Delicate Edible Birds (6 page)

L. is so offended he drops Aliette unceremoniously into the water. She swims, though, and reaches the wall in three strong strokes, her legs dragging behind her.

She says, grinning, “You didn't know I was a nixie, did you?”

“No,” he says, darkly. “I am amazed. And for your information, I am
not
a—”

“L.,” says Aliette, sighing. “I know. But you
are
a fool.” Then, very deliberately, she says, “The nances of the world have many uses, my dear coach.”

When he says nothing, trying to understand, she droops. “I'm tired,” she says. “This lesson is over.” She calls for Rosalind and will not look at L. as the nurse wheels her away.

Only later does he realize she has read his book. He cannot look at her that evening, he is so flattered and fearful of her opinion.

 

SUNDAY, HIS DAY OFF,
L. goes to Little Italy for supper with his family. His mother holds him to her wren's chest; his
father touches his new linen suit with admiration. In Rome, Amadeo was a tailor; here he is a hearse driver. He mutters, “Beautiful, beautiful,” and nods at his son, fingering the lapels, checking the seams. L.'s older sister is blind and cannot remark upon the visible change in him.

But in the trolley home, his stomach filled with saltimbocca, L. thinks of his sister when she touched his face in farewell. “You have met a girl,” she whispered. Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions—how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.

 

IN LATE APRIL, THE NEWSPAPERS
are full of news of a strange illness. The journalists try to blunt their alarm by exoticizing it, naming it Spanish influenza,
La Grippe
. In Switzerland, it is called
La Coquette
, as if it were a courtesan. In Ceylon it's the Bombay Fever, and in Britain the Flanders Grippe. The Germans, whom the Allies blame for this disease, call it
Blitz-katarrh
. The disease is as deadly as that name sounds.

Americans do not pay attention. They watch Charlie Chaplin and laugh until they cry. They read the sports pages and make bets on when the war will be over. And if a few healthy soldiers suddenly fall ill and die, the Americans blame it on exposure to tear gas.

 

L. HAS GONE TOMCATTING
with his writer friends only twice by the time spring rolls into summer. The second time,
he has had only one martini when he pushes a very familiar redhead from his lap so roughly that she hits her head on the table and bursts into tears. C. T. Dane comforts her. When Dane is leaving, indignant redhead on his arm, he raises an eyebrow and frowns at the steadily drinking L.

From that night on, his friends talk about him. “What's eating old fishface L.?” Tad Perkins will ask anyone who will listen.

Finally, someone says, “He's writing a novel. It's like having a mistress. Once he's through with her, leaves her on the floor, weeping for more, he'll be back.”

The friends laugh at this. They raise their glasses. “To the mistress,” they cry.

 

ALIETTE'S CHEEKS GROW PLUMP
and her legs regain many of their muscles. By May, L. is being driven crazy by the touches, leg sliding against leg, arm to knee, foot silky across his shoulder. He immerses himself in a cold-water tub, like a racehorse, before coming out to greet her.

Their flirtation slips. Dawn is pinkening in the clerestory window, and L. is lifting Aliette's arm above the water to show her the angle of the most efficient stroke, when his torso brushes against hers, and stays. He looks at dozing Rosalind. Then he lifts Aliette from the water and carries her to the men's room.

As she stands, leaning against the smooth tile wall and shivering slightly, he slides her suit from her shoulders and
pulls it down. To anyone else, she would be a skinny, slightly feral-looking little girl, but he sees the heart-shaped lips, the pulse thrumming in her neck, the way she bares her body bravely, arms down, palms turned out, watching him. He bends to kiss her. She smells of chlorine, lilacs, warm milk. He lifts her and leans her against the wall.

When they reemerge, Rosalind still sleeps, and the pool is pure, glossy, as if nobody has ever set foot in it.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues, and poems fill the world?

Now, when they don't touch, they share the splash and the churn, the rhythm of the stroke, the gulps of water in the gutter, the powerful shock of the dive, and a wake like smoke, trailing them.

 

ALIETTE LEAVES HER WHEELCHAIR
in the foyer and begins to walk, even though the pain seems unbearable when she is tired. She loves the food she loathed before, for the flesh it gives her. She eats marbled steaks, half-inch layers of butter on her bread. She walks to the stores on Madison, leaning against a wall when she needs to, and returns, victorious, with bags. On one of her outings, she meets her father coming home for lunch. As she calls to him, and runs clumsily the last five steps, his eyes fill. His fleshy face grows pink, and the lines under his mouth deepen.

“Oh,” he says, nearly weeping and holding out his arms. “My little girl is back.”

 

IN THE HOT DAYS OF SUMMER,
the pool sessions are too short and the day that stretches between them too long. In his anxiety to see Aliette, L. writes poetry. Those hours of relief aren't enough, so he walks. But on the streets everything sparkles too brightly: the men selling war bonds smile too much, the wounded soldiers seem limp with relief, their wives too radiant and pregnant. He hates it; he is drawn to it.

To forget her need to be with him, Aliette keeps herself busy. She takes tea with school friends at the Plaza, goes to museums and parties, accepts all dates to the theater that she can. But when her dates lean in to kiss her, she pushes them away.

 

FIVE TIMES AT THE AMSTERDAM BEFORE JULY:
that first time in the men's room; in the lifeguard's chair; in the chaise longue storage closet; in the shallow end; in the deep end, in the corner, braced by the gutter.

All this time, Rosalind sleeps. The days that Aliette suspects she won't, she fills her nurse's head with glorious evocations of the cream puffs that are the specialty of the hotel's pastry chef. Rosalind, she feels certain, will slip out at some point during the lesson and return a half an hour later with a
cream puff on a plate for her ward, licking foam from her lip like a cat.

 

THE SECOND WAVE OF THE ILLNESS
hits America in July. People begin to fall in Boston, mostly strong young adults. In a matter of hours, mahogany spots appear on cheekbones, spreading quickly until one cannot tell dark-skinned people from white. And then the suffocation, the pneumonia. Fathers of young families turn as blue as huckleberries, and spit a foamy red fluid. Autopsies reveal lungs that look like firm blue slabs of liver.

 

ALIETTE SLIPS AWAY ON A DAY
that Rosalind is off, visiting a cousin in Poughkeepsie. She takes a cab to the dark and seedy streets where L. lives, but is so thrilled she doesn't see the dirt or smell the stench. She gets out of the cab, throwing the driver a bill, and runs as quickly to the door of L.'s close, hot bedroom as her awkward legs will allow.

She comes in. He stands, furious to suddenly see her in this hovel. She closes the door.

It is only later, sitting naked on the mattress, dripping with sweat and trying to cool off in what breeze will come from the window, that she notices the bachelor's funk of his apartment, the towers of books and notebooks lining the walls like wainscoting, and hears the scrabble of something
sinister in the wall behind her head. That is when she tells L. her plan.

 

THAT NIGHT MR. HUBER IS CHAPERONING.
L. pays his friend, W. Sebald Shandling, starving poet, to sit by the pool. Shandling is foppish, flings his hands about immoderately, has a natural lisp.

“Watch me like a jealous wife,” L. instructs him.

His friend does watch him, growing grimmer and grimmer, until, by the end of the session, when Aliette comes to the wall and touches L. on the shoulder, he is pacing like a tiger and glaring at the pair. Mr. Huber looks on with an expression of jolly interest.

In the cab home that evening, as the horse's hooves clop like a metronome through the park, Aliette asks her father if L. can come live with them, in one of the guest bedrooms.

“Daddy,” she says, “he told me how disgusting his room is. But he cannot afford to live elsewhere. And I've decided to train for the New York girls' swimming championships in September, and need to add another session in the afternoon, at the Fourteenth Street YMCA. It will just be easier if he lives with us.”

“You have become friends?” he says.

“Oh, we get along swimmingly,” she laughs. When he doesn't smile, she adds, “Daddy, he is like a brother to me.”

Her father says, without much hesitation, “Well, I don't see why not.”

 

ON THE JULY DAY HE LEAVES HIS HOVEL,
L. stands in his room, looking around at the empty expanse. He hears children playing in the alley below. He goes to the window and watches. Two girls skip rope, chanting.

Then they shriek and fall to the ground, clutching their chests, giggling.

L.'s world is spun on its head. Now he deals with servants, people calling him sir, any food he likes at any time of the day, the palatial apartment filled with light. And, of course, midnight creeping, and free midafternoon siestas in the cavernous cool apartment, as the servants sit in the kitchen and gossip about the war. In mid-August, L. is deemed chaperone enough, and Rosalind stays home when they go to the Amsterdam or the Y. If Aliette's father leaves for work a bit later than usual on those mornings, the servants' bland faces reveal nothing. Rosalind begins wearing a long strand of pearls, and French perfume. She takes to sitting on Aliette's bed, comb
ing her hair and asking the girl about her dates with the Ivy League boys. Her voice is rich and almost maternal.

 

ALIETTE TELLS HER FATHER
that she no longer needs Rosalind, that she is healthy, and he can let the nurse go. Then Rosalind becomes
his
nurse, for he has discovered gout in his toes.

One golden night at the end of September, they are all listening gravely to the radio's reports of war dead, eating petits fours in Aliette's father's study. Mr. Huber and Rosalind go into his bedchamber to treat his gout. Through the walls, L. and Aliette can hear their murmuring voices.

L. takes the cake from Aliette's hand and lifts her skirt on the morocco leather couch. She bites his shoulder to keep from screaming. Throughout, they can hear her father moving about behind the wall, Rosalind's heels tapping, the maid dusting in the other room.

When Rosalind and Mr. Huber return, Aliette is reading a novel, and L. is still in his wing chair, listening intently to the radio. Nobody notices the pearls of sweat on his forehead, or, when Aliette stands for bed, the damp patch on her skirt.

 

THE MARVEL IS, WITH ALL
she and L. do together, that Aliette has the time to train. But she does, growing muscles like knots in her back, adapting her kick from the standard three-beat to a lightning-quick eight-beat flutter, better suited for her weak legs.

At the competition in September in the 200-meter freestyle, she is already ahead from her dive, and draws so far away from the other girls that she is out on the diving platform, wearing her green cloak, when the other girls come in. She also takes the 100-meter freestyle.

The captions below her picture in the
New York Times
and the
Sports News
say: “Heiress NY's Best Lady Swimmer.” In the photo, Aliette stands radiant, medals gleaming in the sunlight on her chest. If one were to look closely, however, one would see a bulge at Aliette's waist.

 

THE SLOW RUMBLE OF INFLUENZA
becomes a roar. September drips into deadliest October. In Philadelphia, gymnasiums are crowded with cots of soldiers healthy just hours before. America does not have enough doctors, and first-year medical students, boys of twenty, treat the men. Then they too fall sick. Their bodies are stacked like kindling with the rest in the insufficient morgues. More than a quarter of the pregnant women who survive the flu miscarry or give birth to stillborn babies.

 

ALIETTE'S STOMACH GROWS,
but she does not tell L., hoping he'll notice and remark upon it first. He is in a fever, though, and sees nothing but his passion for her. She begins wearing corsets again, and she makes a great show of eating inordinately, so that her father and Rosalind think she is simply getting fat.

 

THE PLAGUE HITS NEW YORK
like a tight fist. Trains rolling into the boroughs stop in their tracks when engineers die at the controls. After 851 New Yorkers die in one day, a man is attacked for spitting on the streets.

Mr. Huber sends his six servants away, and they are forbidden to return until the end of the plague. Three out of them won't return at all. Mr. Huber, Aliette, Rosalind, and L. remain. They seal the windows, and Mr. Huber uses his new telephone to order the groceries. They buy their food in cans, which they boil before opening, and their mail is baked piping hot in the oven before they read it.

After the second week of quarantine, Rosalind becomes hysterical and makes them drink violet-leaf tea and inhale saltwater. She paces the apartment wildly and forgets to brush her hair. They cannot persuade her to make up the fourth for bridge, so they play Chinese checkers, backgammon, and gin. Mr. Huber suddenly unveils his collection of expensive liquors and dips gladly into them. When he has had too much, he and Rosalind go into the servants' quarters and hiss at each other. At those times Aliette sits on L.'s lap and presses her cheek against his, until the shape of his moustache is embossed into her skin.