The Rose and the Beast

by Francesca Lia Block

  Beauty began to change. Her hair was always a tangle, she bathed less often, her skin smelled of the garden and the forest, she was almost always barefoot—there were hard calluses on her soles. Her senses were so sharp that she could smell and hear things she had never known existed before. This was the happiest she had ever been in her life, if happiness is waking with a start of joy for the day, feeling each moment in every cell of your being, and going to sleep at night with a mind like a clear moonlit sky.

  Beauty was never overwhelmed or suffocated by the Beast’s love, even though, when she left him alone, even for a short time, he looked as if his heart was literally cracking in half inside his chest. But he understood freedom, her Beast. He understood shackles. He never wanted her to feel chains around her neck as he had once felt them. But now she had become his chain in a strange way, and he knew it.

  When Beauty called her father that first night he heard the light and air in her daughter’s voice and almost immediately he was better. It was as if the guilt he had carried for so long about his wife’s death (had he loved his youngest daughter too much, is that why she died?), the neglect of his other daughters, his blind, panicky obsession with Beauty that had driven him to pick the rose that now imprisoned her—because he had told her about it!—was all gone now.

  But after a few weeks, he began to long for her again—just to see her face. He knew he was going to die soon. Please come back home, he begged her. Just for a little while.

  Beauty asked the Beast. He lay his heavy, warm, silky head in her lap and gazed up at her. How could he deny her anything? He felt her need to see her father in his own heart as only Beasts can.

  So Beauty left him and went home. Her father was startled at how his Beauty had changed. He asked again and again if she was sure she was all right, was the Beast hurting her in any way? No, she reassured him. She was happy. Her sisters were horrified. They thought she looked hideous—what was she doing out there in the woods? Beauty smiled at them and shook her matted locks and tried to restrain herself from licking her hand as if it were a paw.

  Beauty sat by her father’s side and held his hand and spoke softly but all she was thinking about, really, was her Beast. How they didn’t need words. How ferocious he became if he ever thought she was in danger. How gentle he was, licking her nose; no one in the world could be so gentle. How she had become so different since she had been with him, so much stronger—she could run for hours now—so much more perceptive and tangled, and how she slept so much better and ate so much more.

  Every night before she went to sleep she sent him messages and received his. This was not hard to do—he had taught her about communicating without words. But each time a message came, Beauty felt his sadness growing deeper, so painful that she wasn’t sure which of their emotions she was feeling, his or hers. It was like a sickness and she sent him the message that she would return to him as soon as possible, but not yet, her father still needed her.

  After Beauty’s father died, she wept. But she also felt a strange sense of relief. The relief frightened her. She went back to her Beast. He was lying by the cold fireplace, with his head down; he was too weak to stand. His eyes were blank, his coat was dull and sparse, his bones stuck out. He looked as if he were dying. Beauty was shocked that she had been so wrong not to see, not to come to him sooner. She was so shocked by his pain that she didn’t even notice the biggest change of all that came about when she threw her arms around him and told him again and again that she loved him more than anyone in the world, she would never love anyone else in such a pure, vast way.

  Yes, the Beast changed.

  He spoke more now, and did not gaze at Beauty in the same intense, almost pained way, as if he were feeling every emotion she felt. He did not sigh in his sleep when she sighed and his stomach didn’t growl when hers hurt. He could not read her thoughts anymore, and she could not read his. He seemed a bit more clumsy and guarded and distant, too. They no longer ran through the woods together, although they still walked there sometimes. They quarreled and raised their voices to each other once in a while. Each time, after they quarreled, Beauty bathed, combed the tangles from her hair, and began to wear shoes again for a few days.

  Beauty loved him more than anything, her Beast boy, but, secretly, sometimes, she wished that he would have remained a Beast.

  ICE

  She came that night like every girl’s worst fear, dazzling frost star ice queen. Tall and with that long silver blond hair and a flawless face, a perfect body in white crushed velvet and a diamond snowflake tiara. The boys and girls parted to let her through—they had all instantaneously given up on him when they saw her.

  I felt almost—relieved. Like that first night with him but different. Relieved because what I dreaded most in the whole world was going to happen and I wouldn’t have to live with it anymore—the fear.

  There is the relief of finally not being alone and the relief of being alone when no one can take anything away from you. Here she was, my beautiful fear. Shiny as crystal lace frost.

  I loved him the way it feels when you get hot wax on the inside of your wrist and while it’s burning, just as sudden, it’s a cool thick skin. Like it tastes to eat sweet snow, above the daffodil bulbs—not that I’ve ever found it, but clean snow that melts to nothing on the heat of your tongue so that you aren’t even sure if it was ever there. I loved him like spaniel joy at a scent in the grass—riveted, lost. I loved him so much that it felt as if it had to be taken away from me at any moment, changed—how could something like that be allowed to exist on this earth?

  We lived in apartments that faced each other and sometimes I’d look up when I was painting and I’d see him watching me but then he’d look away. I watched him, too, when he was practicing his guitar sometimes. We nodded when we saw each other in the street but we never spoke.

  I went to the Mirror one night by myself and when I heard him sing I could feel everything he was feeling. I could feel the throb in the ankle he’d twisted jumping into the pit a couple of nights before, the way the sweat was trickling down his temples, making them itch, the way his throat felt a little bit scratchy and sore and how he wanted to go away from that smoky room, drive out to the lake for some air, how there was something from his childhood that he was trying to forget by singing but how it never quite left him—though I couldn’t quite feel what it was. I have felt people before; my mom used to call me an empath. When she got sick I developed lumps in my breasts and my hair was falling out for a while. It only happened with people I loved, though. Never a stranger. Never a singing stranger with golden hair tousled in his face and deep-set blue eyes and a big Adam’s apple. Maybe my empathy was just because of him. He could make you feel things. Maybe every person in that room was feeling what he did.

  But this was what was strange—he knew me, too. He gazed down through the smoke and kept looking at me while he sang about the shard of glass in his eye. Trying to melt it away. Tears. But he was dry. When it was over I felt like I’d been kissed for hours all over my body. I could feel my own tears running down my cheeks and neck.

  I felt small and stupid-looking and bald when it was over, when I came back to my body and my shorn head. I wanted to go and hide from him. But he found me. He came walking through the crowd and smoke and everyone was trying to talk to him or touch him and he looked wiped out. He looked like he had given every single thing and what could they want from him now? His eyes looked bigger and more hollowly set and I could feel his sore throat and his dry burning glass-stung eyes. He came up to me and sat down and he asked right then if I wanted to get out of there with him, if I wanted to go get high or whatever, he had to get out right now he liked the tattoo of the rose on the inside of my wrist. He didn’t say anything about recognizing me from before.

  The streets were slick with frost, my fingers and nose and toes went numb, my toes knocking against my boots with hammering pain. I didn’t care. I watched him light a cigarette, holding it in his hand with
the fingerless mittens, cupping the flame, protecting it, handing it to me, lighting another for himself. He said he thought smoking was a primitive reflex to the cold—like building fires. The cold inside, too. Our boots crunched through thin sheets of ice. I thought that if I were still crying my tears would freeze and I could give them to him—icicles to suck on. But he needed warming, to be kissed with the fire of a thousand cigarettes.

  We walked for a while and then he got a cab and we went to his place. That’s when he said he hoped I didn’t mind, that he’d been watching me through the window, he wasn’t a crazy stalker or anything, he just couldn’t help it. He said not to take this the wrong way but I reminded him of a sister. He said he believed in that thing about everyone having another half out there, like a twin, that you were supposed to find and that almost no one ever did. We sat in the room that I’d seen through glass for so long, the room with the mattress and the music and the thrift shop lamps and we got high and talked all night. Mostly I did; I told him about my mom and he just listened, but he kept thanking me for telling him. It was almost as if hearing it was as much a relief for him as my saying it. We both kept saying how relieved we felt—relieved, that was the word we kept using. I was like an accident victim who’s been rescued, pulled breathing from the wreckage—until I began to feel afraid.

  All that winter I painted him with his eyes like moons or his head crowned with stars or a frozen city melting in his hands. I had some ideas of how I was going to paint him riding on the back of a reindeer, eating snowflakes, holding a swan. He wrote songs about a girl who was a storm, a fire, a mirror. My hair grew out and I started wearing sparkling light-colored soft soft things I’d found in thrift shops. I had a fake fur coat and a pastel sequin shirt and rhinestones. We got the flu and ate rice balls and miso soup in the bathtub. I gave him vitamin C and echinacea. He felt better. We went to the Mirror and he always made sure to find me right after he sang and hold me so no one else would try to touch him. He knew I was afraid that somehow he would be taken away from me. I never said it but I knew he knew that was why I cried at night, sometimes, after we had made the sheets so hot I was afraid they would stick to our skin like melted wax. He told me over and over again, The songs are for you, you are the girl in the songs, you are all I think about when I pull you into the vortex of our bodies. I never really believed him. Is that why it happened? Because I never believed a real love which then felt betrayed? Or was it because I had sensed something true all along?

  Maybe it happened because when he was sad I tried to get him to remember. I asked what it was he was trying to forget. I said that for me, pain lessened when you let it out, shared it. He shook his head, slid farther away. Maybe I was just being selfish, wanting to know his secret, whatever it was, the one thing he wouldn’t let me have.

  Spring came. We planted flowers in our window boxes since we didn’t have gardens. One morning when we woke up we saw that the tendrils had twisted together, across the space between our windows.

  I painted him with flocks of birds circling, opaled wings spreading out of his back, flowers blooming full burst from his mouth. He wrote songs about a girl who was a fish, a light, a rose. He held me every night, his sweat dripping off onto me, his eyes glazed, my throat aching from the strain of his vocal cords. He said he got so tired. That I was the only thing that could restore him. Boys and girls wanted more than just the songs. They wanted to touch him, they wanted to feel what he was feeling after the songs were over, they wanted him to feel them. I took him home with me. We sat curled in my velvet love seat; he held my wrist, asking questions, and I told him what had happened to me. I tried to get him to tell me what hurt him but then he became even more silent.

  He began to have trouble writing songs. He looked blurry to me after he sang. He was fading, I was sure of it. Just this blur of gold light. He said he didn’t know what people wanted anymore. After a while I couldn’t give him himself back after he sang, no matter what I did. I lay awake at night watching him sleep—his eyelashes tipped with gold, the rise and fall of his chest—thinking, any day now, this can’t last. Look at him. He is too perfect. Like an angel carved on a tomb. If you try to keep something so perfect, you get only silent stone.

  And then winter again.

  That was when she came, my beautiful fear. My fear so beautiful that I almost desired it—her. She was the porn goddess, ice sex, glistening and shiny and perfection. Something you wanted to eat and wear and own and be. Something poisonous delicious forbidden.

  She went straight for him and he couldn’t fight her and I didn’t hate him. I just vanished. With my little less-bald-than-it-had-been head and my fuzzy coat and my big boots against which my numb toes would slam. He didn’t find me after the show and I was no longer the storm girl, fish girl, rose girl, mirror. I was nothing and she was everything and he was gone.

  Later, he saw the rose tattooed on my wrist, and he said, Why did you get that there? The tattoo he had loved the first night we touched. And I said, I told you, remember? I covered some scars when I tried to cut myself after my mom died and he said, I don’t know if I can handle this, and turned away. She had changed him. The ice was in his eye and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.

  I would have ridden on a reindeer or the back of a bird, I would have gone to the North Pole and I would have woven a blanket out of the threads of my body. I would have ripped out my hair and had implanted a wig of long silver blond strands, cut my body and sewn on whole new parts. I would have flayed my skin to find a more perfect whiteness beneath. I would have given him my eyes or my heart so that I could live in him, lying in her arms. At least then I could be close to him. These are the things of stories and I couldn’t do any of them. All I could do was go back to my room and pull down the blinds and paint.

  I painted every story about stolen deadened boys, nearly devoured by evil queens, revived by loving girls. I painted myself ripping out my hair, cutting off parts of me, sewing on new ones. I painted myself on the back of a reindeer. Fish girl storm girl mirror girl. But sometimes art can’t save you. It had before I met him but now it couldn’t. I painted myself and my twin melding into one and eaten by the ice. I was dying but inside him I lived. What would happen to me if she took his soul forever? He is lying in her burning cold bed watching the video screen. This is how they touch. She’s too perfect to be real. He touches himself looking at her. Parts of him are dying and he is blissful. Why did he need to feel things for so long? Look where it got him. Hungry hungry boys and girls who would collect pieces of him if they could to put in their beds, scrapbooks, boxes, put on their plates. A twin who wept almost every night thinking she would lose him. He can’t do this to her. It’s better this way. Poor insecure little bald girl. Remember walking through the frost? Remember her paintings that he said were how things should really look? The flowers tangling into each other? No, he’s forgotten. The Ice Queen is undressing for him again.

  I’ll make you a god, she said.

  That’s what I heard. At the Mirror, in the streets. She said, Move in with me. I’ll give you anything you want. How could he refuse? Me crying on the phone. Or her. And everything. It wasn’t much of a choice.

  Then he disappeared.

  She was alone at the Mirror, surrounded by girls and boys who looked ready to lap her up like walking candy. Where is K.? they asked. She just smiled. So pretty it could blind you. Snowflakes in the sun. Rumors started that he was dead. OD’d. Gun to the skull. She was a killer, you could see it. Someone should go check it out.

  But the boys and girls were being fed on her. She started performing for them. They forgot about him.

  I’d stare into his dark, empty apartment and see him in the window playing his guitar, dancing around like a puppet with his hair in his face. My beautiful boy. He’d stop, look up, shake away his hair, look across at
me with his shadowy eyes. But he wasn’t there at all.

  A bird landed on my flower box. I asked it had it seen him? The bird said, Ask the flowers. All the ones he and I had planted had died. I walked down by the lake where we used to go. Some roses were struggling up. I asked them. They said they’d been under the ground and he wasn’t there. They said I should go to see her.

  She lived in a house high above the city and ice was on the ground. Everywhere else it had started to melt. The numb pain came back in my toes and fingers. I walked through the iron gates, up the icy path among the snow-covered trees, over the threshold of the white palace. The floors were cold marble and echoing. Everything was white. The chill was so harsh that I could see my breath, even inside. I went looking for him.

  Up white marble stairs into a white marble room decorated with giant crystal snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, catching-refracting the light. He lay sleeping at her feet in a little lump. He was barefoot and his feet looked so cold. The blue veins stood out, vulnerable. I wanted to warm his feet in my armpits but I was cold too. She was even more beautiful than I remembered her. I thought that I had made a mistake. There was no way he could love me after seeing her even just once.

  But at least I could touch him again, wake him, something. See if he was still alive inside. Then I’d leave.

  She said I really shouldn’t come barging in like that, didn’t I know he didn’t want me anymore? She touched her hair and light leaped off of it like diamonds. She touched her throat and I felt mine close with fear.

  I remembered how love is supposed to break evil spells. Only if you love purely. I understood how he had come to her. He wanted something that could make him forget. There was something bad enough inside him that he had to forget and I couldn’t help him. I always wanted to remember, wanted him to remember.

  But now I thought that if he opened his eyes I would leave, never come back to bother him again. I just had to see if he was all right. Maybe I could tell him that I understood about forgetting.