A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

BEASTS

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?

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.

When she returned to her village, however, she was surprised to find that she experienced no sense of going home. She was happy, happy enough, to see her father and sisters again, but her father was still the man who hadn’t followed her to the beast’s castle and done battle for her. Her sisters had married the men they were destined to marry — a brick mason and an ironmonger, sturdily prosaic men who performed their jobs with neither complaint nor ardor, who liked their dinners served promptly at six, and who stumbled home late from the pubs to set about begetting still more children. Beauty’s middle sister had two babies already; the youngest was suckling her first, with a second on the way.

What was most surprising, though, was the fact that Beauty seemed to have developed a reputation while she’d been away.

Although the true story of her time with the beast did not get around, no one believed her father’s version, about her sudden departure for a convent. The villagers agreed that she’d been misbehaving in a remote and foreign place, and that, once some duke or earl had tired of her, or she’d grown too familiar to be the pick of the bawdy house, she was deluded enough to think she could simply come back, as if nothing had happened. Now that Beauty was home again, even the pick of the still-unmarried men (the baker prone to unpredictable spasms of rage, the rabbit-keeper with the squint and the tic) — even those sad specimens — were reluctant about a girl with a past that clearly required a cover-up.

Eventually, late one night (explanations would have been awkward), Beauty slipped away, mounted the horse, and rode back to the beast’s castle. At least she was wanted there. At least she was loved. At least the beast saw no reason for her to be ashamed.

The castle, however, when she arrived, was dark and empty. Its massive doors swung open easily enough, but the candlesticks on the walls did not light themselves as she moved down the hallways. The cherub faces in the molding were merely carved, unliving wood.

She found the beast in the garden, which had turned weedy and rank, its hedges throwing out branches like panicky, irrational thoughts. The fountain, gone dry, was etched all over with hairline cracks.

There, on the paving stones before the arid fountain, lay the beast.

Beauty knelt beside him. Although he was too far gone to speak, she could still see a flicker in his yellow eyes.

She lifted, with effort, one of his paws in her small hands. She told him quietly, as if it were a secret, that she’d realized she loved him only by being parted from him. She wasn’t lying; she wasn’t exactly lying. She did love him, in a way. She pitied him, she pitied herself, she grieved for both of them — souls who seemed to have gotten so easily and accidentally lost.

And if he could be healed, if he might be brought back from death’s brink …

She loved the image of herself turning proudly from the low lot of village men who’d deign to have her; she loved the idea of saying no to the baker and the rabbit-keeper and the filmy-eyed old widower whose once-respectable house was going slant on its foundation, shedding shingles into the town square.

She would be the bride of a beast. She would live in his castle. She would care nothing for the whispers of biddies and gossips.

She said softly, into the beast’s furry ear, which was bigger than a catcher’s mitt, that if he could revive himself, if he could manage to rise again, she’d marry him.

The results were instantaneous.

The beast leapt up with a lion’s fervor. Behind him, the fountain spurted water again.

Beauty stepped back. The beast looked adoringly at her. He looked at her with a thankfulness that was marvelous and, somehow, dreadful to see.

In less than a moment, the beast’s hide split open like a chrysalis. The claws and fangs fell away. The feral reek evaporated.

And here he is.

He’s stunning. He’s sturdy, square-faced, snapping with muscle.

The prince stands among the snarls of shed fur, the claws that litter the paving stones. He looks down in amazement at his restored body. He flexes his human hands, tests the athletic springiness of legs that are no longer taloned haunches.

The spell has been broken. Did Beauty suspect it, all along? She’ll enjoy the idea that she’d intuited it, that she was a girl who could ferret out the workings of enchantment, but she’ll never be sure.

She waits breathlessly, ecstatically, for the newly summoned prince to take her in his arms. But first he has to check his reflection in the water, which is already rippling in the revived fountain.

It’s worked. He’s managed it. He’s seduced a lovely woman into pledging her troth to a soul that’s been concealed — to everyone but her — by disfigurement.

Beauty’s pale bosom heaves with anticipation.

The prince turns slowly from his own reflection, shows her a lascivious, bestial smile; a rapacious and devouring smile. Although his face is impeccably handsome, something about it is not quite right. The eyes remain feral. The mouth seems capable, still, of tearing out the throat of a deer. He could almost be the beast’s younger, handsomer (much handsomer) brother, as if his parents had produced a deformed child and then a beautiful, perfectly proportioned one.

Beauty begins, suddenly, to wonder. Is it possible that the beast-spell was meant, long ago, as protection? Had the prince been locked into a monster’s guise for decipherable reasons?

She backs away. Grinning victoriously, emitting a low growl of triumph, he advances.