Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

Sir Fleeting

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 suppose 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.”

It was an order: we hurried. The butterflies seethed over the streets, turned buildings into shuddering things, turned the most stoic of people into sleepwalkers, marveling at the delicate dreams at their feet. Ancel de Chair took hundreds of pictures. Lulu tried to set up her easel before birds fluttered down and picked off every simmering beast. We left her there, and my husband and Ancel de Chair and I walked around the city for hours until, with another gust of wind, the butterflies rose as one and vanished. On the ground wings lay broken, trampled, and in the trees sparrows sat puffed, eyes closed, sated almost to bursting.

When the last butterfly had gone and the streets had returned to their old, prosaic selves, I felt a deep grief, a loss of something I didn’t know I’d had. Ancel de Chair, too, turned to us, his eyes wet. He cleared his throat and mopped his forehead and said, Now, my friends, it is time for a small celebration. Though my husband protested, Ancel de Chair took us by the elbows and led us into a shiny café and made us drink whiskey. We were completely blotto by midafternoon. I remember once asking about Lulu, and his giving a European shrug and saying, “Oh, she’s a big girl, she can manage.” At some point, there was a dinner, a terrific sausage, and whole rivers of wine and waiters with perfect teeth leaning over me. My husband lay down in the middle of the dance floor so we loaded him into a cab, and he waggled his hand at us papal-wise, telling Ancel de Chair to take good care of his wifey, and the cab drove off and the baron and I were left alone. I knew my husband, knew he had always congratulated himself for seeing the allure of a farm girl he thought other men would overlook. In his mind, I was in no danger of sparking an international playboy’s lust when compared to whittled, elegant Lulu.

But when we were alone together Ancel de Chair leaned close to me and whispered things in my ear that made me gasp and turn pink and very warm. He kissed each of my fingers, one after another; he sent a trail of kisses up my plump upper arm and nestled his lips in my collarbone. Later, on a street lit by gas lamps, a tiny, wizened old man took hold of me, humming a tango into my bosoms, which was as high as his head reached. I was crying with laughter and unable to dance; he, obstinately, kept trying to make me follow his feet. From a dark doorway where he was smoking, Ancel de Chair’s eyes gleamed, watching me.

My husband and I awoke at noon the next day, shattered. We could barely call for food, and moaned in bed until it came. When at last the cart was rolled into the room, in addition to the eggs and the coffee and the toast, there was a tiny, perfect bouquet of tea roses. I peered at the card until I understood what it said, and my husband took it from my hand. He read it out loud: “My dear bergère, Lulu has insisted on a hasty departure and we are off again. So sorry we couldn’t say good-bye in person. I feel certain, though, we will meet again, and I will insist on my tango then. Yours, Ancel.”

My husband flipped the card to see if there was anything written for him, then he read the note again. “Tango? Yours, Ancel?” he said darkly. Jealousy twisted his mouth and he looked ugly to me for the first time. Lord knows, it was not the last.

“Listen,” he said, “last night did you do anything—”

“No,” I said, impatiently. “Of course not.” I said this, although I had a brief flash of a slow and salty kiss at the door, a hand on my breast. I turned to my new husband and laughed at him and said, “Why would I ever do anything with that old continental fop when I have you right here?” And, “What, you think I’m so irresistible an international playboy couldn’t keep his hands off me?” I knew that he didn’t. That bleak morning I understood that it would be the essential rift in our marriage, my husband’s belief that he had married down. I cajoled and teased until he smiled and we soon forgot about the eggs turning to rubber on the plate.

Life went on, less magical every year. Ancel de Chair would certainly have devolved into a story I told at dinner parties had I not, shortly after my first divorce, seen him again. I was still young and so recklessly poor that I was fashionably skinny for the first time in my life. I had a part-time position as a secretary in a medical office, and my husband had refused alimony, damn his cheap heart. His new girlfriend, you see, had three children and he was straining to make ends meet already, what with the Party’s poor excuse of a paycheck, he told me, and like a stupid soft-hearted sot, I bought it. That was the last I heard of him. I lived in a converted closet in Chinatown and had a hot plate on which I made my food, and accepted every date I could get in order to eat on someone else’s dime. Cockroaches rained to the floor like bullets when I turned on the lights; I woke up one night to find a man, who had crawled in through the window, watching me sleep.

“I’m giving you ten seconds to leave,” I said in a very slow voice, and started to count. He was outside by four.

Yet that was, in general, a glorious time. We girls from the office would mix malt liquor with gin and powdered punch, pour it into martini glasses that someone had bought at the Salvation Army, and get crocked, and we’d swear it was better than being at the nightclubs downtown. When we had the money, we’d go to a fancy restaurant and order only coffee and pie, and sit for hours living the high life, until we’d picked up enough men or had been politely asked to leave by the maître d’.

In one of those restaurants, I saw Ancel de Chair. I was draped on the couch, laughing, when I felt a hand over my eyes and heard his voice crooning in my ear, “Well, bonjour, ma bergère, I hardly recognized you.” I leaped up in delight; he looked as suave as ever, catlike in the dim restaurant. He suggested going somewhere else for a drink; in three heartbeats, I left my flabbergasted girlfriends behind. He was in town, he told me as we walked, for only a few weeks, on business, something to do with a foundation he was on the board of; he waved his hand. I told him about the divorce and he nodded, gravely, and said, “That nasty flea was never worth your pinky toe, my darling.” Hot tears of gratitude rose in my eyes.

We had one drink in his hotel’s bar, and he told me of his life, his new wife and their baby girl, how she was born with meningitis, but was fine now, a sweet girl, his joy. All this, looking at me, making an offer. I took a sip and considered his lovely face, smiling — offer accepted. We went up to his room in the hotel. It was gilded, full of things that glistened and chimed, a palace compared to my cramped closet. He took off his shoes, I took off my boots. I undid the yellow diamond from his tie and put it on the dresser. He undid his cufflinks and rolled them under his hand, then slowly took off his tie, watching me.

When I unbuttoned my dress from knee to neck, however, he stopped me. He drew the sides of my dress to both sides like a curtain, and looked for a long time at my body. I had lost some of my formerly vast embonpoint, but was still nicely endowed and used to men reaching and grabbing at this point in the unveiling. But Ancel de Chair wasn’t looking at my chest. He sat at the edge of the bed and pulled me close, and looked up at my face briefly.

“Oh,” he murmured. “I can see your poor ribs.” And then, one by one he kissed them, gently, from bottom to top, and began again on the other side. I closed my eyes to feel his mouth, warm and delicate on my skin, and remembered those butterflies of Buenos Aires, how they opened and closed their brilliant wings.

But something heavy fell against the door to the corridor. We stopped and looked at it, startled. The knob jiggled; there were the shadows of feet in the crack beneath. An unearthly cracked voice, a woman’s, said, “I know you’re in there, Ancel, I know you’re in there, you’re in there, let me in.” There was a sliding sound; the woman must have let herself fall against the door to the ground. I imagined her a beautiful young thing, drunk, her lipstick smeared. “Ancel?” she said. “Please? Oh, please?”

I stepped back, and Ancel de Chair gave me a rueful smile. I sat beside him on the bed and took his hand. For a while, we listened to the woman crying out in the hall, his fingers warm and dry in mine, until he sighed and gave my hand a kiss, and whispered, “There will always be next time, ma bergère.” I whispered, “Of course, of course.” I couldn’t look at him as I buttoned up my dress, gathered my things. He put himself back together crisply, and I pinned the yellow diamond back in his tie. He kissed my eyelids, once, twice, then spoke softly through the door for a minute until the girl leaning against it moved. He went out, and she spoke. Their voices moved off down the long corridor.

I waited for a few minutes in a faux Louis XIV chair, under the stern glare of some dead white man in oil. As I left, before I stepped out again into the too-bright day, I saw the backs of Ancel de Chair and the woman at the bar, hers nearly boneless as she leaned against him, his sleek as a seal’s. Beyond the ache of my body, my stomach also ached: I had counted on room service, some hamburger bloody with juices, some sundae topped with cream so rich it would make me want to weep.

Even had he not sent the extravagant chocolates to the medical office later that week, I would have been pleased to see him the next time I did, three or so years later, at a dinner party given by the sister of my second husband. It was a quiet bash in honor of our marriage a week earlier, my sister-in-law wanting to introduce us to the highfliers of her set: Ancel de Chair was on one of her boards. The first time I’d met my sweet and quiet second husband I had liked him very much, even though I had been fishing for a rich hubby and he was at that time only a low man on the public television totem pole. When he asked within two months of dating if I wanted to marry him, I said, somewhat to my surprise, “Oh. Well, of course, why not.” At our party that evening, I saw my stock rising astronomically in my sister-in-law’s eyes because of my friendship with Ancel de Chair, because of his affection. He led me alone to the corner of the room for an entire hour, and held my hand, as if in warm remembrance, though my poor sister-in-law would have had an aneurysm if she’d known what he was saying. A few months earlier I had begun to jog — it was the late sixties; I was long before my time — and he commented on how light and strong my body was, and told me the things he wanted to do to it. He made me laugh like a silly girl of eighteen again. I gave him our telephone number; he memorized it and said he would call me the very next day. We left with a great embrace and showy words about how we would meet again soon, and my face still felt hot in the car on the ride home.

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.

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.