Chapter One
"Did you say Mr. Darcy's pants?" Dinah asked, choking on her espresso.
Flip tucked a long strand of blond hair behind her ear, happy to shock her more upright friend. "Well, it's more polite than the first thing that popped into my head."
Eve grinned. "Which was?"
"Mr. Darcy's pants and a breath mint."
The women laughed loud enough to turn heads at the outdoor café.
"If I were Lizzy Bennet and the heroine of Pride and Prejudice," Flip said in only a slightly lower voice, "and had just bagged Darcy, the hottest man in literature, forget the engagement gift. I'd want his pants, coat, shirt and -- well, he could probably keep the boots -- for a hardy screw in the hedgerow." She considered the image forming in her head. "Oh, yeah. Definitely keep the boots."
Dinah put on her fiery high school English teacher look, the look that transformed her from a happy, bisexual Julianne Moore look-alike to Magenta in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "Lizzy Bennet is not that kind of girl," she said hotly.
"And that, my dear Dinah," Flip replied, "is the trouble with Pride and Prejudice. Not enough hedgerow."
Eve, whose spiky black bob and sleek attorney suit gave her the look of an upscale punk rocker, considered the sandstorm of sugar she was stirring into her iced tea. "I think our friend Flip has a hedgerow fixation."
"You know what they say about hedgerows," Dinah said with a superior smile. "If you're not careful, all you'll end up with is pricks."
"What is it about divorce that takes all the fun out of that word?" Flip tapped a dollop of cappuccino foam from the end of her stirrer. "But it doesn't have to be a hedgerow. I'm just as happy with the deck of a sailboat, the parapet of a duke's castle or the front steps of the New York Public Library. I just like my heroines to get their due."
"Gee, I hope their due includes a pillow." Eve emptied a fourth packet of sugar into the glass. "My ass hurts just thinking about it."
"Gratuitous sex is the refuge of the uninspired writer," Dinah said with the smugness only a few gate attendants or omeone who majored in English Lit can muster. "With its figurative blank page on the matter, Pride and Prejudice allows a reader the ultimate flight of imagination."
"Oh, is that what we're calling it now?" Flip said. "I wondered why you were going through so many batteries at night."
The women's laughter filled the green space in which the café tables sat, but Eve's, Flip noticed, was more infectious than that of all of them. Once you've faced breast cancer, Eve told her, you never pass up the chance to belly laugh. Flip smiled. It was a wonderful sound, and the first man Eve had agreed to see since her mastectomy, Adam -- hold for the laugh -- seemed to like it too. Eve had been teetering on the "should I/shouldn't I" line for a month now.
The Columbia livia at Flip's feet cooed and flapped happily, bobbing for crumbs. She threw down a bit of her biscotti, then let her gaze slide across the street to the gleaming forty-two-story tower known as the Cathedral of Learning that dwarfed everything else on the University of Pittsburgh campus. The topic of sex never failed to reduce her and her friends from thirty-plus-year-olds with more than a decade of bad relationships behind them to a slumber party's worth of snickering teens. It was just what she needed after a long couple of weeks at the Aviary. She rubbed her aching neck.
"Tough day, sweetie?" Eve asked. Eve tended to mother.
"Ugh," Flip agreed. "And it's only half over. I'm supposed to be working on that damned presentation at the library, but Ninja's got a nodule on his wing, so I swung by work this morning to take a look, and, well...let's just say 'Bird Density and Diversity in Clear-cut Oak Forests' is not exactly writing itself." Unsurprising, she considered, given that instead of writing when she'd returned from the Aviary, she'd spent an hour daydreaming about the book she was reading -- specifically, a sink top sex scene in which, for once, the hero was the one who ended up with tile marks on his knees. Venice, she thought fondly. Who needed a gondola?
And now she'd have to tear herself away from what happened next to reread Pride and Prejudice for their book club on Thursday.
Not that she didn't enjoy Darcy and Lizzy's long, fitful submission into love. It was like waiting for two strongly repelling magnets to flip over and snap together with a bang. But given her own current state of carnal deprivation -- two years, three months, one week and 2,437 laps in the YMCA pool, but who was counting? -- what she really needed from her reading material was not a flight of imagination, but an intricately detailed charter excursion into cool sheets, silky boxers, and the snap of panty under insistent fingers. Darcy and Lizzy simply lacked sufficient detail.
Her Venice hero, sure to be literally spouting detail in the next scene, would have to wait, though Flip couldn't help but wonder in what form his reward would come. She tipped the chair onto two legs and let the various options curl through her thoughts....
Stop! her industrious side commanded. Clear-cut forests. Winter migration. Biodiversity. These are the thoughts you should be thinking.
But nothing even faintly ornithological popped into her head. Instead the Cathedral of Learning transformed itself from a stolid skyscraper into what could only be described as the largest literary device ever conceived, with the gently swaying trees at its base pillowy curls of hair, and Forbes and Fifth, the wide boulevards that ran on either side, a pair of creamy, muscular thighs.
Flip dropped the chair back onto four legs and took a deep breath.
She assured herself these spells would be entirely natural in a woman who hadn't experienced the real thing in over two years -- six if one were inclined to charge her ex-husband Jed with heroic underachievement in the area, and, in this case, one certainly was. Entirely natural, she repeated. Why fight it? The tower pulsed with gleaming, pent-up --
"Don't you agree, Flip?"
She jerked her attention back to the table, nearly toppling her cappuccino in the process.
"Hmm, what?"
A plain-faced young woman in a wrap skirt and a PANIC! AT THE DISCO T-shirt stood next to the table, smiling. Two mouse-colored pigtails snaked down the straps of her bright orange backpack, and she clutched an organic yogurt.
"I was saying the best stories appeal to our more noble desires," Dinah repeated, smiling encouragingly.
"Oh, sure," Flip agreed. "Like The Economist...or beets."
The young woman chuckled. If she were a bird, she'd be a killdeer, Flip decided, spindle-legged and slightly nervous.
Dinah said, "Flip and Eve, this is my friend Beth Olinsky. She's a senior in history at Pitt. We're in the choir at church together. Beth this is Flip Allison, an ornithologist with the Aviary, and Eve Bloomberg, a lawyer at Pilgrim Pharmaceuticals."
Beth gave everyone a lopsided grin. She bloomed when she smiled, Flip thought. Not quite a peacock. An oriole, perhaps.
"Flip?" Beth said. "That's an unusual name."
"Short for Philippa," Flip admitted. "Blame it on my older brother, who couldn't pronounce it. He also called elephants 'elphiniums' until he was about fifteen. You a Pride and Prejudice fan like your choir colleague here?"
Beth nodded, rubbing her nose vigorously. "I loved the book. My sister gave me the DVD for Christmas, but my boyfriend never wants to watch it."
"Uh-oh. Time for a new boyfriend."
"Yeah, well, I guess that's what he thinks too." She shifted her weight from one Teva sandal to the other. "We're, um, breaking up."
Flip shook her head. "Oh dear, idiocy starts early. Well, at least you can watch the miniseries now. Believe me, it's a worthwhile trade. Say, would you be interested in coming to our book club Thursday? We're discussing Pride and Prejudice."
Beth brightened. "Sure."
"We're not as old and wizened as we look," Eve assured her. "Some of us even text instead of having meaningful in-person relationships."
"Hey," Dinah said, "there's nothing wrong with a little text sex, I always say."
"Yeah." Flip gave her friend a gentle poke. "Why should your first two fingers be the only digits getting any action?"
"Thursday would be perfect, actually," Beth said. "My history paper's due Thursday, and I hate doing things at the last minute. This'll give me just the impetus I need to get it knocked off by Wednesday."
"Clearly you need to give Flip some pointers," Eve said. "She seems to be stalled on her particular assignment."
"God, it's true," Flip said. "This part's always the challenge for me. I like to be out in the field doing the stuff, you know, but writing about it?" She made a sour face. "I've been working on this presentation for two weeks now, shut up in that sterile library. I was also sidetracked by a fellowship application -- not that that's going to matter much now. So I'm -- "
"Not matter?" Dinah interrupted. "Why?"
Flip tossed more crumbs from her biscotti to the ground and groaned. "Jed applied too."
"That bastard," Eve said. "I thought he was absolutely convinced the ivory-billed woodpecker no longer existed. I thought you'd nearly had a shouting match over it on your birthday a few years ago."
Flip rolled her eyes. "We did, and he is. But that doesn't stop him from trying to get in on the most important bird expedition of the century. And Cornell's only looking for one more person on the search team, which means I've got no chance. You know his résumé is as long as my arm."
"I know it's the one thing of your ex-husband's to which the adjective long could be applied," Dinah said.
Beth laughed again, and Eve gestured for her to sit down.
"Don't give up," Eve said, patting Flip's arm. "God only gives opportunities to tromp around in the mud and cold for weeks at a time to th...
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