Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

At the next corner he turned again, but he was no longer certain whether he was heading toward Main or away from it. He passed a large house where a crowd of people were laughing on a wraparound porch. Someone raised a glass, as if to him. In an orange glow of sodium vapor lamps, Levinson kept looking for a street that would lead him to the center of town, but he found himself in an unknown neighborhood, where a stretch of half-built houses gave way to a dark field. Behind a chain-link fence, a tower crane rose up beside an immense frame of steel beams.

Levinson turned around and headed back. It was 7:55. He came to a street of two-story houses with front porches. It seemed to be his own street, though it was hard to tell. At the end of the block, men with lights in their hats were excavating a front yard. Levinson lowered his window. “How do I get to Main?” he shouted. “That way!” one of the men called, waving him to the left. Levinson turned left; in the light of a flickering streetlamp he saw a half-constructed house with roof trusses in place. In the blackness of the next yard he made out a dim foundation covered by floor joists. The street came to an end; an unpaved path led into what appeared to be a forest. A metal sign leaning against a tree read MEN AT WORK. As Levinson followed the path, branches scraped sharply against the side of his car. The path widened, began to rise; guardrails appeared; he was on a ramp; all at once Levinson found himself on a six-lane highway, where ruby taillights rushed away into the distance. On the other side of the divider, yellow headlights came streaming toward him. Under a blue-black sky, Levinson entered the second lane, passed below a sign with a name and exit number he did not recognize, and rode off into the night.

Climbing

Hand over hand, each foot lifting above the other and pressing against the rough stone, his back tense, his neck arched, the braided hair tightening in his fists: the Prince is strong, but it’s no easy task to make his way up the face of the tower. The adventure excites him. He thrives on obstacles, perils, impediments of every kind. He is filled with such exhilaration that he would cry out for joy, except that his teeth are clenched and his lips stretched wide in a grimace of exertion. He remembers his first glimpse of her: the window high above, the dark figure below, the hair coming down like a shower of fire. Now he’s climbing that burning hair, which, in the summer dusk, in the shadows of the high pines and firs, is not golden, as he always remembers it, but the color of a bale of hay in the shade of a stable. There is danger in the climb, since at any moment he might fall and crack his neck, break his back. And even if his hold is sure, a second danger threatens from the forest: the sudden return of the sorceress, who will see him trying to reach the forbidden place. The Prince welcomes danger, exults in it, for it’s danger that makes him feel his life. In the late dusk the tower lies in darkness, but up above, where the sky is still pale, the casement window catches the last light. The Prince thinks: If only it could be this way forever! — the pull in his arms, the thrill of the ascent, the scrape of branches against his neck. An owl calls in the forest. The Prince pauses, slaps at an insect, continues climbing. From his upthrust hip, his sword hangs straight down, as if it has stopped suddenly in the act of falling.

The Mirror

As the Prince climbs the tower, the sorceress returns through the forest to her cottage at the edge of the darkening village. The cottage is surrounded by a high wall; the sorceress has no use for neighbors. Inside, she walks past the table and the cupboard and goes at once to her dressing table, where she picks up an oval mirror with an ivory handle. It is always like that: after the tower, the mirror. In the glass she sees her reflection staring at her with a familiar look of revulsion. She glares back with fascinated loathing, with a kind of eager bitterness. She detests the thick eyebrows, the small eyes set too close together, the thrusting ridge of the nose, as if drawn by a village caricaturist sketching a witch. Her lips are a knife-slash, her chin juts out like a knuckle. From a wart in her chin-cleft, three hairs stick out like tubers sprouting from an old potato. Her skin is yellow. Her black hair hangs in her face like bush-branches over a fence. Her herbs, her roots, her medicinal salves, even her spells, which can raise towers out of thin air — all useless. She thrusts the mirror aside. The cruelty is that she has always loved beautiful things. At once she thinks of Rapunzel. And her heart lifts: the golden hair, skin like the down of a swan, the graceful slope of the nose. Rapunzel is safe in the tower, asleep under her coverlet. She will visit her darling when night is done.

Hair

In the tower chamber, Rapunzel lies waiting for the Prince. Sometimes she waits by the window, but this evening she is lying on her bed, on the other side of the small room. Her braided hair stretches across the coverlet and over the wooden table to the hook in the ledge. She’s proud of her hair, which is much longer than she is, and comes pouring out of her like rain from the sky, though it takes up a lot of room and can be a nuisance as it drags around the floor picking up dust. Sometimes she wishes she could cut it all off with a sharp snip-snip and watch it lie there nice and dead without it slithering along after her all the time. At sunset, as soon as the sorceress let herself down, Rapunzel drew up the thick braid, waved good night from the window, and stood watching as the sorceress disappeared into the dark trees. Not long after, the Prince appeared in the small clearing at the base of the tower. Rapunzel tied her braid again around the hook in the ledge, then let down her hair hand over hand, as if she were lowering a bucket into a well. When the last handful was over the sill, she returned to the bed and lay down. Even though her braid is tied to a hook, she can feel the tug of the Prince as he climbs. He’s like a boy, her Prince, teasing her by pulling her hair. Through the window she sees the darkening sky. She knows that he loves the difficult climb, but she herself does not love it; she worries every second about the return of the sorceress, she’s afraid that even the slightest movement on her part will cause him to lose his grip and plunge to his death, and she dislikes the perpetual tugging at her scalp. She wishes they could find another way. But the tower has no door, there is no stairway, even the sorceress can’t reach the top without climbing the rope of hair. Of course, there’s the half-finished silk ladder hidden under the mattress, but the thought of it fills her with anxiety. Rapunzel turns her mind to more pleasant things: the moment the Prince will appear in the window, the leap of her heart, his hand on her face. She can hear the squeak of her hair on the hook, the sound of his foot, far down, scraping against stone.

Beautiful Women

As the Prince climbs toward the top of the tower, he thinks suddenly of the palace, which lies on the other side of the forest. Rapunzel is so unlike the ladies of the court that he sometimes finds it difficult to account for what draws him to her, night after night. The ladies of the court are so beautiful that they are dangerous to behold. Sometimes a courtier, catching a stray glance, is stricken as by a bite in the throat; such a man sickens with love as with a wasting disease. The Prince, who has never been sick in his life, admires the ladies of the court and is by no means indifferent to their amorous glances. He has had many opportunities for clandestine adventure and, for so young a man, is already an experienced lover. But although there are many varieties of physical loveliness at court, he’s aware of a note of sameness, for the ladies who surround him are remarkable above all for something high and severe in their beauty: the tightness of their pulled-back hair reveals the fine lines of their cheeks and foreheads, the narrowness of their nostrils, the exquisite modeling of their lips. Sometimes a courtier, bored by such abundance of perfection, seeks out the opposite: a coarse-featured peasant girl, a plump merchant’s wife with a crooked tooth. The Prince, too, has had adventures in the country villages and farms, though he looks not for coarseness but for the unexpected burst of beauty in a gesture or a look. Always, in his love adventures, he has felt pleasure and something else: a remoteness, a lack of conviction, as though he were sitting nearby, observing the antics of the young Prince performing a seduction. It is never that way with Rapunzel. It’s as though she has slipped inside him and moves when he moves. What he sees, when he looks at her, is harder to say. The court ladies would find her wanting in beauty. There is nothing proud and haughty in her face, nothing lofty in the cut of her bones. Sometimes, turning to look at her as she lies beside him, he is startled by something childish and unformed in her features; it’s as if he has never seen her before, doesn’t know what she looks like. At other times, when the Prince is alone and tries to summon her to mind, he can’t see her with any certainty; he sees only what she is not. What he remembers, always, is the first sight of her hair, falling from the tower like fire. She seems to exist only in the realm of dream. Is that why he returns to her, night after night? To assure himself that he isn’t dreaming? And suppose she finds the courage to leave the dream-tower, as he wants her to do. Will she dissolve in the hard light of the sun? The Prince’s thoughts irritate him like gnats; he shakes them away. Reaching up, he grips the hair, lifts a foot and slaps it higher on the wall. He looks up at the evening sky. Somewhere up there, an invisible woman is waiting.