Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online

doting.
    She knows L. from his book of poetry, which she read when she was recuperating from her illness. She feels she knows him so intimately that now, freezing on the dock, she is startled and near tears: she has just realized that, to him, she is a stranger.
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    AND SO, ALIETTE DOES SOMETHING DRASTIC: she unveils her legs. They are small, wrinkled sticks, nearly useless. She wears a Scottish wool blanket over her lap, sinfully thick. L. thinks of his thin sheet and the dirty greatcoat he sleeps under, and envies her the blanket. Her skirt is short and her stockings silk. L. doesn’t gasp when he sees her legs, her kneecaps like dinner rolls skewered with willow switches. He just looks up at Aliette’s face, and suddenly sees that her lips are set in a perfect heart, purple with cold.
    After that, the swim lessons are easily arranged. When they leave—the brunette pushing the wheelchair over the boards of the docks, her trim hips swishing—their departure thrums in L.’s heels. The wind picks up even more and thewaves make impatient sounds on the dock. L. dresses. His last nickel rolls from the pocket of his jacket as he slides it over his yellowed shirt. The coin flashes in the water and glints, falling.
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    ALIETTE LIES IN HER WHITE starched sheets in her bedroom on Park Avenue, and listens to the Red Cross trucks grinding gears in the street below. She puts the thin book of poetry under the sheets when she hears footsteps coming down the hall to her door. But the book slides from her stomach and between her almost useless legs, and she gasps with sudden pleasure.
    Her nurse, the brunette from the dock, enters with a glass of buttermilk. Rosalind is only a few years older than Aliette, but looks as hearty and innocent as Little Bo Peep, corn-fed, pink with indolence. Aliette tries not to hate her as she stands there, cross-armed, until Aliette drains the glass. The nurse’s lipstick has smeared slightly beyond the boundaries of her lips. From the front hall, Mr. Huber’s trilling whistle resounds, then the butler says, “Good afternoon, sir,” and the door closes, and Aliette’s father returns to Wall Street. The girl hands the glass back to Rosalind, who smiles a bit too hard.
    â€œDo you need a trip to the water closet, Miss?” the nurse asks.
    Aliette tells her no, she is reading, and that would be all. When the nurse’s footsteps have faded, the girl retrieves thebook of poetry from under the covers where it had nestled so pleasingly. Ambivalence , the title says. By L. DeBard.
    While L. and Aliette wait to begin their first lesson the next day, the mysterious illness is creeping from the sleepy Spanish tourist town of San Sebastián. It will make its way into the farthest corners of the realm, until even King Alfonso XIII will lie suffering in his royal bed. French, English, and American troops scattered in France are just now becoming deathly ill, and the disease will skulk with them to England. Even King George V will be afflicted.
    In New York, they know nothing of this. L. eats his last can of potted meat. Aliette picks the raisins from her scones and tries to read fortunes in the dregs of her teacup.
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    THEY WILL USE THE NATATORIUM at the Amsterdam Hotel for the lessons. It is a lovely pool of green tile, gold-leaf tendrils growing down the sides and a bold heliotrope of yellow tile covering the bottom. The walls and ceiling are sky blue. They cannot use it during the guest hours and must swim either in the early morning or at night.
    Both, insists L., hating to take so much money from Mr. Huber for so little work. He comes early for the first lesson, marveling at the beautiful warmth and crystal water. He leaps from the sauna to the pool, laughing to himself. His moustache wilts in the heat.
    When Aliette comes in, steaming from the showers, her hair in a black cloth cap with a strap under the chin, L. liftsher from her chair and carries her into the