A Splendid Gift by Alyson Richman Page A

her message, but rather had given a watered-down interpretation of her words.
    Again, once he returned to her side, she whispered to Galantière another message for the pilot, this one more passionate than her first. She hoped that he would translate her second attempt with more accuracy this time.
    But Galantière was not amused.
    “Enough!” he said, turning to her. “I won’t play Cyrano de Bergerac for you.”
    He raised his empty glass to the air. “You’re on your own, the two of you. . . .” He looked at Silvia one last time and shook his head. “Good luck.”
    Saint-Exupéry had been watching them and laughed. Even if he didn’t understand their actual words, he had grasped enough of the conversation to be entertained. Silvia shrugged to intimate
good riddance
, her face beaming because she now had the chance to be alone with the pilot.
    He stood across from her, far taller than she had imagined, with dark eyes framed by thick eyebrows. His face, although not classically handsome, was intelligent and soulful. His smile was disarming, and his gaze contained a predatory wisdom that reminded her of an owl.
    She ventured in a blend of English and German to ask him if he’d like her phone number. Already she was set on establishing a language between them that was all their own.
    “
Oui. Oui
,” he said, with a grin she could well understand. The pilot reached into his breast pocket and handed Silvia a pen.
    ***
    He had arrived in New York on the cusp of 1941, his body aflame with pain from an injury he had suffered in a crash years before. At night he suffered from mysterious fevers. He dreamed of flight and falling, of stars and bodies tumbling from the sky. He closed his eyes as the taxis honked their horns and imagined the silent desert. He saw camels and Bedouins. But mostly he saw the faces of his fellow pilots from his former days on the African mail route, each one now dead. As the only survivor, his anguish cut him to the bone.
    He sought the laughter of others to forget his sadness, and to hide his awkward and clumsy nature. And so at parties, he played the clown. He brought cards and performed magic tricks, or entertained the crowd with songs on the piano.
    Elizabeth Reynal and Peggy Hitchcock, who were married to the founding partners of his American publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock, had furnished an apartment high above Central Park South, with all the necessities to bring him comfort so he could write. They bought him a toaster and stocked the refrigerator. They dressed his bed in crisp white linen and placed a lamp at his desk.
    He used the apartment as a hideaway. He smoked cigarettes and drank tea long into the night. He wrote and scribbled on notepads. He spread out his papers as though they were maps.
    He wrote letters to his wife, Consuelo, who, in a show of independence and South American drama, had taken an apartment upstairs in the same building.
    He pleaded with her to forsake her bohemian ways and live a more private and proper life, while at the same time sifting through scribbled phone numbers collected from women he had met at parties.
    Most of the women he chose not to call. But Silvia, with her dark, sly eyes that reminded him of a fox, who was clever enough to create a language of stolen phrases from other languages, and who rejoiced in pantomime when she had no words, he had found enchanting.
    The evening following their first encounter, he smiled as he remembered how she had clutched her heart to show affection for his books, and how she had extended her slender arms to simulate a plane in flight.
    It was past midnight when he picked up the phone and called her.
    “Hello?” a voice half-asleep answered on the other end.
    He tried to speak in broken English, though mostly French came out, and asked if he could see her.
    “Tomorrow,” she said. “Come at noon.” He envisioned her smile. She had to repeat her address four times before he got the number of her building