by Olga Grushin
She pats her dramatic red mouth with a napkin, and immediately the waitress appears by her elbow. “I’ll bring you a fresh one,” a dozen waitresses promise breathlessly in a dozen mirrors. We wait for her to deposit another white paper square on the table, wait for her to walk away.
“Gloria, I had no idea . . . But you didn’t marry him, did you?”
“Of course not. The very thought!”
“How, then, did you get out?”
“Well. Since you ask. One of the prince’s servants and I fell in love. We figured out a way to see each other. Remember when my hair was really long? If I let it down from the tower window, it would touch the ground, and she could climb up to me. In time, she managed to smuggle in a rope ladder, and I escaped. We escaped together.”
“Sorry.” It has taken a few moments to filter through. “She?”
Gloria smiles at me, indulgently.
“All part of growing up, baby girl,” she says, enunciating as though speaking to a child. “Figuring out what you like. What you are. Which—in spite of being almost forty years old, you know—is something you still need to do, in my opinion.”
“Oh.” I feel as though I have accidentally walked in on my sister naked, so I hasten to skip over her comment. “And then . . . then you lived happily ever after?”
She drinks the last of the martini, calls out, “Check, please!” and turns her level gaze back upon me. “Sometimes, I just don’t know about you. This isn’t some fucking fairy tale. Oh, I suppose we had a few good years. Eventually she left me for another woman. An artist I myself had discovered, as it happened, which wasn’t pretty. That’s when I cut off my hair. In the end, though, I like it better this way.”
I do not know whether she means her hairstyle or her life, and I am feeling too embarrassed to ask, so, to say something, anything, I tell her: “I guess all this happened after your mother’s funeral? Your hair was still long then.”
And now she is looking at me funny, and all at once uncomfortable, I lower my eyes, which is when I see the napkin the waitress brought her still lying on the table, and it is not a fresh napkin at all: the paper square is visibly smudged with the red imprint of Gloria’s kiss.
“Hey, she gave you back your own used napkin,” I mumble.
“Indeed?” Gloria turns it over. A telephone number is scrawled in one corner. “Yes, I rather thought so.” A look of mild yet unmistakable interest flickers through her eyes. “Listen, it was good seeing you. I’ll go settle the bill now.”
She stands up, tall, elegant, collected, and looks down at me.
“Everything will be all right, little sister. Or maybe it won’t be, in which case it will be something else, something new, which may turn out even better once the dust settles. Mel and I are here for you.” She touches my cheek, briefly. “But you really need to stop with those Freudian slips. She was your mother, too.”
I watch her moving away, as though in slow motion, into the black-and-white geometry of the room, the assured clicking of her heels slicing cleanly through the clanking of silverware, through the muttering of other diners’ conversations. There is a sound, a nagging, repetitive sound, like the buzzing of a very loud, angry bee. People at the neighboring tables turn their heads to glare at me, and snapping out of my reverie, I reach for my purse and fish out my cell phone.
It is my lawyer.
“Are you anywhere near my office?” she says. “We need to talk.”
What Happened at the End
And so, half an hour later, still reeling, I sit in a glass-walled office high above Manhattan, across the desk from my lawyer, who is telling me that her private investigator has turned up nothing, nothing at all, for my husband is clever and careful, if not actually clean, whereas the evidence against me is solid. There is the family doctor’s testimony on the subjects of my depression and my propensity for self-medication and self-harm, there is the recent photograph of me inebriated in the park, there are maids willing to confirm the abundance of mouse droppings and ill-smelling weeds all over my former quarters, and to corroborate my erratic habits and odd behavior, such as my staring into a handheld mirror for hours on end or not speaking for months at a time—and, given the facts, the custody hearing is not likely to go my way. Financially, too, everything my husband owns is either part of his inheritance, to which I have no right, or else squirreled away in offshore accounts and shell companies, equally out of reach, and I have next to no claim on absolutely anything, which she has been trying to get through to me for days, for weeks, but do I listen?
And at last, I am beginning to listen.
“There is the Fifth Avenue apartment, though,” I say. “Half of it should be mine. I don’t want to live there, but we can sell it and split the proceeds. It would be more than enough to buy a modest place for me and the kids.”
She snaps my file closed and sits back, exasperated.
“I’ve explained. Over and over again. It belonged to your father-in-law. Roland got it through his inheritance. It’s nonmarital property.”
On the streets below, cars honk, people walk, vendors hawk pretzels and newspapers—life as usual, life as I have always known it.
As Gwen’s words sink in, I force myself to breathe.
“But the house on Martha’s Vineyard?”
“The same.”
“And the furnishings? The artwork? The royal treasury?”
A lonely siren cries somewhere far away. I am starting to panic.
“The same.”
“But surely, half of my husband’s income—”
“Half of it would be yours, yes. If your husband had any income. As it happens, though, he draws no actual salary, he just runs his late father’s company.” I open my mouth. “Which is his inheritance, and thus nonmarital property.” I close my mouth. “On the other hand, Roland’s lawyers have just informed me that your own income since your separation—all the money you’ve earned from your cleaning business, which appears to be doing quite well—is subject to the marital division, so they are now demanding half of everything you’ve made in the past six months.”
“But . . . but it’s all gone!” My heart is pounding now. “I gave some to Melissa, and I’ve been paying rent, and there are Jasmine and Alice—I hired them to help out last month, I told you—and then I bought some presents for the kids, and . . . and it was so little, anyway, nothing compared to his millions upon millions . . . They can’t do that!” I cry, and in a smaller voice: “Can they?”
“Oh, they can,” she says. “In fact, they have.”
A second siren has joined the first, and another, and yet another, until half the city seems to be screaming with doom and disaster.
“But what do they want? What does he want?”
“He wants full custody of the kids. And to keep all his money. And come trial next month, he may well get both. Of course, I will do my best. But.”
“But he can’t do this to me! I’m better at taking care of Ro and Angie than he’ll ever be. He won’t even bother himself, they’ll just have a staff of nannies round the clock . . . Wait—what about Nanny Nanny? She’ll tell the court I’m a good mother, she knows, she was there, all the nights I spent by their beds, all the stories I told them—”
“Sadly, Nanny Nanny no longer works for your husband. She hasn’t been seen since before Christmas. And I’ve heard rumors . . .” Gwen lowers her voice. “The family cook served roast leg of lamb at the holiday feast, and—”
“And what? Please tell me.”
“And my sources inform me, it tasted more like goat. Like tough, old goat.”
For a minute we are silent.
“So, then, what can we do?” I ask, defeated.
She faces me squarely.
“Nothing. There is nothing to do. Unless you are finally willing to tell me what happened between you and your husband at the
end.”
I look through the window at the city of glass and steel before me, and I think of the last months of my marriage, not so remote in time, and yet belonging to the fabric of some entirely different life, ruled by other laws, held together by other truths, an out-of-time fairy tale with a rosy beginning that promised happiness never-ending, stretching all the way from that snapshot of the blue spring skies protectively enclosing a white-veiled bride as she ran down the grand staircase hand in hand with her beloved, both smiling radiant smiles, to the two of them, thirteen years hence, standing side by side in the dimmed ballroom of their silenced home, clothed in the somber black of grief, jointly experienced and yet unshared, their faces blank, their stiff hands not touching.
After the last courtiers had departed muttering condolences, the fairy-tale princess, about to become the fairy-tale queen, slunk away to her own bedchamber without another look at the man who was not her true husband, who was left all alone, hunched over, in the dark. She was feeling faint and not sure of anything, her reality a mere step away from a dream. Her head ached as though she had not slept the night before, and perhaps she had not. Her feet were sore as though she had recently walked a long distance, and perhaps she had. Her lips bore a faintly tingling impression of other lips pressing against them, and this she could not bear to think about at all, for the kiss, whether real or imagined, had been warm, exhilarating, overwhelming, alive, nothing like any of the stilted, close-mouthed, obligatory kisses dimly remembered from the first year of her marriage (there were no later kisses to remember), and the lingering thrill of it, while making her heart beat faster, only served to add to her confusion and misery.
In her room, she sank onto her bed, raised her eyes—and saw two mice, one fat, the other skinny, with whiskers wrapped in golden foil, sitting side by side on her mantelpiece, bracketed by the dusty porcelain poodles.
She gasped.
“Nibbles? Brie? Are you really back? Is that really you?”
The mice nodded, their beady eyes brimming with sympathy.
“We know you are sad,” they offered in unison, “and we are here to help you.”
(This time, astonishingly, unnaturally, the mice were telling the truth: they were indeed the original Brie and Nibbles of her youth. Their long-dead spirits, snatched from a tranquil afterlife by their dear princess’s acute distress, had taken to haunting the dwellings of mice, squealing and moaning, spooking the old out of their slumbers, making the young choke on their cheese, until the venerable Sister Charity, currently known as She with the Immortal Fairy Blood Flowing Through Her Veins, grew annoyed at the hubbub of constant complaints and appeals, and consented to grant the two temporary visibility on the plane of physical manifestations, to “sort out the princess mess,” as she told them sternly, turning her piercing blind eyes in the direction of their flickering shapes, “so you can at last rest in eternal peace and I can be left in peace for at least two minutes to complete my important work. Go now.”
As it happened, the fairy mouse had recently discovered that there was another world only a breath away from theirs—a much richer, thrilling world full of glorious sewer systems to populate, millions of mice and rats to rule over, and whole alleyways of trash cans positively overflowing with magnificent food—and was currently devising some way to merge the two worlds once and for all. For reasons not altogether clear even to herself, she felt the unhappy woman to be a loose end that needed to be tied up in order for her plan to succeed, but she did not explain her secret purpose to the spirits of Brie and Nibbles, and even if she had done so, her grand future vision would have gone right over their furry little heads.
Dismissed, they found themselves materializing on the familiar mantelpiece and there awaited their friend. They felt rather anxious about their status as ghosts—it seemed best not to disclose the fact of their long-ago demise to the princess for fear of upsetting her, yet wouldn’t she be bound to notice that they were ever so slightly transparent? But when she saw them, she did not look beyond what she expected to find, for she was still only a human princess of limited understanding, and grateful as she was for their return, kindhearted and mindful of others as she strove to be in general, she naturally attributed much more significance to her own life than to the lives of simple mice, and would have been genuinely astonished had anyone told her that her one-note, romance-obsessed, cliché-ridden story might not be immensely more important or endlessly more fascinating than the multigenerational, multidimensional, magical, militant, philosophical, and culturally diverse saga of the dynasty of Nibbles and Brie.)
And so, overcome by relief at having someone to talk to at last, the princess broke down and told her friends everything—told them about the cruel curse imprisoning the prince since the early years of their marriage, and how she had been trying and trying to get her true beloved back, and how the world had conspired against her, and how . . . how . . . And just as she choked on her sobs, Brie and Nibbles exchanged a dark look, and Brie cleared her throat.
“Pardon us,” she said in a tiny voice. “We are terribly sorry to tell you, dear princess, but you are mistaken. There isn’t any curse. There never was. We’ve been watching your prince from the very beginning, and sadly, he is the same prince. The very same prince you married.”
She shook her head with such vigor that a headache drummed at her temples.
“No, no, that’s not true!” she cried. “It can’t be true. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what terrible things he’s done since the curse—”
She blushed, fell silent.
“Believe us, we know.” Brie spoke with care. “We mice are small, we can go wherever we please and no one pays heed to us. We’ve seen . . . things. Many things. Many . . . eek . . . different things. Starting just days after your wedding. A young kitchen maid got lost in the hallways delivering breakfast to the Marquise de Fatouffle’s bed, and, well . . . Then, the following week, the marquise herself . . . And others after that . . . Oh, we grew so concerned about you—”
“We argued all the time,” Nibbles interrupted. “I thought we should tell you, that you needed to know. Give the rogue the old heave-ho and good riddance, I said.”
“I disagreed.” Brie’s golden whiskers drooped. “Because who were we to destroy your happily ever after? You didn’t notice anything amiss, and you did seem happy. At first, anyway. Was I wrong? Please, dear princess, was I?”
Her chest filled with a fluttering, as of many birds she could not bear to release, not yet, not yet. She looked at the mice with unseeing eyes, and rose, and walked out of the room. As she slowly went through the palace, she had few coherent thoughts, concentrating merely on putting one foot in front of the other; but she knew, without thinking, that if she happened to interrupt her husband in the midst of yet another copulation, she would not be responsible for what occurred next. But when she threw open the door to the prince’s—now the king’s—study, she found him alone, sitting at his desk, his head buried in his hands, the painted prince, as before, gracing her with his radiant smile from the portrait above.
The prince—now the king—lifted his head at her entrance, and his eyes were lost, swimming. Then a look dawned on his face, a look she could not place, a look she did not want to decipher. She stood before his desk, straight-backed, still, in her regal ermine-trimmed robe the color of sorrow, her hands folded protectively across her chest as though shielding her heart from any further harm he might try to inflict upon it.
“Roland.” Her tone was flat. “Did you ever love me?”
And just like that, the odd look was gone from his face, and in the moment before it vanished, she knew it for a look of hope.
“Now? You want to talk about this now? My father has just died. Or have you been too preoccupied with your own precious little emotions to notice?”
She chose to disregard the ominous rising of his voice.
“I’ll ta
ke it as a no. You never loved me. And this portrait. Who painted it?”
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
He glared at her, and in his glare, she read a threat of looming violence.
She wrapped her arms tighter over her heart.
“Answer me. Who painted it?”
“Who painted it? I did!” he shouted. She forced herself not to shrink back. “I painted it! Imagine that, a prince of royal blood, able to do anything other than sign orders and chop off heads! Imagine me having ideas, having interests, having a life other than the life in which you have me pegged in your own pathetic little world of poodles and teatimes! But did you ever, even for just a second—” He made a visible effort, and his face, his voice, turned cold, turned dead; but his hands were clenched, his knuckles white, as if he was exerting an immense effort to contain something enormous, something monstrous, to prevent it from erupting and subsuming them both. “Did you know that I loved drawing as a child, that I wanted to be an artist, but they told me, when I was only six or seven years old, that I had to follow in my father’s footsteps, had to shoulder the burden of responsibility? No, you didn’t know, and why? Because you never asked. Never asked anything about me. So, let me tell you. I cried for a full week, longer than when my mother had left us, a small, lonely child with no one to talk to. And then I dried my tears and I grew up. I learned to do what was asked of me. Learned to rule my kingdom. Learned when harshness was needed and when to be lenient. Kept my hobbies in check. Married when it was required of me. Produced heirs when it was required of me. You’re right, I never loved you—and why would I? I thought, in the beginning, that you had spirit, that you had understanding, that you could be a worthy partner to me, and that, with time, something real might grow between us. Then I saw what you were really like, what you were really after. All you wanted were balls and roses. Being a sweet little princess. You knew nothing about hard work. You knew nothing about companionship. I should have never chosen you. I should have chosen someone with substance, not someone as vain, empty-headed, and unforgiving as you.”