Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  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.

  Still, he drove me wild, that man. As my girlfriends and I sat and chatted over drinks, I reinvented him as a different lover, my imaginary first, an Argentine with a suave smile who led me in a tango on a cobbled street long ago. I described him as he’d been, with the sleek black hair, the thin nose, the face with those ironic lights dancing under it, the sudden, ready tears in his eyes. I described his body as I imagined it, white and carved like ivory. I told those stories again and again until I almost believed them, and every time the aging face of Ancel de Chair showed up again at another event, I saw the man I’d invented superimposed atop the man he actually was. It was a mixture so heady that in the seconds between when we’d spotted each other and when, having sailed across the room, we kissed, I was overwhelmed by nostalgia, deep and heavy as a flood.

  He was the only person I had ever met who was always so elegant, so right. When my husband died ten years ago, we received such a mass of flowers that my son spread them out on other graves in the cemetery. Among the heaps of lilies and roses, there came to the house a miniature bouquet of tea roses in an antique silver vase with no note, the echo of its mate so long ago in Buenos Aires. I put it by my bed. It was a great comfort to see when I opened my eyes in the morning.

  In the past six years or so, though, I haven’t once seen the man: at this age, it is not unusual to have dear friends one hardly ever sees. I had heard he’d retired to a place in the British Virgin Islands, was living a quieter life, blessed with sand and sea. Still, it was odd that only a very few days after I had shown my granddaughter the photograph in Buenos Aires, Ancel de Chair called me on the telephone. “My darling bergère,” he said, “it has been far too long. I am in town this week and would simply love to meet you, if you have a free moment.” Of course I said that I would be delighted. But I didn’t want him to think that I wasn’t as busy as he, and so I suggested a time one week later. Out of vanity, or pride, I don’t know, I invited him to the apartment. I’m not sure what I expected, only that I am still fine-looking, that I have money now, the right apartment, wonderful pictures on the walls that my last husband collected so carefully. I am, at last, comme il faut, and maybe I only wanted him to know that. Maybe I wanted something more. I’m not sure.

  In any case, the morning of the visit, just yesterday, I worked hard to gather the right cakes and tea, and Rosa flew about, trying to rub the surfaces spotless. I felt foolish, young again. I hadn’t been so nervous about a man visiting since the day I sat in the women’s dorm in Madison, shivering with excitement, my hair in curlers, waiting for the time when I would walk downstairs for my inaugural date with my first husband.

  At last, the intercom murmured, the elevator whirred open, and my old friend stepped into the apartment. I had always remembered him tall, and had worn heels for the occasion, but he seemed shrunken, and when he kissed my cheek with his dry lips, he had to crane upward. His eyes were sunbursts of wrinkles, his hair, once so sleek and so black, had thinned and whitened and was combed over his bald spots. But when Rosa took his overcoat and scarf, his suit was as beautifully tailored as ever, and he wore the old, enormous yellow diamond tiepin. His canny eyes had seen my first distress, and he laughed.

  “Old age humbles even the great, my dear,” he said. He stepped back, holding my arms, and said, “Well, not you, don’t you look lovely. You look half your age.”

  “You old charmer,” I said and felt myself warming, and led him into the sitting room, where he sat and admired the view, the wind in the bare winter branches, the flurries of snow kicked up from the treetops. He took a neat bite of his cake, and spoke of various things, the biography someone was writing of his life, an interview on public radio, how he’d invested rather stupidly in a business run by his son, only to see the company disintegrate as if composed of ashes. “Oh, well,” he’d sighed, “isn’t that life,” and I agreed that it was, and talked of the boards I sat on, my granddaughter’s wedding coming up, my third husband’s death ten years earlier and how lonely it sometimes was in the great apartment all by myself.

  Like this, we chatted amiably for an hour or so, until Rosa took the teapot away to refresh it. Then, when the kitchen door swung shut and we were alone, he leaned toward me with a curious smile. “As I am sure you have already suspected, this is not, unfortunately, only a social visit, my dear. I came to you,” he said, “because we are very old friends, and I know you’re a woman of tremendous delicacy.”

  “Oh,” I said, putting my teacup down, very carefully. I studied the park, a crow bobbing on a branch, and looked back at him. “Please,” I said. “Go on.”

  He sighed, ran his elegant hand down the length of his thigh. His voice purred on, telling me that, as I suspected, he was in straitened circumstances, a life lived rather too well, poor investments, et cetera. He had heard, from who knows where, that my granddaughter was getting married. He thought that perhaps I might want to offer the child a gift that would outshine any other gift. An only grandchild, the apple of my eye, deserves something invaluable. Something she could fall back on in a time of need, God forbid she’d ever have one. But, and he shrugged, one never knows, does one?

  He lifted my hand from my knee, and placed very gently into it the large yellow tiepin that he’d detached during his speech. He said, “Maybe have it reset into a necklace. My great-great-grandmother, Henriette Ancel de Chair, wore it in a necklace,” he said. “A lovely choker at her throat.” He pressed my hand closed and nodded.

  I stood and walked to the window, my back to him. I held the diamond before me, and it glowed, a living creature in the dim winter light, the brightest thing in the city. I had tears in my eyes like a foolish girl. Of the millions of things I had to offer now, it was a wound to find he’d ask for this. My throat hurt, and when I could speak, the words came out in a rasp. “How much?” I said.

  He quoted a number. I looked at the diamond, blinking. A price like that was more than double what the diamond was worth: a price like that, it was plain, and he was asking me to give not one, but two gifts. He counted on my having learned enough subtlety in this life to know he was asking for charity and to understand that he had too much refinement to call it what it was. For a moment, I felt lost, a bumpkin again, stuck in a tight space with a dizzying ladies’ man a hair away. I considered owning this thing, his pride. I thought of reducing those many years to a transaction, one scribbled check. I thought of my kind last husband, of how hard he’d worked for his money, and with that thought, I grew a bit heated. Ancel de Chair was asking for repayment for what: graciousness to a country yokel back when he hadn’t had to be gracious to me? Flirtation? Friendship? I never knew I’d have t
o pay for that.

  My head was beginning to pound. I was not yet old, and I hoped my life was still long before me. I was not yet old and had given already to so many charities.

  I turned around, holding the tiepin like a buttercup, and pinned it gently back into his tie. “I’m sorry,” I said, softly. “I have already bought my granddaughter an entire set of china.”

  Ancel de Chair brushed crumbs off his trousers and stood, a small smile playing on his lips. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I understand. One must think practically, and I shouldn’t expect frivolity from you, my dear Iowa shepherdess.”

  “Wisconsin,” I said. “Actually.”

  “Well,” he said, “well. I’m flying to London tomorrow, and have a great deal to pack. Thank you ever so much for the tea. Very tasty, indeed.”

  He moved toward the door and took his overcoat from the closet. “Wait,” I said, “just a moment. Wait,” I said, but he was flushed now, and tucking his scarf around his throat.

  “Oh, darling, don’t worry about me, it is quite all right. I really must go.” He leaned toward me to kiss me on both cheeks, but came close to my ear, and said a curious thing.

  “By the by,” he said, “your milk has gone sour. I thought you should know.”

  He entered the elevator and threw me a kiss as the doors closed. I stood, burning with shame, then hurried back to the tea things. I lifted the cream pot to my nose and sniffed it, took a small swallow from a spoon. It tasted fine to me. “Rosa,” I called, and she came hurrying out with the teapot in her hand, confused that my guest had left so quickly. I made her take a taste as well, but Rosa also thought the cream was fine, and we shrugged at each other, and I retired to my room to let my headache hatch into the beast it would become.

  It was only late last night when I awoke again to the night-glimmering apartment that I understood, at last, what my old friend had meant. That night in the elevator in Buenos Aires, the sniff of my neck, what he had smelled so many years ago. Milk. I lay awake all night, burning. My granddaughter came by this morning and took one look at my face and was gentle with me. Later, my son called and invited me to go with him and his wife to Tortola in a few weeks, and it’s very possible that I will accept. I should like sun and beach and daiquiris, and a sky with some blue in it, some freedom from the inevitable winter.

  Still, at moments since the odd last encounter with Ancel de Chair, I have found myself watching the bare trees move on my glistening walls, thinking of Buenos Aires. Many times in my life I longed to return to that city, and though I could have gone a dozen times, a hundred, for some reason I never did. I probably never will. I find myself wondering now, in the shining, expensive desert of my apartment during this endless winter, if that city I loved so dearly could have stayed the same, after all this time. If the tiny old woman still sits in the park on her bench, silently weeping into her hands. If that old man still presses his wizened cheek to the bosoms of plump brides, humming tangos in the gaslit streets. If the jungle-smelling wind carries great flights of butterflies into the streets. If, in the restaurants, the waiters are still elegant and the steaks still glisten thick as tongues; if there are those great rivers, those oceans of wine to dizzy us, to wash our bodies sweet again.

  Fugue

  THE WOMAN DOESN’T KNOW HOW LONG SHE’S been here, or where she was before. It doesn’t matter: all that does is this hotel window with its sulfurous draft and the quiet street beyond. The trees scrape forklike against the sky, the mud is matte on the ground. This village rests in a hollow so deep the sun cannot reach into it. Up the street the abandoned hotels hunch in perpetual dim, awaiting the end of winter.

  The only variation is the girl who makes the bed, cleans the bathroom, carries up meals. A strange one, all safety pins and pink hair, a new type, a punk. But gentle: the girl sometimes brings with her small gifts, evidence of the world’s quickening. A crocus bulb with a tender flag unfurling. An abandoned nest with a speckled green egg. When the woman holds those tiny things, she feels something rising in her that she is careful to chase away before it can catch and seize her.

  This morning, the girl cleans, then stands beside the woman until she grabs one of her hands in its constant flight. Ma’am? she says. You a musician or something? Because your hands. They always look like they’re playing music.

  In the girl’s bitten fingers, the woman’s hand is elegant, the type that probably played music well. I believe so, the woman says; she doesn’t know for sure. The girl nods and leaves, her footsteps echoing in the empty hotel.

  Alone now, the woman recalls her own body. The filthy skirt, the cashmere sweater, the mud-caked calves. Unpleasant: she has begun to stink. She goes into the bathroom, dropping her clothes on the way. Under the hot hiss of the shower she notices what has been burning all along: the long, swollen cut in her thigh, the blood black at its edges. The water turns pink. The wound is deep.

  Only when it is stanched with great handfuls of toilet paper can the woman sit again at the window, look out into the town, listen to the roar of the wind corkscrewing down into the hollow. Only then can she recapture all that stillness, all that peace.

  I BELIEVE, BETTINA SAYS as she cuts the gizzard from the turkey, that she’s a ghost. A sad old ghost, yearning to go home.

  Jason cracks pecans and winks at Jaime behind Bettina’s back; he seems to believe that Jaime and he are in some confederacy against his wife. Jason is handsome in a military, washed-out way, with features that blur into one another and buzzed, rust-colored hair. His fingers are long and delicate and can craft woodwork that seems a marvel of sensitivity, but he tells the raunchiest jokes Jaime has ever heard. He keeps her off balance.

  Bettina turns toward them, her violet eyes, overstuffed lips, a beauty mark in a sickle shape across her cheek. She reminds Jaime of an iced cake, all fondant and sugar pansies. She is plump and British, too refined for this dark place, the falling-apart hotel in its sulfur-stinking valley. Jaime, she says, what do you think about our guest?

  Bettina has only begun asking Jaime her opinions, though Jaime has been with them for almost nine months. Jaime’s family had come to Sharon Springs every year since her own grandparents were children, her Orthodox Jewish kin climbing the hill from the springs, their dark clothes damp. Bettina and Jason aren’t Jewish, but are fixing up the village’s grandest hotel, and Jaime’s mother loves them for it. One morning last summer, over blueberry pie, Jaime’s mother had confided to Bettina that her sweet girl had turned sullen, strange. Dressed in rags, wore makeup, refused her religion. Only the day before she came home in a police cruiser; she’d tried to buy cocaine from a boy at the Stewart’s up the hill.

  We don’t know what we did, Jaime’s mother had wept in Bettina’s kitchen, her wig sliding slowly over one ear. How could a good girl become bad so fast? How could our little Jamina become so different? It is our fault, her father’s and mine. We gave her too much, now she wants none of it. The eighties! Jaime’s mother said savagely. Nowadays people think they can do whatever they want.

  Bettina patted her lips and said, Why don’t you leave her with us for the winter? What trouble will she get into in Sharon Springs? Give her a few months with us in this old barn in the wintertime, nothing to do. She’ll run back to you.

  That was that: at the end of the summer Jaime’s parents drove off, and Jaime stood staring at their exhaust. All fall and winter Jaime has been at this closed-up hotel. School had been her choice—she was sixteen—and she’d said, No thanks, thinking of the cloddish boys and passive-aggressive farm girls she’d find there. Without school her days stretched long. She learned to cook, to love the town in winter, empty of people. She’d go for long hikes in the mountains, wander in the huge, abandoned hotels, finding the postcards in odd corners, the cellulose dolls left by forgotten children.

  The night the woman showed up, Bettina and Jason and Jaime had been in the parlor watching the show they all liked with the wily Texas rich folk: the main character, a
raven-haired beauty, had begun to act strangely, an evil new glint in her eye. Then came a knock on the hotel’s dark window, and there was the woman, bedraggled in the rain, like a zombie from a horror film. She’d insisted on a room though the hotel was officially closed until May. She signed her name in an indecipherable scrawl, something like Danielle or Diane or Donna, then closed her door and has not emerged since.

  Jaime wants to tell Bettina and Jason about this morning, when she’d plucked one of the woman’s hands from its graceful scrabble in the air, and felt her flesh, and knew she was real. But she only says, blushing, I just think she’s a really sad person. She told me she plays music.

  Bettina massages butter and herbs under the turkey’s skin, her imagination afire. She speaks of a cellist she once knew who had been in a coma, who had dreamed of her soul wandering, desperate to find its body again. Jaime has stopped listening. Jason is watching her, his face impassive. He puts down the nutcracker. Jaime flushes. Bettina natters, back turned. A quiet lunge, and Jason pins Jaime’s hand on the cutting board, slides his own up her holey tee-shirt, cups her breast, squeezes it.

  It is over: Jason is back to cracking nuts, and there is only the ghost-warmth of his hand on her chest. Bettina is still singing her little tale, tucking the turkey fat over the herbed flesh as if it were a coverlet. Jaime picks up a celery stalk and dices it.