Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

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.

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.