“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.