A Wild Swan Read Online Free Page A

who’ve been waging the battle for decades; who seem to believe that if finally, someday, one of them can prove the other wrong—deeply wrong, soul-wrong—they’ll be exonerated, and released. Amassing the evidence, working toward the proof, can swallow an entire life.
    *   *   *
    Jack and his mother, wealthy now (Jack’s mother has invested the gold in stocks and real estate), don’t move to a better neighborhood. They can’t abandon the beanstalk. So they rebuild. Seven fireplaces, cathedral ceilings, indoor and outdoor pools.
    They continue living together, mother and son. Jack doesn’t date. Who knows what succession of girls and boys sneak in through the sliding glass doors at night, after the mother has sunk to the bottom of her own private lake, with the help of Absolut and Klonopin?
    Jack and his mother are doing fine. Especially considering that, recently, they were down to their last cow.
    But as we all know, it’s never enough. No matter how much it is.
    Jack and his mother still don’t have a black American Express card. They don’t have a private plane. They don’t own an island.
    And so, Jack goes up the beanstalk again. He knocks for a second time at the towering cloud-door.
    The giantess answers again. She seems not to recognize Jack, and it’s true that he’s no longer dressed in the cheap lounge lizard outfit—the tight pants and synthetic shirt he boosted at the mall. He’s all Marc Jacobs now. He has a shockingly expensive haircut.
    But still. Does the giantess really believe a different, better-dressed boy has appeared at her door, one with the same sly grin and the same dark-gold hair, however improved the cut?
    There is, after all, the well-known inclination to continue to sabotage our marriages, without ever leaving them. And there’s this, too. There’s the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It’s possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It’s possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine.
    The scenario plays itself out again. This time, when the fifty-foot-tall dim-witted thug Fi fi fo fums , early and unexpected, from the hallway, the giantess hides Jack in the oven.
    We don’t need advanced degrees to understand something about her habit of flirtation with eating Jack.
    The second exchange between giant and giantess—the one about how he smells the blood of an Englishman, and she assures him it’s just the bullock she’s fixed for lunch—is too absurd even for farce.
    Let’s imagine an unconscious collusion between husband and wife, then. He knows something’s up. He knows she’s hiding something, or someone. Let’s imagine he prefers a wife who’s capable of deceit. A wife who can manage something more interesting than drudgery and peevish, drowsy fidelity.
    This time, after polishing off the bullock, the giant demands to be shown the hen that lays golden eggs. And, a moment later, there she is: a prizewinning pullet, as regal and self-important as it’s possible for a chicken to be. She stands before the giant, her claw-tipped, bluish feet firmly planted on the tabletop, and, with a low cackle of triumph, lays another golden egg.
    Which the giant picks up and examines. It’s the daily egg. They never vary. The giant, however, maintains his attachment to the revisiting of his own bounty, as he does to his postprandial snooze, face down on the tabletop, wheezing out blasts of bullock-reeking breath, emitting a lake of drool.
    Again, Jack emerges (this time from the oven), and makes off with the hen. Again, the giantess watches him steal her husband’s joy and fortune. Again, she adores the meanness of Jack, a small-time crook dressed now in two-hundred-dollar jeans. She