“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.