Michael Cunningham - A Wild Swan - And Other Tales

She’s an unusual girl. I love her as I love life itself.

The beast lowered his paw, thrust it forcefully into the pocket of his coat, as if to keep it from striking out on its own.

Go home, then. Say goodbye to your daughter. Give her the rose. Then come back here and accept your punishment.

I will.

If you’re not back by this time tomorrow, I’ll hunt you down and kill your daughters before I kill you.

The beast turned and strode back to his castle, on legs big and powerful as a bison’s. The father, clutching the rose, leapt onto his horse and rode away.

* * *

When the father reached home he told his daughters the story, said he’d be off on the morrow, at dawn, to be flayed by the beast.

His younger daughters assured him it was all bluff. The beast couldn’t possibly know where they lived. The beast was a standard-issue psychopath. Threats are easy to deliver; the beast was surely on to other hallucinations already. The beast was probably, at that very moment, trying to figure out who was whispering obscenities from the cupboards, or why the furniture kept rearranging itself.

So, Poppa, could we see what you brought us?

Oh, yes, of course …

He began removing the parcels from his saddlebag.

* * *

Only Beauty knew that the beast would track them down, and murder them. Only Beauty understood what a single rose might signify, what acts a rose could inspire, if you lived without hope. If you were a beast confined to a castle, or a girl confined to an obscure and unprosperous village.

And so, after midnight, when her father and sisters were asleep, Beauty slipped out to the stable, mounted her father’s horse, and told it to take her to the beast’s castle. The horse, being a beast itself, was more than ready to comply.

It looked like an act of ultimate self-sacrifice. That was not untrue. But it was also true that Beauty preferred whatever the beast might do to another day of tending the geese, another night of needlepoint.

It was true as well that she hoped her father might come for her, when he woke at daybreak and saw she was gone. It was true that she entertained images of her father confronting the beast — her father who’d been the beast of her youth, enormous and bristling with hair; her father who’d been ostentatiously kind and gentle even as she, unblinded by the naïveté her sisters enjoyed, understood the effort required of him to refrain from certain acts he could so easily have committed, with the girls’ mother safely absent under her cross in the churchyard.

Beauty speculated, as the horse took her through nocturnal field and chirruping fen to the beast’s castle, over the battle she might be inspiring. She took (why deny it?) a certain pleasure in wondering who would claim her — father or fiend?

* * *

The father was, in fact, stricken when morning broke and he found that his eldest daughter had gone to the beast. Still, he couldn’t help thinking that her desire for the rose had not only caused this trouble but was, in its way, an insidious form of vanity. Beauty wanted, didn’t she, to be the pure and faultless one. She was subject to the arrogance of nuns.

He would be harmed forever by his decision to let her take his place. But that’s what he did. He would, over time, discover more and various ways to blame his daughter. He’d sink with a certain sensuousness into the image of himself as an awful man, a heartless man, which would prove, over time, an easier man for him to be.

* * *

From the moment Beauty arrived at the beast’s palace, she was impeccably treated. Meals served themselves, fireplaces ignited merrily when she entered rooms. Childlike arms, manifestations of the plaster walls, offered lit candelabra to guide her through the crepuscular hallways.

She needed less than two days to understand that her father would not mount a rescue; that he was grateful for his own deliverance; that an unthreatened dotage with two out of three daughters (the two could be relied upon to fuss over his aching joints, to wonder if he needed another pillow) struck him as sufficient.

Beauty lived alone, then, with the beast in his castle.

He was always courtly and gentle. No vulpine sex was visited upon the innocent girl in the enormous bed, in which she slept alone. She did not find herself impaled on a lurid red member just under two feet long; she was not tongued in a manner more carnivorous than carnal; she was not subject to a lust that had nothing to do with her own pleasure.

She was, of course, relieved. She could barely admit to herself that she was also, in some dark and secret way, disillusioned.

The days and nights took on a strange but palpable regularity. By day the beast pretended to duties in remote parts of the castle. By night, after he’d sat with Beauty as she ate her dinner, he stalked the halls, muttering, until it was time for him to stumble out into the forest, tear the throat from a fawn or boar, and devour it.

Beauty knew about that only because she happened to look out her bedroom window, late one sleepless night. The beast believed he killed his animals in secret. He didn’t understand Beauty’s capacity to accept the fact that, like everybody, he was tormented, but also, like everybody, he needed to eat.

He was, and was not, what she’d expected. She’d known, of course, that he’d be wild and dangerous and smelly. She had not anticipated this creaturely but chivalrous routine.

If Beauty was surprisingly let down by the beast’s immaculate behavior, by his secrecy regarding his less presentable habits, she did develop, over time, a mild but persistent affection for him. Not for the zoo stench — scat mingled with rage — that no cologne could cover; not for the sight of claws bigger than roofing nails, struggling to pick up a wine goblet. She grew fond of his determination to act kindly and tenderly, to be generous and true, as if she were a wife long married to a man whose carnal wishes had abandoned him, along with his youthful self-regard, but who feared more than anything the loss of his wife’s affection as she lived on with his milder self. She came to harbor feelings inspired by the gentleness the beast forced himself to summon, the gratitude apparent in his inhuman eyes when he gazed at her, the condition of brave hopelessness that was his life.

Finally, after months had passed, with their succession of identical days and nights — Beauty’s distracted engagement in idle embroidery, dinners at which there was nothing to say — the beast told her to go home again. He sank massively to his knees before her, like an elk shot full of arrows, and said he’d been wrong to keep her with him, he’d been subject to some fantasy about love’s power, but really, what had he been thinking? Had he actually believed that a pretty girl, come to him against her will, could love a monster? He’d been duped, it seemed, by stories he’d heard about girls who loved misshapen and appalling creatures. He had not thought to wonder what might be wrong, in such cases, with the girls themselves.

Beauty could not find a way to tell him that, had he been less mannerly, had he offered her a more potent aspect of threat, it might have worked. She wondered to herself why so many men seemed to think meekness was what won women’s hearts.

But she and the beast had developed no habits of candor, and it was too late, by then, to start. She accepted the beast’s offer, and fled. She was sorry about forsaking him, but could not bring herself to embrace such a maidenly future, bored, unchallenged, sequestered in a castle — however accommodating it might be, however prone to the lighting of fires and the laying out of meals — that offered by way of companionship only a monster obsessed with contemplating his own sins. She fled because life in the beast’s castle was more comfortable but not, in its deepest heart, substantially different from the life she’d lived at home.