night for a year or so. Two years maybe. Mostly at the end.”
“And where did the pig sleep?”
“Between us.”
“Between you. In the bed.” Apparently, she wants to make sure she's clear on this point.
“Sometimes it would burrow under the covers and sleep down at the foot.”
“Didn't you think this was relevant to our enterprise here? To the whole question of the fate of the marriage? That you were being asked to sleep with a pig between you. Am I safe in assuming this wasn't your idea?”
“Of course not.” About this at least, I can be emphatic. “It was hers.”
“And you didn't object?”
“Well, yeah, sometimes. In the beginning.”
“And then?”
“Well, you get used to things.”
She sighs and shakes her head. “I think we need to talk about this.”
I can see her point. In retrospect, here, on the Upper West Side of New York, sitting in this book-lined office across from my shrink, who is literally and figuratively framed within a constellation of diplomas and portraits of Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, I can imagine how bizarre this sounds. Now that it's come up, I'm kind of amazed myself that I let my ex-wife talk me into sharing the bed with her potbellied pig. Over time almost anything can come to seem normal in the course of a marriage: food fetishes, sexual kinks, even in-laws. First you get talked into a pet pig, and the next thing you know it's sleeping with you.
“How did it get up on the bed?”
“She built a ramp. With carpeted steps.”
“And you didn't think this was … unusual? And, in terms of your marriage, unhealthy? How did you manage to have sexual relations with a—How big was the pig?”
“By then? Hard to say, really. Too big to lift anyway. I threw my back out the last time I tried. Hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy pounds. About my weight. Plus, the shape's kind of awkward and it's not like they're going to hold still and stay quiet when you try to pick them up.” Normally, her expression is pretty imperturbable, but for the first time in our association I get the impression that she's looking at me like I'm a crazy person. “They're actually very clean,” I add. “And they're smarter than dogs.” I realize I'm quoting my ex. I can anticipate my shrink saying something to the effect that we were enabling each other in our respective fantasy worlds.
She nods slowly, drinking this in, and regarding me with what seems to me an air of wonder mixed with disappointment, as if she now has to reevaluate our relationship and start again from the beginning. It's the kind of expression that leads me to wonder whether psychiatrists ever fire their patients. I want to point out, in my defense, that her cat's purring away in my lap and she didn't seem to think there was anything weird about that.
“Well,” she says. “We certainly have a lot to talk about next week, don't we?”
Having thought I was marrying a southern belle, I hadn't counted on getting Ellie May Clampitt in the bargain. I met her at one of the most fashionable watering holes in Manhattan, where she made an unconsciously grand, fashionably late entrance on the arm of a movie star. It was a birthday dinner for my friend Jackson Peavey, and the chair next to mine had been empty for half an hour. When I asked someone about my absent dinner partner and was told the seat belonged to Blythe, Jackson's aunt, I imagined a blue-haired southern dowager. I certainly wasn't prepared for the leggy, luminous blonde who finally alighted beside me with the ease of someone effortlessly mounting a horse. Though she has since denied it, I could've sworn the movie star leaned over and whispered, “See you later” as he took his leave. She should have been thoroughly daunting, except that somehow she wasn't.
“Hey there, Blythe Peavey, delighted to meet you. If I'd known what an excellent seat I had, I would've absolutely come sooner. That's a beautiful shirt. Is it linen? I love that color with your eyes. Have I missed any bon mots or bad behavior?”
She dispensed compliments with a liberality that would have seemed insincere in anyone I found less attractive and made me feel as if we were dining alone, tête-à-tête. She seemed to know quite a bit about me, which I found gratifying, considering how little there was to know at that early moment in my life, and what