The Canterbury Sisters (21 page)

A hum runs through the group. Tough question, that one. A stumper of sages. Valerie nods, pleased by our response, and resumes her story with a little more vigor.

“When he hears the riddle, Arthur is distraught. He has been married to Guinevere for many years at this point, long enough to know that pleasing a woman is no easy task. In fact, he suspects that the question is unanswerable and that in effect he’s just been given a death sentence. He rejoins the others in his hunting party and tries to act as if nothing has happened, but one young knight among them notices that the king seems preoccupied and worried. Sir Gawain, who is not only one of Arthur’s closest friends, but also his nephew. Gawain eventually manages to pry the story out of Arthur, and when the king gets to the part about the unanswerable riddle, Gawain laughs. He doesn’t think this is any big deal. He’s young and handsome and unmarried, and sure that it can’t be that hard to figure out the ladies. He suggests that the two of them separate and spend the year searching Camelot from one end to the other, looking for the answer. So Gawain goes off in one direction and Arthur the other, and they question every scholar and wizard they meet along the path, asking each one, ‘What is it that women most desire?’ But the answers they receive are all in conflict.”

“Typical,” says Silvia. “It didn’t occur to them to ask a woman?”

“You do realize,” says Steffi, “that in these old myths and fairy tales, the bad guy is always called something like the Black Knight? That sort of bias is so built into our culture that no one even notices it anymore.”

“Hush up,” says Claire, with a flick of her dangling pewter earrings. “Both of you. Let the girl tell her story.” And with that, a new rule is set. No one will argue with the storyteller until her tale is complete.

“Gawain searches relentlessly for the answer,” says Valerie, “becoming more alarmed as the weeks and months go by, bringing them ever closer to the king’s day of reckoning. But Arthur himself is drawn to return to the same dark wood where he had killed the deer and the trouble had begun. There he finds a hideous old hag sitting astride a high white horse. She is the Loathly Lady of the title. She says she knows all about his problem and that she also knows the answer he seeks. But there’s a catch. She will only solve the riddle if he promises her the hand of Sir Gawain in marriage.

“Well, of course Arthur is horrified. Gawain is one of his best friends, one of his most loyal knights. He doesn’t deserve to be wed against his will to a horrible hag. Arthur offers her everything else he has at his disposal—lands and castles and jewels and titles, but the Loathly Lady insists that she will accept nothing but marriage to Sir Gawain.

“Arthur knows that Gawain will do anything to save his king and kingdom and, sure enough, when he is informed of the bargain the hag demands, Gawain readily agrees. And on the one-year anniversary of the day the challenge was set, Arthur takes the Loathly Lady before the Black Knight and she says that what women most desire is sovereignty. That is, they want control over their own lives.” Valerie pauses and looks around. “Which sounds like a no-brainer today, right? Saying that you want to control your own life is like saying that you want air and water. It seems like the most basic of human requests. But this was the Middle Ages. To suggest that a woman might want control over her own life was a radical and shocking notion. Nevertheless, the Black Knight accepts the hag’s answer. Arthur is off one hook and Gawain is onto another.

“The date of the wedding is set. At the ceremony and the banquet that follows, Gawain swallows his pride and treats his new bride with great courtesy, as if she were the most desirable woman in all the land, and he was delighted to have her for a wife. He pours her wine and asks her to dance, and no one in the great banquet hall, especially Arthur, is allowed to see the true depths of his despair. Keeping a smile on his face is difficult, for of course the hall is buzzing about this bizarre marriage and everyone is saying, ‘Poor Gawain.’ Nothing is as hard to bear as the pity of your friends—that’s precisely how the storyteller puts it. ‘Nothing is as hard to bear as the pity of your friends,’ he writes, and I agree. Because the Loathly Lady isn’t just old and ugly. She’s also incredibly vulgar—farting and belching and cursing in the midst of the high-born ladies, and the story further says that ‘the civility of Arthur’s court was greatly strained by the presence of this woman.’ The Loathly Lady is never going to fit into Camelot, that’s for sure. But through it all, Gawain doesn’t only go through with his part of the bargain, he does it gracefully, attending to his bride’s every wish.

“When it’s finally time for the two of them to go into the wedding chamber . . . well, poor Gawain indeed. He takes a shot of whiskey for courage. The story doesn’t say that part. I added it. But when he pulls back the bed curtain and approaches the bridal bower, he does not find the loathly creature he expects. Instead, there before him awaits the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She is not only beautiful, but gentle and gracious, the perfect consort for a knight of his standing, and she explains that a curse had been put upon her by the Black Knight. She was condemned to be a repulsive hag until a good man agreed to marry her, and now, thanks to him, the curse is partially lifted. She is allowed to be her true self half of the time, either at day or at night. And because Gawain has not only fulfilled his part of the bargain, but has treated her with great courtesy, she gives him the choice. Would he rather she be beautiful when they are alone at night, in the privacy of their bedchamber, or during the day, when they are among the other knights and ladies of the court? So here comes the riddle. Not the one you expected, about what women want, but a different one: How do you think that Gawain answered her question?”

For a moment, no one answers. I look out over the fields—more flat and silver now, a shimmer of a city in the distance that I assume must be Canterbury. Whatever conclusion we are to reach must be reached within the course of today and tomorrow, for two afternoons from now we will file into the Cathedral to receive our blessings, earned or not. Tess has told us she’s arranged for a female priest—the Anglicans have them—and it seems fitting. If we are to confess woman to woman, then it’s only right that our quest should end with a woman’s forgiveness.

But in the meantime there is Gawain, and the horns of his dilemma. The line in Valerie’s story that most struck me was the one she repeated, that bit about how it is so hard to bear the pity of one’s friends. The truth of it stings like disinfectant in a wound, for I suspect my rapid wordless flight from Philadelphia to London had as much to do with avoiding my friends as it had with any duty to scatter my mother’s ashes. I couldn’t bear telling them the story of Ned’s desertion, at least not yet. But I have to go back at some point. Sometime soon. In fact, by this time next week, I’ll have resumed my normal life and all of our mutual friends will be flocking around me, saying what an asshole Ned’s been. Or at least some of them will say that, and others will be talking to him, behind my back, and they will say he was justified, that they don’t know how he hung in there with someone as demanding and stubborn as I am for as long as he did, and then of course there will be the ones who do both, who console me and congratulate him in the same breath. And thus it will begin—the divvying up of the couples we hung out with, just as we will have to divide the furniture and books and dishes at the beach house. Lawyers and real estate agents and accountants will be informed that our paths have diverged. My female friends will come over and drink up the dregs of my business wine, and some of them will feel compelled to point out how much easier it is for a man to move on. Hell, he already has. My replacement was hired before I was let go. While for a woman lost somewhere in her own middle ages . . . no, my own respite from romantic love will be extended, perhaps indefinitely. They all know this, and so do I. And then I will see the flashes of pity in their eyes and that pity will be, in many ways, harder to bear than the initial sting of Ned’s departure.

“I know why you looked at me back there,” Claire says to Valerie, and her voice is different than I’ve ever heard it, biting and unpleasant. “You think this is my story. That’s why you suddenly remembered you had an ace in your pocket. You wanted to go next.”

Valerie looks genuinely surprised. “This isn’t your story. It isn’t remotely about you. Why would you say that?”

“Because she’s paranoid,” says Silvia.

Claire fidgets with her sunglasses, pushing them up and then immediately back down. “You think Gawain’s choice was just like Adam’s choice, don’t you? Only Adam didn’t have a woman who changed back and forth in the course of a day, he actually had two women. I was one who was acceptable in public, but a disappointment in the bedroom, while Edith was a hag during the day and beautiful in bed.”

“That’s insane,” says Silvia.

“You looked right at me before you started your tale,” Claire says flatly to Valerie. “You know you did.”

“Maybe, once, when we were talking about where the story came from,” says Valerie. She is more ragamuffin than ever today. A tight orange shirt and loose gray pants. Her mud-brown hair, so nondescript in color and length, is for the first time held back in the sort of big-toothed clip I use when I wash my face. “Because in
The Canterbury Tales
, it was the Wife of Bath who told a version of this story and she . . . well, okay, I’ll admit this much. I was thinking that she’s a little like you. It occurred to me back in London, at the George Inn when we were all introducing ourselves. You said you’d been married four times and you had a younger lover . . . and I thought yes, of course, this one must be our own Wife of Bath.” Valerie looks around, throwing herself on the mercy of the group. “Well, four husbands? You’ve got to admit that’s a little unusual, right?”

It’s very unusual.

“And if I meant anything at all, that was it,” Valerie says. “That you have things in common with the storyteller, not the story. I certainly don’t think you’re a hag. You’re the furthest from being a hag of anybody here. I’d say there are quite a few of us that are haggier than you. In fact—”

“So what do the rest of you think?” says Tess, stepping in before Valerie can create a second crisis in her efforts to subdue the first one. “How did Gawain answer? Is it more important to have the perfect mate in public, someone who looks and acts just as expected, and perhaps even elevates your status in the eyes of your friends? Is that the secret to a happy marriage? Or is it more important how your mate behaves in private, behind closed doors?”

“I want both,” says Becca. “Someone I can be proud of and someone who’s good to me.”

“Of course you want both,” says Claire. “Everyone wants both. But didn’t you hear Valerie? They were under a curse.” Her voice is still snappish. She wasn’t even a little bit mollified by that Wife of Bath explanation.

“I think he would choose a wife who was lovely in public,” Jean says slowly. “But not for the reasons you might expect. Gawain wasn’t a shallow person. He was so noble, in fact, that he didn’t want to make Arthur feel bad with constant reminders of the sacrifice he had made on his behalf. Because this isn’t a love story, not really. It isn’t about the knight and the hag. She’s just a prop. At heart, this is the story of Gawain’s devotion to Arthur and how he was not only willing to sacrifice his own happiness to save his king, but that he didn’t even want Arthur to know the true extent of his suffering. So if you claim that the Loathly Lady was disrupting all of Camelot, Gawain couldn’t have that. I think he would have been selfless enough to want a proper wife in public and would have thus accepted the hag in bed.”

It’s a plausible position, at least from my perspective, but Steffi counterargues immediately.

“I agree that he would choose the beauty by daylight and the hag in bed,” she says, “but there’s nothing noble about it. All of us care more about how things look than how they are. It’s far more important to appear to have a perfect life than it is to actually have a perfect life.”

“No,” says Claire. “You’re both wrong. A woman might think that way. We’d stay in the middle of hell as long as it was well-decorated, but not a man. For them, sex makes the decision. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Middle Ages or last week. We can talk about grand ideas like chivalry and courtesy and loyalty, but in the end the world is moved by only two forces: sex and money. They may take many forms, but together they’re the engines that drive the whole universe and to pretend anything else . . . it’s just delusional. A young guy like Gawain? He would have chosen what worked in the bedchamber over what worked in the banquet hall. Trust me.”

The group falls silent again. Our rhythms have become so synchronized over the last few days that we make our stops without discussion, and now we have paused at a turn in the path, all of us reaching in unison for our water. Unstrapping the pack and lifting it on and off every time is a pain, so I’ve gotten pretty skilled at reaching behind my back and blindly finding the right pocket. I tug at the zipper, but it doesn’t want to open, so I give it a stronger yank, twisting my shoulder a little in the process. Steffi raises an eyebrow at me, as if asking if I need help. I shake my head. I don’t know why I’m so stubborn about silly things like this, why I don’t put my backpack on the ground like everyone else so that I can rifle through it at leisure. Being careful with my shoulder, which is tingling, I slide my hand around my back again and pull out the water bottle.

“Wait a minute,” says Angelique. “What did you say that word was? Sovenery? What did you say it means?”

“Sovereignty,” says Tess. “It’s from the word ‘sovereign,’ and it means that each person wants to be the king or queen of their own life.”

“Like making their own decisions?”

“Yes,” says Tess. “In the context of this story, that’s exactly what that means.”

“Then I think I know the answer to the riddle,” says Ange-lique, returning her bright-pink water bottle to her pack and swaying a little as she hefts the weight of it back to her shoulders. “Gawain remembered what the hag had said to the Black Knight. That what women desire most is the chance to make their own decisions. So he wouldn’t have decided for her. When it came to the night and day thing, he would have said, ‘Whatever you want, baby. Totally your call.’ ”