A Wild Swan (4 page)

On his third visit, Jack decides not to press his luck with the giantess. This time, he sneaks in through the back.

He finds the giant and giantess unaltered, though it would seem they've had to cut back, having lost their gold and their magic hen. The castle has dissolved a bit—sky knifes in through gaps in the cloud-walls. The daily lunch of an entire animal runs more along the lines of an antelope or an ibex, sinewy and dark-tasting, no longer the fattened, farm-tender ox or bullock of their salad days.

Still, habits resist change. The giant devours his creature, spits out horns and hooves, and demands his last remaining treasure: a magic harp.

The harp is a prize of a different order entirely. Who knows about its market value? It's nothing so simple as gold coins or golden eggs. It too is made of gold, but it's not prosaic in the way of actual currency.

It's a harp like any harp—strings, knee, neck, tuning pins—but its head is the head of a woman, slightly smaller than an apple, more stern than beautiful; more Athena than Botticelli Venus. And it can play itself.

The giant commands the harp to play. The harp obliges. It plays a tune unknown on the earth below; a melody that emanates from clouds and stars, a song of celestial movements, the music of the spheres, that which composers like Bach and Chopin came close to approximating but which, being ethereal, cannot be produced by instruments made of brass or wood, cannot be summoned by human breath or fingering.

The harp plays the giant into his nap. That gargantuan head makes its thudding daily contact with the tabletop.

What must the giantess think, when Jack creeps in and grabs the harp?
Again? You're kidding. You actually want the very last of our treasures?

Is she appalled, or relieved, or both? Does she experience some ecstasy of total loss? Or has she had enough? Is she going to put an end, at last, to Jack's voracity?

We'll never know. Because it's the harp, not the giantess, who finally protests. As Jack makes for the door, the harp calls out, “Master, help me, I'm being stolen.”

The giant wakes, looks around uncertainly. He's been dreaming. Can this be his life, his kitchen, his haggard and grudging wife?

By the time he's up and after Jack, Jack has already traversed the cloud-field and reached the top of the beanstalk, holding firm to the harp as the harp cries out for rescue.

It's a race down the beanstalk. Jack is hampered by his grip on the harp—he can only climb one-handed—but the giant has far more trouble than Jack in negotiating the stalk itself, which, for the giant, is thin and unsteady, like the rope he was forced to climb in gym class when he was a weepy, lonely boy.

As Jack nears the ground, he calls to his mother to bring him an axe. He's lucky—she's semi-sober today. She rushes out with an axe. Jack chops the beanstalk down, while the giant is still as high as a hawk circling for rabbits.

The beanstalk falls like a redwood. The giant hits the earth so hard his body crashes through the topsoil, imbeds itself ten feet deep, leaves a giant-shaped chasm in the middle of a cornfield.

It's a mercy, of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

*   *   *

Jack has had the giant-hole filled in, right over the giant's body, and in a rare act of piety he's ordered a grove of lilac bushes planted over the giant's resting-place. If you were to look down at the lilac grove from above, you'd see that it's shaped like an enormous man, arms and legs akimbo; a man frozen in an attitude of oddly voluptuous surrender.

Jack and his mother prosper. Jack, in his rare moments of self-questioning, remembers what the mist-girl told him, years earlier. The giant committed a crime. Jack has, since infancy, been entitled to everything the giant owned. This salves the stripling conscience that's been growing feebly within Jack as he's gotten older.

Jack's mother has started collecting handbags (she especially prizes her limited-edition Murakami Cherry Blossom by Louis Vuitton), and meeting her girlfriends for lunches that can go on until four or five p.m. Jack sometimes acquires girls and boys in neighboring towns, sometimes rents them, but always arranges for them to arrive late at night, in secret. Jack is not, as we know, the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he's canny enough to understand that only his mother will uncritically adore him forever; that if one of the girls or boys were suffered to stay, the fits of mysterious frustration, the critiques, would set in soon enough.

The hen, who cares only for the eggs she produces, lays a gold one every day, and lives contentedly in her concrete coop with her twenty-four-hour guard, Jack's attempt at exterminating all the local foxes having proven futile.

Only the harp is restive and sorrowful. Only the harp looks yearningly out through the window of the room in which it resides, a room that affords it a view of the lilac grove planted over the giant's imbedded body. The harp, long mute, dreams of the time when it lived on a cloud and played music too beautiful for anyone but the giant to hear.

 

POISONED

You wanted to last night.

And tonight, I don't think I want to.

Why, exactly, is that?

It's weird. Don't you think it's at least a little bit weird? And I'm, well, getting tired of it.

When exactly did you change your mind?

I didn't. Okay, I'm tired of pretending that I'm not tired of doing it.

Is it because of that apple joke, today at the market? Did that bother you?

Hell no. You think I'm not used to apple jokes by now?

You've always told me you liked it. So, you've been lying?

No. Well, not exactly lying. I suppose I've liked it because you like it so much. But it seems that tonight, I don't really want to.

That's a little ever so slightly humiliating, don't you think? For me, I mean.

No. I've been doing it because I love you. When you love somebody, it makes you happy to make him happy.

Even if you think it's weird. Even if you think it's disgusting.

I didn't say disgusting. “Weird” and “disgusting” are not synonyms.

You didn't get tired of doing it for the midgets.

They weren't midgets. They were
dwarfs.
I don't know why you refuse to understand the difference.

Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm displacing my emotions.

You got that phrase from your shrink, do you even know what it means?

I'm sorry about the
dwarfs
. I know you loved them.

Or I loved it that they loved me, I've never been completely sure.

Do you think we should have them over again?

Because it was so much fun the last time?

I wouldn't say it was
un
fun. Did you think it was?

You had to lift them up to get them into our chairs. Our spoons were the size of spades to them. Have you really actually forgotten that?

I was trying to be kind. I was trying to be hostly. I took away the love of their goddamned lives. Did my position that night strike you as easy?

No. You were trying to be generous to them. I know that. I do.

Okay. Ten minutes. Just ten, okay?

This really matters to you, doesn't it?

Please don't condescend.

Could you tell me something to say that won't offend you?

It matters to me. Okay, right, I'm a little ever so slightly embarrassed that it matters to me. But it does.

Tell me something you love about me.

Come on.

Be specific.

Okay. I love the thing you do with your mouth when you're concentrating. This little squinchy thing, sort of half biting your lip but not exactly, it's just … squinchy, it's totally involuntary, it's so you.

Tell me another.

I love it when I wake up before you do, and then when you wake up you have this kind of pure astonished awed expression, like you can't quite believe you're … where you are. It fucks with me. It's what gives me those morning hard-ons.

Okay. Ten minutes.

Are you sure?

Does it bother you, that I like making you happy?

Ten minutes, then.

Hey, I'll go to twelve. For you.

I adore you.

Be careful with the lid, all right?

Aren't I always careful with the lid?

Yes. I'm honestly not sure why I said that.

Are you all right? Is this comfortable?

I am. It is.

Do you think …

What?

I feel like some kind of creep, now.

Just tell me.

Do you think you could cross your hands just a little lower down? More like directly over your breasts?

Mm-hm.

Yeah. Perfect. That's so entirely completely perfect.

I'm closing my eyes now. I'm going into the zone.

God, you're beautiful.

I wish sometimes I could watch you. Watching me.

I'd like that, too. But it wouldn't …

Of course it wouldn't.

Look at your skin. Look at your lips. Look at the petals of your eyelids.

I'm going to stop talking now. You can lower the lid.

I'm the luckiest man in the world.

I'm not talking anymore. I'm going into the zone.

Twelve minutes, tops. I promise.

Shh.

Twelve minutes on the dot. Promise. Thank you for doing this, I know you're stopping speaking. But, well, thank you. It matters to me, it does. Okay. Twelve minutes and I lay one on you. Then we can order in, okay? Or we can go out, whatever you like. We could catch a movie. But thank you for twelve minutes. I mean, look at you. Sleep like death. Before I even existed. For you, I mean. When I was, okay, I like thinking this way, when I was a dream you were having, when I was a premonition, when I was perfect because I didn't exist, when I was pure possibility, and, I really hope this isn't weird, when you were immaculate, and entirely strange, and the most perfect and beautiful creature I'd ever seen. Before I lifted the lid, I mean, and kissed you for the first time.

 

A MONKEY'S PAW

Take the Whites, a modest but happy family. A happy-enough family. It's just the three of them: mother, father, and son. The son works in the local factory. If he's cross about supporting his parents; if he chafes at his sexless nights or wonders about a youth devoid of carousing and petty criminality; if he's upset about certain premature afflictions brought on by his labors (that tricky knee, the painful knot at the base of his spine) at the age of twenty-two, he never brings it up. He was not born into a place or time when sons kiss their parents goodbye, gently chide their mother's hanky-dabbed tears, and stride off into lives of their own.

They live in a cottage, though it's not the thatched, tidy dwelling the word “cottage” ordinarily brings to mind. It sags in a slushy, wind-haunted remoteness. The Whites have not been offered much in the way of choices.

And yet, they don't bicker. They don't get snappish over minor domestic failings. These quarters cramped and damp, this road rendered impassible by mud more than half the year, strike them as inevitable, and they console themselves with vague references to how it could have been worse (although it's difficult to say what “worse” might entail). There is no hint among them of
Why did I let you bring me here?
or
When will you die, so I can escape?