How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,118

the Declaration of Independence. I still couldn't believe they'd let me in, but I was pretty sure they'd draw the line at Sweetheart. “What they don't know won't hurt them,” Blythe told me.

I pointed out the impracticality of transport, of sneaking Sweetheart into the building and keeping her existence a secret, but it was no use.

Blythe had a friend who designed handbags, and she had him construct a special carrying case with a sturdy plywood bottom. “She has to fly in the cabin with us,” she insisted. “She'll be traumatized flying in the hold.” I said that even if Sweetheart could fit under the seat, which I doubted, it was probably illegal to take a pig into the cabin of a passenger plane. “Then we'll just have to smuggle her aboard,” she said.

Because the beast was now tipping the scales at eighty pounds, this scheme required my participation. On the morning of our departure, I staggered into the Nashville airport carrying a heavily reinforced black canvas shoulder bag. Blythe was carrying Dylan, who then weighed about eighteen pounds.

“What's in the bag?” the guard asked at the security checkpoint.

“Actually, it's a potbellied pig,” Blythe said.

“A what?”

The other guards gathered around, more excited than alarmed, while I unzipped the front of the bag and Blythe expounded on the habits of the domestic pig.

“They're actually very clean. She loves to eat soap; she had a bar of Crabtree & Evelyn lemon verbena that she relished the other morning. A free-range pig will always go to the far corner of her enclosure to do her business, and Sweetheart has a litter box.… Well, yes, it's a big litter box. They eat just about anything, but we try to keep her on a vegetarian diet to help her retain her girlish figure.”

In the end, the security supervisor couldn't recall any official ban on pigs, and Sweetheart marched through the metal detector on her leash while her bag went through the X-ray machine. A small crowd had gathered before we managed to stuff her back in her bag.

Blythe was addressing a young brother and sister. “Of course she knows her name. They're very smart—way smarter than dogs.”

With no small difficulty, I hoisted the bag up on my shoulder and started toward the gate, moving deliberately, like a conscientious drunk. When our group number was called, I threw a jacket over my bulging carry-on and followed Blythe past the stewardess checking boarding passes—hoping Dylan might distract her—and lurched into the plane, located our seats and swung the bag into the space in front of them, though it didn't quite fit and its occupant was grunting indignantly. When I straightened up, I felt the sharp bite of a pulled muscle in my lower back. I pressed the top of the bag, the pig squealing away, and finally slid it under the seats. Glaring at my wife, who was standing in the aisle behind me, I indicated the window seat. She climbed in and perched, her feet resting on the bag; I eased myself into the aisle seat, grunting as I felt the hot stab of back pain. I'd just settled in beside her when a fat woman clutching a violin case tapped my shoulder. “I'm sorry, but I think this is my row. Twelve A. That would be the window seat.”

“This is row thirteen,” I said.

She pointed to the illuminated number over my head. “Twelve, see? You're in the next row back.”

“Oh shit,” I said, rolling my eyes and glaring at Blythe, who seemed to find the whole situation hysterically funny. From a certain point of view, I guess it was funny. But from seat 12B, it was incredibly frustrating. It wasn't the pig, per se, although that was a major component. A year ago, even a month ago, I'd shared a frame of reference with Blythe; we lived within the same marriage. Her idiosyncrasies were charming and her faults, in the early years of our marriage, virtues. That she insisted on living with a pig and treating it like a member of the family was amusing enough, especially when we were still having sex on a regular basis. But now for the first time I felt myself looking over at her as if from a great distance, from outside the rosy bubble of our shared existence. At that moment I felt something turn cold inside of me.

With an almost palpable sigh of relief, I resumed my life in New York. For the next six months I was