Free A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Page B

trying to make a point at all. It was just a story.
    It was just the only story there is about somebody who’s missing a leg, and gets followed into a fire by his ballerina girlfriend.
    Do you really think I was trying to make some kind of point about your father and me?
    I remember you asking me if I knew what the word “destiny” meant.
    I guess I wondered … If you were worried. About your father and me.
    Fucking right I was.
    I’m not crazy about that word.
    Tell me you never noticed that Trevor and I knew how miserable you both were. You seem to be getting better, though.
    Leave the hoodie here, all right?
    I’m perfectly capable of keeping it safe, all on my own, in my dorm room. This hoodie does not need to reside within the House of Safety.
    Honestly? I’m not really sure what we’re talking about, anymore.
    We’re talking about a paper ballerina who had two perfectly good legs of her own but flew into the fire anyway.
    It’s silly for you to pack something you’re never going to wear. Dorm rooms have extremely limited storage space.
    Okay, let’s keep the hoodie here. Let’s keep everything here.
    Please don’t be melodramatic.
    Trevor’s gone. I leave tomorrow.
    And you keep saying that because …
    That story was all about the paper ballerina. She didn’t have a destiny. Only the one-legged soldier did.
    Do you want us to read the story again?
    I think I’d rather eat glass.
    All right, then.
    I’m going to leave the hoodie here. It’ll be safer here.
    Good. It’s nice to be told I’m right about something. Some little thing. Every now and then.
    *   *   *
    They’re into their sixties now.
    He’s still selling cars. She’s returned to her practice, knowing she’s too old and yet too inexperienced to rise above the level of associate. The firm is doing well enough to have room for a competent-enough tough-but-compassionate mother figure. She’s not only there to litigate, but to be salty and irreverent for men whose own mothers tended to be prim, mannerly, and cheerful almost to the point of madness.
    She minds, more than she’d thought she would, that she appears to others as a cantankerous, endearing old lady.
    He’s worried about sales. Nobody wants American cars anymore.
    The two of them are at home tonight, as they are most nights.
    He’s become the only person to whom she remains visible, who knows that she hasn’t always been old. Beth and Trevor love her but so clearly want her to be, to always have been, grandmotherly: reliable and harmless and endlessly patient.
    The next surprise to come, it seems, is true decline. The surprise after that is mortality, first one of them, then the other.
    Her therapist encourages her not to think this way. She does her best.
    Here they are, in their living room. They’ve built a fire in the fireplace. The movie they’ve been watching on their big-screen TV has just ended. His prosthetic (it’s titanium, beautiful in its way, nothing like the grotesque, Band-Aid-colored appendage of their college days) stands beside the fireplace. As the closing credits roll, they sit together, companionably, on the sofa.
    She says, “Call me old-fashioned, but I still like a movie with a happy ending.”
    Watching the credits roll, he wonders: Have we reached our happy ending?
    It feels happy enough, in its modest, domestic way. And there’ve been happy endings already.
    There was that night in his fraternity-house room, forty years ago, when he took off his clothes and revealed the damage that had been done to him; when she did not, like so many girls before her, insist that it was no big deal. There’s the fact that they didn’t have sex until the following night, and when they did have sex on the following night he was already halfway in love with her, because she was able to look at him and apprehend his