. When she reached the end of the catwalk, the song would increase in volume and momentum, and she’d peel her arms from the sleeves and pull the neck of the dress over her head.

  The audience gasped. It had seemed as if Bella was removing the dress, but instead she’d writhe her shoulders through the neck of the dress and tie the arms around her waist. This was one of the hundred ways. She’d swivel back down the catwalk, loosening her bun, her long, dark hair cascading over her back. As the drums thumped and everyone’s pulse ignited, Bella would swirl in time with the music, changing the design of the dress over and over until she spun at the end of the catwalk, hair roping around her neck and covering her face, eyes closed, in rapture at the end of the song.

  I’d stare up at her with envy. I could never do this dance. She was possessed, illuminated by a single spotlight, all eyes on her, everyone either wanting her or wanting to be her. Even at a young age, I knew there was something sexual to this dance, to this song, and it both excited and troubled me.

  I enjoyed visiting Bella’s home. She had a large pool with a diving board and a citrus grove in back of her house in Miami’s horse country. She’d let me pick fruit, and I’d mill among the trees, alone in the shade, daydreaming, peeling oranges and eating them whole, sour juice pouring off my chin onto my shirt.

  One day, when I was eleven, Poppy picked me up from summer day camp at the YMCA. He was red-faced, his lips drawn tightly into his mouth like they did when he was angry, and he grasped the steering wheel with white knuckles.

  “Bella is marrying an eighteen-year-old boy,” he said to me through his teeth. “Can you believe that?”

  Eighteen sounded old to me, and I didn’t have a clue how old Bella was. She could have been twenty-five or a hundred.

  “She is ridiculous,” he said. “She believes her own press. Never, ever, believe your own press. Do you know what that means, Chérie?”

  I didn’t understand what all the fury was about. I told him I didn’t know what that meant.

  “When we go places to show my fashions, they bring her roses, they tell her how beautiful she is, they write about her in the newspapers. But I made her. I created her, and she forgets that.”

  I stared silently through the windshield as we drove.

  “And now she is going to marry an eighteen-year-old boy.” He hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “She will fail, but I can never take her back.”

  He wiped his eyes. “I do not want you to see your Poppy like this,” he said, his tone changing.

  I didn’t see what the big deal was, but Poppy was upset. His anger and sadness dominoed onto me, and I started to cry.

  “No, Chérie, do not cry.” He patted my frizzy hair with one hand as he drove. “These are adult problems, not yours.”

  Then he took me for ice cream at Swensen’s. I stood in front of the cold ice cream display with Poppy’s hand on my shoulder, both of us walking slowly down the row of colorful flavors.

  Once we decided, Poppy opened his wallet and asked the lady loading our cones with mint chocolate chip, “Do you want to see a picture of my pride and joy?” She nodded, and he showed her the wallet-size photograph of the furniture wax and the dish soa
p.

  After she laughed, he turned to the recent wallet-size school portrait of me and said, “That is my little girl.”

  We licked our cones and I soon forgot about Bella and her impending marriage.

  I turned the page of the red journal. Bella’s handwriting was neat, cursive, and light, as if she hadn’t pressed hard with the pen, or perhaps the ink had faded with time. The entire journal was filled with love poems, florid and clichéd verse about how she felt warm and womanly and on fire with Poppy. I read the next one, then the next.

  Beneath green boughs

  To lie awake

  Rolling gently love to make

  Beneath your back

  Joining has become

  An act sublime

  And you are me

  I am you

  Oh tell me darling

  Is this beauty true?

  There were poems about Poppy’s hands on her body: some explicit, some rambling and repetitive. I read halfway through the journal and couldn’t continue. Why had he shown this to me? Did he understand what he was doing, or had the tumor affected his judgment? How had he saved this from the hurricane? What tall shelf had it been hiding on for all these years?

  Folded between the pages of the book, there was a fourteen-page apology letter in the same handwriting on purple paper in blue ink:

  My dearest beloved friend, it’s nine o’clock Sunday night. The house is still and in this time I reflect on a day in which I loved poorly and with a mean spirit. You are more lovable than dreams I dreamed and so I have opened myself wide to you. It is very painful, for I burn with the nastiness and impetuosity of my twenty-five years to give and give madly, to fly and sail and soar. My personal spirit has gyrated to a compulsion in movement, grand scope. I shall endure with you until the drops become canyons and we are free without the confines of your world.

  I put the book down and walked toward the bathroom. I wanted to take a long, hot shower, and scrub myself raw with a hard loofah. Poppy saw me as I passed his room.

  “Did you read the book, Chérie?” he called out.

  “I did,” I said, backing up and standing in his doorway.

  “What did you think of it?”