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.
When next we see her, dutiful at the dictator’s side at a dance, we watch her delicate hands with a new interest, see the poignancy of the gold cross at her throat, study the way her dark hair frames her face. We feel a warmth not unlike pity in our chests. This surprises us.
Mater dolorosa, she has become newly interesting. A dark flower of sorrow transplanted to the strange soil of this bright place; a woman famous for painting angels.
THE RAINY SEASON ARRIVES and we can no longer swim in the pool, or walk by the lake, or play croquet, or complain about the heat. We can no longer stand on the hill and watch the young officers through our binoculars. There are the endless tea parties, the dramatic recitations of Shakespeare, the new Chaplin we love no less for being a whole year late. The remaking parties when we take apart our old dresses and refashion them according to the magazines our friends and sisters send us, letting down the waists and necklines, heaving up the hems. We smoke cigarettes out the windows, eat pastries until we gasp for air in our clothing, squash spiders under our thumbs, too weary to make much of a fuss. Affairs spark up during the rainy season and fizzle along in the dampness. Our husbands eat their lunches at the club and we are relieved that we don’t have to entertain them, too. When we are reduced to watching the pots of geraniums on the verandas fill with water and overspill, we scold our servants for their lapses in housekeeping. They stand, eyelashes on their cheeks, until we release them. We’re sure they talk about us in their language in the kitchen. It aggravates us until we want to slap them. Sometimes we do.