assistant and the librarian and the studio executive, about her cousin-in-law and the neighbor two farms down who'd come over to dinner one night and flirted across the table, then ridden her horse over a couple days later after seeing Blythe drive into town.
“That sneaky cunt! Goddamn her. I saw her shaking her cleavage under your nose. But I hardly thought she'd come riding right over here like Annie Oakley and fuck my husband.”
It was curious how she seemed to blame the women more than me; she hated every one of them from that day forward. I have no idea why I largely escaped blame. It was like the time when Sweetheart ate our house-guest's Dopp kit. She didn't find fault with me so much as with the women who'd tempted me, who'd waved treats in front of my face. Over the years she managed to cut most of them dead, to let them know that she knew and was pissed. This is another southern trait—cutting people—and she's good at it. She didn't forgive and she didn't forget, except in the case of Katrina, who, she felt, had at least shown remorse and done the right thing by breaking up with me. Years later, at a play opening in New York, she went out of her way to let her know that it was okay. As to her treatment of me, I eventually remembered the conversation we'd had about her brother, when she'd said she never looked back.
Even by her own admission, Blythe's postmarital dating life was somewhat compromised by the presence of Sweetheart. “I've become familiar with a certain facial expression,” she told me. “These guys walk in and look at Sweetheart and what they're wondering is, How long does a pig live? They're wondering if they can outlast her. Sometimes they ask. But even when they don't, I still know that's what they're thinking. I see that look, I just up and say,‘About fifteen years is the answer to your question. And she's eight.’ Some of them turn tail right away.”
I was living in the city with my new girlfriend; Blythe had stayed in Tennessee. I visited every month to spend time with Dylan, staying with them for a week, an arrangement that made perfect sense to us, if not always to the girlfriends and boyfriends. In the end, though, I think Sweetheart scared away more suitors than I did, which was only one of the reasons I was astonished when Blythe told me she was getting another pig.
“Are you crazy?” I said. We were sitting on the back porch, watching Dylan splash in the pool, and looking out at a vermilion slash of sunset bleeding through the storm clouds above the roof of the old barn.
“Probably,” she said.
“Explain this to me.”
“I'm not sure I can.”
“It's perverse.”
“Look, I know it's going to be a disaster for my love life, but somehow I don't care.”
The afternoon's intolerable heat was finally subsiding, the cicadas shutting down their tiny chain saws, the fireflies just waking up under logs and eaves, checking their switches. It was a moment of hiatus, of stillness between the activities of the day and those of the night. Sweetheart lay on her side, catching the last rays of the sun. Even Dylan seemed to pause for a moment, standing at the edge of the pool, gazing out over the pasture as it turned from pink to gray as the sun slipped beneath the treetops at the far end of the field. The air was heavy with the promise of rain. All at once I felt myself projected back in time, the light and the temperature and the scent of the air exquisitely and precisely mimetic of a previous June evening some four or five years ago, when I was a better and a happier man.
“I already paid the breeder,” she said. “He's arriving at the airport tomorrow. It's a boy. Another McSwine.”
“What the hell,” I said. “I'll drive you.”
It was no crazier, I realized, than certain aspects of my own life. And it was no longer my fight.
The next day we dropped Dylan off at preschool and then drove to the airfreight terminal. After several inquiries, we were directed to a door with plastic flaps and a gravity wheel conveyor. As we watched, three big cardboard boxes with holes punched in them parted the flaps and rolled out, GRASSMERE ZOO stamped on each one.
“What are those?” Blythe asked the men who were retrieving the boxes.
“Mice' n' rats,