Her charge has just emerged from a nightmarish awakening in which she was kissed by a toad and turned into one herself and as usual has come running, so to speak, to the fairy, who is calming her with a tale about a beautiful young princess who got pricked one day by a spindle and fell asleep for a hundred years. Have I heard this story before? Hush, child. When she woke up, she found two little babies suckling at her breasts, and one of them — Babies—?! Yes, it seems that her prince, or some prince anyway, had been visiting her person regularly over the years, and these— But didn’t the prince kiss her? Didn’t he break the spell and wake her up? Well, he may have, I don’t know, that’s not part of this— But that’s terrible! Already she had these babies and she didn’t even know if she’d been kissed or not—?! I hate this story! All right, wait a minute, let’s say he did. He came into the room, greeted the fairies, played with little Dawn and Day, and kissed the princess. That’s it? Now what’s wrong? It doesn’t sound right. It’s not like a real story. What do you know about it, you little ninny? snaps the fairy, picking up one of the children and smacking its bottom to, making her point, make it cry: Whose story is this anyway? Rose takes the baby away from her and cuddles it. You really are very wicked, she says, rocking the baby gently in her arms to stop its screaming, and the fairy cackles at that. You’re right, she says, when she woke up there weren’t any children, that’s a different story. Rose stares confusedly into her arms, now cradling empty air. I don’t mind, she says timorously, you can leave the babies in if you want. No, no, there were no babies, forget that. Beauty woke up and found not one prince beside her bed, but three: a wizened old graybeard, a leprous hunchback with a beatific smile, and the handsome young hero of her dreams. Which one of you kissed me awake? Beauty asked, looking hopefully at the pretty one. We all did, replied the oldtimer in his creaky voice, and now you must choose between us. Take the holy one, he said, pointing to the scurvy hunchback in his haircloth, and your life will be lost to the self deceiving confusions of human compassion; take the other and you must live all your life with lies, deceit, and unrestrained wickedness. That may be true, old man, said the beautiful one with a snarling curl of his lip, but at least I’m not so hard of heart as you. And I live in the real world of the senses, not some chilly remote tower of the mind. Look at this! He stripped off his princely finery and, with a flourish, watching himself in a round gilt-framed mirror on the wall, struck a pose worthy of the great classic sculptors, with that funny thing between his legs hopping like a frog. Ah, but remember, said the leper, opening his robes and, as though in parody, peeling off a wafer of flesh from his diseased chest, physical beauty is only this deep and lasts but a brief season, while spiritual beauty lasts forever. So tell me, my love, says the fairy, scratching her cavernous armpits, which did Sleeping Beauty choose? Oh, I don’t know, whines Rose, and I don’t care. You’re just making my head ache. Tell me about the babies again.
Her prince has come at last, his clothing shredded from his ordeal in the briars, his stained sword drawn. He slips the blade under her thin gown, grown fragile over the long century of waiting, and with a (her eyes are closed, but she sees all this, knows all this, feels the cold blade slide up her abdomen and between her breasts, watches it lift the gown from her body like a rising tent) quick upward stroke slices it apart. She lies there in all her radiant innocence, exposed to the mercy of his excited gaze, excited by his excitement and by her own feeling of helplessness (she can do nothing about what happens next), and then he kisses her and she awakes. My prince! she sighs. Why have you waited so long? But he has turned away. The room is full of household knights and servants and they are all applauding, her mother and father among them, clapping along with the rest. He sheathes his sword, accepts their cheers and laughter with a graceful bow, blows kisses at the ladies. They gather around him and, chattering gaily, lead him away, fondling his tatters. He does not even look back. Abandoned, she wraps her naked shame in her own hug and drifts tearfully into the nursery or the kitchen, looking for consolation or perhaps some words of wisdom (maybe there are some babies around), but finding instead a door that is not a door. She opens it to the hidden corridor on the other side, which leads, she knows (it’s all so familiar, perhaps she wandered here as a child), to a spiral staircase up to a secret tower. Passing the slotted archers’ window, she pauses to wonder: is he out there somewhere in the briars? More important: is he really he? She climbs the staircase, which winds round and round, up, up, into the shadowy tower above, so high she cannot see from up here where she began below. At the top, behind a creaky old door, she finds a spinning room and an old humpbacked woman in widow’s garb, sitting there amid a tangle of unspooled flaxen threads like a spider in her web. Ah, there you are, my pretty, the old crone says, cackling softly. Back for more of the same? Who am I? What am I? she demands angrily from the doorway, fearing to enter, but fearing even more to back away, uncertain that the stairs she has climbed are still there behind her. It’s not fair! Why am I the one?
Hopelessly enmeshed in the flesh-rending embrace of the briars, he consoles himself with thoughts of what might have been: the legendary princess, his brave overcoming of all obstacles to arrive at her bedside and disenchant her with a magical kiss (he has a talent for it, women have often told him so), her soft expectancy and subsequent adoration of him, his fame and hers and the happiness that must naturally flow therefrom. Around him, the tinkling bones of those nameless brothers he’ll soon join speak to him of the vanity of all heroic pursuits and of the dreadful void that the illusions of immortality, so-called, cannot conceal. Well, of course, all life affirmations are grounded in willing self-delusion, masks, artifice, a blind eye cast toward the abyss, this is the very nature of heroism, he knows this, he doesn’t need the bones to tell him. Yet still, mad though it may be, he longs to write his name upon the heedless sky. Still (he slashes, a branch falls; it grows back, doubly forked; rearmed, he slashes again), he must strive. If he were now to reach her bedside and, with his bloody lips, free her from her living death, he would tell her that he did it for love — not for love of her alone, but for love of love, that the world not be emptied of it for want of valor. Would that disappoint her? No, she would understand, she was Beauty, after all, chosen as he was chosen, or as he’d thought he’d been (damn!), and so would know that his kiss, their love, their fated happiness, existed on a plane beyond their everyday regal lives, that theirs has been an emblematic ordeal and a redemption shared with the world. Yes, all right, but it wasn’t much of a kiss. What—?! I mean, it was hardly more than a little peck, I didn’t even feel it. It was like you really didn’t mean it. Oh, he sighs, slashing away bitterly, I guess my mind was elsewhere.