Bluebeard’s Last Wife

In the Bluebeard fairy tale, which enjoys variants across time and cultures, a boorish, rich, and mysterious man with a bluish countenance woos and takes several wives. After each whirlwind courtship and marriage, the new wife is given a key with which to breach a forbidden room. She’s instructed not to, but does so anyway, and discovers carnage; the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives whom he has beheaded, chopped to pieces, and/or hung from rafters or hooks.

The forbidden room is knowledge. Of Bluebeard’s true nature. Of his murderous intent. But, also, of each wife’s unwillingness or inability to trust her intuition: the wives receive warnings during the courtship, which they ignore.

When she enters the bloody chamber, the key begins to hemorrhage. It won’t stop. In some versions, Bluebeard also gives each wife an egg—let’s presume white for purity and soft-boiled for tenderness—to always carry with her. In the forbidden room, the egg turns crimson. It stays blood stained.

Now Bluebeard knows she knows. Only her death will staunch the bleeding. Then, along comes the final wife. She gathers her wits and wiles about her. She confronts the aspects of herself that brought her to this place. She realizes the only way to end this madness is to kill Bluebeard. She’s left to tell the story.

1.

You are eighteen. You do not yet know loneliness. Sadness and grief, yes. Anxiety and depression. Borne of a petite and pretty mother whose erratic behavior, twisted anger, virulent control, and infallibility went not unnoticed, not unremarked but unobstructed. It’s summer. You’ve been sent to the high desert, where wind, rain, and time have weathered the crimson and cream-colored sandstone mountains into surreally sculpted megaliths that stand sentinel against a crisp cerulean sky. Magical.

You are a check-out girl at a health-food store. One late afternoon, a family walks in, leaving you breathless. The stepmother is slim; hands dancing, words lilting, her thick black hair curling softly around a broad face with deep-set dark eyes that notice everything and are framed with long black lashes and bones cutting cleanly around rosy cheeks. Her skin is flawless, shiny, beaming with hydration. You lock eyes. Hello!

The stepmother’s husband is very tall, lanky, with a massive head in which a set jaw and long, strong nose sit aggressively below a thinning head of black hair. He’s beside her. Insistent. Gruff. Also, there’s his son, her stepson: almost as tall as the father but thinner with thick blue-black hair curling at his shoulders and hanging in his eyes. Blue eyes downcast between long black lashes. A true aquiline nose, bridged and bent. A full wide mouth, softly pursed. Long thin arms falling from the short sleeves of his thin t-shirt, shoulder blades poking out the back like palette knives, broad shoulders narrowing down a long back to a small waist.

He is the most beautiful man, or rather boy, you have ever seen. He glances at you, then his chin (same as his father’s) angles up and turns sharply up and away, his face suddenly opaque, hooded in aloofness? Imperviousness? A move you’ve never encountered, which you take for shyness, which it might have been, or assembled in response to neglect, fear, or vulnerability.

Over the weeks their tans deepen. They become regulars. You learn things. They’re from the West Coast, a place you associate with a sun-kissed sheen of well-being and natural beauty evidenced by their gorgeous skin. They are building an adobe house powered by the sun. It has a kiva: a circular room sunk into the earth, which the area’s Native peoples devised for spiritual ceremonies. The family’s exoticism, their allure, increases.

The son, a bit drifty after a few years of college, has been enlisted to help with construction. He’s also making stained-glass windows for the kiva room. This nascent Bluebeard, then, is an artist of sorts, just as the fairy tales have it, but has not yet begun assembling his tableau of wives.

The stepmother issues invitations to join the family at their little trailer by the creek, during which you all sit outside under the sycamores as she bustles about preparing goat roast, corn on the cob, watermelon slices. She takes you under her wing, you un-mothered child, and instructs you in things like the virtues of organic apple-cider vinegar as a facial toner.

The first courtship begins. Trips to the creek where, even though the spot is very public, he strips naked while you (fully clothed) hide behind a bush out of embarrassment. An evening at the bar where he plays the drums and you’re charmed. Hikes off red-dirt roads up pinyon and juniper-dotted hills, across manzanita and cactus-filled mesas, and down into cool sandstone canyons, where you’re told, even though you’ve worked up quite an appetite, that a handful of grapes is enough.

Date nights at the under-construction kiva house, listening to prog rock. An overnight, in his black Pontiac Bonneville, parked on top of a mesa, where you innocently sleep on each other’s shoulders. He backs that car into a 7-Eleven shattering the plate glass, an accident for which you’re somehow to blame. His chin tilts up sharply and away, cutting you off, leaving you gasping for connection.

Your father calls you back to the North. Time to return to college. You know the boyfriend will never visit. He’s from the sunny West Coast; it’s too much to ask. But you pine for him. In return, you receive large pieces of paper folded into letter-size missives for mailing, on which he’s drawn colorful shapes meant to resemble stained glass and writes, I love you and that’s all I know. It’s just enough. The only thing to do is go back. Which your father permits as long as you’re enrolled in college. So, you do.

The boyfriend purchases a double-wide, in which he lives with often shirtless, guitar-playing, avocado-eating roommates. He’s a waiter. Construction on the kiva house has stopped due to lack of funds; the father and stepmother are back on the West Coast. One weekend, he agrees to visit your apartment near your new Southwest university. He never shows. Doesn’t call. You give him another chance.

The boyfriend moves to an apartment with his cousin and the cousin’s girlfriend. Sometimes you sleep over. Sometimes, while dreaming, you sit up in bed, wave your arms, and call out: I want to be free. You pay attention.

One day, he shyly mentions that he’d be a good husband right now. What does that even mean? You’re too stunned to ask. You say, I can’t get married. I am too young. I need to finish college. I want to study dance, read literature, be a writer. Look at our parents, their divorces. There has to be more to life than this.

One day, while you’re napping on his bed, he goes for a run. When you wake, there’s a note. In the note, he breaks up with you. He soon regrets this. He delivers gifts: a painting, much like his stained-glass work, notes, crystals. You’re resolute. You’re going back North to finish college.

Decades ensue. You build and nurture a career, buy and manage property, create a friend circle, care for sick family members. Every now and then, you come across photos of the sad beautiful boy. Your heart sighs.

You could have been his first wife. Instead, you are his last.

2.

In the Bluebeard tales, not much is known about the other wives. Once married, they’re given a key with which to open a forbidden room, do so, and meet their demise. Same here. But, in your version of Bluebeard, no actual “murder” takes place—except of sanity, of sanctity, of souls.

Thirty-some years later, you receive his sweet yet nonsensical voicemail. Call him right back, commands a friend. You compress the decades into that conversation, then others. You talk of careers, of locations lived in. He tells you of his first wife, who may have pursued him for years after you left. She lost her mind, slept with the neighbor, and became an alcoholic. He tells you of the second wife who allegedly drank herself to death, refusing intervention, refusing a new liver.

You think, Oh, crazy wives. None of that has anything to do with me. Ignoring the suggestion of a pattern.

You think, Oh, poor beautiful boy. Who would ever want to leave you? Eliding the fact that you once did.

During dinner with another friend, you announce, I’m going to marry him. You’re both shocked—and giddy. You’ve heard stories of high school or college sweethearts meeting again, or calling each other out of the blue, after decades apart, then getting back together (‘til death do us part) because of a shared sense of history, an infallible sense knowing one another deeply that dates back to youth. It does provide a profound sense of comfort. Your certainty is unshakeable, this returning to once upon a time.

The reunion takes place in the high-desert town where you met. His appearance is more Beavis than Adonis at this point, the black hair short and nearly gone on top, a paunch, but he’s bigger, taller, and still movie-star handsome, the eyes still blue-blue. You are spritely, can fit into skinny jeans and you’re wearing them. Your hair is thick and straight. He can’t get over your beautiful skin. You are entranced. You issue an invitation. He accepts.

You submit to the folly of his courtship, like Bluebeard’s wives before (imaginary and actual). Not ribbons and feasts and gowns and horses. Rather, clichéd pronouncements, bad poetry, plane tickets, hearts drawn in the sand, naked plunges into the sea, dinners with champagne, walks on the beach, sexual intrigue, diamonds, and the promise of happily-ever-after.

You are not his youngest age-wise, as the fairy tales have it, although as a teenager you were the first he sought to marry. Why not then, but now? Because, as an adult, despite barely surviving several run-ins with other Bluebeards, you clutch tightly to your naiveté; your youthful exuberance, romantic foolishness, and grasping love for difficult people.

Yes, you’re brainy. Also, a smarty-pants. Also, tough as nails, colleagues say, hard-working, accomplished. Dedicated to a family that wraps its love in disregard and disdain. Put kindly, you’ve yet to resolve past trauma. Don’t fool yourself. You are willing prey.

There are warning bells. Keys, you might say, jangling against the bedrock of your certainty. Keys on a ring with instructions to never open that door with that key. The two prior wives. His drinking, which he stopped temporarily after the second wife. The engagement, which must be kept secret from his family until they get to know you better. His flirtation with a man—their eyes locked and probing, you can feel the pheromones leaching from their skin; you’re invisible, and aggrieved.

Contrary to the fairy tale, he’s not rich and is without a castle. In fact, he lives with his father, whom several family members will, beneath their breaths, accuse of murdering their beloved stepmother out of neglect. You, on the other hand, have several castles, some owned with your sibling, who will not, as in many Bluebeard versions, ride out with brothers in arms to save you as Bluebeard bears down, but will insist on a pre-nup. That’s a different sort of saving.

The keys jangle: that pre-nup, which he tearfully agrees to, warning how it sullies the purity of our love. When he tilts up his chin and his angular face sharply moves up and away into that mask of impenetrable aloofness. Finally, it pisses you off. I thought you loved that. And you know how to reel me back in, he says referring to sex. For the first time, you say, No, I hate it. And yet you will reel him back in again and again, so as not to be shut out, so as not to be alone.

3.

Be bold.

Be bold, be bold.

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest your heart's blood should run cold.

Thus, reads the plaque above the forbidden door in one Bluebeard variation. It’s not that you’re bold, but rather emboldened. By your youthful credulity, your fiancé’s soft-boiled endearments, your choice to find an old-fashioned bumbling charm in his daftness and idiosyncrasies; your willingness (still) to intervene in his angling off and away, to chase as he disappears in plain sight.

You’re emboldened by the folly of a first marriage in your fifties, the romantic foolishness you share. By his promise of a paradisiacal next chapter, the unfolding of a new life, the return to something lost that you’ve been seeking.

In your Bluebeard variation, the engagement is the key. The marriage itself—the ceremony complete, the threshold crossed—is the bloody chamber. Now, here you stand, in shocked awareness, alone, holding a bloodied egg, a bleeding key: your wounded self.

Wondering, what have I done.

4.

As in all Bluebeard variations, your blood runs cold. You see, with sudden and bitter clarity, the carnage rendered on the past wives. You also see your own victimization. More terrifying is this: recognizing the harm you are capable of inflicting upon yourself.

In your Bluebeard story, you don’t start planning or plotting. Nor do you await a mother’s rescue so dramatic it conjures the roiling color, billowing texture, and holy eroticism of a Turner merged with Tintoretto, as in one Bluebeard version. Not your mother (the first wound from which all else bleeds), nor your father (as beloved as he is inept). Nor sibling. Nor friend. Nor anyone else.

In your Bluebeard story, you go numb with shame. You feel outrage and resentment, yes. But shame wins. Then, shame takes up with hope.

You cradle that bloody egg, hide that bleeding key, for as long as you can.

5.

Now married, Bluebeard no longer hides his maleficence. He drinks, coupling his inebriation with disdain for you. He plucks your hand from his shoulder with disgust. There are public accountings of your supposed inadequacies as a wife as he struggles to stay upright. He empties six packs while “working” at his computer, pausing to stomp downstairs and smash his hand into your face as you’re sleeping.

You drink, too—excessively. Often to meet his quota for sex. Curiously, despite your pleadings with him to stop, he never questions your consumption. You don’t figure out why until much later: It’s because you’re right where you should be; another of his drunk wives. One who, incidentally, compounds that numbing by binge-watching zombie shows.

Sometimes there’s sweetness, apologies. You enjoy the outings to wineries, to old-growth forests for hiking, to hot springs for soaking. Sometimes you share wine and it’s lovely. When he’s drinking alone, it’s not.

One night, after waking up as he grabs your body in a faltering attempt to lay claim, you turn over and laugh at the idiocy of it all. Not out loud. Inside. You’re snickering, no roaring with contempt, like the dead severed wives that a last wife sews back together in one Bluebeard variation. You’ve hit your limit. You’re ready. The next morning, you tell him, I can’t do this anymore. You need to leave.

He does, seemingly without a care in the world. He whistles, he sings, he moves with a mystifying lightness. Bluebeard never expects his own demise.

You put starting putting his stuff on the porch. You change the locks. You see a therapist. She suspects he has narcissistic personality disorder, amplified by alcoholism. Voila. There it all is: his feeling of entitlement, an inflated sense of self-importance, disregard for others’ emotions, an inability to admit to fault. The therapist recommends no contact.

You reject couples counseling. You get a lawyer, a divorce. You start excavating patterns in yourself, beginning in childhood, of self-erasure and appeasement, of creativity extinguished by the fatigue of managing expectations, of culpability bred of victimization.

He won’t let go. He returns a ring, per the divorce decree, in a viscous substance. He collects the rest of his things, leaving you a basket of memorabilia you don’t want, like extra wedding invitations and postcards from wineries, texting, Didn’t you love what I left you? He moves away. He posts pictures of new girlfriends on social media, a different one every week. The posts become strangely inappropriate, then deranged. You unfollow and block all means of communication.

So then, packages arrive. Long missives blaming you, mash notes, mea culpas, mid-century manuals on matrimony, his AA medallion, his passport, his notes from the wedding planning, a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, books on Buddhism, receipts from the honeymoon, his copy of the pre-nup, his copy of the divorce decree. None with a return address. He breaks through the email blockades. More blame, more apologies, more nonsense.

A restraining order will escalate things, family members advise. Shouts a friend, It’s been three years! It’s already escalated! You apply for and receive a harassment restraining order. He finds workarounds. You work at finding inner peace.

6.

In the fairy tales, Bluebeard gets sliced and diced, tossed off the ramparts, thrown to the wolves, or imbibes a poison. The correlation-making is easy. Sometimes you pity him. That the wolves continue to tear at his mind, the poison still flows through his veins, that he’s trapped inside a bloody chamber of his own making with his dead wives and memories of the one who escaped.

But your concerns are more pressing. Because the story of Bluebeard is, at its core, the story of the last wife’s transformation.

A story of naively entering a dark forbidden chamber, examining the bloody carnage of self-sabotage therein, and emerging into a new knowing. With the bleeding key and bloodstained egg held firmly, lovingly, forever in your hand.

A story of opening your heart and holding all the wives, including yourself, closely and tenderly there.

A story of re-discovering your creative impulse, your strength, your wits and wiles, to trap Bluebeard in a variation wherein you can still see that poor sad beautiful boy. Wherein you rescue yourself and live to tell the tale.

-Camille LeFevre

Camille LeFevre, a former arts journalist, now writes creative nonfiction. She lives in the North and the Southwest.