Delicate Edible Birds (18 page)

He told the story again from the beginning: the scaly wreck, the chasm, the strange fishes. He broke off where he had before, where you and I had once thought he'd paused to build tension. Watching his buddy fall and be slowly swallowed by the dark chasm, teetering between his own life and the chance of saving another's. Now, under the strange slow hush of Bach and conversation, the diver blinked and blinked and shifted the glass in his hand.

Instead of telling me about his decision, though, the quick flipping down into the dark maw, the laughter, catch
ing his buddy, he said, Listen. I have to say it. I didn't go after him.

What? I said. I heard him through the gray felt I'd thickened around myself since the phone call, the hospital.

I watched him go, he said.

What? I said, again.

By the time I saw him, he said, he was too far gone. I had to let him go.

I pulled away, my fists clenched. But your crazy laughter, I said.

He looked at me, the very whites of his eyes wine-stained.

But the love, I said.

That was all true, he said. Only after I couldn't see him anymore. When I was just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone.

I stared at the diver, his purple face. He was trying to tell me something, but it was too raw. A story can also be cruel. And when I remember this scene, I remember it static, my hand in mid-slap, hovering near his left ear. On his face a curious look, almost voluptuous, his cheek tilted up as if to accept the blow, eyes closed and lips nearly bent in a smile.

 

IN JULY, THE SUN
at last came out, dried the mud, sopped the wet from the air. The bodies of water abated, and the greens were so green they filled all of us with wonder. So many different shades lived in the world that summer. For some moments, in some especially strong lights, I felt the
generosity of such green as a salve, drawing the sick grief from me.

But even in those deepest greens, hiking in the hills (the maples, the ferns, the pines, the scuttling toads), I caught a memory. When my heart at last righted itself, it beat, but furiously.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, it said into the lovely day.

Long ago, before I found you a second time, when I must have been in college, I was home, driving on East Lake Road. It was a cold day but the lake hadn't yet melted and large pieces of mist flaked off the lake in pastry layers. I was listening to public radio. On one of the shows, a narrator, his voice soft but emotionless, was telling a story about Niagara Falls. There was a sound effect of roaring water—harsh, impersonal—behind his words, a strange contrast to his hush.

In one very poor town near the Falls, he said, there lived an old couple. She was dying of an old-age disease, and her husband was taking care of her. I pictured an orange afghan, a half-drunk cup of tea, a room with olive paint so peeled it was as if the walls were shrugging out of their skins. I pictured a bent old man in suspenders, hovering over a tiny woman, all bones.

The narrator continued, saying that one morning, after the woman had had a very bad night, the couple's son stopped by on the way to a night shift. He found an empty house, no parents, everything tidy. He grew alarmed and drove to all of their places: the diner, the theater, the library, the hospital. They weren't anywhere. He didn't know where else to drive,
and at last, to pull himself together, he drove to the Falls. It was almost dawn now; there was a pink cast at the edge of the sky. When the son climbed from the car and went to the fence at the edge of the Falls, he found two pairs of shoes polished to a brilliant shine. The tiny black shoes of his mother, the cordovans of his father, pointing, eloquently, toward the water.

The old man had taken his wife in his arms, hot, sick; he had stood there in the dark predawn with her in his arms. He looked into her old face. Then he jumped.

I had to pull my car over because of this story, because of those lonely four shoes at the annealing edge of the Falls, right where the water hesitates and seems to catch its breath before shattering downward. And, later, during that long winter when you made me come home, I thought vaguely of this story, again and again. Not because I wanted to die, of course. But because I thought I had found exactly that, someone to take me to old age, someone who could take me beyond, if it were necessary and right to do so.

There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.

THE WINTER IS INESCAPABLE HERE. HALF OF
my walls are glass, opening to a Central Park vista of naked trees with branches like grasping fingers, and down in the courtyard, even those floozies, the cherry trees, have turned spinsterish in the cold. In my modern apartment their bare limbs are doubled upon the shining walls, the stainless-steel kitchen, the mirrors. What doesn't reflect trees reflects my face, which is not always a welcome variation. Last week, for instance, after my granddaughter visited, full of plans for her wedding and honeymoon in Argentina, I showed her a picture from my own trip so many years ago and upset her; after she left I stood for a long time palpating my cheeks, watching the woman etched in the steel elevator doors do the same.

I don't know why I said what I did. I suppose I was piqued when she held the old photo by its edges, and said, “Oh God, Nana, you were so beautiful.”

I took the picture from her. That eighteen-year-old idiot, squinting in the Argentine sun? A pretty face, yes, a girl with a clever hand at dressing well with no money. But fat. A Wisconsin farm girl raised on apples and whole milk, a body carved out of a slick ton of butter like those statues at the state fair.

“Darling,” I said, “I was a ball of lard.” My granddaughter, bless her heart—she's nothing close to the pudge I was—actually hissed at me. “No,” she said loudly. “You were beautiful,” and she stood to go, and I couldn't press the check into her hand before she left.

Afterward, I watched that lady reflected in the elevator door and I didn't like her much. Whatever it was I'd had in that picture had seeped away over the years, a rubber tire with a long, slow leak. In the days that followed, I tried to push that image in the elevator door out of my head and go about my life—the yoga, the hairdresser, the charity luncheons. The photo stayed where it was, facedown on the glass table, for days, until it woke me up in the middle of the night and insisted that I look at it again.

I walked through my dark apartment and flipped the photo over to see it in the moonlight. There she was again, that bride, beside her new husband, leaning on the hotel's Corinthian columns. Buenos Aires, 1956. I could feel the warm sun on my face, my first husband's hand in my own. It was spring in Argentina, and the city was full of flowers, great washes of buds bursting open, red hibiscus on our balcony, roses and bougainvillea in the parks. The day of the
photo, a fluke of wind from some distant jungle had carried a gigantic cloud of iridescent blue butterflies into the city, and we had run outside to see them. The city seemed to pulsate under the beat of those many wings. In the black-and-white picture the butterflies are blurry streaks behind us, though one creature has settled on my husband's breast pocket like a boutonniere. He is scowling in the sun and I am grinning, not at the butterflies or even my new groom, but, rather, at the man holding the camera.

Once in a while, I like to say the name aloud:
Ancel de Chair.
That name alone seems to bring warmth to this wintry city. We overlapped for only a short time in Argentina when we first met, but a sort of static cling brought us together again and again throughout our lives. My husband and I had already been in Buenos Aires for two weeks by then, though I don't believe we did much during those weeks save eat enormous, glistening steaks and run back upstairs to bed again where we had discovered, to our virginal disbelief, our own bodies. Before marriage we had fallen into an itchy sort of lust, and, good children, we had waited until we were married to scratch it. On our honeymoon, sex was still strange to me: the awkward fittings of parts to parts, my poor husband sobbing after his every achievement, me wide-eyed and wondering if there wasn't something I might have missed in those few frenzied minutes. I'd found my most voluptuous tenderness in stroking my husband's furry ears, and hoped there was more to learn in what I thought would be our eternity together.

How sophisticated we'd thought ourselves then, we innocents. I'd had a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, a farm girl with six sisters, a talent for sewing, and a sharp brain for math, and had spent my freshman year lonely, refusing dates, taking the train home on weekends to help with the chores. When I met my first husband in a social theory course and heard how well the man could argue, I was like a match sparked alight. I used to long to lick his face in the middle of class.

Poor man; I believe he is still alive somewhere like Scottsdale or Santa Fe, an old immigration lawyer turned fat and wheezy. But when I met him he was a child from a New York family that I, with my scant knowledge of wealth back then, thought inordinately rich. He had a cashmere coat and smoked pipe tobacco constantly, something my father was able to treat himself to only once a week, at most. My husband had blazing eyes, an attractive nervous energy, and a passion for justice that transmuted, over time, into a Communist zeal that eventually broke up our little union. When my first husband told me his family drank wine at meals, argued about books, and had a strongly Socialist bent, it took my breath away, daughter as I was of a farm wife with chicken blood on her hands and a stony Libertarian with one penny in his pocket that longed for a mate to jingle with.

When my husband and I came to New York after we were married so that I could meet his family, his mother (tweedy, with the face of an Afghan hound) took one look and broke down sobbing on her husband's shoulder. I sup
pose it was swell to embrace the masses in theory, but she never thought the masses would be quite so blond and blowsy in practice.

Off we flew to Buenos Aires, my husband in a rage about how his parents had treated me. By the day the butterflies landed in the city, I had become slightly bored by his wiry body, and by our tall white room and its balcony. A sign on the door told me the same joke every day; the English translation of a notice to the guests, in which the greeting, “
Señor Pasajero
”—Dear Guest—had been somehow torturously translated to “Sir Fleeting.” The first day my husband and I had laughed until we cried about it, called each other Sir and Dame Fleeting, but soon the joke had gotten old. Soon we avoided it as if it were a faux pas we ourselves had made, some stink in the room with an unknown provenance.

So I was restless on the night we first saw Ancel de Chair, made more restless by our dinner company, another newlywed couple we'd been palling around with since we arrived. It was a lukewarm friendship, sparked by proximity and youth rather than true alignment; the man had the personality of a sheet of waxed paper, and the woman was a small, brown field mouse from some excellent English family who read the gossip magazines and relayed everything to us whether we cared to listen or not. We were chatting about Rio de Janeiro, where we were going after Buenos Aires, when the door opened and in walked a couple so striking that our conversation stopped. The woman was a blade, all bones and angles, black hair cut severely to her chin, French by the
quiet words I overheard. He, on the other hand, was the distillation of the heroes in the books I loved, a smiling, dapper Mr. Rochester, Rodolphe Boulanger, Sir Percy Blakeney. He had a handsome face with a fine, thin nose, wide-set green eyes, hair as black and shining as a puma's fur, which I'd later find was slicked back with some sweet-smelling oil. The enormous yellow diamond on his tiepin caught the candlelight and winked merrily at us.

They sat at a table by the window, and our table's conversation began again. My gossipy friend gave a chirrup and leaned toward me.

“I can't believe it, I can't believe it,” she whispered, her face animated as I'd never seen it. “Those people,” she said, “are Ancel de Chair and Lulu Fauré.”

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.”