Delicate Edible Birds (13 page)

I could never tell Blythe why I had stopped writing: she needed the fiction that I was there solely for her. “Without you, Harriet,” she'd cry in her exuberance after a performance, “I'd be nothing, nothing.” We both knew it was true; only I knew it was bittersweet, and that before making my decision, I spent long nights at the kitchen table, my eyes sandpapered with sadness.

The day I was accepted at UPenn, Sam said, “You, Harriet, are going to be the most overeducated mommy in the world,” and I couldn't tell you then why that statement seemed to suck the air right out of me.

Her new celebrity made Blythe grow first indiscreet, then downright flippant, about her lovers. She even invited her most recent beau to a February party she threw to celebrate her new artist's grant. He was a florid Montana painter,
tall and moustached, so full of himself that he didn't seem to notice the inappropriateness of his presence or the poisonous way Blythe grinned at Pritch all night. As at all of the Cantors' parties, there was too much whiskey, too little food, too loud house music. Their parties had such an air of permissiveness that inevitably some actor would paw his pretty-boy date in the corner or some matronly woman would disapear conspicuously into the bathroom with a man decades younger than she was.

I should have put a stop to Blythe's display, I knew. But I was drunk, loving the silver bangles that chittered on my wrists when I danced, celebrating my own minor victory: I'd just had my first book review accepted for publication. So I thought,
Yummy,
looking at the cowboy-painter, instead of
I'd better go stop this nonsense,
which was more like me.

Just before dawn the second-to-last couple staggered out with the Montana painter to give him a ride home. Sam and I were left to pick up the empty glasses and clean the ashtrays and turn off the music. In the new silence, Pritch's and Blythe's whispers boiled up into shouts in the kitchen. Sam seized my arm, pulling me to the door, but I shook free to listen.

“Had to bring him here, in front of our goddamn friends. In our goddamn house with our goddamn children sleeping upstairs,” Pritch said.

“What do you want me to do? I can't touch you, Pritchard. You make me sick,” said Blythe. There was a horrible
sound of hand against flesh, a fall, a shattering of glass. Sam and I ran to the kitchen. Blythe was sitting in a pile of broken tumblers, bleeding from her hands and clutching her left cheek.

Before we could rouse ourselves, Pritch bent down and scooped her up as if she were light as a doll. Blythe buried her face in her husband's chest and threw her arms around his neck, murmuring, “I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.” Pritch gave me a stern look, then turned away, carrying Blythe upstairs. Sam cleaned up the blood, the glass, as I stood there, burning. We let ourselves out into the dove-gray dawn in silence, clutching each other's hands with all the force we could muster.

Yet, when we were safe in bed that morning, I resisted sleep. All night there had been a strange lightness in me, and as I listened to Sam's breath, I imagined vivid impossibilities. A dark bathroom, the heartbeat of a party downstairs, tile cold against my hands and knees. One silky moustache tickling my ear.

 

I NEVER GREW USED TO BLYTHE'S CRUMBLINGS,
or how they could come along so suddenly. One happened before my eyes when we were thirty-eight, and Blythe had been manic for quite some time. She'd put a great deal of weight on her bones and though the lithium had given her odd twitchings, weird darts of her tongue, it made her skin glow and her sore chapped lips swell and ripen, a postcoital look.

Throaty, glittering, these were the years she was performing naked, glorying in her thick body, in her shame. She sat in a bathtub made of ice as she said,
And the sweet wet slide of my son into water
/
a dive
/
how he beats like a pulse before bursting
/
into air
. Severe, incantatory, she made an electric chair of willow rods as she repeated,
Give us the brank
/
give us the switch
/
we are all witches
/
we terrible ones.

Blythe was still the darling of New York, of London, but I saw that she had begun to repeat herself, that her vision had narrowed, that she was growing only more extreme, not more subtle. I tried to tell her, but even small criticisms were treason to Blythe. She would shout so much that I learned to stay quiet and watch. I thought she would do what she wanted to no matter what I said; that I would be a better friend by being purely supportive.

The night of her collapse she was in an elegant gray silk suit, flushed and victorious from a performance that held the critics in thrall: these were her AIDS years, and she had black male models and white female models walking in a tight room, brushing up carnally against one another. Blythe was in the center, touching everyone who passed by like an enormous, ravenous spider. Afterward we had returned home to her Merion house, and she thrust open the French doors so the sunset threaded her bob with veins of bronze. In that moment, she had transformed into a figure of bliss. She turned to speak to me, to hold my face in her hands and kiss me on the forehead in her excess of joy, when the phone rang and she went to it, all a green-eyed dazzle.

Her face fell and she said “No” in a very low murmur. She grew pale, seemed to shrink, and her eyes darkened until they were black. The moment after Blythe hung up the phone and just before she looked at me and spoke of her mother's sudden death, I couldn't find my friend in her transformation into a dull and bloodless woman.

That was her most decided collapse yet. She grew querulous, fought more. She grew plumper, then outright fat, though her new flesh was creamy and somehow beautiful, making her even grander. Pritch stayed away from the house for as long as possible, as did the boys. Tom and Bear turned my rec room into a foot-smelling sanctuary for themselves, and they slept there, on a bunk bed I'd bought them, more nights than not. Once, despairing at her weight while Pritch was on a business trip, Blythe trashed all the food in her house, and the boys had no meals for a whole day until Tom called me, crying. She even turned on me when she seemed strong enough to do something bad and I stole her pills. She would throw glasses and lamps, whatever was at hand, until I fled.

It felt inevitable that I would come upon Blythe lying on the hideous dress on the sofa, senseless, so I was calm when I called the ambulance. Blythe had shouted at me when she awoke to the hospital's buzz and bleachy sheen, “How dare you, Harriet? How dare you? You're not my friend,” and she refused to talk to me for the three weeks she was in the hospital. Then one day she called to chat as if nothing had happened.

Those years I awoke at night many times in a panic of sweat, having dreamed of falling. Such constant urgency began to feel routine, Peter and the Wolf on repeat. I began to ignore the histrionics, and a few times refused to come to the phone when I sensed Blythe was on the other line and only mildly insane.

Then came the fall morning when the boys were at school and Blythe slipped from the house and drove to the Jersey shore, where her mother's family had had a summer house for generations. She went to a cup of light at the top of the antique curving stairwell. In that smell of salt and fish, under the rattle of the bubbled windows, she slit her wrists, letting her blood dribble in rays down the stairs. But the man the family hired to check on the house grew suspicious on seeing Blythe's car in the drive and entered, and she was saved, yet again.

 

THE CHILDREN WERE IN MIDDLE SCHOOL
when Blythe began spreading rumors about herself. She was quite large by then, and reporters had stopped taking pictures of her. Plus, her newest performance was not going well. Africa had grown popular as a cause: the extent of the genocide in Rwanda was emerging, and Blythe had orchestrated a piece in which she'd “borrowed” Tutsi orphans, some as old as three, and put them naked in a close, white room, to be suckled by extremely pale women. The babies sobbed and soiled themselves and the women, though they had been told to
hold still, grew anxious, wanting to clean the babies, to comfort them. I could only stand to see it for a minute before I walked out. The critics had the same reaction I did.

Blythe had always been a canny marketer; her new rumor campaign had a sort of sidewise brilliance. Some of what she spread was true, some was flagrantly untrue, but everything had an element of reality to it. These are only a few of the many rumors I heard:

That Blythe had found Christ by seducing a Catholic priest. True.

That Blythe had spent an entire semester as artist in residence at Bryn Mawr sitting with her back turned to her students and saying nary a word. Untrue.

That Blythe had found herself a lesbian lover. True; the lover was an unattractive fifty-year-old psychiatrist from Plymouth Meeting with whom she had a yearlong affair. At its denouement, the lover showed up at my house weeping, wanting me to explain Blythe to her. I could only give her some warm milk and send her home.

That Blythe had found herself wandering naked in South Philadelphia. Semi-true: she had been wandering naked, but it was on the Swarthmore campus.

That Blythe had had sexual urges for Tom, her son. This scared me the most. I longed to ask him, to make sure he was all right, but it is hard to meddle with a family, and I couldn't hurt Blythe like that. I watched him and hoped. I still had faith in Blythe.

I had tried to protect Blythe from these rumors for a long
time; I had no idea she was the one spreading them. But one day when she sat on my veranda, nursing a glass of ginger ale, she began telling me a strange dark fable in which, a year earlier, she had been abducted by a man at the grocery store, held for twenty-four hours in a small apartment, and repeatedly violated. She had given the man her engagement ring, and when he was out pawning it, she escaped, half-naked, and caught a ride home in a taxicab. She had actually rather enjoyed the escape, she said. I should tell my girls and any other woman I knew, she said, because that man could still be out there in this horrible world of ours.

She told me this, looking beyond me and nodding. I watched her, ill. There was no twenty-four-hour stretch in the past year when I hadn't spoken to Blythe. There was no twelve-hour stretch. I was there when she lost her engagement ring down the pool filter, and cried for four hours, for fear of Pritch. Her story was horribly false.

But I knew what harm I could do by showing disbelief, and said, “That sounds awful,” then asked her how her Rwandan piece was doing.

She gave me her old dazzling smile and leaned forward. “Darling,” she said, “I'm doing it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I'm officially famous.”

She was, and she had been even before that moment, and she would remain so for these five years since. All this time Sam and I have become more comfortable, moved from Manayunk to a house in Rittenhouse Square, spent our weekends fixing it up. I gained some small celebrity with my critical
pieces, perhaps mainly because I had tried to eschew the savagery that was so common in my field, and instead tried to locate the piece I was considering within the larger web of art, to consider it under those lights. I was afraid of what I would discover if I considered Blythe's. I never did.

Blythe once read a piece of mine, a five-thousand-word essay in
The New York Review of Books,
then waved it at herself, as if it were a giant fan. She said, “This is great and all, but, Harriet, doesn't it make you sad to do this kind of stuff? You were such a good poet, remember? Writing about writing just seems so, I don't know. Meaningless. Or masturbatory, or what have you.”

I had to control my voice. “I think,” I said, “that criticism can be just as meaningful as the art it considers. It creates a dialogue.”

“Art creates dialogue,” said Blythe. “Critics are just vultures.” She watched my face with her sharp green eyes, then laughed. “Not you,” she said. “You're too sweet for carrion.” She poured me another glass of iced tea and chattered away until my irritation dissolved and I found my resistances collapsing, found myself sinking into her again.

 

IN THE AUTUMN THIS PAST YEAR
I went to Blythe's house, prodded by a bad feeling, and found a spout of Pritch's clothes issuing from the bedroom window, a hailstorm of shoes. Pritch was in the yard, red-faced, gathering his things from where they fell into the piles of leaves. “Harriet,” he spat
when he saw me. “If she doesn't do it herself, I swear to God I'm going to kill her.”

I looked at Pritch. He stood, his arms heaped with suits, and sighed. “She's insisting that we get a divorce. Out of nowhere. Not to mention hypocritical for a born-again Catholic. I'm apparently the one that makes her crazy.”

“Oh, Pritch,” I said. “Oh, no.” His eyes were red-rimmed. I said, “You're the one who keeps her sane.”

“You are,” he said. “We both know it.” Pritch dropped his face into the bundle of clothing and held it there for a long time. “Harriet,” he said, looking up at last, “I give up. I'm so tired. It's up to you now, kid.” He walked to his car and shoved the things into the backseat, then sat on the bumper and buried his head in his hands again.

When I went inside, Tom was sitting on the stairwell. “Oh, Aunt Harriet,” he said. “I'm so glad you're here.” Tom was seventeen, a beautiful boy though almost too graceful, with worry marks etched in his forehead. He still spoke with a lisp. Of all my children, and I include Blythe's, he was the one who gave me heartache; his happiness seemed the least sure, his life to come the hardest. I gave him a kiss on the way upstairs, and he squeezed my hand as I passed. He smelled of pine and, surprisingly, jasmine.

When I opened Blythe's door, she was in the middle of the floor, nude. She was pulling her hair with both hands. My friend had gained a great deal of weight again, and I looked at her body with a little thrill: my own aging one was so lumpy compared to hers. Her fat was smooth, her body beautifully
large. I lay down beside her. She rolled over and buried her hot, wet face on my chest, and I rubbed her head until she calmed.