Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Even as she was now — unbathed, unkempt, exhausted — Bern knew she had it, that same old something. She’d had her first great love affair at sixteen, was still notorious because of it. The man in question had been three times her age, the mayor of Philadelphia, but even so they blamed her, a child. The father of a schoolmate, he had given her a ride home from school one day in his chauffeured car, and that was that. Over the year she was involved with him, his wife grew skinny and sour, his daughter turned the entire school against Bern, and her lover took her to Montreal for a week while her parents were visiting family in Newport News. She was enraptured; she felt free. She took it as her due when her lover fed her vast meals and put her in bespoke lingerie and took her to burlesque shows and, the last night, to a dinner party given by the kinds of friends who would be amused by a sixteen-year-old mistress. In that gilt-and-velvet world of closed curtains and secrets circling like electricity, there was another girl there not much older than Bern, but uncertain and clumsy with her hands, her face in painted roses like a porcelain doll.

Bern had still been vibrating with her strange new joy when the butlers set the silver domes in front of them. The lights had dimmed, and the lids were whisked away. There, on the plates, Bern saw the tiniest bird carcasses imaginable, browned and glistening with butter. There was a collective gasp: L’ortolan, a woman murmured, her voice thick with longing.

A bunting, whispered her lover, bathing her ear in his wine-warmed breath. Caught, blinded, and fattened with millet, then drowned in Armagnac and roasted whole. A delicacy, he said, and smiled, and she had never noticed until then that his eyeteeth were yellowed and extraordinarily long.

With the gravity of a religious ceremony, her tablemates flicked out fresh white napkins and veiled their faces with them. To hide, someone said, from the eyes of God. The porcelain girl held hers like a mantilla for a moment before she dropped it over her face. Bern did not: she watched, holding her breath, as each person reached for his own small bird, and made it disappear behind the veil. For a long time, at least fifteen minutes, there were the wet sounds of chewing, small bones cracking, a lady’s voluptuous moan.

A stillness came into Bern as she observed this, a chill, as if she were watching from a very distant place. Later, she would read of what the others tasted just then: the savory fat, representing God, followed by the bitter entrails, which is the suffering of Jesus, followed by the bones, which lacerated their mouths so they tasted their own blood. All three tastes commingled became the Trinity. Bern, to whom Christianity was a gorgeous myth, like literature, saw then the barbarism at the heart of all the beauty.

The bird on her own plate cooled and congealed, and she didn’t even look at it when she wrapped it in her napkin and placed it gently in her evening bag. She watched as the others, radiant with badness or shamefaced and shaky, came from behind their napkins, wiped their lips. A tiny bone — a wishbone, a foot — stuck to the carmine lipstick of some opera singer. Bern saw thin wet streaks in the porcelain girl’s cheek powder, saw she was still holding something in her mouth, and Bern gazed hard at her until the other turned away, flushing for real under her paint.

That night Bern let the tiny carcass drop from the hotel balcony, setting it free, she thought, though it dropped like a lead weight to the ground for some prowling beast to eat. Like that, she who had been perhaps too amenable, too obedient — why else could she be seduced so easily? — felt herself harden. When she returned to Philadelphia, Bern never spoke to the man again, and the story formed the foundation of the first piece of fiction she ever wrote, in a hiatus between wars. After the magazine ran it, people in Paris and New York began to call her behind her back L’ortolan. Bern Orton; Bern Ortolan. It made a certain awful sense, Bern herself could admit.

Now, so close to Viktor’s peculiar scent, Bern felt something stirring in her again, and with her silent cool hands undid his belt. This is what she needed, a man coming alive in her arms, such comfort; and though she preferred Parnell — there was no complication in him, and he was gentle and sweet to Viktor’s large roughness — when Viktor put his hand on her waist and slid it under the band to hold her rear, she let him, eager. She loved this, and not because she ever had much pleasure from it; it was a gift, the men wanted it. Their gratitude made it good; the way that Bern was the white-hot center of another person’s world for those minutes or hours; the way for a moment it made them both forget everything but this other skin, forget the shattered souls drifting over the world, how it was cracking in half.

But Viktor put his two hands on hers and stopped them. She could see a glint in his dark eyes as he looked at her. He lifted her hands to his mouth, and kissed them both, on the palms and on the backs. Then he turned her about so that her back was facing him, and he held her gently around the chaste arc of her rib cage, his arm for her pillow, the deep beat of his heart a current, eventually drifting her off to sleep.

Frank was up earlier than everyone else because his blasted hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Hungry, too. The others useless logs in the hay, Bern cuddled with that mad Russky Viktor. In the back the donkey stinking in his own muck. The dark barn, the stench, the longing to leave made his skin crawl. When he went to the doors and peered out into the half-dark, he saw the refugees along the road. Pale as death, a huddle, waiting.

Frank remembered an assignment he took to Haiti long ago, when he was young, not the fat sad sack he was now. He remembered the stories, the fear in the people’s faces when they talked of the warlords who would steal souls and turn the emptied bodies into slaves. Those people out there moving in the dust and dawn seemed to have their very souls leached from them: war zombies. When they sensed someone awake in the cottage, they knocked, loudly; when nobody answered, two of them moved on. The last, a young man, waited for an hour until the sun rose fully, and then halfheartedly stole a chicken from the yard. The son with the bruised eye stepped from the roadside and cocked his rifle under the man’s chin. The man released the chicken and limped away.

Crazy, Frank muttered, what war makes people. Animals.

There was a rustle and he peered behind him, saw Bern sitting up with her lovely sleepy eyes, hay in her hair. Frank? she said uncertainly.

What I wouldn’t give, he said, for a fucking drink. His voice was shaking, he noticed. Bern stood, and Frank’s heart lifted as she moved toward him, but then the group in the hay began to stir and his mood darkened again. Always there were others around. Frank was no match for handsome Parnell, or Viktor, who sweated virility, or even Lucci, with his easy charm. He’d seen it, there was something going on there between Bern and the photographer. He might as well forget about it. Not that a cold bitch like Bern would be good for him, drive a cold dagger through his heart, more likely than not. There was something so phony about her.

They rose and stretched and tried to forage for food and watched the sunbeams slowly rake across the floor of the barn. Still no Nicolas, none of the sons, not even the weepy old hag, no food but the scent of some kind of ham wafting from the cottage. He couldn’t ignore Bern: just by existing she commanded attention. She needled him. There was that one time in Oslo, anyhow, when they were drunk on aquavit and everyone else had gone to bed. Frank normally resorted to whores, peroxide and bosom, but that night when the electricity shorted out, under the smoke of the cheap tallow candle there was something so dark and appealing about Bern that he put his hand on her and raised his eyebrow. She went still, and carefully raised hers back. Bern had tasted of alcohol and copper, and in the night, rumpled and sweating, he wept and confessed that for years he’d dreamed of killing himself. Usually a noose, he’d said. Sometimes a gun. Sometimes I step deliberately on a land mine.