Funeral Dirge for a Fairytale

It was never exactly what it would have been if I hadn’t cheated. I knew that was just something it could never be. There were times, when he had had a bad day, that I could feel the specter of my infidelity in the room with us. There were times Derek might as well have been in bed with us, driving Tim to angrily fuck me; I held him afterwards and told him I loved him, tender where he couldn’t be. We usually made love afterwards, a way to dispel the darkness from our room. But sometimes, when I knew he was having the most trouble, I just spooned with him until he fell into a restless slumber.

Thankfully, by the end of the second year we were back together, those times almost never came along anymore. There would still be the occasional oddity; an edginess when I was a little too late, a frown when one of Derek’s songs snuck up on us. But they were pushed further and further into the background until they almost didn’t exist anymore.

When Amelia was three, I started telling stories to her, or rather, with her. We would make up fanciful tales together. Some days, she was a superhero princess with a robot dog sidekick. Other days she was a space mermaid on a mission to save lunchtime. They were fun, fluffy, silly little things. But they were something I wanted to keep. I started to record them on my phone so we’d have them for later.

Then… then I wanted to write them down. Maybe edit them a little bit. There were the kernels of some fun children’s stories in there. It wasn’t the need to create for creation’s sake, that burning, destructive, selfish impulse to make something that was just for me. I wanted it for her, and maybe for her kids if she ever had them. So I talked to Tim and told him. Asked him how he would feel about it.

I could see the pain on his face, the fear. I was an alcoholic saying, “I can have just this one drink,” at least in his eyes. We talked about it at length, and I told him what I was feeling and why. That it was a different feeling, that it wasn’t anything like what I had felt before. He just sat and brooded. I let it go; it wasn’t worth causing him pain over. It wasn’t something I felt like I needed anymore. I wasn’t that person, the one who let a selfish want hurt her husband. I wouldn’t let myself be.

A few days later, he came home at lunchtime. It was a pleasant surprise for Amelia and me; I started to prepare something for him, but he stopped me.

“Here.” He produced a small gift box from behind his back.

“Sweetheart! You didn’t have to get me anything!” I gave him a little kiss on the cheek, and he handed Amelia a similarly sized box.

I let her open hers first, while I gave daddy one more kiss. It held some coloring books and crayons. “Thank you, daddy!” Off she went to start coloring, lunch entirely forgotten. I rolled my eyes and laughed.

I opened my present under Tim’s very watchful eyes. He seemed almost nervous, but that wasn’t quite right. Anxious? Then, when the package was opened, I understood. It was a bundle of writing journals. “Tim?”

“I never… I never hated that you wrote. I didn’t get it, a lot of the time, but you didn’t get my games, either. I only– it wasn’t until after, after you– after I found out what you’d done. But this is something you want to do for our family; I know it’s something you want to do for you, too. But it’s not why you’re doing it, not deep down. That’s what you’ve told me, and I’m going to believe you.” He kissed my cheek. “I wish I could stay, but I need to get back to the office. I can’t wait to see what you’ve written when I get home.”

I didn’t write anything at first. I wanted to; god, how I did. But the idea of writing was different from the reality of it. I felt an unease that I hadn’t when I’d simply considered writing down the stories. The idea of opening one of these notebooks, of once again doing the thing that I had allowed to destroy my life, seemed suddenly anathema. I put them down and went to color with Amelia, then to try to direct her back to her lunch.

Afterwards, we were playing together, and she asked me to tell her a story. We went back and forth, adding to it, bit by bit, weaving a simple tale of a unicorn astronaut and her crew of space pirates. It was silly, simple fun. But then, when it was time for her nap, I sat down with the journal and started to write. And then write some more. Revise. Edit. Furiously scribble bits out and add others.

By the time Tim was home, I had a new, streamlined version of her story. Our story. We read it together as a family, with Tim doing the pirate voices and Amelia making the spaceship noises. It felt good. Like I had finally done the right thing with a gift I had been given, after so many years of letting it destroy my happiness.

After not too much longer, there was another member of our audience; Tim and I agreed that we wanted a sibling for Amelia, and I stopped my birth control. I don’t know if we got it on the first try, but there were plenty more after anyways; the sacrifices we make for our family. Little Donald came nine months later, and my father was overjoyed that his grandson bore his name. I had filled a dozen journals with our family’s stories by this time; even Tim joined in to make some. His contributions tended to be more action-adventure oriented, but that was okay. My four year old daughter assured me she was ready to be done with kid stuff.

I never heard from Derek again; not directly, at any rate. He stayed away and never contacted us again. Tim and I had avoided his music, but sometimes it would sneak in. He was still using the songs we had written together; that rankled a little bit, but I tried not to care too much. I knew that I was never going to get credit for what I had written, and it meant I wouldn’t need to answer uncomfortable questions from my kids later.

From what little I heard, his songs had improved. His voice had a new depth to it, presumably because he could no longer play guitar and tried to channel his passion into the only instrument he had left. His arrangements were improved, too; since he was no longer playing it, the guitar became just another part of the instrumentation, not the star of the show. The music was more complex and mature once his ego was making fewer decisions.

He released another three albums; the first two were end-to-end products of our collaboration. I gave the music itself no special notice, but it was nice to see that they were reviewed well, especially the lyrics. Sue me, I’m only human. The third album… it was his, his entirely. But I didn’t know that until a few months after it came out.

I turned on the radio in the car, getting ready for a quick trip to the grocery store while Tim watched the kids. “ – singer songwriter Derek Aldrich was found dead last night in his apartment, two days before his thirtieth birthday. Anonymous sources report his death was due to a drug overdose; Aldrich had been in and out of rehab due to an opioid addiction, following the accident which cost him the use of his hand. Rest in peace, Derek.”

They played a track from his new album, Funeral Dirge for a Fairytale. I knew it had been savaged by both fans and the press as being an overwrought throwback of a concept album. After his death, they would, of course, “revisit” and “reexamine” it as a misunderstood masterpiece from a tortured genius.

I downloaded the whole thing while I was in the car. It was us. Me and him and Tim. It told the story of a princess and her friend that grew up together, each plagued by their own wicked stepparents. There was an evil curse from the boy’s stepfather that festered in him and turned him into a monster; but because the princess loved her friend, she was unable to see it. The story went from there: the boy pushed his friend away to save her; the princess met her knight; the boy returned, a monster now, but the princess was still unable to see the change.

The princess was corrupted by the monster; he stole her magic to craft more of his own. But the knight learned the truth and destroyed the monster’s magic, freeing her. The knight could not stay with her, because she had betrayed him. She prevailed and prevailed upon him, but it was only when their daughter was born that he welcomed her back. The monster’s curse, unable to find an outlet, began to eat him from the inside. At the end, he made one more thing, a gift to the princess and her knight, and died. In the liner notes of the album, the dedication read, “To the princess with love and to the knight with regret.”

There were debates within his fandom whether his overdose on heroin was an accident or not, but I knew: his last album had been a suicide note. There was wild speculation afterwards about the meaning of the final album, but the people that knew everything that happened never gave out specifics. Derek had kept my name away from his band, and Tim’s friends only knew that I had cheated on him. There were only a handful of people that ever knew the whole story, and one of them was now dead.

I texted Tim to let him know that I needed to take a little time to myself that day. I sat in the park and mourned the loss of my childhood friend, the boy before he became the monster. When I came home a few hours later, I think Tim knew, but he never pressed me on it. He never said anything about Derek’s death, nor did I; I don’t know, to this day, what Tim feels about it.

I do know that Derek’s death lifted the last of the pall over our marriage. Tim trusted me, and he had forgiven me. But we both knew that the corrupting influence that had taken me down that path was still out there. And now, suddenly, it was gone. We were free of the dread that had hung over us.

Our life was a fairytale, but not the Disney kind. Instead, it was a more classic one, the kind the Brothers Grimm would tell. It was a dark one, a cautionary tale about self-indulgence. But the ending did mesh with more modern sensibilities: we never let go of one another again. The knight and his princess, together forever.

A voice shakes my reflection from her reverie. “El, it’s time.” The best man in the world looks at me from the doorway; we’re older now, and graying, but he’s still the man I fell in love with. Still the man I love more than any in the world. He leads me to the front pew, then hurries to the back of the church. The wedding march will begin soon, and he will walk our daughter down the aisle to give her hand to her knight. They’ll write their own story together, and I hope they find their own happily ever after.

-----------------------------------------------------------

In pretty much all of my stuff that's written in the first person, the narrator is as fallible as any other character in the story. Steve in "Incompatible Needs" is a selfish horndog. Tim in "At the End of the Tour" is a guy who deals poorly with his emotions in the middle of something just shy of a psychotic break. The narrator in "I Know My Wife" doesn't, actually; that's something only a few commenters picked up on. Any of those stories told from the point of view of another character is likely to be wildly different and far more sympathetic to the narrator of that story than the depictions in the original story.

When I write, I tend to do a sort of lazy Rashomon thing: what the character narrates isn't necessarily how it happened, but it's how they remember it happening. Thus the slight differences between some of the spoken words in "At the End of the Tour" and "Funeral Dirge for a Fairytale;" Tim is a guy having the worst three days of his life, and he's understandably angry and not coping very well. Ellie is telling the story with several decades worth of distance and is intensely remorseful. Neither of them is intending to mislead the reader, but both of them probably are. Most of my stories don't have followups that show more than one POV. Hence the "lazy" part of "lazy Rashomon."

As to why the ending of this is so markedly different from "At the End of the Tour," which was a light BTB/consequences story, whereas this is a reconciliation ending (not an RAAC, as that implies an emotionally unearned reconciliation), part of that was that Ellie is a somewhat sympathetic character. Flawed, yes, very flawed. But even in the original story, Tim accepted that she had been manipulated by Derek. He even said that he thought Derek was going to try to manipulate him, as well. And if Tim is, in fact, "the best man in the world," the notion of him finding a way to forgive is certainly not out of the question, if circumstances forced him and Ellie back together. I originally had a pretty dark ending planned for this, but as I wrote it, I realized it didn't really fit either of the characters, and felt closer to unnecessary misery porn than anything else.

Plus, it's the holiday season. If the reconciliation ending bothers you, then just remember the words of Hans Gruber: "It's Christmas, Theo! It's the time of miracles."

Merry Christmas, everyone!