Delicate Edible Birds (14 page)

“I hate him,” she mumbled. I could feel her mouth move warm on my breast and, to my shame, felt my nipple harden. “I figured it all out. I wasn't really crazy until I married him. And then I had his kids, and poof! I'm insane. I'm getting a divorce. I'm getting it tomorrow. Just wait and see.”

I just stroked her glossy hair, wondering when she'd begun to get those few white hairs, when the crows'-feet had pushed themselves more deeply beside her eyes. I didn't know how to say that I was tired, too. I had just that morning refused a wonderful offer to teach in England, and had refused many more lectureships in the past, because I couldn't be away from Blythe, for fear that her world would crash down and I wouldn't be there to salvage what remained. I didn't know how to say that I wished she could safely go to the beauty salon without me, to the grocery store, to the movies. That I wished she were a stranger, and I could walk away. That I wished to go to sleep for just one night without the fear of awakening into a shattered world.

I couldn't say this, of course. So I said nothing.

For a long time we lay there as the sky darkened and small rain fell through the open window. Downstairs, we could hear Bear's television nattering and Tom moving about the kitchen, making dinner. “Oh, Harriet,” she sighed into my chest. “My Harriet.” She drew her head up. Her eyes had gone slate gray and narrow. She leaned forward and gave me
a long, lingering kiss. Her lips were very soft and tasted like whiskey.

I can't say that I didn't like it. I can't say that somewhere in me, for twelve years, I had not longed for exactly that. To be, for a moment, the center. To, finally,
take
.

She nuzzled my cheek. When she gave a seductive little laugh, a laugh that spoke of practice, of seduction, I felt a break in me.

I pushed Blythe aside and stood, shaking. I went to the door. And I didn't look around when I said, “Blythe, honey. Get dressed and come downstairs. Take a deep breath, and do whatever it is you want me to tell you to do.”

I left. My call awoke the kindly gentleman in England, who had been so disappointed when I'd refused the lectureship that morning. He was gracious and pleased that I had changed my mind. Weeks later, when the plane lifted from the runway for the transoceanic flight, I felt as if I were a great plant being ripped from the ground, roots snapping below me with great shudderings.

 

AT THE END OF THE TERM
I flew home for Blythe's party in honor of her grandest award yet. When the plane circled down into polluted, glorious Philadelphia, I felt I willed it down myself. But I didn't have time to do much more than hug my girls, take one long look at my Rittenhouse Square garden, with its wisteria climbing the latticework, and then Sam and I hurried to the party. In the tight space of the car, my
husband seemed a stranger to me, and we held the shyness of a first date between us, sweet and awkward.

“It's been so hard without you,” he said when we turned into the driveway of the monstrous modern house in Paoli where the party was to take place. In his words I felt his giddy relief at my return. Then he added, “Not just me. All of us. Mack and Sue went nuts somehow. Blythe, too. Harriet,” he said, watching me in a sidelong way, “I'm afraid that Blythe is going again.”

I nodded. All summer I sensed a growing problem, and had called Blythe twice a week. And just before I returned to America, I received a package from my friend, two inches thick with her new piece she'd been creating at a white heat since spring.
Bombing the Wreck,
she called it. As far as I could tell, it was only a collection of loose, troublesome lines:
and so I choose the bloodsnake / the writhing shades in the eggs it makes / curls like smoke and licks my life / for I have wearied so of water.
The accompanying drawings for the performance made no sense to me: Blythe in a swimsuit, majestic, chained underwater in a great glass aquarium. This was not a performance. I didn't quite know what it was.

The party was enormous, more than two hundred important people, and Blythe was late, of course. One hour rolled into two and I stood alone at the edge of the living room, growing furious. I could be with my girls, I thought: they had surprised me with how leggy they'd become in the few short months I'd been gone, and I wanted to touch them
again, to know how they had changed. In the living room of the modern house, the cement walls had been scattered with random-seeming windows, and the party, growing edgier by the minute, was reflected back at itself. I searched the windows for a reflection of Sam's dear bald pate, my one comfort, but couldn't find him. I felt a little bereft at the lack.

At last, some of the guests began to slink home and the hostess finally gave up on Blythe. She gathered people at the buffet, though the meat was now rubbery, the shrimp pale, the potatoes cold.

Only then did the sliding doors thunder open, drowning out the light techno on the air. A jolt, a buzz, recognition: Blythe had arrived. I was too angry to look up, but heard her husky voice saying, “Oh, darlings, I am fearfully late, so sorry. A car crash! It was awful.”

The irritation in the room disappeared like smoke. I peered at Blythe in the concise reflection in the window. She wore a golden-brown velvet minidress, a thick gold cuff on her bicep, one arm in a sling. Her head was thrown back, hips forward, the good arm akimbo on her hip. All adazzle, as usual. She was magnificent, as shocking as she was that first night I saw her, if mainly because of the warp of the glass. I also knew that when I turned, I would see Blythe as she actually was, the lines on her thin skin, the lickings of her lips, the great broad bulk, the panic in the eyes whirling up as soon as she saw me, that need.

I thought:
I will turn around now. I'll pull her back again.
I
gave myself to the count of three, but kept counting to thirty, and didn't turn.
Come on, Harriet,
I scolded myself. But I was so very weary. I just couldn't do it. Not again.

Instead, I looked into the glass, into the darkness of the October night. I thought of how, out there in a Pennsylvania pond, near some sleeping farmhouse, there was probably one old catfish caught and released so often her gills were scarred and stiff, barely filtering the water anymore. When I took a step closer to the wall of windows, I saw my own face grow large and pale. Beyond, the moon and the dark lawn seemed to shrink the closer I came to them. I took another step, watched them shrink again. Blythe spoke, and though I couldn't hear the words, I heard the hunger in them.

I would release her. She'd swim into whatever dark and terrible place she needed to go. I could do no more. I took one more step toward my face, toward the landscape, a chill draft from the loose casing stroking my cheek. One more step. Then I watched it all, miraculously, bloom.

THE WIFE OF THE DICTATOR IS SALLOW AND
strange. She's a plump woman
,
uncomfortable here in the hot sun with our cocktails and croquet. She has not yet learned to perspire with grace; in one hour her gray silk dress is dotted, then black with moisture. She speaks little, moves in a series of small fidgets, wears a corset. When she stands to excuse herself and gives us her hand it is so soft it seems almost to not exist at all.

What has been reported is true: the dictator has brought back a wife from his last visit to America. It is also true that she is not one of us.

We survey the hole in the air where she had been sitting, let it fill for a moment with the scratchy tenor on the gramophone. The children shriek at the edge of the lake with their nannies; we mix more gin into our drinks. When the dictator's black car slides from the compound, dips from sight into
the city, and later beetles up the hill toward the pink palace glistening in the sun, we, at last, feel free to wonder.

The dictator is an enormous man with a cruel mouth: we like to watch him on his chestnut charger when his troops are doing maneuvers on the parade grounds. Wherever could he have gotten this plump sparrow of a wife? And why, when he could have plucked one from the ten thousand good families of his own country, trembling girls with downcast eyes and charming virginal figures? If he must marry an American to discharge what secret debts he holds, could he not have chosen one of our daughters or one of our friends, some fine, laughing girl who would know how to entertain us at the palace, a girl who would at least look good beside the dictator on horseback?

The tiny monkeys chew red fruits and cast the sticky seeds down into our hair.

Her family must be very rich, we say, and imagine train lines, coal mines, houses in Newport. Woozy under the sun and drink, someone says she looks like a medium, and we imagine her in a dark room, ectoplasm spinning from her mouth, voices of the dead rising from within her to enchant the dictator into an occultish love. Or maybe, we say, she sat opposite him on a train, and her plainness moved the dictator to pity, his hard heart dissolving into a thousand small butterflies that flitted away with his sense.

We drink, we speculate, until our heads ring wild. We are ossified, we laugh; we are zozzled. At home, in a pique, we put our good dresses away; they hadn't been worth wear
ing, now, had they. The evening cools and from the city smells of strange cooking waft up to us. When our husbands come home from the Company, from the Embassy, we sit beside them as they eat their supper. Like our children who hold up for our scrutiny the strange stones they find by the lakeside, green-veined, bulb-shaped chunks of this country, we hold the dictator's wife up for our husbands' amusement. We exaggerate her oddness, say she reminds us of our mothers' generation, conservative and dark, of Queen Victoria. We turn her this way and that, and, in the process, we make her an object of wonder.

 

THE DICTATOR IS ONLY
two years a dictator, a man from an obscure mountain city. There had been unrest in his country for a decade, bloodshed and bandits; from the turmoil the dictator was spat into power, as smooth and hard as a gem. This city is still ensconced in the nineteenth century, with its alabaster gas lamps and carriages still more plentiful than automobiles; his grandeur suits it well. There is something in him that makes other men smaller. At the few dinners to which we were invited when he was a bachelor, we watched his tanned, scarred face, his hawk nose, the vast breadth of his shoulders, and when he put his eyes on us we might as well have been nude.

By hints and dribbles we hear of the dictator's wife in her former life in Saint Louis. To escape the humid fug we float in the women's pool, waiting for the cocktail hour, and talk of
what we've learned. She is four years older than the dictator, we know now, the widow of another man, the mother of a dead son. She was born into nothing, a provincial dull family, married a boat captain on the Mississippi. On their boy's ninth birthday his father took him on a trip. A flash flood, and the ship foundered and sank, drowning her husband, her boy.

In grief, the dictator's wife took up painting. She painted scenes of epiphany, revelation, saturated with color, details to make grown men weep. She is Catholic, like the natives, we hear: and we can't help but see her in the confessional, the grille casting shadows like lace on her skin, her thin mouth hungry for grace.

When next we see her, dutiful at the dictator's side at a dance, we watch her delicate hands with a new interest, see the poignancy of the gold cross at her throat, study the way her dark hair frames her face. We feel a warmth not unlike pity in our chests. This surprises us.

Mater dolorosa,
she has become newly interesting. A dark flower of sorrow transplanted to the strange soil of this bright place; a woman famous for painting angels.

 

THE RAINY SEASON ARRIVES
and we can no longer swim in the pool, or walk by the lake, or play croquet, or complain about the heat. We can no longer stand on the hill and watch the young officers through our binoculars. There are the endless tea parties, the dramatic recitations of Shakespeare, the new Chaplin we love no less for being a whole year late.
The remaking parties when we take apart our old dresses and refashion them according to the magazines our friends and sisters send us, letting down the waists and necklines, heaving up the hems. We smoke cigarettes out the windows, eat pastries until we gasp for air in our clothing, squash spiders under our thumbs, too weary to make much of a fuss. Affairs spark up during the rainy season and fizzle along in the dampness. Our husbands eat their lunches at the club and we are relieved that we don't have to entertain them, too. When we are reduced to watching the pots of geraniums on the verandas fill with water and overspill, we scold our servants for their lapses in housekeeping. They stand, eyelashes on their cheeks, until we release them. We're sure they talk about us in their language in the kitchen. It aggravates us until we want to slap them. Sometimes we do.

We watch the pink palace on the hill, a subdued coral now that it is wet. We wonder if the dictator's wife ever slaps her servants. We doubt it, and we resent her for it.

The rains let up at last and we allow our children to play in the mudpuddles. The dry air in our chests feels like a long sob. Some of our servants' sisters work in the palace, and it is from them that we hear that the dictator's wife is now thickening around the middle.

When we meet one another on a clear, cool day, we laugh behind our hands. So
that's
what the dictator and his wife do when it rains, we giggle. Though the image of the dark plump woman and the grunting vast man together is surreal, it does make a certain sort of sense.

We have asked our sisters and friends to send us articles about the dictator's wife and her art. Famous people consume us because we are bored. In the articles she is described the way we see her, but in kinder tones, words like
pale
for our
sallow, unearthly
for our
strange
. She describes her art as products of visions, ghastly revelations that would not let her sleep until she set them down as exactly as possible on her canvases.

When, at one of our bridge parties, out of boredom or tipsiness, we blurt out a question about her painting, she flushes. She looks down at her jostling knees, and in her quiet voice, she says,
But I no longer paint, you know. I haven't needed to since I married the dictator.

We are so flabbergasted that hers is a talent that can turn on and off like a fountain, according to need, that it is only later, when we are alone and drifting off to sleep, that we realize how odd it is that she, too, calls her husband
the dictator
.

 

OUR HUSBANDS AT NIGHT
tell us a story. The dictator took a few of his generals, some of the higher ranking of the Company and Embassy, over to his hunting camp where the sugarcane meets the jungle. A party of thirty, plus servants, they were there to hunt boar.

They awoke before dawn, when the jungle was filled with hooting monkeys and great cats slinking in the shadows. When the thrashers at midmorning rustled up an enormous boar, grunting with horrific power and fury, the men circled their horses and waited for the dictator's command.

In lieu of bringing the gun to his eye and simply killing the beast, though, he slid down and put his gun on the ground. He approached the boar, which fell silent, watchful, as he neared. When the dictator was a mere foot away, the boar bowed his head, the prelude to spearing it up and gutting the dictator with his tusks. But before he could, the dictator planted his knife in the base of the boar's neck and the great beast collapsed in a geyser of blood.

When our husbands tell us this story, we wonder what it is like to be married to a man who could kill such a beast with his hands. We look at our husbands' balding temples, their concave chests, their pale shoulders, and try not to laugh.

That isn't the end of the story, our husbands protest. They prop themselves on their arms, leaning over us in their eagerness. As he drove the knife in and the boar collapsed, there was a smile on the dictator's face. It was a sweet, shy look, our husbands say: it was the kind of smile better worn by a man in love.

 

WE HEAR REPORTS:
there is unrest again at the country's edges. If possible, the dictator grows even more stern. Our husbands tell us not to listen to the radio, that we should not worry one whit, and because we know not to ask what they do at the Company or the Embassy, we take them at their word. There are few cars in this small country, and those that pick our husbands up in the morning, whether from the Company or the Embassy, appear to be the same.

When the wife of the dictator is six months expecting,
the dictator rides off with a few battalions to quell the militants. Over the city falls a new gentleness, a new quiet, and in the trees land flocks of strange green birds that end their rills with metallic clicks. When the birds startle at a sound, it looks as if the trees are tossing handfuls of their own leaves into the skies. We can hear the bands in the square at the bottom of the hill; we find ourselves dancing to them as we ready ourselves for bed. We Shimmy, we Charleston, we Bunny Hug; we imagine ourselves at great gay parties where these things come to us with ease.

The night the wife of the dictator goes into labor, heat lightning branches blue across the sky and our hair yearns staticky toward our brushes. We can't sleep. We sit on our verandas, smoking our clandestine cigarettes and across the compound see other embers floating, fireflies of disquiet.

The electricity breaks around two with a thunderclap and torrential rain. We are chasing frogs from our porches in the morning when we hear the news. The dictator charged into the city on his wheezing horse in the midst of the storm and hurried into the palace. The mud clotted thick and black on the carpets behind him. When he reached his wife, his face was so dirty and wet she screamed as if he were a baboon come in from the jungle. The dictator knelt, he shuddered. He held her little pale feet in his hands, as if they were delicate as teacups, and he kissed them.

With the last push and convulsion, the dictator's wife near dead with fatigue and fear, the tiny baby emerged at last, all skinny and blue. The dictator sat back on his heels,
country-style. And when the doctor at last got the baby to breathe and mewl, the dictator stood and left the room, because she was only a girl.

 

WE SEE THE DICTATOR'S
wife everywhere, it seems, and nowhere: while the dictator is fighting the rebels she pushes her babe down by the lake in her perambulator, trailed by the useless, pretty nannies the dictator hired. She refuses a wet nurse, which is not done here, and the native ladies have turned indignant. We hear they have refused to invite her to their teas; we wonder at her solitary life now. It can't, we think, be a hardship for her.

The news from the border is not good. The opposition forces, they say, are resilient and clever at blending into the countryside. The papers hold photos of the dictator, enormous and severe, in his command tent in the jungle. When we see them, we are filled with a hot thrill and wish, briefly, that we could read the language and understand the captions. Some of our husbands are sent to the plantations, the mines, the Embassy, with more frequency, and when they return they stare at their knees with a blank look. But a few days soaking in the gentlemen's pool, a few nights at the club, and they are normal again. We have our charity bazaars for the victims of the dengue fever, which is gripping certain tight-packed segments of the city. We have our ice cream socials. We keep busy.

Our servants' sisters who work in the palace relay ru
mors that the dictator's wife sometimes awakes shrieking in the nights. They say she wanders the white marble halls in her humble slippers, passing like a ghost through the shadows. When a servant comes upon her, she does not appear to see, and passes as if her eyes are fixed on another world. We wonder what the dictator's wife is thinking of at those times: her dead son, her dead husband, those two souls lost under the thick murmuring water of a distant river. Or if, like us, she dreams of a vaster country, one where she is not caged in the palace as we are caged in our compound. Or if she ever longs to take up brush and palette again, paint that old life away until the grief rises, time and again, gently back into the heavens.

 

THE DICTATOR IS SHOT
in the foot. He returns home to the palace, gray-faced and grim, to recuperate. He has left his generals in charge in the jungle. The little girl is walking now, an unfortunate small replica of her mother, and in public she shrieks into her mother's skirts and hides her face from our children, who would not hurt her.

The dictator's wife is wearing new colors, greens and purples and indigos, and on her head she now wears hats with chin-length veils. When we search out her eyes we believe we see bruises around them, and from that moment on we don't search them out anymore. Later we wonder if they are not bruises, if she is simply exhausted from all of the sleep she has been missing. When they are together in public, the
dictator rarely turns his eyes from his wife. We almost never hear her subdued voice now.