A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham

loss.
    That was a happy ending.
    There was the sight of her walking into that hospital room, and his sudden, surprising awareness that he wanted to see nobody more urgently than he wanted to see her. That only she could get him out of there and take him home.
    There was the night Trevor came out to him, at Beth’s engagement party, when they found themselves alone together with brandy and cigars; the night he realized that Trevor had decided to tell his father first (aren’t the sister or mother usually the first to be told?); the chance Trevor gave him to hold his trembling and frightened son, to assure him that it didn’t make any difference, to feel his son’s worried head burrowed gratefully into his chest.
    That was another happy ending.
    He could name dozens of others. A camping trip when, as the first light struck Half Dome, he knew that Beth, age four, was comprehending the terrible clarity of beauty, for the first time. A sudden rainstorm that soaked the whole family so thoroughly that they danced in it, kicking up puddles.
    There’s this text from Beth, sent less than an hour ago, a selfie of her and her husband, Dan, in their kitchen on an ordinary night (the baby must have been asleep by then), their heads pressed together, smiling into Beth’s iPhone, with only the message, XXX.
    Beth wasn’t required to send that text, not on a random and unremarkable night. She wasn’t meeting expectations. She’d simply wanted to show herself, herself and her husband, to her mother and father, so they’d know where she was, and who she was with. It seems that that matters to her, their younger child, the thornier and more argument-prone one. It seems that she’s twenty-four, happily married (please, Beth, stay happy even if you don’t stay married); it seems that she wants to locate herself to, and for, her parents. It seems that she knows (she’d know) how future nights lie waiting; how there’s no way of determining their nature but it’s probably not a bad idea to transmit a fragment of this night, when she’s young, and thrilled by her life, when she and Dan (stubbled, bespectacled, smitten by his wife, maybe dangerously so) have put the baby down and are making dinner together in their too-small apartment in New Haven.
    Happy endings. Too many to count.
    There’s the two of them on the sofa, with a fire in the fireplace; there’s his wife saying, “Time for bed,” and him agreeing that it is in fact time for bed, in a few minutes, after the fire has burned itself out.
    She gets up to stir the last of the embers. As she scatters the embers she sees, she could swear she sees … something in the dying flames, something small and animate, a tiny sphere of what she can think of only as livingness. A moment later, it resolves itself into mere fire.
    She doesn’t ask him if he’s seen it, too. But by now she and he are sufficiently telepathic that he knows to say, “Yes,” without the slightest idea of what he’s agreeing to.

 
    BEASTS
    You’ve met the beast. He’s ahead of you at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, flirting with the unamused Jamaican cashier. He’s slouching across the aisle on the Brooklyn-bound G train, sinewy forearms crawling with tattoos. He’s holding court—crass and coke-fueled, insultingly funny—at the after-hours party your girlfriend has insisted on, to which you’ve gone because you’re not ready, not yet, to be the kind of girl who wouldn’t.
    You may find yourself offering yourself to him.
    Because you’re sick of the boys who want to get to know you before they’ll sleep with you (“sleep with you” is the phrase they use); the boys who ask, apologetically, if they came too soon; who call the next day to tell you they had a really great time.
    Or because you’re starting to worry that a certain train is about to