The Swan Wife, by Adrienne Clarke. Page 5/8
Wife:
Yesterday, my husband took me in his car to see what he called “a play.” The voices of the men and women on the stage were as bright and sharp as the edge of a hunting knife. I wondered: what they were they trying to tell us with their painted faces and hands that were never still? When it was over I copied the man and woman seated next to us, standing and clapping loudly. My husband smiled at me, his eyes round with gratitude.
I have listened to men and women whisper secrets to one another in the dark, watched them press their lips together in the rain; and smelled the bitter scent of their sweat, but human feelings are still strange to me. My husband wants me to smile and clap and kiss his cheek, so he can forgive himself for what he's done. If he had not been a thief I would not be sitting beside him smiling foolishly, my words and expressions more unnatural than those of the actors on stage.
After the performance we went to the Theatre Cafe for a drink. At home with my sisters I never drank anything but lake water. But here I have grown to like the dark red liquid in the tall, slippery glasses my husband orders for me. The taste is strange on my tongue; dry and slightly bitter. If it were just for drinking I would prefer water, but water does not make the heaviness go away; it does not stop the ground from pulling me downwards until I cannot remember what it was like to glide effortlessly above it. The liquid warms me until all of the lines and edges of my husband’s face soften and blur, and I no longer feel the need to search his eyes for weakness. But the dream does not last long - all too soon the lead returns to my limbs and I am my husband's prisoner once more.
Sometimes I drink glass after glass until I am too weak to stand. On nights like these my husband carries me home, much like he did that first morning in the forest, except that now I do not struggle in his arms or claw at his face. My attempts at resistance would be as false as everything else. I am alone here; there is nowhere else for me to go.
But last night I did not take anything to drink. I wanted to see the shadows in my husband’s eyes and the long hard line of his jaw.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked him.
“It’s a surprise,” he said.
“A surprise? But haven’t we already had what we came for? The people dressed in costume like the men and women in your paintings.”
“Yes, I wanted you to see the play. I thought it might…I thought it might be good for us to do something a normal couple would do. There’s still so much you don’t understand, so many things you’ve never experienced. I can help you with all of that. I want to give you as much of everything as I can.”
“So I will be a real wife?” I asked.
“That’s not what I meant.”
I wondered how we looked to the other people there, sitting at their tables, drinking wine, talking about …what? I do not know what other people talk about. I suppose we must have looked like everyone else. There was nothing extraordinary about our appearance. I was wearing the clothes my husband had picked out for me: A red dress with tiny shoulder straps and a deep V in the back that exposed my neck and shoulders. My husband likes to tell me I am beautiful. When I asked him what he meant by this he pressed the palms of his hands so tightly against his eyes that they left red marks on his skin. “It means,” he said, “that that looking at you makes me happy in a way that looking at other people doesn’t.” Afterwards I looked in the mirror trying to see what it was he liked so much. I could see no cause for happiness in my dull eyes and pale skin. All that was good and beautiful about me had been stripped away. I hated the small, weak woman staring back at me almost as much as I hated him.
But, listening to him talk about our life and the things he wanted to show me, I didn’t hate him. My feelings towards him are like the wind, soft and gentle at times, and violent and unpredictable at others. When we talked I thought how high and tight our voices sounded – as though any moment they might break and shatter into a million pieces at our feet.
“Don’t you want to know what the surprise is?” he asked.
The surprise. I’d already forgotten about it. Words could not hold my attention for long when I was in a new place; I was too distracted by the cigarette smoke that curled around our table like soiled lake mist, and by the woman the woman at the table beside us whose long gold earrings made a tinkling sound when she laughed.
“Finish your drink and I’ll show you.”
After we left the bar we walked back towards the theatre. “Are your shoes comfortable enough to walk in?” he asked.
I nodded, smiling at his concern. He’d twice brought me home shoes that I refused to wear – the backs were so high I had to stand on tiptoe to put them on. I preferred the soft leather slippers that I wore at home with Lena. Finally, he gave up on the others and bought me the shoes I was wearing – black satin flats that resembled my slippers except with harder soles.
So once more we pretended to be like the other couples, strolling arm in arm down the paved walkways, or sitting quietly on benches telling one another their secrets. But my husband and I didn’t share our secrets – they hovered in the air between us like wasps waiting for the right moment to strike. We walked in silence until he took me by the arm and pointed to the water. “There they are,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to show you. Let’s go and see them up close.”
“They're called Mute swans,” he told me. “Most of the swans that live on the Avon River are Mute swans; there are a couple of Black swans as well, but you don't see them very often.”
I felt the blood rush to my head causing the river and the fluffy white clouds that floated near the shore to turn black and fuzzy. A strange chill started in my feet and crept up my legs until the flesh seemed to dissolve in the silk stockings I wore. I wanted to let myself fall into the soft, green grass and never get up again. But slowly my head began to clear, and when the darkness faded I wanted to run at him, to scratch and kick and bite until it was he that wanted to run from me. I don’t know what angered me more - the sight of the swans snapping up crumbled bread thrown to them by human hands - or the sound of my husband's voice as he described my "surprise." He might have been telling me about the weather, or what he wanted for dinner.
“They're so peaceful aren't they?” he went on. “Peaceful and content - watching them you almost –”
“Swans are not often peaceful," I said finally. “Swans will tear at one another’s skin until there is nothing left but a pile of bloody feathers. Swans have a capacity for hate and betrayal that you in your world of paper and paints cannot imagine.” I could feel all of my carefully wrought control slipping from my shoulders like a liquid shawl, but I didn't care. I wanted to shock him, to make him look at me as I really was. Not as a woman but as a creature; a caged, miserable thing that would rather die than be tamed by him.
“I'm sorry - it was a mistake to bring you here. I never should have…”
“Why would you wish to show me this? Do you think that your shoes and dresses and paintings have made me forget who I am? I will never forget. It is you that wants to forget.”
“Don’t you love Lena and I at all? he asked. When I see you with her… and even sometimes when we are alone together I feel that it is possible for us –”
“To be happy together?”
Why shouldn’t we happy if we both want it?
“I care for you and for the child but it is not the same for me as it is for you. I don’t understand your happiness. You are free – I am not. How can I be happy with you when you are the one who has taken everything away from me? I cannot be happy without the power to choose for myself.
“What if you were free?” he asked. Could you be happy then?”
“Freedom,” I said slowly, turning the word over in my mouth as though I might taste it. “Freedom would make all of the difference in the world.”
