A Fair Maiden (16 page)

In a kingdom by the sea dwelt a Fair Maiden. And the King of this kingdom was aged and yearning to die, for he had lived a very long time and was ripe to die yet feared Death, who boasted to him: "You are soon to die, old man! You are not royalty to me but just such an old man as any commoner in your kingdom—you are no one special and will fester and rot and stink like all the others." Death was an unshaven lout with a face crude as a boot, bulging bloodshot eyes, wild sprouting whiskers, warts on all his fingers, and a smell of garlic on his breath. Who was Death but an alehouse proprietor lacking all dignity!

And the aged King was bred to dignity, vanity, and pride and could not bear so crude an execution. He was a lonely King who had outlived his wives and even his children and took little solace in the pleasures of his elderly life. And he feared there was a curse on him, that though of noble birth he was destined for a commoner's death, and such festering and rot as Death promised. And so the King had but one final request: he must die at the hand of the fairest maiden in the land, for then his death would be delicious to him, and not sordid.

So long the aged King had dwelt in his castle high above the sea and the town below; his subjects feared him, for the King had such powers to peer into their hearts and to know them as their neighbors and even their families did not know them. But the aged King was a wise man and a seer and took little solace in his powers, which left him chastened by melancholy and lonelier than before. In the King's troubled sleep the Fair Maiden was revealed: she who was but a child, not yet a woman, in the care of her aged grandmother, a beautiful shining blond child, and pure of heart like no other maiden in the kingdom.

And the King's heart, which had long been brittle as stone, was rent in two, and the King woke as from a magician's enchantment, and joy and purpose filled his heart, and for the first time in many years the King wished to leave his castle and descend into the town and walk among the common people, in disguise so that they should not know him, and fall to the ground in fearful homage to him. And the King was jostled by the crowds in the town square, seeing how some persons were rude, and others were courteous; some were loud and coarse as brutes, and others were warm, sympathetic, and friendly; and the King saw that these were his subjects, and he could not judge them.

"These are my subjects. I have the power to bless."

And so the King entered the church, and knelt and prayed with the congregation; and even the priest did not recognize who had come to worship in their midst. And among the communicants appeared the Fair Maiden, exactly as she had appeared in the aged King's dream; and the King knew her at once, and knelt before her. And the Fair Maiden shrank from him, in modesty and alarm, and ran away to her home; and the King bade his servants to seek her out and to bring her to him, to pay to the girl's grandmother whatever sum of money was required, to fetch the Fair Maiden to his castle to be the aged King's last bride. And in his bedchamber the aged King prayed: "She who is the Fair Maiden must come to me—the King's executioner must she be."

And so the grandmother was offered a sum of money for the Fair Maiden, and in vehement pride said no. And yet again the grandmother was offered money, a higher sum, and in vehement pride said no. And a third time the grandmother was offered money, a yet higher sum, and this time the elderly woman said yes.

And so it happened that the Fair Maiden was brought to the aged King, and in a private ceremony in the castle they were wed by the priest, who blessed them, though the Fair Maiden, who was very young and knew little of the ways of the world, was stricken with fear of her aged royal bridegroom, as of the opulence of the castle, and could not cease weeping; and the King vowed to her that he adored her and would never wish to harm her: "For you are my soul mate, my dear bride—no more would I wish to harm you than I would wish to harm my own soul."

And when all others were banished from their presence, and when the King and the Fair Maiden were at last alone in the King's bedchamber, the King explained to his bride that it was not an impure, carnal love for which he had wed her, but that his bride should be his executioner, that the King might thwart Death. For the King had outlived his life, and wished to die while he yet retained some measure of youthful dignity. Her reward would be great, not only wealth and property and the most exquisite jewels, but her knowledge that she had fulfilled the King's great wish, and she would be known in all the kingdom as the King's soul mate, and so revered and envied. In their bridal bed, the aged King would lie with his arms folded across his chest, and very still, and the Fair Maiden would lie beside him, unclothed; by glimmering firelight the Fair Maiden would spread her long golden hair over the King's face, and coil it around his throat, and tighten it, and press her soft lips against his with all the force of her young body, and suck the very life from him, that the King's agèd heart would quicken, and strain, and burst in very rapture. And the King would pass from this vale of tears and strife into the next life, with no pain; his soul would expire and be released of all torment; the King would escape the crude alehouse lout Death, left thwarted outside the gates of the castle, in mud and pelting rain. In the firelit bedchamber, the Fair Maiden would summon the priest to bless her husband, and she alone would prepare his gaunt, aged body, tenderly washing it and wrapping it in the raiments of the grave, and a final time kiss the King's cold lips and bid her royal bridegroom adieu.

And so it came to pass that the aged King died happily in the arms of the Fair Maiden; and the Fair Maiden, who was both bride and widow on her wedding night, came to be known through all the kingdom as the King's soul mate, and revered and envied by all for the remainder of her life.

With a shudder Katya woke from her heavy, stuporous sleep. What time was it! What had happened to her! Her mouth was parched, as if she'd swallowed sand. She was lying on the sofa in a stiff and contorted posture, as if she'd fallen from a great height; beneath her the velvet cloth was bunched, and chafed against her skin. The white shawl was covering her again; someone had drawn it to her chin. Dimly she saw, seated in a chair only a few feet away, a male figure. The shade of the lamp beside him had been tilted to throw light on Katya's face and not on his own, and the panicked thought came to Katya,
He has been watching me in my sleep.

Yet more panicked:
He has done something to me in my sleep.

"Mr. Kidder! What t-time is..."

Clumsily Katya tried to sit up. Something was wrong; her head seemed to swirl. She was naked beneath the shawl and—had someone lain beside her, on the sofa? While she was naked? Vaguely she remembered his arms around her, his mouth on her; her effort to throw him off, and her gradual submission; the strange tale he'd told her, as you'd tell a child at bedtime, which had sounded like a fairy tale, of an aged King yearning to die and a Fair Maiden chosen to be his executioner...

Katya was shocked to see, by the mantel clock, that it was nearly
2 A.M.
So late! Mr. Kidder must have put something in her drink. Must have drugged her. Half pleading, she said, "Mr. Kidder, what did you do to me? I—I feel so strange. My head is so strange. I—I want to leave now..."

Still Katya was very groggy and could barely sit up.

Weak as if she'd had a sudden attack of flu. Yet with maddening calmness Mr. Kidder sat in his wicker chair regarding her with his shadow-eyes, as he'd regarded her from behind his easel. There was something wrong with Mr. Kidder: the handsome ruin of a face now looked ghastly, ghoulish. Most shocking was the absence of his snowy white hair ... In a cajoling voice he said, "Dear Katya! Juan is gone for the night, but of course I will drive you. As soon as you are ready to leave, it's back to the Mayflies, to whom you seem so perversely attached."

Katya could not bear it that Marcus Kidder was trying to make a joke of this. She was furious with him, trying to stand: "What—what did you do to me? It was more than just wine, wasn't it! Made me fall asleep, so you could do nasty things to me! I—I hate you—"

Mr. Kidder pressed a forefinger to his lips. "Katya, not so loud. This is Proxmire Street, at nearly two in the morning. I assure you, everyone else is asleep, for this is an elderly neighborhood. We do not want to attract the attention of the local police, do we? You are perfectly all right, as you must know. Dear Katya Spivak of Vineland, New Jersey, whom someone, a lusty lover I would guess, has branded as his own in the tender flesh of your thigh. Surely you are much safer with Marcus Kidder."

Katya managed to teeter to her feet. Bare feet, her toes clutching at the hardwood floor. She held the shawl against her as she willed herself to stand, not to give in to a weak sensation in her knees and sink back down on the sofa. "I can't believe you would do this to me! I trusted you! You said you l-loved me—"

Mr. Kidder protested: "Katya, of course I love you. Though knowing now more about you, yet I still love you. As I've said, you and I are soul mates, and that will never change. Frankly, I didn't intend to reveal myself to you so openly so soon. Before our bond of intimacy had deepened. But I have decided I don't want to wait much longer. As you see, I am not quite the person you thought I was." With a smile, indicating his nearly bald head, for the snowy white hair must have been a wig. Katya could see that Mr. Kidder's head was covered in a scruffy, tarnished silver down and looked shrunken, pitiable. And his eyes were the eyes of a death's-head. The vertical lines on his face seemed to have deepened, bracketing his thin-lipped mouth, which shaped itself into Marcus Kidder's familiar mock-wistful smile: "I am the aged King, dear. You are the Fair Maiden. To be blunt, I am asking you to assist me in a very pragmatic act of ... I believe the clinical term is euthanasia—mercy killing. Not by strangulation, nor by sucking away my breath—don't look so alarmed, dear Katya. We will be more civilized, more merciful. I have amassed a generous store of painkillers—opiates—and we will drink champagne in our bridal bed. Not immediately, my dear—but soon, I think. Once my financial affairs are in order, and on both sides we are in agreement about how you, dear Katya, will be rewarded." Mr. Kidder paused as his smile became more pained. "You would not make me beg, would you? For it is exactly as the doomed old King wished, to die in the arms of the Fair Maiden, and not at the hand of crude Death."

Katya stammered, "Th-this is a—joke, isn't it? Please, Mr. Kidder, it's a joke, right? You're laughing at me right now—aren't you?"

But Mr. Kidder wasn't laughing, just smiling. "You will have plenty of time to make a wise decision, Katya. You will not be rushed. I am utterly serious, of course. Funny Bunny is always utterly serious, even as he is a very funny bunny. And I will be true to my word to reward you generously. Before the ... occasion, as well as after. You've learned, dear Katya, that you can trust me to pay you generously, yes?"

Katya pressed her hands against her ears. How terrible this conversation was! Her eyes flooded with tears of vexation. "I don't b-believe you, Mr. K-Kidder! You are—you are joking, aren't you! Except this is
not funny
..."

"Katya, on the morning we first met, I'd just come from my nephrologist's office—and just the previous day from my gastro-enterologist's office. Such fancy words, eh? Pray, dear Katya, in the heedless health of youth, you will never learn what they mean. And the news was both good and not so good: after a siege of somewhere beyond eighteen months of radiation and chemotherapy, Marcus Kidder had been diagnosed as—seemingly! tentatively!—in remission. And was this good or not so good news? For if you are in remission—and not for the first time, it pains me to admit—you must live with the shadow over your head, like a black thunderhead, that there will come a time, perhaps soon—no fear, it will come—when you are no longer in remission, when you must again be strapped into zapping machines and injected with sizzling chemicals, and must endure again what you'd only just managed to endure. By which time—for time weakens us all—it may be too late to act upon your deepest wish, which is a wish that can be fulfilled only when you are strong and clear-minded and, indeed, in remission—succinctly put, not to be. 'To cease upon the midnight with no pain.' For everyone waits too long in such matters. As the aged King knows, having seen too many others in the last grasping, gasping months of their desperate lives..."

Katya heard some of this. Katya heard as much as she wanted to hear of this.
He wants me to help him die. Help him kill himself. That is what he wants of me!
Desperate now to escape this stifling room, this terrible place; how trapped she felt here, drugged, paralyzed, desperate to get back to her room in the Engelhardts' house before anyone knew she was missing. Mr. Kidder was on his feet with the intention of helping Katya walk, for her legs were unsteady, but Katya shoved at the strange bald man, whom she hardly knew—"No! Don't touch me!"—made her way, stumbling, to the bathroom, locked the door behind her, and hurriedly dressed, seeing in the mirror a girl's pale, sickly, frightened face. Yes, but Katya was angry too, Katya was damned angry, fumbling with her clothing, taking no heed that she'd pulled the top on backward, kicking her feet into her sandals; she was furious and trembling, unlocking the door and pushing past the disgusting old man hovering just outside, damned old baldie-head, scruffy baldie-head, like her own grandfather Spivak he was, an elderly sick pitiable man yet like a vulture, the hungry eyes, the disgusting mouth sucking at her energy. In the street Katya wouldn't have given such a man a second glance; on Ocean Avenue that morning, if he hadn't been wearing his snowy white wig and hadn't been dressed so elegantly and carried a cane and had such an upright posture, she'd have turned away from him at once, hurried little Tricia and the baby away from him, for here was Death plucking at her wrist, here was Death wanting to embrace her. Katya threw him off, threw off his hand from her wrist; such curses sprang from her mouth as she'd been hearing for much of her life in Vineland,
Fuck you, the hell with you, goddamn you bastard leave me alone,
as she fumbled to snatch up her bag, ignored the old man's apologies, his pleas, his offer to pay her,
goddamn.
Katya was too furious and too agitated to remain in this terrible place another moment, but pushed out the door, outside and into the night. At once the fresh chill ocean air revived her, and the smell of the ocean, the angry
slap-slap-slap
of the surf; she was running to the front gate, and behind her Marcus Kidder's uplifted voice: "Think it over, Katya! The offer—the King—will be waiting for you."