The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (2 page)

“Really,” Anna told him.

When she arrived around two, Pierre was standing at the stove in the center of the loft with ten or twelve guests arrayed in a semicircle around him. “You have to commune with the pancake,” he explained, glancing at Anna only long enough to raise his chin in a fleeting hello. “You pour in the batter, and then you watch her. Let her tell you when she needs to be flipped.” He bent down, staring at the little discs beginning to bubble, then gently turning them one by one. “You treat her with respect and grace.” He sniffed at the air above the pan. “You take in her perfume.”

Finally, a guy in the back said, “This is getting X-rated.”

Without acknowledging his heckler, Pierre took his spatula, gave one of the pancakes a tiny nudge, flipped it into the air, and caught it with the pan. “This is the language of love,” he announced. “Syrup and butter are on the table.”

Pierre's gathering offered the perfect occasion for Anna to prove, to herself at least, that she lived a full life. She had changed out of her shorts and pulled on a sundress and a pair of pretty sandals she hadn't worn in years. Over the course of the afternoon, she tried to talk to everybody. She ate a lot, too—five or six pancakes and she didn't even know how much bacon. Generally, Pierre was only a mediocre cook, but he always had the best ingredients. His pancakes, which were nothing special on their own, became sublime with the addition of top grade New Hampshire maple syrup (judged superior by
Yankee
magazine) and butter from France. Under these conditions, people became ravenous. The African steel drum music and the coffee laced with Cuban rum certainly didn't hurt.

Anna had just finished a conversation about Argentinian tango when she heard Pierre call her name. He was standing at the stove, motioning to her with a tip of his head.

Anna walked over. “Are you feeling like a slave over here?” she asked.

Pierre, tall and broad shouldered, wore a long goatee that made him look, against all evidence to the contrary, like an ascetic. He was actually the most social person Anna knew. Now he leaned closer to her ear and whispered, “I like having a task. If I have to flit around and talk to everyone, I become cross and overwhelmed.” He was agile at the stove, moving swiftly on the balls of his feet, like someone playing Ping-Pong. He flipped a couple of pancakes.

Anna opened the microwave and stuck her coffee mug inside. “It's gotten a little cold. Do you mind?” she asked.

“I'm surprised you didn't do that earlier,” Pierre replied. All Anna's family and friends knew that she was particular about what she put in her mouth. She called herself “discriminating”—she had one place for Chinese takeout, one café for coffee, one brand of pasta she deigned to buy—but others used less generous terms. Ford had called her “fussy,” and he had eventually refused to eat at Chi Chi's with her because she sent her burritos back to the kitchen so many times.

“Stop it.” Anna whacked Pierre gently on the arm. When the microwave stopped, she pulled out her mug and took a sip. “Now it's perfect.”

Pierre grinned at her. “How are you doing?”

She appreciated that he wanted to check on her. “I'm being the life of the party,” she told him. She felt good in her dress, and despite her time away from society, she was finding herself nimble enough, and even a little witty. “I was talking about Sartre.”

“Really?” Pierre's Mississippi was all plantations and bourbon, old money, cotton. His accent was so melodious and refined that it sounded, to Anna, almost British. When he said, “Faulkner,” it came out as “Faulknuh.” And when he said, “Are you bragging?” as he did right now, it sounded like “Ah you bragon?”

Pierre had a sharp, angular nose, thin lips, and a long, narrow face. Each feature alone seemed slightly off balance, but somehow they combined to give him a look that was pleasing, though not quite handsome. “I'm not bragging,” Anna said. “I'm just happy because I'm so”—she hesitated to admit it—“out of practice.” Maybe her sister was right. It helped, after all, to get out of the house.

“What did you say about Sartre, anyway?”

“I said he broke Simone de Beauvoir's heart.”

“That's not talking about Sartre. If I started talking about Einstein's relationship with Marilyn Monroe, I wouldn't be discussing physics.”

Anna pulled a last piece of bacon off of a platter by the stove and took a bite. “I didn't say I was talking about philosophy,” she told him. “I said I was talking about
Sartre
.”

Pierre set the spatula down on the counter and lifted a finger to brush a stray curl away from Anna's cheek. He said, “Show-off.”

Pierre's parties evolved into laid-back marathons of food, music, and conversation. Today, his Argentinian friends showed a rough cut of their documentary about Memphis blues. The guests, made sleepy from the pancakes and bacon and rum, lay sprawled across the sofas and the floor, some nodding off on their pillows. Anna remained near the stove. Pierre stood behind her, his hands resting on her shoulders in the easy affection that had, over the past few years, become natural to them. While Anna's husband was healthy, her relationship with Pierre had been merely tangential. It deepened when Ford got sick, though, and Pierre, unlike some of their other friends, continued to visit them. Now, two years after Ford's death, Anna considered Pierre an important presence in her life, though she always felt that the bond between them had a tear in the middle of it, where her husband used to be. When she was with Pierre, especially, she often found herself conjuring Ford. If he were here, would he have liked the film? He had always loved the blues, but would he have agreed with Anna that the movie was totally boring?

Oddly, it was in part the thought of Ford that made Anna reach up at that moment and take Pierre's hand. She felt a sense of inevitability, too, combined with certain looks that over the past few months had let her know that Pierre was there for her. It was Goldie's call as well, and Sadie's worry. It was the gauziness of her sundress, and the fact that looking at herself in the mirror that day, Anna had really, really liked what she saw. It was a recognition that her compulsion to conjure Ford didn't help her feel better in any measurable way, and it was a fear that she could spend the rest of her life circling back to the same low-grade sadness. It was all of these reasons that compelled her just then to pick up Pierre de Rosset's hand, slide it along her cheek toward her mouth, and kiss it. And by doing so, everything between them shifted.

Over the past few months, Anna had contemplated the wisdom of allowing more to happen with Pierre. She could imagine herself with him, yes, if circumstances had been different—her own widowhood less raw, Pierre's social life less, well,
social
. In the years that she had known him, she had watched him pass through several serious, though “not quite right” relationships, plus various passionate and brief affairs that had given his life a theatrical intensity. Anna had quite enjoyed her role as friend and impartial observer. She felt like a person with a front-row seat at the circus, able to watch heart-stopping feats without actually putting herself in any danger.

With one gesture, kissing Pierre's hand, then, Anna pushed herself into the ring. On the television in front of them, a grandniece was recounting her memories of W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues. Anna felt Pierre's body step closer behind her, and though there was nothing terribly different in the way they might have appeared to others, the change felt so portentous that Anna was glad to be standing at the back of the room, where no one could see them. Pierre pulled her toward him, letting his chin settle onto the top of her head. He sighed. She didn't hear it so much as feel it, full of heat and promise. Anna could not have said if the rest of the documentary was boring, because, though she kept her eyes on the screen, she didn't see it.

When the film ended, at around seven, an uncomfortable moment passed during which the filmmakers seemed ready to take questions. A few polite viewers offered vague compliments, but within minutes the guests were carrying the sticky dishes to the sink and looking for their backpacks and purses. Soon, everyone had left but Anna, who helped Pierre clean up while at the same time fighting a sudden urge to flee. Outside the window the sun had begun to set, turning the sky a dusky pink and the woods across the river gray. Anna faced Pierre in the empty loft. “Maybe I should head home, too,” she offered.

She didn't have to mention the complications here. They were longtime friends, and between them lay the no-longer-pertinent but still awkward fact that it was Anna's husband who had introduced them. On top of that, Anna was out of practice. Not only had it been years since she had kissed anyone, but a decade had passed since she had experienced a moment like this one. Her last first kiss had been a singularly important one—something or other with Ford, the memory of which, unfortunately, had grown hazy over time. She worried that
this
first kiss, in relation to
that
one, would somehow upset her. She felt, too, a tumult of conflicting emotions: In addition to the welcome surge of sexual excitement and the enormous relief that came with the sense that something new, finally, was happening, she also felt apprehensive about so great a change. Two years had passed, but was she ready?

Still, she felt that she should try. It was Pierre who walked over, took her arm, and led her to the sofa, but it was Anna who pulled him close in a way that was so open and eager that it represented a different category entirely from the dozens of hugs they'd exchanged in the past. He nuzzled his face into her neck and inhaled deeply, seeming to absorb everything—her smell, the feel of her skin against his, her solid substance within his arms. Then he pulled back and gazed at her, reaching toward her face to weave his fingers through her hair. “I've always wanted to do this. You may not know it, but I love”—his voice broke off—“your curls.” Anna laughed, tipping her ear down to brush against his fingers.

It all seemed sweet and right to her, until they kissed. One can never know what to expect from that moment when two people, and two bodies, tentatively begin to explore each other. Pierre and Anna started slowly, with a few brief rubs of lip across cheek, down to chin, the scratch of goatee, then lip to mouth. Hesitant nibbles. Lip pressed lip, then, finally, that opening and tongue to lip, lip to tongue, then tongue to tongue. Considered intellectually, the process sounds entirely unappealing, but people like it. Lovers crave it. Anna herself had liked it very much in the past, which made it even more upsetting to discover that now, Pierre's tongue in her mouth disgusted her. It felt like a snake trapped in a bag. Her own tongue, repelled, slithered away. Was she a coward? Summoning her courage, she moved forward one more time and, at the bottom of his mouth, she discovered a pool of saliva, thick and still, lukewarm. Anna's tongue jerked back. The suddenness of the move caused Pierre to tilt his head. His jaw lifted and their teeth crashed against each other. Anna's eyes shot open. From this angle, she could see the pores spreading in a fine mesh across his nose. She couldn't breathe. She pulled away from him.

They fell against the sofa, each in their own private universe, staring at anything besides each other. The last few pinkish slips of sun were visible out the window, and the lights of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge had already begun to twinkle.

Anna said, “I'm so sorry. I thought I could do this, but I can't.” She picked up his hand and held it lightly. She didn't want him to feel rejected by her entirely.

Pierre contemplated Ford's wedding band, which Anna kept on her right thumb. “You don't wear your own wedding ring anymore, but you wear his. Your left hand says, ‘I'm a single woman now.' And your right hand says, ‘I'm still kind of married.' It's like your two hands are debating each other.”

Anna welcomed the change of tone, but she didn't appreciate this dissection of her psyche. “Don't get overly analytical.”

“Maybe you're still in love with him.”

Hardly,
Anna thought. She didn't want to get into that subject, so she just looked down at the ring and tried to offer her own reasonable explanation. “They asked me what I wanted to do with it, you know, before the funeral. It didn't seem right to bury it, so I just stuck it on my hand.” Wearing Ford's ring had seemed the right thing to do at the time, but she hadn't anticipated the open-ended nature of the gesture. At what point would she take it off?

Pierre dropped Anna's hand to rub at his eyes. His breathing sounded much less robust than it had before. “I guess it's me, then.”

“No!” She wasn't just trying to make him feel better. She had grown attached to Pierre, and she had even begun to think that eventually they might end up together. How could he be the problem, really? More likely, romantic feeling remained completely unavailable to her, not just with him, but with anybody. “I'm flat,” she explained. “Empty. Finished.
Finissimo
.”

“That's nonsense,” he said, but not emphatically. Pierre was a realist, not a masochist. He seemed willing to believe that her rejection was universal, not specific. He eased back into the sofa, and when he spoke again his words were confessional, but also detached. “I might have fallen in love with you,” he said.

Anna had seen evidence of Pierre's feelings toward her over the years in many unspoken ways, so she believed him. It seemed unkind to acknowledge it, though. She patted his knee. “You fall in love too easily.”

He wasn't really listening. “You're pretty, funny, so much smarter than I am. I always felt like Ford was so lucky.” It only took a moment for them both to register the absurdity of that statement. He put his fingers to his forehead and shook his head. “That's not right.
Lucky
is the wrong word.”