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.”