Michael Cunningham - A Wild Swan - And Other Tales

There’s this text from Beth, sent less than an hour ago, a selfie of her and her husband, Dan, in their kitchen on an ordinary night (the baby must have been asleep by then), their heads pressed together, smiling into Beth’s iPhone, with only the message, XXX.

Beth wasn’t required to send that text, not on a random and unremarkable night. She wasn’t meeting expectations. She’d simply wanted to show herself, herself and her husband, to her mother and father, so they’d know where she was, and who she was with. It seems that that matters to her, their younger child, the thornier and more argument-prone one. It seems that she’s twenty-four, happily married (please, Beth, stay happy even if you don’t stay married); it seems that she wants to locate herself to, and for, her parents. It seems that she knows (she’d know) how future nights lie waiting; how there’s no way of determining their nature but it’s probably not a bad idea to transmit a fragment of this night, when she’s young, and thrilled by her life, when she and Dan (stubbled, bespectacled, smitten by his wife, maybe dangerously so) have put the baby down and are making dinner together in their too-small apartment in New Haven.

Happy endings. Too many to count.

There’s the two of them on the sofa, with a fire in the fireplace; there’s his wife saying, “Time for bed,” and him agreeing that it is in fact time for bed, in a few minutes, after the fire has burned itself out.

She gets up to stir the last of the embers. As she scatters the embers she sees, she could swear she sees … something in the dying flames, something small and animate, a tiny sphere of what she can think of only as livingness. A moment later, it resolves itself into mere fire.

She doesn’t ask him if he’s seen it, too. But by now she and he are sufficiently telepathic that he knows to say, “Yes,” without the slightest idea of what he’s agreeing to.

You’ve met the beast. He’s ahead of you at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, flirting with the unamused Jamaican cashier. He’s slouching across the aisle on the Brooklyn-bound G train, sinewy forearms crawling with tattoos. He’s holding court — crass and coke-fueled, insultingly funny — at the after-hours party your girlfriend has insisted on, to which you’ve gone because you’re not ready, not yet, to be the kind of girl who wouldn’t.

You may find yourself offering yourself to him.

Because you’re sick of the boys who want to get to know you before they’ll sleep with you (“sleep with you” is the phrase they use); the boys who ask, apologetically, if they came too soon; who call the next day to tell you they had a really great time.

Or because you’re starting to worry that a certain train is about to leave the station; that although you’ll willingly board a different train, one bound for marriage and motherhood, that train may take its passengers to a verdant and orderly realm from which few ever return; that the few who try to return discover that what’s felt like mere hours to them has been twenty years back home; that they feel grotesque and desperate at parties they could swear had wanted them, had pawed and nuzzled them, just last night, or the night before.

Or because you believe, you actually believe, you can undo the damage others have done to the jittery, gauntly handsome guy with the cigarettes and the Slim Jim, to the dour young subway boy, to the glib and cynical fast-talker who looks at others as if to say, Are you an asshole or a fool? , those being his only two categories.

* * *

Beauty was the eldest of three sisters. When the girls’ father went off to the city on business, and asked his daughters what presents they’d like him to bring back, the two younger girls asked for finery. They asked for silk stockings, for petticoats, for laces and ribbons.

Beauty, however, asked only for a single rose, a rose like any that could have been snipped from a half dozen or more bushes not fifty feet from the family’s cottage.

Her point: Bring back from your journey something I could easily procure right here. My desire for treasure is cleansed of greed by the fact that I could fulfill it myself, in minutes, with a pair of garden shears. I’m moved by the effort, not the object; a demand for something rare and precious can only turn devotion into errand.

Was she saying as well, Do you really imagine a frock or hair ribbon will help? Do you think it’ll improve the ten or so barely passable village men, or alter the modest hope that I will, at least, not end up marrying Claude the hog butcher, or Henri with the withered arm? Do you believe a petticoat could be compensation for our paucity of chances?

I’d rather just have a rose.

The father did not comprehend any of that. He was merely surprised, and disappointed, by the modesty of Beauty’s request. He’d been saving up for this trip; he’d finally found a potential buyer for his revolutionary milking machine; he was at long last a man with a meeting to go to; he liked the idea of returning from a business trip as treasure-laden as a raja.

That’s all you want, Beauty?

That’s all.

You’re sure? You’re not going to be disappointed when Cheri and Madeline are trying on their new frocks?

No. I’ll love my rose.

There was no point in telling him that Cheri and Madeline were inane; that the finery he’d bring them was destined to be worn once or twice, at village parties, and then folded into a drawer, to be looked at wistfully every now and then after their husbands and children kept them housebound; after the silks and crinolines were so peppered with moth holes they were no longer wearable anyway.

A single rose it would be, then, for Beauty. She who possessed a sharper and less sentimental mind than her sisters. She who knew there was no point in acquiring anything she didn’t have already, because there was no future she couldn’t read in the dung-strewn streets of the village, in the lewd grins of the young chimney sweep, or the anticipatory silence of the miller’s boy.

All right, then. A rose was what she wanted. A rose was what she would get.

* * *

The father, on his way back from his trip to the city (the meeting with the buyer had not gone well), stopped on the verge of a castle surrounded by lush gardens. He needed, after all, to pick a rose that grew close to the village, or else he’d have nothing for Beauty but a stem and a few withered leaves when he got home.

Grumbling, annoyed by his daughter’s perverse and hostile modesty (but relieved as well that, unlike her sisters, she wasn’t costing him money he’d recently learned he would not receive), he plucked a rose from a particularly abundant bush. One rose out of thousands.

Wrong castle. Wrong rosebush.

The beast pounced on the father. The beast was more than eight feet tall, a hybrid of wolf and lion, with bright, murderous eyes and thickly furred arms bigger than the father’s waist. The beast was somehow all the more menacing for the fact that he wore a waistcoat over a ruffled shirt.

He proclaimed rose-stealing a capital crime. He raised a paw like a bouquet of daggers. He was about to peel the father’s face from his skull, and work his way down from there.

Please, sir, the rose was for my daughter!

Stealing is stealing.

Imagine a voice like a lawn mower on gravel. Try not to think about the beast’s breath.

She’s the loveliest and most innocent girl in the world. I offered to buy her anything she wanted, and all she asked for was a rose.

The beast paused over that.

She could have had anything, and she asked for a rose?