Delicate Edible Birds (19 page)

It was an order: we hurried. The butterflies seethed over the streets, turned buildings into shuddering things, turned the most stoic of people into sleepwalkers, marveling at the delicate dreams at their feet. Ancel de Chair took hundreds of pictures. Lulu tried to set up her easel before birds fluttered down and picked off every simmering beast. We left her there, and my husband and Ancel de Chair and I walked around the city for hours until, with another gust of wind, the butterflies rose as one and vanished. On the ground wings lay broken, trampled, and in the trees sparrows sat puffed, eyes closed, sated almost to bursting.

When the last butterfly had gone and the streets had re
turned to their old, prosaic selves, I felt a deep grief, a loss of something I didn't know I'd had. Ancel de Chair, too, turned to us, his eyes wet. He cleared his throat and mopped his forehead and said, Now, my friends, it is time for a small celebration. Though my husband protested, Ancel de Chair took us by the elbows and led us into a shiny café and made us drink whiskey. We were completely blotto by midafternoon. I remember once asking about Lulu, and his giving a European shrug and saying, “Oh, she's a big girl, she can manage.” At some point, there was a dinner, a terrific sausage, and whole rivers of wine and waiters with perfect teeth leaning over me. My husband lay down in the middle of the dance floor so we loaded him into a cab, and he waggled his hand at us papal-wise, telling Ancel de Chair to take good care of his wifey, and the cab drove off and the baron and I were left alone. I knew my husband, knew he had always congratulated himself for seeing the allure of a farm girl he thought other men would overlook. In his mind, I was in no danger of sparking an international playboy's lust when compared to whittled, elegant Lulu.

But when we were alone together Ancel de Chair leaned close to me and whispered things in my ear that made me gasp and turn pink and very warm. He kissed each of my fingers, one after another; he sent a trail of kisses up my plump upper arm and nestled his lips in my collarbone. Later, on a street lit by gas lamps, a tiny, wizened old man took hold of me, humming a tango into my bosoms, which was as high as his head reached. I was crying with laughter and unable to dance; he,
obstinately, kept trying to make me follow his feet. From a dark doorway where he was smoking, Ancel de Chair's eyes gleamed, watching me.

My husband and I awoke at noon the next day, shattered. We could barely call for food, and moaned in bed until it came. When at last the cart was rolled into the room, in addition to the eggs and the coffee and the toast, there was a tiny, perfect bouquet of tea roses. I peered at the card until I understood what it said, and my husband took it from my hand. He read it out loud:
“My dear bergère, Lulu has insisted on a hasty departure and we are off again. So sorry we couldn't say good-bye in person. I feel certain, though, we will meet again, and I will insist on my tango then. Yours, Ancel
.”

My husband flipped the card to see if there was anything written for him, then he read the note again. “Tango? Yours, Ancel?” he said darkly. Jealousy twisted his mouth and he looked ugly to me for the first time. Lord knows, it was not the last.

“Listen,” he said, “last night did you do anything—”

“No,” I said, impatiently. “Of course not.” I said this, although I had a brief flash of a slow and salty kiss at the door, a hand on my breast. I turned to my new husband and laughed at him and said, “Why would I ever do anything with that old continental fop when I have you right here?” And, “What, you think I'm so irresistible an international playboy couldn't keep his hands off me?” I knew that he didn't. That bleak morning I understood that it would be the essential rift in our marriage, my husband's belief that he had married down.
I cajoled and teased until he smiled and we soon forgot about the eggs turning to rubber on the plate.

Life went on, less magical every year. Ancel de Chair would certainly have devolved into a story I told at dinner parties had I not, shortly after my first divorce, seen him again. I was still young and so recklessly poor that I was fashionably skinny for the first time in my life. I had a part-time position as a secretary in a medical office, and my husband had refused alimony, damn his cheap heart. His new girlfriend, you see, had three children and he was straining to make ends meet already, what with the Party's poor excuse of a paycheck, he told me, and like a stupid soft-hearted sot, I bought it. That was the last I heard of him. I lived in a converted closet in Chinatown and had a hot plate on which I made my food, and accepted every date I could get in order to eat on someone else's dime. Cockroaches rained to the floor like bullets when I turned on the lights; I woke up one night to find a man, who had crawled in through the window, watching me sleep.

“I'm giving you ten seconds to leave,” I said in a very slow voice, and started to count. He was outside by four.

Yet that was, in general, a glorious time. We girls from the office would mix malt liquor with gin and powdered punch, pour it into martini glasses that someone had bought at the Salvation Army, and get crocked, and we'd swear it was better than being at the nightclubs downtown. When we had the money, we'd go to a fancy restaurant and order only coffee and pie, and sit for hours living the high life, until
we'd picked up enough men or had been politely asked to leave by the maître d'.

In one of those restaurants, I saw Ancel de Chair. I was draped on the couch, laughing, when I felt a hand over my eyes and heard his voice crooning in my ear, “Well,
bonjour, ma bergère
, I hardly recognized you.” I leaped up in delight; he looked as suave as ever, catlike in the dim restaurant. He suggested going somewhere else for a drink; in three heartbeats, I left my flabbergasted girlfriends behind. He was in town, he told me as we walked, for only a few weeks, on business, something to do with a foundation he was on the board of; he waved his hand. I told him about the divorce and he nodded, gravely, and said, “That nasty flea was never worth your pinky toe, my darling.” Hot tears of gratitude rose in my eyes.

We had one drink in his hotel's bar, and he told me of his life, his new wife and their baby girl, how she was born with meningitis, but was fine now, a sweet girl, his joy. All this, looking at me, making an offer. I took a sip and considered his lovely face, smiling—offer accepted. We went up to his room in the hotel. It was gilded, full of things that glistened and chimed, a palace compared to my cramped closet. He took off his shoes, I took off my boots. I undid the yellow diamond from his tie and put it on the dresser. He undid his cufflinks and rolled them under his hand, then slowly took off his tie, watching me.

When I unbuttoned my dress from knee to neck, however, he stopped me. He drew the sides of my dress to both
sides like a curtain, and looked for a long time at my body. I had lost some of my formerly vast embonpoint, but was still nicely endowed and used to men reaching and grabbing at this point in the unveiling. But Ancel de Chair wasn't looking at my chest. He sat at the edge of the bed and pulled me close, and looked up at my face briefly.

“Oh,” he murmured. “I can see your poor ribs.” And then, one by one he kissed them, gently, from bottom to top, and began again on the other side. I closed my eyes to feel his mouth, warm and delicate on my skin, and remembered those butterflies of Buenos Aires, how they opened and closed their brilliant wings.

But something heavy fell against the door to the corridor. We stopped and looked at it, startled. The knob jiggled; there were the shadows of feet in the crack beneath. An unearthly cracked voice, a woman's, said, “I know you're in there, Ancel, I know you're in there, you're in there, let me in.” There was a sliding sound; the woman must have let herself fall against the door to the ground. I imagined her a beautiful young thing, drunk, her lipstick smeared. “Ancel?” she said. “Please? Oh, please?”

I stepped back, and Ancel de Chair gave me a rueful smile. I sat beside him on the bed and took his hand. For a while, we listened to the woman crying out in the hall, his fingers warm and dry in mine, until he sighed and gave my hand a kiss, and whispered, “There will always be next time,
ma bergère
.” I whispered, “Of course, of course.” I couldn't look at him as I buttoned up my dress, gathered my things. He put
himself back together crisply, and I pinned the yellow diamond back in his tie. He kissed my eyelids, once, twice, then spoke softly through the door for a minute until the girl leaning against it moved. He went out, and she spoke. Their voices moved off down the long corridor.

I waited for a few minutes in a faux Louis XIV chair, under the stern glare of some dead white man in oil. As I left, before I stepped out again into the too-bright day, I saw the backs of Ancel de Chair and the woman at the bar, hers nearly boneless as she leaned against him, his sleek as a seal's. Beyond the ache of my body, my stomach also ached: I had counted on room service, some hamburger bloody with juices, some sundae topped with cream so rich it would make me want to weep.

Even had he not sent the extravagant chocolates to the medical office later that week, I would have been pleased to see him the next time I did, three or so years later, at a dinner party given by the sister of my second husband. It was a quiet bash in honor of our marriage a week earlier, my sister-in-law wanting to introduce us to the highfliers of her set: Ancel de Chair was on one of her boards. The first time I'd met my sweet and quiet second husband I had liked him very much, even though I had been fishing for a rich hubby and he was at that time only a low man on the public television totem pole. When he asked within two months of dating if I wanted to marry him, I said, somewhat to my surprise, “Oh. Well, of course, why not.” At our party that evening, I saw my stock rising astronomically in my sister-
in-law's eyes because of my friendship with Ancel de Chair, because of his affection. He led me alone to the corner of the room for an entire hour, and held my hand, as if in warm remembrance, though my poor sister-in-law would have had an aneurysm if she'd known what he was saying. A few months earlier I had begun to jog—it was the late sixties; I was long before my time—and he commented on how light and strong my body was, and told me the things he wanted to do to it. He made me laugh like a silly girl of eighteen again. I gave him our telephone number; he memorized it and said he would call me the very next day. We left with a great embrace and showy words about how we would meet again soon, and my face still felt hot in the car on the ride home.

My husband was struggling at the network in those years; he couldn't afford to alienate bigwigs like Ancel de Chair, who was instrumental in getting funding for many projects. I'm not sure if anyone knew what Ancel de Chair did at that time: it was said he was in international relations, which I interpreted to mean he was an arms dealer. In any case, he was heavily wooed by the types who wooed. My second husband had sat at his sister's all night, smiling painfully at us from across the room, not daring to interrupt our tête-à-tête. He was a gentle man, raised in the Midwest, and had a horror of confrontation; he said nothing about Ancel de Chair to me that night, or any night afterward. Still, if my old friend had called for me as he said he would—as I sometimes believed he actually had—I never received the messages. It was only
much later, when my attorney was going through the boxes of documents during the divorce, that I understood the depth of my second husband's hatred for the man. There were old pictures of Ancel de Chair from the magazines, the seventies playboy aging a tad around the mouth and gut, but my husband had doodled on them goatees and devil's horns, slashed his face out of the society pages. He had mauled the sole photograph of Ancel de Chair and me together at an event, poked holes through his eyes while I beamed on, blonde and thin in my nice dress, my diamonds timid beside the giant yellow one in Ancel de Chair's tie.

Even today I wonder if the baron's sudden fall from grace had anything to do with my husband—there were some ugly rumblings of someone's pockets being filled with the wrong funds, an exposé on the network's news magazine that mentioned him unfavorably by name—but by the time I thought to ask my second husband about what he'd done to my poor old friend, I had three quarters of the man's money and didn't feel I had the right to inquire about such things. I'd learned, of course, from my poor first husband. It's perhaps crass, but a nice pile of money does go a long way to make up for the absence of a warm body in the bed, and I only regretted not doing it earlier, when I first suspected my mild-mannered second husband's interest in his assistant.
A true genius,
he'd called her, brimming with glee. I never thought to ask in what, exactly, her genius lay.

In any case, the collapse of my second marriage had left me sad, spent, my body racing toward the day when it would
no longer be possible to have children. I yearned for one, but couldn't think of having a child on my own. There seemed nothing to do but laugh in the stern, wrinkly face of time. I lived the life of the gay divorcée for some time, until, one rainy night, my third husband came along and swept me up like the warm blast of wind that he was. He was a good man, a gallery owner who created his own wealth, so clever that he could craft any little creature out of whatever was at hand, so humble that it took years for me to realize that what he'd really wanted was to be an artist himself. My third marriage was the one to stick. Almost immediately we had a son who was a dream, a country house in Maine and the one off the coast of Florida, and vacations and parties and lobster bakes on the beaches. Once in a while at a party, there would swim into my view that sleek and smiling face that would bring back the old pangs, the thrilled heart, and I would feel my body respond as it hadn't since I was just a girl. Ancel de Chair would send a glance from across the room that seemed to laugh at the world and to include me in the joke. He'd smile at me so gently, kiss my hand, say, Ah, if it isn't my favorite shepherdess in the whole wide world. But never again would we find each other in a secluded corner, never again try our decades-belated rendezvous.