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 thrilclass="underline" 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.