Bird in Tree

Valerie is 19 going on 20... His tuxedo was drenched with his bloody sweat. He hauled himself to his knees, looked about at the people passing. Cornelius walked every day to get ideas for his music. Everything led to an idea, this one useful, that one not. He had walked all over every city he'd ever lived in, and he had watched. But he wished he had never taken this particular walk. Fresh from rehab, she's just glad to have escaped her adolescence with her sanity, if not her dignity, intact. Now she is pretty sure she will be okay-that no one ever again will make her do things she does not want to do. But enter Cornelius Price, a clairvoyant classical and jazz pianist, whose life has been all about trying to avoid meeting her. When they fall in love, and get married, the looming question in both their minds is whether or not what he foresaw is powerful enough to destroy or save. Not only a tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Bird in Tree is also a story of love and a treatise on faith and fate-featuring an albino cockatiel with a classical bias, a singer so beautiful she cannot be photographed, thirty-year-old starlight rushing through space, and childhoods of anticipation and remorse.