Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  I must have looked blank, because she spooled out what she knew, how Lulu was a painter, French, daughter of someone I didn’t catch; Ancel de Chair was, well, a playboy. Had a yacht, sailed it all over the world, child of a French baron and his Austrian wife (he has a title!). Impossibly wealthy. He spoke fifteen languages, she said (when I asked him later, he laughed, said, No, only about seven or so). Always had a pretty woman on his arm and never seemed to want to marry her. Played cards for money. Bet on horses. Did all sorts of naughty things, and his picture was always in the magazines.

  I looked at the man quietly forking up pasta at the table by the window. His companion sat back from her untouched meal, smoking, pouting. “He sounds like a made-up gentleman from a book,” I said.

  Our giddy companion tossed her head, affronted, and said, “That sort always does, but that’s how you know they’re real. Besides, see the diamond on his tie?”

  “How could you miss it? Nearly put my eye out,” sneered my husband. I’d already come to suspect that the poor man was a secret snob, someone who scorned Europe but checked us into the best hotel in Buenos Aires, who pretended he liked humble food, rice and beans, but couldn’t repress a greedy gleam when a plate of foie gras was set before him.

  “That diamond is his signature,” said our gossipy friend. “They say it belonged to his great-great-grandmother who was the mistress of some French king. And seeing it in person, well, I do believe it,” she said fervently.

  “I’m sure you do,” said my husband, and soon started a quarrel with the woman’s husband over an entertainment we were going to have that evening. We finished our meal and said good-bye coldly and for good and my husband and I went up to our room, the evening’s entertainment dropped, of course, to my annoyance.

  “That vulgar busybody,” fumed my husband, “is not a suitable influence on a girl like you.” Anyway, he said, he didn’t want to go out, he’d been thinking of this fun thing that we could do…. But I had had enough of our room and paced wildly until he gave up coaxing me and fell asleep, face wedged in a book. I was still dressed, and went out into the hall, intending to use my respectable married state to sit at the bar, have a glass of wine by myself, perhaps watch the people pass on the street out the window. I called the elevator up, tapping my toe, adjusting my suit so it didn’t look quite so homemade, refreshing my lipstick.

  There was a chime, the noise of the elevator whirring to a stop. The golden doors slowly slid open and my heart burst into a full gallop, for there, slouched in the corner, was Baron Ancel de Chair himself, with an unlit cigarette in his hand. He stood straight and his eyes twinkled gleefully at me when I stepped inside.

  “Well, hello,” he said, as the door clanged shut. “Why, aren’t you a lovely thing. Wait, don’t tell me. You’re Norwegian, wife of some diplomat, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said as the elevator lurched and we began our descent. “I’m from Wisconsin.”

  “Oh! Wisconsin,” he said. “Exquisite. What an accent, so charming, so rustic.”

  Slowly, slowly, the elevator crept down, past the third floor, the second, while Ancel de Chair smiled at me with a perfect mouthful of white teeth. Sliding toward the first floor, he pushed off the wall and loomed closer and closer until we were a mere hairbreadth apart. I held my breath. He dipped his head down, as if to kiss me—I’m sure I would have let him, he was so very handsome—but he only buried his nose in my neck and took a long sniff.

  Then he backed away, his eyes closed, and sighed delightedly. “That’s what I thought,” he murmured. The door opened. He gave me a bow and walked into the lobby. I stood, stunned, in the elevator until the doors closed again and it chugged upward once more.

  The next morning, I was dreaming of that odd, electric moment while I waited for my husband to finish getting ready for breakfast. To pass the time, I peered out the window at the park below and watched an old woman creep by with her shopping. She sat on a bench and put her groceries at her feet. Slowly, she brought her trembling hands to her face; a dark stain was creeping over her blue skirt. She’d lost control of her bladder. She was weeping in shame. I was so young, only eighteen, and I felt so much pity for the old lady I almost wanted to strike her. I looked away, thought again of Ancel de Chair in the elevator, and when I looked again at the old woman, she seemed ten times shabbier, twice as comical, with her big ears and a man’s boots on her feet. I called my husband over and pointed her out, because a joke seemed the only thing I could do to make her bearable, and we were still laughing when we stepped into the breakfast room, incandescent with light from the tall windows.

  It was early, and the tables were empty save one by the windows, where Ancel de Chair and his girl were sitting. He stood when he saw us, pulled out a chair, and beckoned us over. We found ourselves sitting beside them, chatting over our coffee.

  “I told Lulu here all about you,” said Ancel de Chair to me, smiling. “A fresh-cheeked American, I told her, pretty as a shepherdess. We’ve been calling you just that. La bergère, you know. Lulu has been eager to meet you.”

  Lulu’s eyes flicked over me and she muttered, “Bof, la berceuse.” Though my French was poor, even I knew that meant nursemaid from a painting I’d seen in an art history class. I blushed hot, and Ancel de Chair laughed until he saw that I understood. Then he said, “Oh, you must forgive her, this crazy girl’s an artist, she has no manners.”

  She gave a click of her tongue, and was about to launch into some hotheaded comment when a blue butterfly sailed in its wobbly flight through the window. I can still see it before me in that bright white room, how it seemed so breakable.

  “Look!” I said as it settled on the dip of a silver spoon, and the others turned to look. Three more butterflies fritillated in after the first.

  “It’s an infestation,” cried my husband, cringing. But Ancel de Chair leaped up and said, “My God, no, no, it’s a miracle.” He ran to the window and looked out, and said, “Hurry, hurry outside, everyone, we must get pictures of this.”

  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 returned 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 stree
t 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 sill
y 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.