How It Ended Part 22

She slipped away around midnight, whispering that she hoped to see me again and disappearing at a raucous moment, so that I was the only one to actually observe her departure. I would learn later that this was her habitual strategy, that she didn't believe in saying good-bye.

After that, I followed her career as a girl about town, watching for her at parties and in the gossip columns. She was one of those women who conquered Manhattan for a few years, who seemed to be everywhere and to know everyone interesting, although even the most brilliant and articulate among her admirers had a hard time defining the qualities that made her so popular, in part because her greatest gift was the ability to reflect and magnify the attributes of those around her, particularly with men, a talent that was much rarer in New York than it was in Tennessee. She had a way of identifying and admiring the traits you liked most in yourself, no matter how recessive, so that as long as you were with her, you could imagine you were the person you most wanted to be. "Tony is the most extraordinarily talented tax accountant." "Roger has the most exquisite taste of any heteros.e.xual in the city." "Collin was without a doubt the most popular man in Savannah before he chose to break a thousand hearts and move up north." She added to the collective sense of self-esteem. And though it wasn't obvious at the time, it became clear after she left that she wasn't terribly invested in the whole scene-and that was another aspect of her charm. Unlike the rest of us, her lack of vaulting ambition gave her an aura of grace. As it turned out, she was just visiting from another world. Several admirers tried to get her to stay. I knew of three spurned marriage proposals-from a publishing mogul, a playwright and a tennis player-and two book dedications.

One theory about Blythe's elusiveness, propounded by her nephew, was that she would never marry anyone while her father-a former Tennessee governor and doting domestic tyrant-was alive. I never met the man, but he left a big footprint on his native soil. In Nashville, a street and two buildings, including the tallest skysc.r.a.per, were named for him. As the president of the chamber of commerce, he'd gone up against the prohibitionist lobby to legalize restaurant alcohol sales, reaping a whirlwind of calumny and death threats; for more than a year, Blythe had been attended by full-time bodyguards. He had not approved of any of Blythe's suitors, Jackson told me, not even the English lord who'd brought him a present of matched Purdey shotguns. And he certainly wouldn't have approved of me. Another of her expatriate kinsmen speculated it was the death of her beloved brother in Vietnam that had made her so skittish about long-term attachments. At any rate, she left the city before anybody had a chance to get tired of her, and before she became coa.r.s.ened by it or embittered by watching younger women take her place.

Blythe went home to Tennessee to care for her ailing parents, but she kept her apartment in the city and returned for brief visits every couple of months. I saw her at parties with a poet or a CEO, or, once, with a ridiculously good-looking guy who, she said, was a carpenter from Tennessee. One night, at a c.o.c.ktail party in an Upper East Side penthouse, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and found Blythe standing alone, her blond hair billowing in the breeze from the river. Against the backdrop of the downtown skyline-with her head slightly tilted to the right, it looked as if she were leaning up against the Chrysler Building-she seemed like the embodiment of all my cosmopolitan fantasies.

"Well," she said, "you've certainly made good since I last saw you."

It was true. My first book had been a success and I was currently adapting it for the screen. Perhaps this emboldened me enough to ask her out, something I would have been too intimidated to do a few years earlier. I couldn't believe my good fortune, and not long after finding myself in her bed at the end of our third date, I proposed. Why she accepted me, having turned down so many others, I can't really say. Maybe it was because her father had died the year before, or maybe she'd just gotten tired of fleeing. Sometimes I think she agreed to my proposal on a whim, marriage being one of the few adventures she hadn't essayed. Or it's possible I was just at the right place at the right moment. At the time, I never really asked the question, being more than a little full of myself and my own success, but in retrospect, I have to wonder. Better-looking, more successful, richer and funnier men than I had failed to drag her to the altar.

A childhood friend of Blythe once dropped a clue that I didn't initially pay much attention to, saying that I reminded her of Blythe's deceased older brother. "I don't know what it is, something about your smile, the way you carry yourself. But d.a.m.n if you didn't make me think of Jimmy just now. They were really close. Blythe was just devastated." Later, I cautiously tested this theory on my wife. We were in bed, flipping through the on-screen cable guide, looking for movies. Platoon Platoon was coming up on HBO. was coming up on HBO.

"I never really thought about it," she said in response to my question. "I suppose it's possible. Maybe, subconsciously, you do remind me of Jimmy."

"Do you think about him often?" I asked.

"No, not very," she said.

"Really?"

"You know, one of the things I hate about the South is the backward-looking aspect, the obsessive dwelling on the past. Nostalgia is like our regional disease. All that longing for the lost cause, lost plantations, Dixie. All those odes to the Confederate dead. That was one of the things I wanted to get away from when I went north. I try not to look back. Ever."

After our city hall wedding, we split our time between Manhattan, where I taught a spring semester workshop at Columbia, and Tennessee, where we bought an antebellum farmhouse outside Nashville with sagging wide-board floors, tilting barns and ragged pastures. Early on it became clear that she was happier on the farm than she was on Park Avenue. I came to think of her as Persephone, who stoically suffered her six months in Hades in exchange for another six in the sunlight of the surface world. Which would make me the king of the underworld.

For a long time I was happy enough with the contrast between our two worlds. After a decade in the city, I was ready for a change-and I was in love. Honestly, I would have followed her anywhere, although there was something particularly romantic for me, student of Faulkner and Welty that I was, about seeing her in her natural environment. For me, the South was mysterious and exotic, and the sense of nostalgia for a lost Eden, the deeply ingrained social hierarchies and the polite insincerity of public discourse were all endlessly intriguing. I studied the local population with the detachment of an anthropologist and the pa.s.sionate intensity of a man attempting to decode the mysteries of his wife.

In those early days, Blythe's menagerie consisted of six cats, one of which deposited a dead bird on my chest the first morning I woke up in her bed. "A welcome offering," she said. "You should feel very honored." But once we moved to the farm, the animal population exploded, starting with goats, eventually five of them. Blythe left the table in the middle of a dinner party to check on the pregnant goat that was confined in the laundry room and returned forty minutes later, her white peasant blouse thoroughly stained with blood. "We have a new member of the household," she said, sitting down to resume her meal as if she'd just stepped out to go to the bathroom. "Topsy just gave birth to a fine young billy goat. What did I miss?"

The chickens came next, although the foxes eventually took care of those-except for the one clever enough to move in with the goats. Our first horse was adopted from the local polo club after it came up lame; she took the second, a stately black Tennessee walking horse, in trade for a Parker side-by-side shotgun inherited from her father.

I took to the role of country squire, even going so far as to buy a secondhand John Deere tractor with a bush hog in order to cut the fields myself. At times I could almost imagine leaving my life in the city forever. In the spring, before the heat became unendurable, we would sit on the back porch and observe the sunsets, which could be positively lurid across the back pasture. I would fix a pitcher of martinis and we'd sit and watch the horizon flare up pink and orange. The air was laced with the sweet herbal tang of fresh-cut gra.s.s and horse manure and you could feel it grow cooler as the fireflies became visible in the failing light. If we lacked anything at all, it was hard for me to imagine what it might be. Blythe, however, had plans.

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I would always claim later that the pig was foisted on me through trickery, particularly after it had just eaten an entire coq au vin, or destroyed a cashmere coat in search of the packet of cashews in my breast pocket. She'd talked before about getting a potbellied pig, but I'd quashed the idea, or so I thought. Her strategy was to buy one for the movie star, whose fortieth-birthday party we'd been invited to, and for some reason couldn't attend. So in our stead, Blythe sent a baby potbellied pig to the event-at the Beverly Wilshire-dressed in a bridal veil. The pig was presented to the movie star shortly after the cake and was a big hit, especially with his kids, who apparently were pretty upset when he decided he couldn't keep it; he was about to go off on location for three months and his ex-wife wanted nothing to do with a pig, potbellied or otherwise. I think Blythe had been counting on this all along. In her birthday note she offered to raise the foundling if it didn't prove convenient for him to do so. A week later the pig was back in Tennessee.

If I'd known it was meant to be an indoor pet, I might have protested from the start, but in its infancy, when it was about the size of a football, it had the inherent charm of all baby mammals, and the fact that it was so easily trained to use a litter box was an added bonus. But somehow I a.s.sumed that when it got bigger and fatter, it would take its place outdoors with the other farmyard creatures as G.o.d and nature had intended. At any rate, I was led to believe that it would always remain a shrimp among pigs. "Potbellies don't get really big," Blythe a.s.sured me. "She's definitely fully grown," she said, a few months later, when she was already too heavy for Blythe to lift. "No way will she get any bigger than this. The breeder showed me pictures of her parents."

I don't quite know what compelled Blythe to surround herself with animals, even in the face of fierce and protracted human opposition. After two miscarriages and one round of in-vitro fertilization, we had both resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren't going to have children. This certainly played a role, but I think it was a preexisting condition. Her friends told me about the racc.o.o.ns and squirrels of her childhood, and a previous boyfriend, with whom she was still on good terms, confided to me one night over bourbon that he thought she cared more about animals than people. At any rate, a week after Sweetheart arrived, Blythe discovered she was pregnant again. We might have been spared the pig if our son had been born a little earlier.

The pig was, if anything, cuter at first than the baby. Blythe certainly thought so. For three months after Dylan came home from the hospital, after a long bout with a staph infection, she seemed strangely indifferent to him, and far more absorbed by the piglet. Eventually her maternal impulses kicked in, for which I was grateful, although our s.e.x life never really recovered. We would hardly have been the first couple to have experienced postpartum celibacy, but I couldn't help wondering if the pig, by now sleeping in a little box beside our bed, didn't bear some of the blame. Dylan gradually grew hair and developed recognizable human features, while Sweetheart, whom Blythe referred to as his older sister, soon sported long black bristles and a vast sagging belly. To me, she resembled a boar who'd come in from the wild in order to live the good life. I don't think it was ever Blythe's intention that her name would seem ironic, but it was hard not to see it as such.

Many of our friends were horrified once the pig got big enough to knock them over if they happened to be standing between it and a food source, or after it rooted through their purses or their luggage to snack on soaps and cosmetics. It didn't help that Blythe would inevitably blame the victims.

"Well, you could hardly expect a red-blooded pig to resist a delicious and highly aromatic Cadbury bar that just happened to be lying within easy reach, practically begging to be eaten. It's not fair. Really, Karen, you should watch where you leave your purse. Now she's going to have a tummy ache all night."

Pity the houseguest who made the mistake of leaving his suitcase on the floor and then tried to complain about the destruction. "You don't have to tell me me she ate your prescriptions-she's been up all night puking her guts out. What the h.e.l.l kind of pills did you bring into this house anyway? You could have killed little Sweetheart McSwine." she ate your prescriptions-she's been up all night puking her guts out. What the h.e.l.l kind of pills did you bring into this house anyway? You could have killed little Sweetheart McSwine."

The houseguest proved to be too flabbergasted to point out that there was nothing little about Sweetheart, too flummoxed by Blythe's righteousness to press his grievance-the fact that hundreds of dollars of pharmaceuticals were consumed and that he would be suffering from acid reflux, insomnia, high cholesterol and high anxiety until he could replace them. Instead, he stammered an apology. He came from across the seas, after all; he'd heard about the eccentricity of southerners.

Blythe used to say pigs were smarter than dogs, and this one certainly showed great ingenuity in the pursuit of anything edible. Sweetheart learned to open the refrigerator door before her first birthday. She would feign sleep, only to lunge at a bag of potato chips or a bowl of popcorn when she sensed we'd let our guard down. Dylan was regularly robbed of his snacks and his bottle. If we failed to clear the table after a dinner party, she would inevitably pull the tablecloth to the floor in order to get at the leftovers. On the first such occasion we lost a fair portion of the antique crystal and china that Blythe had inherited from her parents. We heard the crash and went running downstairs from our bed-neither the first nor the last time the pig would interrupt coitus.

She was busy rooting in the remains of the cheese plate, becoming frenzied as Blythe tried to separate her from the feast, snorting and grunting as she engaged in a tug-of-war for the last of the Manchego. Then she bolted for the living room, sliding and nearly falling over as her hooves. .h.i.t the bare floor beyond the dining room carpet as Blythe jumped to her feet empty-handed. "Bad Sweetheart," she shouted. "Bad girl!"

"I don't believe this," I said, surveying the wreckage-the shards of Waterford and Worcester, the linen tablecloth soaked in red wine.

"Cheese is just so bad for her," she said.

"That's your big concern? That cheese is bad for her?"

"Well," she said, "at least there wasn't any chocolate on the table."

It was trying enough to have the pig in the house in Tennessee; weirder still when Blythe decided it should go with us to New York. She felt Sweetheart would be too lonely in Tennessee for six months without us. During our New York sojourns, we lived in one of the snootier co-op apartment buildings on the Upper East Side, where capital was only the most obvious of the entry requirements, and I certainly wouldn't have pa.s.sed the co-op board if not for Blythe's venerable family name, which even graced the Declaration of Independence. I still couldn't believe they'd let me in, but I was pretty sure they'd draw the line at Sweetheart. "What they don't know won't hurt them," Blythe told me.

I pointed out the impracticality of transport, of sneaking Sweetheart into the building and keeping her existence a secret, but it was no use.

Blythe had a friend who designed handbags, and she had him construct a special carrying case with a st.u.r.dy plywood bottom. "She has to fly in the cabin with us," she insisted. "She'll be traumatized flying in the hold." I said that even if Sweetheart could fit under the seat, which I doubted, it was probably illegal to take a pig into the cabin of a pa.s.senger plane. "Then we'll just have to smuggle her aboard," she said.

Because the beast was now tipping the scales at eighty pounds, this scheme required my partic.i.p.ation. On the morning of our departure, I staggered into the Nashville airport carrying a heavily reinforced black canvas shoulder bag. Blythe was carrying Dylan, who then weighed about eighteen pounds.

"What's in the bag?" the guard asked at the security checkpoint.

"Actually, it's a potbellied pig," Blythe said.

"A what?"

The other guards gathered around, more excited than alarmed, while I unzipped the front of the bag and Blythe expounded on the habits of the domestic pig.

"They're actually very clean. She loves to eat soap; she had a bar of Crabtree & Evelyn lemon verbena that she relished the other morning. A free-range pig will always go to the far corner of her enclosure to do her business, and Sweetheart has a litter box.... Well, yes, it's a big litter box. They eat just about anything, but we try to keep her on a vegetarian diet to help her retain her girlish figure."

In the end, the security supervisor couldn't recall any official ban on pigs, and Sweetheart marched through the metal detector on her leash while her bag went through the X-ray machine. A small crowd had gathered before we managed to stuff her back in her bag.

Blythe was addressing a young brother and sister. "Of course she knows her name. They're very smart-way smarter than dogs."

With no small difficulty, I hoisted the bag up on my shoulder and started toward the gate, moving deliberately, like a conscientious drunk. When our group number was called, I threw a jacket over my bulging carry-on and followed Blythe past the stewardess checking boarding pa.s.ses-hoping Dylan might distract her-and lurched into the plane, located our seats and swung the bag into the s.p.a.ce in front of them, though it didn't quite fit and its occupant was grunting indignantly. When I straightened up, I felt the sharp bite of a pulled muscle in my lower back. I pressed the top of the bag, the pig squealing away, and finally slid it under the seats. Glaring at my wife, who was standing in the aisle behind me, I indicated the window seat. She climbed in and perched, her feet resting on the bag; I eased myself into the aisle seat, grunting as I felt the hot stab of back pain. I'd just settled in beside her when a fat woman clutching a violin case tapped my shoulder. "I'm sorry, but I think this is my row. Twelve A. That would be the window seat."

"This is row thirteen," I said.

She pointed to the illuminated number over my head. "Twelve, see? You're in the next row back."

"Oh s.h.i.t," I said, rolling my eyes and glaring at Blythe, who seemed to find the whole situation hysterically funny. From a certain point of view, I guess it was funny. But from seat 12B, it was incredibly frustrating. It wasn't the pig, per se, although that was a major component. A year ago, even a month ago, I'd shared a frame of reference with Blythe; we lived within the same marriage. Her idiosyncrasies were charming and her faults, in the early years of our marriage, virtues. That she insisted on living with a pig and treating it like a member of the family was amusing enough, especially when we were still having s.e.x on a regular basis. But now for the first time I felt myself looking over at her as if from a great distance, from outside the rosy bubble of our shared existence. At that moment I felt something turn cold inside of me.

With an almost palpable sigh of relief, I resumed my life in New York. For the next six months I was back on my own turf, among my friends and living in a beautiful apartment, which I now shared with a potbellied pig-a pig that, by the end of the year, was well over a hundred pounds and far too big to be lifted. Blythe had taken one of the doormen into her confidence, but we had to hide her from our fellow shareholders and especially from the super, a cranky tyrant who certainly would have reported us to the board. To prevent her detection, Blythe designed a secret compartment underneath the platform bed, where Sweetheart could be hidden on short notice.

As she grew, we had to get increasingly bigger litter boxes, which we concealed beneath a round side table draped in a floor-length cloth. Our occasional dinner parties would sometimes be interrupted by the thunder of hooves on the parquet floor as a black shape shot across the floor, disappeared under the table and then, after a pause, unleashed a hissing torrent. The contents of the litter box became something of an obsession for Blythe. Because our garbage was sorted by the super and his minions down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, she believed it had to be disposed of outside the building. She solicited her friends and kept a collection of shopping bags-Barneys, Bergdorf, Chanel, Armani-that would seem appropriate on the arm of an uptown girl, and once a day she would venture out with one of these, a beautiful woman carrying a bag of pig s.h.i.t out to Park Avenue. She chose a different street-corner trash receptacle each day, fearing, irrationally, that the garbage collectors might become suspicious of agricultural waste and locate the illegal animal unless extraordinary measures of concealment were taken.

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 G.o.d 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 ent.i.tled, less guilty about my transgression. I didn't really have a plan or a specific ambition for the affair. Katrina was funny and s.e.xy, 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 a.s.sistant who held my gaze as she suctioned my gums; the librarian who helped me find Peter Quennell's Byron in Italy; 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 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-a.s.s 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 bulls.h.i.tting me. Stop bulls.h.i.tting yourself. You've been lying to both of us. And don't you dare say not really 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sistant 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 c.u.n.t! G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 f.u.c.k 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 she knew and was p.i.s.sed. 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. knew and was p.i.s.sed. 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 h.e.l.l," 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, GRa.s.sMERE ZOO GRa.s.sMERE ZOO stamped on each one. 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 G.o.d," Blythe said.

I looked around. "Shouldn't someone ... be here?"

For the moment we were alone.

I looked at her. "Maybe we should ..."