How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (30 page)

Blythe had her Sweetheart and I found mine.

With her I could talk about how I felt underappreciated and unsatisfied at home; many were the justifications with which I mollified my conscience, although the pig wasn't necessarily one of them. To me, it was now merely a fact of life, albeit one that signaled Blythe's increasing distance from social conventions, especially as practiced on the island of Manhattan. Whatever the rationalizations for my affair, it would hardly have been possible if Blythe hadn't grown increasingly withdrawn, frequently sending me off into the night on my own while she stayed in the apartment with Dylan and Sweetheart and her needlepoint.

After all those years of being a virtual dervish, Blythe seemed to have lost her curiosity. “I think I've already been to that party,” she would say when I would run an invitation past her. “Like about three thousand times.” I don't know, maybe we're all born with certain quotas and she'd hit her limit of parties. A jaded friend of mine likes to say that God allows us all a swimming pool full of vodka and a bathtub full of cocaine, and that he finally quit the latter after realizing he'd started in on his second bathtub. Blythe had burned pretty bright and steady in her early days in New York. Maybe some filament had burned out. She'd gone to more parties, on the arms of more men, than most people even read about in the course of their lifetimes.

She preferred to sit on the couch, a bowl of popcorn within reach on the coffee table, reading a book, one foot rubbing the belly of the pig lying beneath her, our son crawling around on the floor. “Besides, somebody has to watch Dylan.” I pointed out that we had a nanny to watch Dylan, not to mention that he'd be asleep anyway by the time the party started. “Well, somebody has to watch the Sweetheart.”

Perhaps she'd evolved to a higher plane of consciousness and no longer required the shallow distractions of small talk and flirtation, of voyeurism and self-display. But I did and I wasn't ready to retire. Even though I'd sworn off the bathtub, I still had several feet of vodka left in my swimming pool and I was still drawn to the music of the night. And inevitably I was drawn to a face across the room, the flash of a provocative smile.

My affair with Katrina lasted for the duration of that Manhattan sojourn, almost six months. It seemed incredible that Blythe didn't question me more closely about my late nights and midday disappearances. With each successful tryst, I became more emboldened, more entitled, less guilty about my transgression. I didn't really have a plan or a specific ambition for the affair. Katrina was funny and sexy, and she also seemed to be happy with a part-time lover, with the stolen hours and midnight departures. I often went to sleep on the daybed in my office so as not to wake Blythe and Sweetheart, although I would often, after a late night, return to the master bedroom for a restorative nap; on these occasions, Sweetheart liked to join me, shoving her nose into my armpit and stabbing me with her hooves. Actually, it was strange how well we got along during this period, after almost two years of uneasy coexistence.

Katrina and I had been friends for years, a fact that helped to mask the drift into physical intimacy, to make it seem innocent even to ourselves, right up until the irrevocable moment—the kiss in the back of the taxi, my hand sliding down her shoulder to her breast, her hand sliding up my knee.

“This is probably a terrible idea,” Katrina said as she unfastened my belt. After the night we moved from her couch to her bed, we fell into a pattern of twice-a-week trysts.

I probably would've been satisfied with this arrangement indefinitely, but eventually Katrina's conscience started to bother her; she wanted more, yet was loath to demand it, and I wasn't nearly ready to leave Blythe. But I was crushed when Katrina ended our affair, and in order to console myself, I embarked on a crime spree of serial infidelities. Or perhaps I'm being too easy on myself; maybe I'd just developed a taste for it.

I must have been exuding some kind of scent that telegraphed my debauched availability and my intentions, because there were willing women wherever I looked. I had never noticed them in the early years of my marriage, but suddenly I was awash in opportunity: the dental assistant who held my gaze as she suctioned my gums; the librarian who helped me find Peter Quennell's
Byron in Italy;
the studio executive I met on the plane to L.A. I was compulsive and insatiable. It reminded me of one of Blythe's folksier aphorisms—that once a dog starts sucking eggs, there's no stopping him. In her part of the world, where guns were standard household equipment, the implication was that the dog needed to be shot. Yet in the end she was surprisingly forgiving.

The tipping point was reached back in Tennessee, where I was spotted emerging from a hotel at midnight with the wife of one of Blythe's cousins. At that point, the community, which teemed with friends and relatives, took it upon itself to advise Blythe that enough was enough.

The showdown was surprisingly muted.

We were lying in bed, Sweetheart splayed between us, her sharp cloven hooves thrust toward me. She grunted interrogatively, hoping for a tummy rub, just as Blythe launched her interrogation.

“They say people are calling me the Hillary Clinton of Tennessee.”

Scared and guilty as I was that we were finally addressing the elephant in the room, I tried to delay the inevitable. “Down here, I guess that's a bad thing to be.”

“This isn't the time for you to be a smart-ass Yankee. They mean I'm a fool who's turning a blind eye to your flagrant and relentless philandering.”

“I know,” I said. I was, I realized, actually relieved that we were finally discussing this.

“This can't go on. I can't go on.”

“I know.”

“You realize my father would have had you shot. And I'm not even exaggerating.”

“I guess I could only say I deserve it.”

“Now you're exaggerating. You don't believe that, so stop bullshitting me. Stop bullshitting yourself. You've been lying to both of us. And don't you dare say
not really
. Not telling isn't the same as not lying. Now listen, I'm not going to give you a real hard time about this, though I probably should. People think I'm crazy, that I should cut your balls off and have done with it, but I just don't have it in me to yell and scream and cuss. I can't say I'm not hurt. I am. You really stabbed me in the heart and turned the blade. But nobody can help falling out of love with someone else.”

“It's not that,” I said. “I still—”

“Shut up and listen,” she said. “All I ask is that you tell me everything—and everyone. I'm serious about this. You owe me that much at least. And if I think you're not being honest, you'll end up wishing Daddy was still around to shoot you and put you out of your misery.”

So, I told her. About Katrina. About the dental assistant and the librarian and the studio executive, about her cousin-in-law and the neighbor two farms down who'd come over to dinner one night and flirted across the table, then ridden her horse over a couple days later after seeing Blythe drive into town.

“That sneaky cunt! Goddamn her. I saw her shaking her cleavage under your nose. But I hardly thought she'd come riding right over here like Annie Oakley and fuck my husband.”

It was curious how she seemed to blame the women more than me; she hated every one of them from that day forward. I have no idea why I largely escaped blame. It was like the time when Sweetheart ate our house-guest's Dopp kit. She didn't find fault with me so much as with the women who'd tempted me, who'd waved treats in front of my face. Over the years she managed to cut most of them dead, to let them know that
she
knew and was pissed. This is another southern trait—cutting people—and she's good at it. She didn't forgive and she didn't forget, except in the case of Katrina, who, she felt, had at least shown remorse and done the right thing by breaking up with me. Years later, at a play opening in New York, she went out of her way to let her know that it was okay. As to her treatment of me, I eventually remembered the conversation we'd had about her brother, when she'd said she never looked back.

Even by her own admission, Blythe's postmarital dating life was somewhat compromised by the presence of Sweetheart. “I've become familiar with a certain facial expression,” she told me. “These guys walk in and look at Sweetheart and what they're wondering is, How long does a pig live? They're wondering if they can outlast her. Sometimes they ask. But even when they don't, I still know that's what they're thinking. I see that look, I just up and say,‘About fifteen years is the answer to your question. And she's eight.’ Some of them turn tail right away.”

I was living in the city with my new girlfriend; Blythe had stayed in Tennessee. I visited every month to spend time with Dylan, staying with them for a week, an arrangement that made perfect sense to us, if not always to the girlfriends and boyfriends. In the end, though, I think Sweetheart scared away more suitors than I did, which was only one of the reasons I was astonished when Blythe told me she was getting another pig.

“Are you crazy?” I said. We were sitting on the back porch, watching Dylan splash in the pool, and looking out at a vermilion slash of sunset bleeding through the storm clouds above the roof of the old barn.

“Probably,” she said.

“Explain this to me.”

“I'm not sure I can.”

“It's perverse.”

“Look, I know it's going to be a disaster for my love life, but somehow I don't care.”

The afternoon's intolerable heat was finally subsiding, the cicadas shutting down their tiny chain saws, the fireflies just waking up under logs and eaves, checking their switches. It was a moment of hiatus, of stillness between the activities of the day and those of the night. Sweetheart lay on her side, catching the last rays of the sun. Even Dylan seemed to pause for a moment, standing at the edge of the pool, gazing out over the pasture as it turned from pink to gray as the sun slipped beneath the treetops at the far end of the field. The air was heavy with the promise of rain. All at once I felt myself projected back in time, the light and the temperature and the scent of the air exquisitely and precisely mimetic of a previous June evening some four or five years ago, when I was a better and a happier man.

“I already paid the breeder,” she said. “He's arriving at the airport tomorrow. It's a boy. Another McSwine.”

“What the hell,” I said. “I'll drive you.”

It was no crazier, I realized, than certain aspects of my own life. And it was no longer my fight.

The next day we dropped Dylan off at preschool and then drove to the airfreight terminal. After several inquiries, we were directed to a door with plastic flaps and a gravity wheel conveyor. As we watched, three big cardboard boxes with holes punched in them parted the flaps and rolled out,
GRASSMERE ZOO
stamped on each one.

“What are those?” Blythe asked the men who were retrieving the boxes.

“Mice' n' rats, I reckon,” one of them said in a slow country drawl.

“Chow for the reptile house,” said the other.

“I would've thought frogs,” Blythe said.

“Frogs, too,” said the country boy. “Frogs was last week.”

As they wheeled the rodents away, a large red-and-white-striped box appeared between the flaps.

Blythe saw it before I did, and a pained expression crossed her face as she lifted her hand to her mouth. I looked again as the box emerged, sliding toward us on the steel rollers. Then I saw the blue field of stars at the other end of the box—an American flag wrapped neatly around a coffin.

“Oh my God,” Blythe said.

I looked around. “Shouldn't someone … be here?”

For the moment we were alone.

I looked at her. “Maybe we should …”

“I don't know.”

“Me, neither.”

At that moment a uniformed baggage handler holding a small animal carrier approached us.

“Are you the pig parents?”

Blythe nodded, gingerly taking the carrier. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she bent down to look in through the slats. “Look at him—he's so scared,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “The poor baby.”

“Maybe you should tell someone about … this,” I said to the baggage handler, gesturing toward the coffin.

He shook his head and sighed. “Second one this week.”

Back in the car, the little pig squealed like a banshee when Blythe took him out of the carrier and held him in her lap. He was about the size of a beer bottle, with black-and-white bristles, stubby legs and a straight tail that twitched incessantly. “The sweet thing,” Blythe said, stroking his back. The tears reappeared as we drove down the exit ramp. “That poor boy,” she said. “Why wasn't anybody there for him?”

I shook my head, not trusting my voice.

“It's so awful,” she said, rubbing the piglet. “All alone, nobody to welcome him home. Oh God, my poor Jimmy.”

It was, I realized, just the second time I'd heard her say her brother's name.

We drove in silence until I finally found my voice. “I'm so sorry, Blythe,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. “I'm so goddamn sorry.” It was some time before I could speak again. “Please forgive me. I never even said I was sorry.”

“It's okay, McSwine,” she said, turning to me and wiping my cheek. “You know my motto:‘Don't look back.’” I took her hand and lifted it to my mouth. Kissing the back of her wrist, I could smell the sweet, milky, barnyard tang of her fingers. As I squeezed her hand and pressed her fingertips to my lips, I believed there was still time and hope for me, if I could only remember always exactly how I felt at that moment.

2007

Everything Is Lost

Sabrina decided to throw Kyle a surprise party for his thirty-fifth. Her biggest concern was that she wouldn't be able to keep it a secret—so pleased was she with the whole idea. She liked to say she shared all her thoughts and feelings with Kyle. “I tell him everything,” she would say. And Kyle would say the same.

She'd been talking to the owner of the Golden Bowl—the hottest new place in TriBeCa—telling him she expected maybe forty or fifty people for the party, dropping some names in hopes of getting him down a little on the price, when Kyle walked into the bedroom and threw himself across the duvet.

“Who was that?” he asked, stroking her knee after she quickly hung up.

“Just a fact checker.”

Much to her relief, he didn't seem to notice she was blushing; at least she assumed the heat in her cheeks had to be visible. She felt so transparent that she could hardly believe he didn't sense something amiss.

She suddenly realized that her preparations would be complicated by the fact that the bedroom walls stopped six feet short of the ceiling in their loft. She didn't usually think about it, except when Kyle was being particularly loud on the phone in the other room or the time her brother had spent the night on their sofa and she'd been self-conscious about having sex. When they'd first seen the loft and the Realtor had suggested the walls could be extended up to the ceiling, Sabrina had remarked, rather smugly, that they didn't need privacy. Walls were for people who weren't really in love.

“What was that you were saying about Toby Clench?” he asked.

“Toby Clench?” She was trying to buy a minute to think of what to say.

“I thought I heard you mention his name.”

“He collects Brancott's work.”

“Who's Brancott?”

“The artist I'm writing about.”

“Oh, right. God, I can't believe that son of a bitch is collecting art,” he said, again not noticing that she was blushing. He was stroking her knee, moving in the direction of her thigh, pursuing his own secret agenda. If she hadn't been so flustered, she would already have realized he'd come into the bedroom in search of nookie. She could have two jugglers and three elephants in the room and he wouldn't notice when he was in this particular state of anticipation. It was so simple—sweet, really. All she needed to do was administer a quick blow job. Sometimes it was so much easier than the full production. And she'd never heard him complain.

She reached down, unbuttoned his jeans, and slipped her hands inside his boxers. He moaned and lay back on the duvet. Spontaneous sex—one of the perks of the freelance life.

Sabrina worked at a desk in the bedroom. Kyle taught writing at NYU and had an office there. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he had classes and office hours, but most other days he liked to work at home at the kitchen table. Sabrina had been his student a couple years ago and now was writing articles to help pay the bills while intermittently working on her first novel. She loved that they shared a sacred vocation—literature, he liked to say, was their religion—and one that allowed them to spend so much time together.

When she was working, she'd hear him pacing around on the uneven old wooden floors. Sometimes she could hear him humming, or even singing, when concentrating deeply, and she loved the idea that he was working on some short story that might appear in
The Paris Review
or
The New Yorker
. And while he must have been able to hear her on the phone, he didn't seem to mind. They'd check up on each other, intermittently, in one room or the other, and if she didn't hear him for a few minutes, she would go out to see what he was doing. Sometimes, irrationally, she was afraid that he wouldn't be there. He often came into the bedroom with that earnest, hungry look on his face, and if she wasn't too busy, they'd fall into bed and devour each other. This routine had seemed wonderful until she needed a little privacy. Was it her imagination, or was he more housebound than usual this week? She kept waiting for him to leave so she could make her calls. Though she knew it wasn't fair, she grew increasingly irritated as he failed to do so.

“How do people who live in lofts have affairs?” she asked her friends one night over drinks at the Odeon.

“They have offices,” Daisy said.

Kyle's office, she recalled, was the first place they'd ever had sex.

The next day she told Kyle she had to go out to conduct an interview, hoping she sounded casual enough to be convincing. He was sprawled on the sofa, reading a manuscript. “Have fun,” he said.

In the elevator she wondered, somewhat peevishly, if he ever even thought about her whereabouts. She could be on her way to some assignation, though in fact she was going to check out the restaurant for his party.

The owner, Brom Kendall, had offered to show her around. She recognized him from his picture in
New York
magazine, where he'd been included in a feature on hot restaurateurs. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt, and his cleft chin and a slightly crooked nose just barely saved him from being too handsome. For some reason, she felt awkward. She had a notion that he would be conceited, although in fact he seemed a little shy as he shook her hand.

“How about a drink?” he said after they'd completed their short tour of the restaurant, which, in broad daylight, without its glittering clientele, seemed to her interchangeable with a dozen others in the neighborhood. Kind of an Armani palette: taupe walls, black wood trim, gray leather upholstery and moody vintage black-and-white photos of scantily clad women.

Not wanting to seem unfriendly or uptight, she said she'd have a Ketel One and tonic. He went behind the bar to mix the drinks while she took a seat on the other side.

He told her that for years he'd been an actor but that then one day he'd realized it was never going to happen. Besides, he liked people; he liked food.…

It wasn't a terribly original story—she was glad she didn't have to write it—but his obvious sincerity made it interesting. She was expecting him to be glib. “Sometimes that's what I think about my writing,” she said, “like I should give it up for something practical.”

“I thought that piece you did for
Black Book
was really insightful,” he said, surprising her. “The one about the new chick lit.”

“Wow, I'm, like, amazed.” So much so that she was suddenly talking like a moron. It didn't occur to her until later that he'd probably Googled her the night before, after she first called. Still, it felt good, knowing that someone besides friends and family had read it.

He asked how she'd gotten into writing, which led her to explain that Kyle had been her writing teacher.

“Huh. How long have you two been together?”

“A little over a year.”

“It's very cool of you to throw a party for him. I'd be so blown away if someone did that for me.”

“Nobody's ever thrown a surprise party for you? You don't seem like the kind of guy who's been totally deprived of female attention.”

“Not the
right
anybody,” he said, looking at her with an intensity that made the remark seem significant.

Once again she found herself blushing. “I guess I should be getting back,” she said, swilling the rest of her drink and rising to her feet.

“If you have any questions, just call,” he said, handing her a card.

Kyle went to his office on Monday, giving her a chance to make some calls. She sent the invitation out by e-mail at noon, and though she'd requested RSVPs by the same means, some of their friends, knowing they had separate lines, started calling her with acceptances just as he returned from campus. She had to keep her voice down and keep the conversation general while he puttered in the next room.

She was pleasantly surprised when Toby Clench called, having doubted he would come. One of Kyle's students at NYU a few years ago, he'd gone on to publish a wildly successful novel, and since then his teacher's feelings had oscillated between pride and jealousy. Kyle's own novel, published six years before, had been a critical success, but it hadn't been featured on the cover of the
New York Times Book Review
, as Toby's had, nor had it been optioned by Brad Pitt's production company. But Toby's meteoric debut had certainly raised Kyle's profile, because he routinely cited his mentor in interviews.

“I'll be coming in from London that afternoon,” Toby told her, “but for sure I wouldn't miss it.”

“Kyle will be so pleased,” Sabrina said. “I'll put you by someone sexy and smart.”

“I hope that means I'll be sitting next to you,” he said.

She heard Kyle's footsteps approaching the bedroom door. “We'll just have to see,” she said, lowering her voice.

Kyle appeared in the doorway as she put down the receiver. “S'up?”

“Nothing.” Her voice sounded high and false—the squawk of a seabird.

He smiled. “Need anything? I'm going out for a pack of smokes.”

“I'm fine.” How could he not notice her discomposure?

“See you in a few.”

She was relieved that he hadn't noticed anything, but after the elevator door closed behind him, she wondered if he'd always been so unobservant. In class she'd often heard him invoke Henry James's prescription for writers: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” He also had it on a typed index card tacked on the bulletin board over his desk.

She was pleased, though, to nab Toby for the party. That was a coup. And she'd definitely seat him next to her; after all, he'd asked. And as the hostess, she figured she was entitled to sit beside the smartest and most entertaining guy at the party. She'd loved his book. Sure, it had become fashionable to say Toby's novel was overrated—she'd heard Kyle say it—but in her opinion that was just jealousy talking.

The answering machine was a problem. She kept meaning to get the service from Verizon, but for now she turned down the volume whenever she left the bedroom, worried that Kyle might overhear something about his birthday. She kept the RSVP list in the bottom drawer of her desk. Suddenly she wondered if he ever looked through her things, or, for that matter, wondered about her life beyond the sphere of this loft. She considered the few stories he'd written since they'd been living together: The women in the stories weren't terribly complex, really. There was a recurring neurotic, mendacious, narcissist type that represented his old girlfriend. And then there was the nice girl, presumably her, who the angst-ridden protagonist struggles to be worthy of. Nice, but hardly subtle or interesting. Which said more about his lack of curiosity than it did about her. She couldn't remember the last time he'd asked her about her desires and dreams and fears. She hadn't said anything at the time, reading the last couple of stories, but he actually wasn't very good with female characters.

While Kyle was out getting cigarettes, George Brasso called to accept. “But I'd rather be having an intimate dinner with you,” he said.

“I'm not sure Kyle would like that.”

“Does that mean you told him about us?”

“To tell you the truth, I forgot about us until just this minute,” she said. They'd been classmates at Yale and they'd had a fling their first year in the city.

“You've never told him?”

“A girl needs a few secrets,” she said.

“I couldn't agree more.”

She heard the elevator. “I've gotta go. Kyle's back.”

“Call me.”

Sabrina went out to make a cup of tea, and Kyle was in the kitchen, flipping through the mail. While she stood at the counter, waiting for the water to boil, he came up behind her and wrapped one arm around her waist, groping her breast with his free hand.

“What say we take a little break?” he said.

“From what?” For some reason, she wasn't really in the mood. But as he stroked her breast, she relented. “Okay,” she said, turning off the kettle and walking back to the bedroom.

“Wow,” he said when they'd finished. She was almost surprised to hear his voice, so absorbed had she been in her own orgasm. She felt a little guilty, realizing she'd been thinking about George. They'd never really had any resolution to an affair that had lasted only a few months before George went off to Paris for
Newsweek
. Was she keeping her options open? George had, upon his return to New York, become a mutual friend, but somehow she'd neglected to tell Kyle about their history. Then again, she wondered why he'd never asked. She'd always been afraid the sexual tension between her and George was conspicuous, but Kyle had never once commented on it, which suddenly seemed incredibly weird. Was he that unperceptive, or did he just not care?

Two hours later she found herself increasingly irritable as she waited for him to leave for his weekly department meeting. She had a lot of party-related calls to make. With each passing minute she became more agitated. Finally she went out to see what he was doing. As nonchalantly as she could, she asked about the meeting.

“Postponed,” he said cheerfully. “Haddon and Maselli are sick.”

The next day, Sabrina had to fly to D.C. She worried herself sick about the phone, then decided it was better to say something than to have Kyle pick up her phone or turn up the volume on the answering machine.

“Listen,” she said, “I've ordered this birthday present and somebody might be calling about it. That's why I turned down the volume on the machine.”

“You don't have to get me anything,” he said.

Which struck her as a silly thing to say.

“Of course I do. And you sure as hell better get me something for mine. Now promise me you'll stay away from the phone.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

The next evening, the night before the party, they stayed home and watched
Le Mépris
, Godard's adaptation of the Moravia novel. Kyle was in a Moravia phase.

“Do you ever get jealous?” she asked, lying on the couch with her legs in his lap.

He shrugged. “Not really. I trust you.”

“I trust you, too,” she said. “But I wouldn't want you sharing a villa in Capri with Brigitte Bardot.”

“Don't worry,” he said. “She must be in her seventies by now.”