back on my own turf, among my friends and living in a beautiful apartment, which I now shared with a potbellied pig—a pig that, by the end of the year, was well over a hundred pounds and far too big to be lifted. Blythe had taken one of the doormen into her confidence, but we had to hide her from our fellow shareholders and especially from the super, a cranky tyrant who certainly would have reported us to the board. To prevent her detection, Blythe designed a secret compartment underneath the platform bed, where Sweetheart could be hidden on short notice.
As she grew, we had to get increasingly bigger litter boxes, which we concealed beneath a round side table draped in a floor-length cloth. Our occasional dinner parties would sometimes be interrupted by the thunder of hooves on the parquet floor as a black shape shot across the floor, disappeared under the table and then, after a pause, unleashed a hissing torrent. The contents of the litter box became something of an obsession for Blythe. Because our garbage was sorted by the super and his minions down in the basement, she believed it had to be disposed of outside the building. She solicited her friends and kept a collection of shopping bags—Barneys, Bergdorf, Chanel, Armani—that would seem appropriate on the arm of an uptown girl, and once a day she would venture out with one of these, a beautiful woman carrying a bag of pig shit out to Park Avenue. She chose a different street-corner trash receptacle each day, fearing, irrationally, that the garbage collectors might become suspicious of agricultural waste and locate the illegal animal unless extraordinary measures of concealment were taken.
Blythe had her Sweetheart and I found mine.
With her I could talk about how I felt underappreciated and unsatisfied at home; many were the justifications with which I mollified my conscience, although the pig wasn't necessarily one of them. To me, it was now merely a fact of life, albeit one that signaled Blythe's increasing distance from social conventions, especially as practiced on the island of Manhattan. Whatever the rationalizations for my affair, it would hardly have been possible if Blythe hadn't grown increasingly withdrawn, frequently sending me off into the night on my own while she stayed in the apartment with Dylan and Sweetheart and her needlepoint.
After all those years of being a virtual dervish, Blythe seemed to have lost her curiosity. “I think I've already been to that party,” she would say when I would run an invitation past her. “Like about three thousand times.” I don't know, maybe we're all born with certain quotas and she'd hit her limit of parties. A jaded friend of mine likes to say that God allows us all a swimming pool full of vodka and a bathtub full of cocaine, and that he finally quit the latter after realizing he'd started in on his second bathtub. Blythe had burned pretty bright and steady in her early days in New York. Maybe some filament had burned out. She'd gone to more parties, on the arms of more men, than most people even read about in the course of their lifetimes.
She preferred to sit on the couch, a bowl of popcorn within reach on the coffee table, reading a book, one foot rubbing the belly of the pig lying beneath her, our son crawling around on the floor. “Besides, somebody has to watch Dylan.” I pointed out that we had a nanny to watch Dylan, not to mention that he'd be asleep anyway by the time the party started. “Well, somebody has to watch the Sweetheart.”
Perhaps she'd evolved to a higher plane of consciousness and no longer required the shallow distractions of small talk and flirtation, of voyeurism and self-display. But I did and I wasn't ready to retire. Even though I'd sworn off the bathtub, I still had several feet of vodka left in my swimming pool and I was still drawn to the music of the night. And inevitably I was drawn to a face across the room, the flash of a provocative smile.
My affair with Katrina lasted for the duration of that Manhattan sojourn, almost six months. It seemed incredible that Blythe didn't question me more closely about my late nights and midday disappearances. With each successful tryst, I became more emboldened, more entitled, less guilty about my transgression. I didn't really have a plan or a specific ambition for the affair. Katrina was funny and sexy, and