A Wild Swan (8 page)

The queen silently summons two of the guards, who lift you in two pieces from the floor in which you've become mired, who carry you, one half apiece, out of the room. They take you all the way back to your place in the woods, and leave you there.

There are two of you now. Neither is sufficient unto itself, but you learn, over time, to join your two halves together, and hobble around. There are limits to what you can do, though you're able to get from place to place. Each half, naturally enough, requires the cooperation of the other, and you find yourself getting snappish with yourself; you find yourself cursing yourself for your clumsiness, your overeagerness, your lack of consideration for your other half. You feel it doubly. Still, you go on. Still, you step in tandem, make your slow and careful way up and down the stairs, admonishing, warning, each of you urging the other to slow down, or speed up, or wait a second. What else can you do? Each would be helpless without the other. Each would be stranded, laid flat, abandoned, bereft.

 

STEADFAST; TIN

It's his lucky night. She's relented, after two years of aloof and chilly friendliness. Finally, cherries have appeared in all three of his slot machine windows. At the kegger thrown by his fraternity (it's spring by the calendar, but wind still knifes in off the lake, the grass is still sere), she's gotten a little drunker than she'd intended to, because she's just been abandoned by a boy she'd thought she might love; a boy who, when he left, took with him her first ideas about a cogent and convincing future.

At the frat party, her best friend whispers to her,
Go with that guy, give both of you a break, haven't you already observed your second anniversary of him mooning over you? And hey
, the friend whispers,
he's just hot enough and just dumb enough for tonight, which, honestly sweetheart, you could use right now, it's part of your recovery program, it's your post-asshole-boyfriend vacation, just take the poor fuck for a spin, it'll make you feel better, you need a little, how to put it, unintensity.

He's drawn to remote girls, unavailable girls, girls who don't fall for it, being, as he is, a boy who might have been carved by Michelangelo; one of those exceptional beings who wear their beauty as if it were a common human state, and not an aberration. A remote and unavailable girl is rare for him.

Upstairs, in his room, he's got her shirt unbuttoned, he's fingering her crotch, which is pleasant for her, but only pleasant. She's been right, since he first locked eyes with her in Humanities 101—these hunky, uber-confident guys are never truly adept, they've never had to be, they've received their educations at the hands of girls who were too grateful, too enamored; girls who failed to teach them properly. This rough groping, these inexpert kisses, have been enough for those simple and besotted girls whose main objective was to keep him coming around. He must have had sex with a hundred girls, more than a hundred, and every one of them, it seems, has done little more than cooperate; than assure him that he's been right all along about what a girl wants, what a girl needs.

She's not that patient. She's not that interested.

So she steps back out of his embrace and strips, with the quick mechanical carelessness of a teammate in the locker room.

Oh. Well. Wow. This is a new one on him, this matter-of-fact, let's-get-on-with-it attitude.

It means he hasn't had time to prepare her, to slip her the abashed confession that's worked every other time, since he started college.

Disconcerted, confused, he strips as well. He can't think of anything else to do.

And there it is, unannounced.

All he can manage is “It's a prosthetic.” He detaches it, tosses it carelessly, callously, onto the floor.

His right leg ends just above the knee.

Car accident, he tells her. When I was seventeen. The summer after high school.

The tossed-away lower leg sits on the floor. It looks like an accident, all by itself: the flesh-colored plastic calf tapering to an ankle that sprouts a toeless foot.

He stands before her. He has no trouble balancing on one leg.

He tells her—he always tells this story, to every girl—that the other car was driven by a fifteen-year-old who'd just stolen it, and was being chased by the police. It matters to him that he was not in any way at fault; that a young criminal, a demon of sorts, took his leg from him.

She needs a moment to fully apprehend the missing lower leg. His body, from the broad farmhand shoulders to the crop-rows of abdominals, is as flawless as she'd expected it to be.

He's harmed, though. He's been bluffing, since that car accident, which got him right after he'd emerged from high school, laureled and impeccable. It seems that some devil delivered the punch line before the joke had been set up, and that the joke, in its earliest stages (no time for a talking dog or a rabbi or a crazy wager), can deliver only a surreal and macabre finish.

So, this really handsome guy walks into a bar and … The bar blows up and kills everybody.

The bravado she's never liked in him, the thuggish self-assurance that's turned her off, reveals itself to have been a trick, a way of coping. He's come off as cartoonishly confident because that's what he's needed to do.

He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing's wrong.

*   *   *

Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small.

She marries not only a man but an inconsistency; she falls in love with the gap between his physique and his affliction.

He marries the first girl who hasn't treated his amputation as if it were no big deal; the first who doesn't need to evade his sorrow and his anger or, worst of all, try talking him out of his sorrow and his anger.

The surprises arrive in their own time.

After they're married, as year piles upon year, he's surprised by how often her abhorrence of sentimentality can render her cold and cruel; he's surprised by her insistence on calling it “honesty.” How is he supposed to fight with someone who demands that her every lapse or failing be treated as a virtue, as an admirable quality he refuses to understand?

She's surprised by how quickly his carelessly incandescent beauty relaxes into the grinning, regular-guy appeal of a car salesman; by the fact that he's become a car salesman; by the ways in which his heftier, coarser flesh renders him less a sacrifice to some jealous god's wrath and more an everyday optimist who's merely missing a leg.

He's surprised by how lonely he can feel in her presence, she by how she struggles to stay interested. Her foundering interest feeds his loneliness. His loneliness drives him to be more affable, more desperately charming, which further dulls her interest. It's not a good sign when she finds herself saying to him, over dinner in a restaurant, “For god's sake, will you stop acting like you're trying to sell me a
car
?” It's not a good sign when he has an affair with a foolish girl who listens raptly to his every opinion, laughs (perhaps a bit too riotously) at all his jokes.

The two stay married, though. They stay married because she took maternity leave when Trevor was born and, although she'd intended to, didn't go back to the law firm—she hadn't expected to be so endlessly fascinated by her infant son. They stay married because the remodeling of the kitchen is taking forever, because there's Beth now as well as Trevor, because the marriage isn't all that bad, because getting
un
married seems so difficult, so frightening, so sad. They can separate after the kitchen is finished; after the kids are a little older; after they as a couple have finally passed through the realm of irritation and bickering and reached the frozen waste of the unbearable.

They hope they'll learn to be happier together. They also yearn, sometimes, for the point at which misery becomes so profound as to leave them no alternative.

*   *   *

So, honey, did you like that story?

It was okay.

I've been saving that story. Until you were a little older.

Older?

Well, eight isn't old, it's just older than, you know, six. Why didn't you like it?

I hate it when you ask me that question. I said it was okay.

All right, let's phrase it a little differently. What didn't you like about it?

Can I go now?

In a minute. Would you answer the question, first?

You didn't read that story to Trevor. Trevor is outside, playing kickball.

I wanted to read this one specially to you. What didn't you like about it?

Okay. Why did that soldier have only one leg?

The toymaker ran out of lead.

It seemed kind of stupid. How the soldier fell in love with the ballerina because he thought she had one leg, too.

He could see only one of her legs. The other was raised up behind her.

But wouldn't he have known that? Hadn't he ever seen a ballerina before?

Maybe he hadn't. Or maybe it was wishful thinking. If you had just one leg, wouldn't you want to meet other people like you?

It doesn't make sense.

What doesn't?

The soldier falls out a window, some bad boys put him in a boat made of newspaper, and he sails down a storm drain.

That seems like it makes sense, to me.

But then he gets swallowed by a fish and the fish is bought by the same family's cook and when she cuts it open, the soldier's inside.

Why didn't you like that?

Uh, because it was stupid?

It was about destiny. Do you know what “destiny” means?

Yes.

The soldier and the ballerina couldn't be kept apart. That's destiny.

I know what it means. It's still stupid.

Maybe we could think of another word …

Then the little boy threw the soldier into the fireplace. For no reason. After the soldier came back, in the fish. The boy threw him into the fire.

A demon put a spell on the boy.

There's no such thing as demons.

Agreed. All right, let's say he didn't like it that the soldier was different.

You always say “different” when there's something wrong with somebody.

I'm not crazy about a phrase like “something wrong with somebody.”

And then. You know what's really stupid? That the ballerina blows into the fireplace, too.

Could we talk about what “destiny” actually means?

The ballerina had both legs. The ballerina was up there on a shelf. The ballerina wasn't “different.”

But she loved somebody who was.

What's the big deal, about being different? You make it sound like some kind of prize.

*   *   *

The marriage takes its turn on their twentieth anniversary, when the boat catches fire.

It occurs during the first vacation they've taken as a couple since the kids were born. Trevor is a freshman at Haverford, Beth is a junior in high school—they're pretty much grown up by now. And, according to the real estate agent, with the kitchen so meticulously redone, they could get a fortune for the house.

All their reasons are evaporating on them. They're taking the sort of save-the-marriage vacation that generally means the marriage is already lost.

The chartered sailboat, with its ten passengers and three-man crew, explodes in flames just off the Dalmatian Coast. They'll learn later about the drunken deckhand, the Zippo, the leak in a propane tank.

At one moment, they're sunning on the deck. She's noticed a cloud that looks like FDR's profile and is pointing it out to him, thinking this is what happy couples do; hoping that the impersonation of happiness will evolve into the genuine article. It helps, it seems to help, that they're spending two weeks in close quarters with eleven strangers; that they heard Eva Balderston say to her sister Carrie, “What a lovely couple,” as they got up from dinner last night; that there are believers.

He's trying to make out FDR's profile in the cloud. She's trying not to mind that he can't seem to see it, when it's so obviously
right there.
She's striving not to think about all he fails to notice in the world. He's fighting off his own burgeoning panic over letting her down again. He's about to say, “Oh, yeah, right, that's amazing,” when in fact he sees only ordinary clouds …

The next moment, she's in the water. She knows there's been thunder, she knows there's been hot and blinding brilliance, but that reaches her as memory. She immediately inhabits a new impossibility, and for a moment it seems she's always been stroking through seawater, a mockingly tranquil, sparkling blue-green field on which, about thirty yards away, the boat's black silhouette is suspended in flames, like a skeleton on an orange X-ray screen.