Free The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine by Peter Straub Page B

know this doesn’t make sense, but if we ever did this before,
exactly
this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn’t the food even better, I mean a
lot
better?”
    “I can’t say anything about that,” Ballard said. “I really can’t. There’s just this vague …” The vagueness disturbed him far more than seemed quite rational. “Let’s drop that subject and talk about bird language. Yes, let’s. And the wine.” He picked up the bottle. “Yet again a very nice Bordeaux,” Ballard said, and poured for both of them. “However. What you’ve been hearing are real birds, not the Pirahã.”
    “But they’re talking, not just chirping. There’s a difference. These guys are saying things to each other.”
    “Birds talk to one another. I mean, they sing.”
    She was right about one thing, though: in a funky, down-home way, the stewlike dish was delicious. He thrust away the feeling that it should have been a hundred, a thousand times more delicious: that once it, or something rather like it, had been paradisal.
    “Birds don’t sing in sentences. Or in paragraphs, like these guys do.”
    “They still can’t be the Pirahã. The Pirahã live about five hundred miles away, on the Peruvian border.”
    “Your ears aren’t as good as mine. You don’t really hear them.”
    “Oh, I hear plenty of birds. They’re all over the place.”
    “Only we’re not talking about
birds
,” Sandrine said.

1982
    On the last day of November, Sandrine Loy, who was twenty-eight, constitutionally ill-tempered, and startlingly good-looking (wide eyes, long mouth, black widow’s peak, columnar legs), formerly of Princeton and Clare College, Cambridge, glanced over her shoulder and said, “Please tell me you’re kidding. I just showered. I put on this nice white frock you bought me in Paris. And I’m
hungry
.” Relenting a bit, she let a playful smile warm her face for nearly a second. “Besides that, I want to catch sight of our invisible servants.”
    “I’m hungry, too.”
    “Not for food, unfortunately.” She spun from the porthole and its ugly view—a mile of brown, rolling river and low, muddy banks where squat, sullen natives tended to melt back into the bushes when the
Sweet Delight
went by—to indicate the evidence of Ballard’s arousal, which stood up, darker than the rest of him, as straight as a flagpole.
    “Let’s have sex on this table. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks.”
    “Kind of defeats the fucking purpose, wouldn’t you say? Comfort’s hardly the point.”
    “Might as well be as comfy as we can, I say.” He raised his arms to let his hands drape from the four-inch marble edging on the long steel table. “There’s plenty of space on this thing, you know. More than in your bed at Clare.”
    “Maybe you’re not as porky as I thought you were.”
    “Careful, careful. If you insult me, I’ll make you pay for it.”
    At fifty Ballard had put on some extra weight, but it suited him. His shoulders were still wider by far than his hips, and his belly more nascent than actual. His hair, longer than that of most men his age and just beginning to show threads of gray within the luxuriant brown, framed his wide brow and executive face. He looked like an actor who had made a career of playing senators, doctors, and bankers. Ballard’s real profession was that of fixer for an oversize law firm in New York with a satellite office in Hong Kong, where he had grown up. The weight of muscle in his arms, shoulders, and legs reinforced the hint of stubborn determination, even perhaps brutality in his face: the suggestion that if necessary he would go a great distance and perform any number of grim deeds to do what was needed. Scars both long and short, scars like snakes, zippers, and tattoos, bloomed here and there on his body.
    “Promises, promises,” she said. “But just for now, get up and get dressed, please. The sight of you admiring your own dick