Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

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 to 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.

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.