The Charmed Wife

by Olga Grushin

  Alone in her bedroom, having accepted yet another unwanted cup of tea, dismissed the maid, and locked the door, for the first time in her life—clearly, it was to be the day for underhanded actions, uncharacteristic emotions, and miniature revolts—she sat on the bed and raised the mirror before her.

  “Show me my husband,” she demanded, her heart swollen with an unfamiliar excitement, and, when nothing happened, added plaintively, “Please?”

  Still nothing happened. She wondered if she would have to be subjected to the indignity of rhyming. In the lusterless glass, she could see a sliver of a pasty cheek, a corner of a bleary eye, a puffy eyelid. The prince had been right (though he could have been kinder about it), she was losing her beauty. Hastily she thrust the glass away from her face, and chanted, all in a rush, drawing on some dimly recalled stock of stories heard in the most remote recesses of childhood: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . .”

  But of course, it was not on the wall, she was holding it, so she started anew: “Mirror, mirror, in my hand, show me Prince Roland and . . . and . . . and . . .”

  It did rhyme, in its way, but obviously something else was needed. She took a few turns about the room, thinking furiously, then tried a more abstract approach: “Mirror, mirror, bring me luck. Show me Prince Roland and . . . and his . . . his . . .”

  But the prince kept no pet ducks, “pluck” applied only to peasant upstarts, and “yuck” did not rightly belong in legitimate poetry. She tossed the mirror onto her blanket, the reflection of her nose skittering along its surface at a wide angle, and screamed in frustration—and, all at once, had the very spell.

  “Mirror, mirror, on my bed, show me my spouse, instead of my head!” she recited triumphantly.

  The surface of the mirror fogged and billowed.

  “That. Was. Simply. Horrendous,” drawled a peevish voice. “But you are persistent, I will give you that, and I am really bored.”

  “Plus the bonus rhyme,” she offered readily, anxious to appease the disembodied speaker. “You know. ‘Instead.’ ‘Head.’”

  “Well. The previous incantation, had you but completed it, would have been better. More accurate.”

  “How do you mean?”

  But the mirror refused to elaborate.

  “Also, technically, this is spying, you are aware,” it said after a pause.

  “I just want to know him better,” she protested hotly. “There is nothing wrong with that! Because I realize now, we were very young when we got married, and we might not have had that much in common. Back then. But our years together have brought us closer. All the things we’ve shared. Like our children. Only sometimes it feels like I’ve had our children alone. Oh, of course, he is there for us, he works so hard, and I’ve always had money and help, I know that, only . . . only sometimes I see these peasant families from the carriage window, a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, having a meal together in some field, a checkered tablecloth, a fat bottle of wine, their dog stealing sausages from their picnic basket, the mother telling a story, the father smacking her cheek with a greasy kiss, the children chasing each other through the grass, all of them laughing, and the sky so blue above them, like a hand cupping them all together, a perfect life, simple yet perfect, you know? Not this—this marble lockbox of a place, the cold ceremonials, the one-two-three dances, the polite agony of loneliness . . . Oh, I don’t mean to complain, I’m very grateful for everything, it’s just that . . . that . . .”

  She stopped abruptly, all at once conscious of babbling—worse, of voicing aloud things that were intimate and shameful. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then the mirror sighed. When it spoke again, it sounded very old and very tired, and for the first time it occurred to her that its voice might just belong to a woman.

  “Yes, girl, I know. That’s what they all say. You won’t like it, of course. But if you are sure.”

  “I am sure!” she cried.

  After an interminable moment, the fog shifted in a gesture oddly like a shrug and began to recede. Sucking in her breath with a childlike eagerness, she leaned over the glass, and frowned, then tilted her head, then continued to tilt it, trying to comprehend what it was she was seeing, until her head was jammed all the way against her shoulder and had nowhere else to go.

  Her mouth loosened in a wordless scream.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Ahem. It might be wise to take a break here,” the fairy godmother says, her lips pursed as she steps away from the cauldron. “Or shall we just skip this part?”

  “Must you be such a prude?” says the witch. “I was finally beginning to enjoy myself. We deserve a bit of excitement after all the dreary dross we’ve had to suffer through! And in any case, it was my impression that you yourself were indulging in some extracurricular activities with the good old King Roland, or am I mistaken?”

  “What gave you such an absurd idea!” exclaims the fairy godmother, visibly flustered. “That is, he was a client of mine, yes. Depressed for years, if you really want to know, though I shouldn’t be telling you that, it is privileged information. Not that there is much harm in divulging it now, poor dear . . . His wife died young, I felt terrible for him, just terrible. But of course, he was a widower, so there would have been no harm if . . . Not that . . . I mean to say . . .”

  “Human!” the witch cries with savage triumph, poking one gnarled finger in the fairy godmother’s direction. “After everything, she, too, is human. Who knew?”

  To my astonishment, the fairy godmother blushes, stutters, and looks away.

  I blink. Who knew, indeed.

  “Might as well get this over with,” I say then. “I want you both to understand.”

  Sighing, the fairy godmother draws back to the cauldron.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the mirror, the prince was having relations—but no, that was not quite right, the polite euphemism failed to convey the vigorousness and shamelessness of what she was seeing; was copulating, then—but that, too, fell well short of the mark; so, then, was—and there was no other way of putting it—her husband was—a cry of fury born at last, a hand slammed against the wall, a smashed teacup, cold tea running down the front of her dress, a deep breath, a deeper breath, look again, look, do not look away—her husband was fucking two women, one of them the stout forty-nine-year-old pastry chef on an exchange visit from a neighboring giant’s castle, and the other, shockingly—as if the rest had not been shocking enough—but yes, still, shockingly—their butler’s daughter, who was rosy, long-limbed, lovely, and not a day over sixteen. The energetic tumble was loud with deep-chested grunts (the pastry chef’s) and high-pitched moans (the butler’s daughter’s) and took place on a rich crimson background abloom with royal-blue tulips, which she recognized, after another breath, as the plush oriental rug in Prince Roland’s study. The mirror’s angle was not sufficiently wide to take in the entire scene at once but offered her a rapid succession of pornographic glimpses of female flesh—pale narrow thighs and puckering pink nipples (the butler’s daughter’s), reddened gelatinous thighs and massive chocolate nipples (the pastry chef’s)—over all of which labored Prince Roland, hard-eyed, trim, and sleek with sweat, looking rather like a circus seal, his teeth gritted with manly concentration, from which he occasionally emerged to demand, in harsh, seal-like barks: “Who’s your prince, yeah, who’s your prince?”

  She watched for a minute, then carefully turned the mirror over, and quietly sat on the edge of her chaste white bed, her hands still and listless like plucked birds in her lap. After a while, she rose, crossed the room to her writing desk, at which she spent a laborious daily hour composing inevitable thank-you notes and invitations to tea parties, and, just as quietly, slid the mirror into the wastepaper basket that stood between the desk’s thin white legs. The basket had a border of plump golden cherubs practicing archery all along its edge.
The mirror settled on the bottom and was now partially obscured by a small pile of glistening cherry pits, some tangled lace trimmings from an embroidery project, and a draft of a letter to the Marquise de Fatouffle, which she had begun penning on her special peach-tinted stationery the previous morning, before losing a valiant battle with the spelling of “appreciation.”

  “Thank you,” she said, because she had excellent manners and it was customary to offer thanks for rendered favors, even when they resulted in death and devastation, and waited, likewise out of politeness, in case the mirror chose to reply from the trash. The mirror said nothing, however, so she returned to her bed and sat back down. Her hands were empty now. Her heart was empty. She knew the truth at last—but the deeper truth, the truth beneath the truth, was that she might have known it once or twice already and had tricked herself into forgetting. Now she could hide from it no longer. She heard the clock in the corridor outside strike noon, and felt mildly surprised at its being barely past morning, at the curious fact that time was still functioning, still flowing, still meting out the meager minutes, sand grains, bread crumbs, of her life’s passing. For just one moment longer she sat pondering the vastness of nothing in her hands, and then, somehow, the room was dark and the pale jellyfish of the moon swam in the inky sky outside the window. Someone was banging on her door, someone must have been banging on her door for a while now, and a chorus of frantic, hoarsened voices, maids, footmen, mice, were demanding to know, more and more shrilly, whether she was fine, whether everything was as it should be.

  “I’m fine, I’m perfectly fine,” she told them through the door. “I’m napping. Please let me rest until morning.”

  And they believed her and departed, for, as everyone knows, fairy-tale princes and princesses never lie.

  Sometime later that night, she awakened from a dream of crashing trains, shattering lightbulbs, and telephones ringing forever in empty apartments to find herself slumped over in a chair. The moon was gone from the window. Her neck ached, her head pounded, she was wearing unlaced muddy boots and a filthy dress stiff with tea stains. A candle, propped dangerously on the chair’s arm, had melted down to a guttering stump and was about to set her hair on fire prior to burning down the entire palace. She blew it out, thus saving everyone from imminent demise—those who deserved to live and those who deserved to die, in equal measure—and went into the washroom. There, she lit every candelabrum until the room blazed, stood before the wall mirror, and stripped naked.

  Then she looked at herself.

  She had never seen herself naked before, not openly, not wholly. No one had ever seen her naked before. She was shy around her maids, and her couplings with the prince, few as they had been, long ago as they had been, had been nothing like the debauched midday romp she had witnessed in that diabolical mirror—the first few, in the darkness under the covers, and the last, fully clothed. Now she stood before her reflection, and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else. She looked over her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, her belly, her hips, her thighs, the darkening cleft between them. Then, slowly, slowly, she ran her hands along her skin, watching all the while in the mirror, the lights blazing so brightly that her very essence seemed to be burning away in their white, searing glare. She watched the pale, flaxen-haired, disturbingly voluptuous woman in the mirror, as the woman slid her hands down her sides, feeling strange heat beginning to rise from the body no longer her own, touching first her neck, then her shoulders, then her breasts, then her belly, then her hips, then her thighs, then—

  Her heart stopped. Her heart stopped, and started again, quickening, racing. Her hands fell away and hung loose by her sides, shamed, still. Because there it was—her thigh. Her left thigh. The bruise, on her left thigh. The bruise, in the shape of a desk’s corner, high on her left thigh, just like the bruise she had received in her dream the night before—was it only the night before?—in the uncanny, thrumming dream the night before, the dream in which she had loved the radiant prince in the painting, and he had said: “Help me.”

  Nothing was as it seemed.

  She turned her back on the dissolute hussy with tempestuous eyes and hunger in her belly, rapidly blew out the forest of candles, pulled on her thick woolen nightgown, and slipped into bed. She slept the dreamless sleep of the righteous, and in the morning, she woke up a new woman, a woman on a mission. Skipping breakfast in order not to lose any time, she paid a visit to the court artist in his attic studio crammed with unfinished busts of ghosts and mermaids, and the shabby little man with smears of yellow and red in his unruly hair confirmed what she had already suspected: he had never painted the portrait above Prince Roland’s desk, nor did he have the slightest idea of where it had come from.

  “I saw it once, though, when His Highness left his door ajar,” he confessed with a giggle. “The likeness is exceptional.”

  Satisfied on that point, she returned to the library and spent weeks perusing weighty reference tomes. Since she was anything but adept at mining nuggets of value from wordy swamps of reading matter, she waded through tedious lists of potion ingredients, arcane discussions of child-to-bird transformations, and incomprehensible interpretations of fairy-tale symbolism with clenched teeth and aching temples, and at times felt the dull, gray despair of excessive knowledge crush her like a tombstone. Still, she refused to concede defeat. And at last, as the muggy summer heat gave way to the crisp chill of autumn, in a dingy little book with a torn-off cover, she stumbled upon a paragraph on enchanted portraits, unsatisfyingly brief and yet enough to reassure her that such things were indeed possible.

  A living, warm human soul could, indeed, be trapped in a darkly charmed painting while its empty shell of a body, stripped of all love and understanding, continued to walk, talk, consume pastries with raspberry jam, sign death warrants with self-satisfied flourishes of porcupine quills, ignore concerned family members, and, in its free hours, diddle anything that moved—in short, play at being Prince Roland engaged in the regular business of everyday life.

  All the certainties fell into place; but then, in her heart of hearts, she had known the truth—the real truth, this time, deeper yet than any of the other truths, which had not been true, after all—had known it the moment she had seen the bruise on her thigh on that terrible wreck of a night. She was not responsible for the unhappy state of their happily ever after—it was he, he alone; but of course, it was not her sweet prince’s fault, either. Some years into their conjugal bliss, he had been trapped under an evil enchantment. And now—now it was her wifely duty to save him, just like in the stories.

  Her love for him was back, alive and generous, and it was all courage, and self-sacrifice, and, in some small measure, rising excitement at the thought of embarking on a perilous quest to rescue her beloved, then having him in her debt for the rest of his life. Energized by her clear-cut purpose, she felt prepared to enter into dangerous camaraderie with wolves, bargain with spoons and chicken bones, beg for help from cantankerous old ladies, even walk to the far side of the wind if need be, in order to break the spell. It was only a matter of figuring out how to start.

  She knew that someone suitable should be coming out of the woodwork to provide the required instruction—a wizened dwarf with whom she might share a cupcake, or a bear whose paw she would obligingly rid of a splinter. She also knew herself at some disadvantage, as there was a decided shortage of bears in the manicured park at her disposal, and, too, most quests involved rosy-cheeked maidens in the first bloom of youth, not thirtysomething mothers of two.

  Nonetheless, she determined to do her best.

  Her initial efforts proved futile. That entire winter, she spoon-fed soup to ailing old cobblers in nearby villages, snatched baby squirrels from under the wheels of a reckless carriage (her own, as it happened, but it was the intention that counted), peered into every cluttered closet in the palace in search of an overlooked crone with a spindle who might grant her three w
ishes, and received nothing for her pains but manifold blessings from teary-eyed peasants, a bite from a chipmunk that had not, it transpired, wanted to cross the road, and a growing reputation for charity.

  Eventually, however, cogs of magic started to turn, if a bit sluggishly. One afternoon in the early spring, a scrawny young orphan whom she helped with his orthography lessons directed her to a pond behind a neighboring mill. The pond was choked with lily pads, and in the center of every green platter sat a frog. As she neared the mill, hundreds of liquid eyes swiveled toward her as one.

  “Kiss me—kiss me—kiss me,” croaked the frogs.

  “Thank you, but I’m already married,” she demurred with a nervous laugh, hiding behind her parasol. But the frogs stared up at her with their wet, insolent eyes and chanted: “That never stopped nobody before.”

  She thought them terribly uncouth, and was just turning to leave when the largest frog spoke up from the largest pad.

  “Personally, I’m too old to care for kisses,” said the frog, and in truth, it did look ancient, warty and fat. “But if you bring me that tasty beetle crawling over there, I will tell you what you desire.”

  The frog stuck out a pink tongue, fleshy and long and horribly indecent, so she picked up the beetle and carried it to safety; and once the grateful beetle had revived from its faint, it told her about the beekeeper who lived at the foot of the hill.