Delicate Edible Birds Read online

  Then came the fall morning when the boys were at school and Blythe slipped from the house and drove to the Jersey shore, where her mother’s family had had a summer house for generations. She went to a cup of light at the top of the antique curving stairwell. In that smell of salt and fish, under the rattle of the bubbled windows, she slit her wrists, letting her blood dribble in rays down the stairs. But the man the family hired to check on the house grew suspicious on seeing Blythe’s car in the drive and entered, and she was saved, yet again.

  THE CHILDREN WERE IN MIDDLE SCHOOL when Blythe began spreading rumors about herself. She was quite large by then, and reporters had stopped taking pictures of her. Plus, her newest performance was not going well. Africa had grown popular as a cause: the extent of the genocide in Rwanda was emerging, and Blythe had orchestrated a piece in which she’d “borrowed” Tutsi orphans, some as old as three, and put them naked in a close, white room, to be suckled by extremely pale women. The babies sobbed and soiled themselves and the women, though they had been told to hold still, grew anxious, wanting to clean the babies, to comfort them. I could only stand to see it for a minute before I walked out. The critics had the same reaction I did.

  Blythe had always been a canny marketer; her new rumor campaign had a sort of sidewise brilliance. Some of what she spread was true, some was flagrantly untrue, but everything had an element of reality to it. These are only a few of the many rumors I heard:

  That Blythe had found Christ by seducing a Catholic priest. True.

  That Blythe had spent an entire semester as artist in residence at Bryn Mawr sitting with her back turned to her students and saying nary a word. Untrue.

  That Blythe had found herself a lesbian lover. True; the lover was an unattractive fifty-year-old psychiatrist from Plymouth Meeting with whom she had a yearlong affair. At its denouement, the lover showed up at my house weeping, wanting me to explain Blythe to her. I could only give her some warm milk and send her home.

  That Blythe had found herself wandering naked in South Philadelphia. Semi-true: she had been wandering naked, but it was on the Swarthmore campus.

  That Blythe had had sexual urges for Tom, her son. This scared me the most. I longed to ask him, to make sure he was all right, but it is hard to meddle with a family, and I couldn’t hurt Blythe like that. I watched him and hoped. I still had faith in Blythe.

  I had tried to protect Blythe from these rumors for a long time; I had no idea she was the one spreading them. But one day when she sat on my veranda, nursing a glass of ginger ale, she began telling me a strange dark fable in which, a year earlier, she had been abducted by a man at the grocery store, held for twenty-four hours in a small apartment, and repeatedly violated. She had given the man her engagement ring, and when he was out pawning it, she escaped, half-naked, and caught a ride home in a taxicab. She had actually rather enjoyed the escape, she said. I should tell my girls and any other woman I knew, she said, because that man could still be out there in this horrible world of ours.

  She told me this, looking beyond me and nodding. I watched her, ill. There was no twenty-four-hour stretch in the past year when I hadn’t spoken to Blythe. There was no twelve-hour stretch. I was there when she lost her engagement ring down the pool filter, and cried for four hours, for fear of Pritch. Her story was horribly false.

  But I knew what harm I could do by showing disbelief, and said, “That sounds awful,” then asked her how her Rwandan piece was doing.

  She gave me her old dazzling smile and leaned forward. “Darling,” she said, “I’m doing it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m officially famous.”

  She was, and she had been even before that moment, and she would remain so for these five years since. All this time Sam and I have become more comfortable, moved from Manayunk to a house in Rittenhouse Square, spent our weekends fixing it up. I gained some small celebrity with my critical pieces, perhaps mainly because I had tried to eschew the savagery that was so common in my field, and instead tried to locate the piece I was considering within the larger web of art, to consider it under those lights. I was afraid of what I would discover if I considered Blythe’s. I never did.

  Blythe once read a piece of mine, a five-thousand-word essay in The New York Review of Books, then waved it at herself, as if it were a giant fan. She said, “This is great and all, but, Harriet, doesn’t it make you sad to do this kind of stuff? You were such a good poet, remember? Writing about writing just seems so, I don’t know. Meaningless. Or masturbatory, or what have you.”

  I had to control my voice. “I think,” I said, “that criticism can be just as meaningful as the art it considers. It creates a dialogue.”

  “Art creates dialogue,” said Blythe. “Critics are just vultures.” She watched my face with her sharp green eyes, then laughed. “Not you,” she said. “You’re too sweet for carrion.” She poured me another glass of iced tea and chattered away until my irritation dissolved and I found my resistances collapsing, found myself sinking into her again.

  IN THE AUTUMN THIS PAST YEAR I went to Blythe’s house, prodded by a bad feeling, and found a spout of Pritch’s clothes issuing from the bedroom window, a hailstorm of shoes. Pritch was in the yard, red-faced, gathering his things from where they fell into the piles of leaves. “Harriet,” he spat when he saw me. “If she doesn’t do it herself, I swear to God I’m going to kill her.”

  I looked at Pritch. He stood, his arms heaped with suits, and sighed. “She’s insisting that we get a divorce. Out of nowhere. Not to mention hypocritical for a born-again Catholic. I’m apparently the one that makes her crazy.”

  “Oh, Pritch,” I said. “Oh, no.” His eyes were red-rimmed. I said, “You’re the one who keeps her sane.”

  “You are,” he said. “We both know it.” Pritch dropped his face into the bundle of clothing and held it there for a long time. “Harriet,” he said, looking up at last, “I give up. I’m so tired. It’s up to you now, kid.” He walked to his car and shoved the things into the backseat, then sat on the bumper and buried his head in his hands again.

  When I went inside, Tom was sitting on the stairwell. “Oh, Aunt Harriet,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Tom was seventeen, a beautiful boy though almost too graceful, with worry marks etched in his forehead. He still spoke with a lisp. Of all my children, and I include Blythe’s, he was the one who gave me heartache; his happiness seemed the least sure, his life to come the hardest. I gave him a kiss on the way upstairs, and he squeezed my hand as I passed. He smelled of pine and, surprisingly, jasmine.

  When I opened Blythe’s door, she was in the middle of the floor, nude. She was pulling her hair with both hands. My friend had gained a great deal of weight again, and I looked at her body with a little thrill: my own aging one was so lumpy compared to hers. Her fat was smooth, her body beautifully large. I lay down beside her. She rolled over and buried her hot, wet face on my chest, and I rubbed her head until she calmed.

  “I hate him,” she mumbled. I could feel her mouth move warm on my breast and, to my shame, felt my nipple harden. “I figured it all out. I wasn’t really crazy until I married him. And then I had his kids, and poof! I’m insane. I’m getting a divorce. I’m getting it tomorrow. Just wait and see.”

  I just stroked her glossy hair, wondering when she’d begun to get those few white hairs, when the crows’-feet had pushed themselves more deeply beside her eyes. I didn’t know how to say that I was tired, too. I had just that morning refused a wonderful offer to teach in England, and had refused many more lectureships in the past, because I couldn’t be away from Blythe, for fear that her world would crash down and I wouldn’t be there to salvage what remained. I didn’t know how to say that I wished she could safely go to the beauty salon without me, to the grocery store, to the movies. That I wished she were a stranger, and I could walk away. That I wished to go to sleep for just one night without the fear of awakening into a shattered world.

  I couldn’t say this, of course. So
I said nothing.

  For a long time we lay there as the sky darkened and small rain fell through the open window. Downstairs, we could hear Bear’s television nattering and Tom moving about the kitchen, making dinner. “Oh, Harriet,” she sighed into my chest. “My Harriet.” She drew her head up. Her eyes had gone slate gray and narrow. She leaned forward and gave me a long, lingering kiss. Her lips were very soft and tasted like whiskey.

  I can’t say that I didn’t like it. I can’t say that somewhere in me, for twelve years, I had not longed for exactly that. To be, for a moment, the center. To, finally, take.

  She nuzzled my cheek. When she gave a seductive little laugh, a laugh that spoke of practice, of seduction, I felt a break in me.

  I pushed Blythe aside and stood, shaking. I went to the door. And I didn’t look around when I said, “Blythe, honey. Get dressed and come downstairs. Take a deep breath, and do whatever it is you want me to tell you to do.”

  I left. My call awoke the kindly gentleman in England, who had been so disappointed when I’d refused the lectureship that morning. He was gracious and pleased that I had changed my mind. Weeks later, when the plane lifted from the runway for the transoceanic flight, I felt as if I were a great plant being ripped from the ground, roots snapping below me with great shudderings.

  AT THE END OF THE TERM I flew home for Blythe’s party in honor of her grandest award yet. When the plane circled down into polluted, glorious Philadelphia, I felt I willed it down myself. But I didn’t have time to do much more than hug my girls, take one long look at my Rittenhouse Square garden, with its wisteria climbing the latticework, and then Sam and I hurried to the party. In the tight space of the car, my husband seemed a stranger to me, and we held the shyness of a first date between us, sweet and awkward.

  “It’s been so hard without you,” he said when we turned into the driveway of the monstrous modern house in Paoli where the party was to take place. In his words I felt his giddy relief at my return. Then he added, “Not just me. All of us. Mack and Sue went nuts somehow. Blythe, too. Harriet,” he said, watching me in a sidelong way, “I’m afraid that Blythe is going again.”

  I nodded. All summer I sensed a growing problem, and had called Blythe twice a week. And just before I returned to America, I received a package from my friend, two inches thick with her new piece she’d been creating at a white heat since spring. Bombing the Wreck, she called it. As far as I could tell, it was only a collection of loose, troublesome lines: and so I choose the bloodsnake / the writhing shades in the eggs it makes / curls like smoke and licks my life / for I have wearied so of water. The accompanying drawings for the performance made no sense to me: Blythe in a swimsuit, majestic, chained underwater in a great glass aquarium. This was not a performance. I didn’t quite know what it was.

  The party was enormous, more than two hundred important people, and Blythe was late, of course. One hour rolled into two and I stood alone at the edge of the living room, growing furious. I could be with my girls, I thought: they had surprised me with how leggy they’d become in the few short months I’d been gone, and I wanted to touch them again, to know how they had changed. In the living room of the modern house, the cement walls had been scattered with random-seeming windows, and the party, growing edgier by the minute, was reflected back at itself. I searched the windows for a reflection of Sam’s dear bald pate, my one comfort, but couldn’t find him. I felt a little bereft at the lack.

  At last, some of the guests began to slink home and the hostess finally gave up on Blythe. She gathered people at the buffet, though the meat was now rubbery, the shrimp pale, the potatoes cold.

  Only then did the sliding doors thunder open, drowning out the light techno on the air. A jolt, a buzz, recognition: Blythe had arrived. I was too angry to look up, but heard her husky voice saying, “Oh, darlings, I am fearfully late, so sorry. A car crash! It was awful.”

  The irritation in the room disappeared like smoke. I peered at Blythe in the concise reflection in the window. She wore a golden-brown velvet minidress, a thick gold cuff on her bicep, one arm in a sling. Her head was thrown back, hips forward, the good arm akimbo on her hip. All adazzle, as usual. She was magnificent, as shocking as she was that first night I saw her, if mainly because of the warp of the glass. I also knew that when I turned, I would see Blythe as she actually was, the lines on her thin skin, the lickings of her lips, the great broad bulk, the panic in the eyes whirling up as soon as she saw me, that need.

  I thought: I will turn around now. I’ll pull her back again. I gave myself to the count of three, but kept counting to thirty, and didn’t turn. Come on, Harriet, I scolded myself. But I was so very weary. I just couldn’t do it. Not again.

  Instead, I looked into the glass, into the darkness of the October night. I thought of how, out there in a Pennsylvania pond, near some sleeping farmhouse, there was probably one old catfish caught and released so often her gills were scarred and stiff, barely filtering the water anymore. When I took a step closer to the wall of windows, I saw my own face grow large and pale. Beyond, the moon and the dark lawn seemed to shrink the closer I came to them. I took another step, watched them shrink again. Blythe spoke, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I heard the hunger in them.

  I would release her. She’d swim into whatever dark and terrible place she needed to go. I could do no more. I took one more step toward my face, toward the landscape, a chill draft from the loose casing stroking my cheek. One more step. Then I watched it all, miraculously, bloom.

  The Wife of the Dictator

  THE WIFE OF THE DICTATOR IS SALLOW AND strange. She’s a plump woman, uncomfortable here in the hot sun with our cocktails and croquet. She has not yet learned to perspire with grace; in one hour her gray silk dress is dotted, then black with moisture. She speaks little, moves in a series of small fidgets, wears a corset. When she stands to excuse herself and gives us her hand it is so soft it seems almost to not exist at all.

  What has been reported is true: the dictator has brought back a wife from his last visit to America. It is also true that she is not one of us.

  We survey the hole in the air where she had been sitting, let it fill for a moment with the scratchy tenor on the gramophone. The children shriek at the edge of the lake with their nannies; we mix more gin into our drinks. When the dictator’s black car slides from the compound, dips from sight into the city, and later beetles up the hill toward the pink palace glistening in the sun, we, at last, feel free to wonder.

  The dictator is an enormous man with a cruel mouth: we like to watch him on his chestnut charger when his troops are doing maneuvers on the parade grounds. Wherever could he have gotten this plump sparrow of a wife? And why, when he could have plucked one from the ten thousand good families of his own country, trembling girls with downcast eyes and charming virginal figures? If he must marry an American to discharge what secret debts he holds, could he not have chosen one of our daughters or one of our friends, some fine, laughing girl who would know how to entertain us at the palace, a girl who would at least look good beside the dictator on horseback?

  The tiny monkeys chew red fruits and cast the sticky seeds down into our hair.

  Her family must be very rich, we say, and imagine train lines, coal mines, houses in Newport. Woozy under the sun and drink, someone says she looks like a medium, and we imagine her in a dark room, ectoplasm spinning from her mouth, voices of the dead rising from within her to enchant the dictator into an occultish love. Or maybe, we say, she sat opposite him on a train, and her plainness moved the dictator to pity, his hard heart dissolving into a thousand small butterflies that flitted away with his sense.

  We drink, we speculate, until our heads ring wild. We are ossified, we laugh; we are zozzled. At home, in a pique, we put our good dresses away; they hadn’t been worth wearing, now, had they. The evening cools and from the city smells of strange cooking waft up to us. When our husbands come home from the Company, from the Embassy, we sit beside them as they
eat their supper. Like our children who hold up for our scrutiny the strange stones they find by the lakeside, green-veined, bulb-shaped chunks of this country, we hold the dictator’s wife up for our husbands’ amusement. We exaggerate her oddness, say she reminds us of our mothers’ generation, conservative and dark, of Queen Victoria. We turn her this way and that, and, in the process, we make her an object of wonder.

  THE DICTATOR IS ONLY two years a dictator, a man from an obscure mountain city. There had been unrest in his country for a decade, bloodshed and bandits; from the turmoil the dictator was spat into power, as smooth and hard as a gem. This city is still ensconced in the nineteenth century, with its alabaster gas lamps and carriages still more plentiful than automobiles; his grandeur suits it well. There is something in him that makes other men smaller. At the few dinners to which we were invited when he was a bachelor, we watched his tanned, scarred face, his hawk nose, the vast breadth of his shoulders, and when he put his eyes on us we might as well have been nude.

  By hints and dribbles we hear of the dictator’s wife in her former life in Saint Louis. To escape the humid fug we float in the women’s pool, waiting for the cocktail hour, and talk of what we’ve learned. She is four years older than the dictator, we know now, the widow of another man, the mother of a dead son. She was born into nothing, a provincial dull family, married a boat captain on the Mississippi. On their boy’s ninth birthday his father took him on a trip. A flash flood, and the ship foundered and sank, drowning her husband, her boy.

  In grief, the dictator’s wife took up painting. She painted scenes of epiphany, revelation, saturated with color, details to make grown men weep. She is Catholic, like the natives, we hear: and we can’t help but see her in the confessional, the grille casting shadows like lace on her skin, her thin mouth hungry for grace.