How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,114
she didn't know, she seemed to be in a desperate hurry to learn. Eventually I admitted that I'd been expecting someone much older.
“My brother Johnson, Jackson's dad, is almost twenty years older than I am,” she explained. “Jackson loves calling me ‘Aunt Blythe,’ which seemed funny when he was ten and I was twelve, but now that he's followed me to New York, I'm thinking of offering him lots of money to quit it.”
Later she told a self-deprecating story about having lunch, in her early days in the city, with Leo Castelli and an artist named John something—she hadn't caught his entire name. She found him rather attractive and confessed to possibly flirting with him a bit, frequently repeating his name and touching his arm. The artist became more and more remote, until he finally said, “My dear, I've been called a john before, but never by a woman.” Castelli later told her that she'd been flirting with Jasper Johns. “You can imagine,” she said, “that I've never been able to show my face at a Castelli opening again, for fear of running into him.”
I thought her story was a kind of wonderful spoof of the name-dropping that passed for anecdote in the world I was then aspiring to enter.
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 heterosexual 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 skyscraper, 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 coarsened 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