A Wild Swan (2 page)

Finally he packed a few things and went out into the world. The world, however, proved no easier for him than the palace had been. He could get only the most menial of jobs. He had no marketable skills (princes don't), and just one working hand. Every now and then a woman grew interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly drawn to some Leda fantasy or, worse, hoped her love could bring him back his arm. Nothing ever lasted. The wing was awkward on the subway, impossible in cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And unless it was washed daily, feather by feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a linty, dispiriting gray.

He lived with his wing as another man might live with a dog adopted from the pound: sweet-tempered, but neurotic and untrainable. He loved his wing, helplessly. He also found it exasperating, adorable, irritating, wearying, heartbreaking. It embarrassed him, not only because he didn't manage to keep it cleaner, or because getting through doors and turnstiles never got less awkward, but because he failed to insist on it as an asset. Which wasn't all that hard to imagine. He could see himself selling himself as a compelling mutation, a young god, proud to the point of sexy arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel wing.

Baby, these feathers are going to tickle you halfway to heaven, and this man-part is going to take you the rest of the way.

Where, he asked himself, was that version of him? What dearth of nerve rendered him, as year followed year, increasingly paunchy and slack-shouldered, a walking apology? Why was it beyond his capacities to get back into shape, to cop an attitude, to stroll insouciantly into clubs in a black lizardskin suit with one sleeve cut off?

Yeah, right, sweetheart, it's a wing, I'm part angel, but trust me, the rest is pure devil.

He couldn't seem to manage that. He might as well have tried to run a three-minute mile, or become a virtuoso on the violin.

He's still around. He pays his rent one way or another. He takes his love where he can find it. In late middle age he's grown ironic, and cheerful in a toughened, seen-it-all way. He's become possessed of a world-weary wit. He's realized he can either descend into bitterness or become a wised-up holy fool. It's better, it's less mortifying, to be the guy who understands that the joke's on him, and is the first to laugh when the punch line lands.

Most of his brothers back at the palace are on their second or third wives. Their children, having been cosseted and catered to all their lives, can be difficult. The princes spend their days knocking golden balls into silver cups, or skewering moths with their swords. At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats perform.

The twelfth brother can be found, most nights, in one of the bars on the city's outer edges, the ones that cater to people who were only partly cured of their curses, or not cured at all. There's the three-hundred-year-old woman who wasn't specific enough when she spoke to the magic fish, and found herself crying, “No, wait, I meant alive and
young
forever,” into a suddenly empty sea. There's the crownletted frog who can't seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the spell. There's the prince who's spent years trying to determine the location of the comatose princess he's meant to revive with a kiss, and has lately been less devoted to searching mountain and glen, more prone to bar-crawling, given to long stories about the girl who got away.

In such bars, a man with a single swan wing is considered lucky.

His life, he tells himself, is not the worst of all possible lives. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's what there is to hope for—that it merely won't get any worse.

Some nights, when he's stumbled home smashed (there are many such nights), negotiated the five flights up to his apartment, turned on the TV, and passed out on the sofa, he awakes, hours later, as the first light grays the slats of the venetian blinds, with only his hangover for company, to find that he's curled his wing over his chest and belly; or rather (he knows this to be impossible, and yet…) that the wing has curled itself, by its own volition, over him, both blanket and companion, his devoted resident alien, every bit as imploring and ardent and inconvenient as that mutt from the pound would have been. His dreadful familiar. His burden, his comrade.

 

CRAZY OLD LADY

It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.

You ran, as your mother put it, with a fast crowd. You threw off your schoolgirl plaids early, lied your way to adulthood in taverns three towns away, encouraged the men there to put first their fingers and then other parts into whatever interlude of skin you were able to offer them in the dimness of alleys, the little patches of neglected grass that passed for parks.

You went through three husbands, and joked to your girlfriends that with each marriage you'd thought you'd reached bottom, only to find that the elevator of love went to still lower floors. You decided against husband number four because, by then, even you could see the nascent defeat in his plans for the future. You could hear the muttered, gin-marinated accusations to come.

After you'd dispatched the fourth candidate, you embarked on a career of harshly jovial sluttishness. You were in your forties. By then your girlfriends had all married tolerable men and gradually, over time, found more and more reasons not to meet you for drinks (
Sorry, but the children wear me out; I'd love to, but you know how my husband gets when I come home loaded
).

It struck you, during your forties and then your fifties, as a personal victory. You weren't sweeping splintery floorboards as your husband sat bemoaning the bleak fate you'd helped make for him, the job that barely paid for heat and light; you weren't pressing a fifth infant to breasts increasingly unwilling to produce more than thimblefuls of milk. Your solution to your slackening body was squeezing it into ever-tighter dresses until, by the time sixty loomed, it seemed as if the dresses themselves held you upright on the bar stools; that if they were cut away, you'd spill onto the floor and lie there, helpless, a pink-white muddle of overused flesh.

You let that lost tooth remain a black square in your knowing smile. You dyed your hair: circus orange, followed by a maroon deep enough to verge on purple, followed by white-hot blond.

You were undeluded. You believed you were undeluded. You were thinking, “House of the Rising Sun”
—
a wised-up, whorish finish, with its scattered rhinestones still sewn on here and there. You imagined, in the long run, a perversely glorious, housebound lasciviousness; a reputation for insanity among the zealots who worshipped banal virtues as if they were glory incarnate. You expected late-night visits from the local young bucks (yes, you thought about your old girlfriends' sons), in search of the instruction you'd provide (
Put your fingertip there, right there, pinch gently, very gently, I promise you she'll love it
); boys who'd be grateful for the nights of ecstatic transport you'd visit upon them, and, more touching still, for the mornings they'd wake with faces buried in your breasts, abashed, embarrassed, eager to depart, in which endeavor you'd encourage them (you'd cultivate no hint of desperation, never urge them to stay). During the brief interludes before they jumped up to search for their socks and underwear, you'd assure them that they were marvels, they were warriors; gifts in the making for some girl who'd be thankful forever for what you'd taught them in a single night.

The boys would grin with nervous self-admiration as they stumbled back into their clothes. They'd know the truth when they heard it. They'd understand: You were seeding your town with suitable husbands. You were a goddess (a minor goddess, but still) of carnal knowingness; you were seeing to it that the youth of the region knew not only where the clitoris is, but what to do with it. You were cultivating, in absentia, a cohort of girls (might a few of them learn about it, might they pay you an occasional visit?) whose nights in bed with their husbands would feel like proper compensation for their days of washing and ironing.

That future, that particular old age, however, refused to occur.

It had to do, most likely, with the accident (the backfiring car, the horse) that left you with that gimp leg. It had to do with the tiny apartment over the laundry (who expected rents to go up the way they did?), where the smell of mouse pellets and dry-cleaning chemicals seemed only to be made worse by the veils of perfume you sprayed around. What boy would want to come there?

It had to do as well with the surprising timidity of youth; the endangered-species status (or so it seemed) of the fearless princelings you remembered from your own early days—the boys (old men now, the ones who were still alive at all) who'd been drunk on confidence, touching in their unpracticed attempts at swagger. They'd been replaced by this generation of alarmingly well-behaved man-children, who seemed content to learn about women at the hands of girls who knew almost as little about their own bodies as the boys who fumbled with them.

Eventually, by the time you'd come to think of seventy as still young, you bought yourself a bit of real estate. It lay a considerable distance from town—who could afford even the outskirts, anymore? Once the deal had been struck you stood (aided by the cane you still couldn't quite believe you carried) on your modest patch of bare ground surrounded by forest, and decided that your house would be made of candy.

You did the research. It was, in fact, possible to construct bricks—out of sugar, glycerin, cornstarch, and a few unmentionable toxins—that would stand up to the rain. Gingerbread, if fortified with sufficient cement dust, would do as a roof.

The rest, of course, would require ongoing maintenance. The windows of spun sugar were good for a single winter, if that; the piped-on lintels and windowsills would need to be remade every spring, even when the icing was reinforced with Elmer's glue. The tiles made of lollipops, the specially ordered shafts of candy cane that served as banisters and railings, held up, but faded in the summer heat and had to be replaced. What could be more depressing than elderly-looking candy?

The house, however, was charming, in its insane and lavishly reckless way, all the more so because it put out its lurid colors, emanated its smells of sugar and ginger, in a tree-shadowed glade far from even the most rudimentary of roads.

And then you waited.

You had—it was probably a miscalculation—expected a more exploratory spirit among the local youngsters, whatever their general devotion to decent behavior. Where were the sweet little picnickers; where were the boy gangs looking for hideouts where they could (with your approval) imbibe the whiskey they needed in order to fully imagine themselves? Where were the young lovers in search of secret sylvan places they could claim as their own?

Time did not pass quickly. There wasn't much for you to do. You found yourself replacing the frosting and lollipops more often than necessary, simply because you needed projects, and because (it was a little crazy, but you didn't regret a trace of craziness in yourself) you wondered if a heightened version—a sharpening of cookie smell, some other manufacturer who produced candy with brighter stripes and swirls—might make a difference.

As eighty approached, your first and only visitors were not quite who you'd been expecting. They looked promising when they first emerged, blinking with surprise, from among the tree trunks into the little clearing in which your house stood.

They were sexy, the girl as well as the boy, with their starved and foxy faces—that hungrily alert quality you see sometimes in kids who've been knocked around a little. They were pierced and tattooed. And they were, even more gratifyingly, ravenous. The boy didn't seem to mind that the handfuls of icing he stuffed into his mouth were so clearly held together with paste. The girl sucked seductively (with the cartoonish lewdness of girls taught by porn rather than experience) on a scarlet lollipop.

The boy said, through a mouthful of icing and Elmer's, “Hey, Grandma, what's up?”

The girl just smiled at him, tongue pressed to lollipop, as if he were clever and intoxicatingly dangerous; as if he were a rebel and a hero.

And what, exactly, did you expect those young psychopaths, those beaten children, to do, after they'd eaten half your house, without the remotest expression of wonder, or even of simple politeness? Were you surprised that they ransacked the place, eating their way from room to room, stopping every now and then to mock the bits of jewelry they found (she, with your pearls around her neck: “Our mother has pearls like these, how do you like them on me?”) or the vase you'd had since your grandmother died, into which the boy took a long, noisy piss. Did you think they'd fail to complain, ultimately, that there seemed to be nothing here but candy to eat, that they needed a little protein as well?

Were you relieved, maybe just a little, when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you into the oven? Did it seem unanticipated but right, somehow—did it strike you as satisfying, as a fate finally realized—when they slammed the door behind you?