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.