The Bodice Ripper

by Byron Rempel

“It sold two hundred and thirty-eight copies.”

  “Well then.”

  Anna put her hand over her mouth. All this talk made her too open to the world. Now, she wouldn’t say any more until asked.

  “Did you…” the woman started.

  “It sold well because the cover had a graphic fourteenth-century woodcut that featured fellatio.”

  Julia stopped drinking long enough to look at Anna. A man across the aisle was attentive too.

  “The first reviewer called the book a ‘Huge achievement.’ There was a promise of more illustrations inside.”

  The man cleared his throat, and Julia collapsed in laughter on Anna’s shoulder. They spilled wine over each other and pointed at the man with his face now buried in a magazine. They were schoolgirls. They were drunk. They didn’t care.

  The hostesses brought more wine, although Anna waved away Julia’s hand. Julia ignored her. Somewhere over the white darkness of Greenland, Anna rallied to use the toilet again. She looked over the seats from the rear of the plane, tried to focus her eyes. Every woman’s video screen was tuned to the same romantic comedy. As one they all threw back their heads in laughter at the kooky heroine’s antics, then sniffed and wiped tears away with choreographed precision. When her eyes focused most screens showed only the interminable progress of the plane across the Atlantic.

  “I’m on my way to meet a French man and fall in love,” Anna confessed to Julia while she searched for her seatbelt.

  “Anyone, or a particular one you got in mind?”

  “Oh, particular.”

  “How lovely for you,” Julia said. “I fell out of love and I’m on my way to divorce a French man.”

  “Oh no,” said Anna.

  “No sympathy, please. Should’ve known.”

  “Known what?”

  “Not to marry a playwright.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “See? I tell my clients: CEO, rancher, spy, policeman, fighter pilot.” Julia enumerated as she held up five fingers. The ring was still on the fourth finger, but the stone had fallen out.

  “Your clients?” Anna asked.

  “Worst is, you see yourself on stage later. If you go to the theatre. I don’t. That’s the only good thing. Hardly anybody does.”

  Julia stared straight into the screen in front of her and touched the ring on her finger.

  “And your Frenchman?” Julia said, not able to bear self-pity and silence for longer than fifteen seconds. “What’s he do?”

  “Um,” Anna said. “He’s a professor too.”

  “Yikes. Not your boss?”

  “No no.”

  “You’re not pregnant?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Suffer from amnesia spells?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  The woman seemed relieved. “Don’t mean to pry,” she said. “A little quiz I give.”

  “So you’re a teacher too?”

  “Could say that. I wouldn’t. More of a babysitter.”

  “Can I pry?”

  “You Canadians, so polite. Where I come from we call it conversation. Fire away.”

  “You’re American?” It was a surprise to no one.

  “Philly. Had a little meeting in Montreal. Can you say ‘out and about’ for me?”

  “Out and about?”

  “That’s cute. The accent’s not as punchy as some parts of your country though. I always got my French husband to say ‘The thing.’ Tray sexy. ‘Ze sing.’ Try it sometime on your man. Make sure there’s a bedroom nearby.”

  Anna chortled, blushed, looked up at the plastic ceiling. “So let me guess,” she said, her hand on Julia’s arm, “a dating agency for lonely rich women? And your clients chase spies and cowboys?”

  “They’d better. Or we drop them.”

  “That is so so dreamy. The spies I mean. And it all works out in the end?”

  “I hope so. Or I’d be dropped.”

  “It isn’t your dating agency?”

  “It ain’t no dating agency, honey. I’m an editor with Harlequin Romance.”

  Anna let out a bark. She wasn’t sure if Julia knew it was a laugh, so she coughed a bit, then interspersed it with a few more barks, then drank some wine out of the flimsy plastic cup too quickly and began to cough for real.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Your clients. They’re authors.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry too.”

  “No, I meant. A Canadian thing. We’re sorry. We apologize.” Anna reached for her cup of wine again. The stuff parched her mouth.

  “We accept. People have ideas about romance novels, you know. Even women. And especially professors.”

  “Oh,” Anna said, only it came out as more of a squeak than she had intended, “not me. Not me.” She’d written a quickie paper on supermarket romances when she was an undergrad. Couldn’t miss with a feminist target the size of a loading dock. Something about passive women and an insistence on sexual violence. She straightened out her ruffled blouse, pulled back her hair. “Then that pile of paper, that was someone’s potential novel?”

  “No. That was someone’s potential divorce.”

  “Oh. Right. But you know what’s too funny? I research romance too.”

  Julia didn’t look convinced.

  “Well see romance, you know… it doesn’t mean love.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Well no. Romance was a heroic narrative. Medieval. Like the King Arthur stories. Magic and adventures, no need for princesses in towers. Told or sung in the languages that stemmed from the Romans, so they began to be called Romances. The Birth of Romance. You see?”

  “Okay Professor. So you write poems about knights in buffed armour.”

  “I never write poetry. Poetry is self-indulgent and tasteless.

  Like gruel.”

  “Gruel is self-indulgent?”

  “Yes. It wants everything to be gruel.”

  Anna wanted to be witty, but it so rarely worked. “I don’t write. I mean, not that way. And then you can’t confuse it with Romanticism, the intellectual movement. You know: Blake and Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys.”

  “Attorneys at law.”

  “I always tell my students, ‘Listen to Chopin and read Frankenstein under a canvas by Turner. That’s Romanticism.”

  “Or overkill. But you wrote a new book?”

  “It’s a collapse,” Anna began on autopilot, until the soft pop of the cabin bell sounded, enough to let the pills in and fade her voice and it took her a few seconds to remember, “a re-construct of interrupted gender correctives,” until another pilot’s mumbled version of chatter came over the tin speaker, the oral equivalent of a doctor’s written prescription: authoritative, indecipherable, prone to understatement. The pilot didn’t advise the passengers about turbulence, but instead narrated the antics of a heroine on the seatback screens, currently embarrassed at a party. And then the voice became her father, kind but unequivocal about her seatbelt. Told her she was too deep into the details again, and couldn’t see the sky for the clouds. In front of Anna the little plane on her screen loop-de-looped over the North Atlantic Ridge.

  [

  “Wait a minute,” Julia said while she poured them another glass, “you mean you’d make the hero of your romance novel a poet?”

  “Nineteen shentury,” said Anna. “Century. I wish I could read poetry.”

  “Oh that’ll sell. The lovers die of consumption, do they?”

  “I haven’t outlined it that far.”

  “Not far at all. You got a year to spare? You know that mystery writer Dorothy Sayers?”

  “I don’t think she…”

  “It looks simple, she said, but so do some little frocks. Not the kind of thing any fool can run up in half an hour with a machine
. Listen, I’ll give you one word that’ll save you a bunch of trouble: Damaged Alpha Male.”

  “Three words.”

  “Wanted to make sure you’re awake. Ya see? Strong. Irresistible. Poets are not strong. Poets are resistible.”

  “Not what you’d expect from an editor.”

  “Au contraire.” She spoke French with an accent flat as the Great Plains. “Honey: the guy I want to divorce wrote poetry. I know of what I speak. All wonderful till they have to do something.”

  “At the start, he’s alone among the cliffs and heather, calls her name…” Anna saw Christophe peer through his tousled hair into the distance, look for her ship, her plane. Torn apart by this prolonged absence, but keeping it all inside. Whatever century it is. As he walks towards the cliffs something tugs on his long-tailed coat, and he turns to pull it from the rose-bush thorns, but he’s caught, he’s trapped, he needs to be rescued by her but where is she? He kicks at the bush with his riding boots, now scarred and saddened. His perfect exterior comes apart, his ascot, askew, takes wing with the wind, flies towards the white cliffs and he watches it leap off the lip, nothing he can do, where is she? He pulls at his coat and it comes free, but not before a thousand rose petals are loosed in the wind and their scent whirlwinds around him with the memory of…

  “My favorite place for poets,” said Julia, “on a cliff. Often they jump. Or if we’re all lucky there’ll be a good stiff wind.”

  Anna was still in the heather, eyes half-closed. How did one tie an ascot? Maybe he had a scarf, tossed about his neck. That would have to be looked up. And were there roses among heather, and heather among cliffs, and where were these cliffs? And when was then? She’d have an advantage at this, that was sure. Research, and documents, and footnotes. Although editors like Julia couldn’t allow footnotes in historical romances. But they should. She could begin a trend.

  “You’re at a disadvantage, you know. A history prof. You’ll use footnotes like little tortures, then bury your readers alive with boredom.”

  “But historical romance,” Anna said. “Love and history, I’ve got it covered.”

  “You’ve got to keep it on a leash. The strong hero, and your ten plots. Marriage of Convenience.”

  “I’ve never even dated for convenience,” said Anna. “Unless you count the history department chair from Rostov-on-Don. Dmitri. The date at his convenience.”

  He’d wandered the halls, asked after a tie he’d lost. Dmitri Bushnov was so pitiable when she found it (in his office) that she accepted dinner at a Chinese restaurant. He had tried to kiss her but she couldn’t do it, not after he’d ordered litchis in syrup. He already had a permanent aroma of pepper vodka about him. But he was still in her camp at the University.

  “Two: Stranded with a Stranger.”

  Another reason she avoided travel whenever possible. Friends turned out to be strangers.

  “Then, Runaway Bride, Secret Baby, Reunion Romance…”

  There had been so many dates. So little romance. The reunion—she’d tried to hook up with that whitewater raft guide in Maine, the one who’d rescued her. So what if it had been a twelve-year-old kid who’d pulled her out of the rapids, the guide had supervised. She’d tried to rekindle that campfire for a good six years now.

  “…Back From the Dead, Mistaken Identity…”

  Deadbeats, mistakes about identity. As Julia ticked off titles on both hands, Anna looked out the window into the stars where some glimmer of sunrise wished itself on the curved horizon. The editor enumerated her plots, but by now Anna only heard a rosary of romantic Hail Marys. The woman counted off the catastrophes and fiascos of Anna’s life. Please stop, Anna said, although she wasn’t sure if she said it out loud. The plane’s drone blended with Julia’s list.

  “…and of course, Woman in Jeopardy, without whom we’d all be lost, and The Dad Next Door. That’s nine.”

  It seemed like Julia had called up all of Anna’s delinquent dates, because the line-up in front of the airplane bathroom was all men, and included The Dad Next Door with what looked like a Secret Baby in his arms. She blinked, wished them away. One by one they disappeared through the tiny door. They left an empty space. The definition of her love life. Her head rested against the cold of the plastic window, and beads of moisture gathered there, and ran into her eyes.

  “Ten, though: ten is a collective, a grab bag. They’re my favourites. So: Boss-Secretary; Amnesia; Virgin Heroine (as if); Pregnant Heroine (more like it); On the Run; and our winner ladies and gentlewomen…”

  Julia’s voice echoed through Anna’s head with the hum of

  the plane.

  “…The Rancher and the City Girl. That’s it. Love is all about tension, you know. Can’t miss. That, and happily ever after. Not too much to ask?”

  When Julia did turn to Anna, she only saw Anna’s shoulders shaking, and the blanket up to her face, and heard the unmistakable melody of a woman sobbing, for her life.

  There were moments on the six-hour flight when Julia didn’t speak, didn’t try to fill emptiness with chatter, with professional revelations about her romance, with acid-dipped memories of her French ex, and this moment, however brief, was one of those. For almost fifty-six seconds she waited for the tears of Anna to ebb.

  “Oh look,” Julia said, “I think we’re over England.”

  The sky glowed brighter beyond the channel.

  “Jane Austen and all that,” Julia said in an execrable English accent.

  England for Anna only meant Paris was that much closer. If Paris was closer, so was her rendezvous with Christophe, although now she couldn’t recall how they had agreed to meet, or where, or, come to think of it, that mysterious scamp, if he had even said he’d meet her at the airport, although it couldn’t have been otherwise. That was the thing about travel. You can stay up all night atop the ocean, float on medication and cheap red wine, smell of a vineyard, your eyes with their own luggage, and then someone mentions Woman in Jeopardy and you see your empty shell for what it is, no tissues in sight. That’s why one didn’t travel.

  Over the channel in a panic over today, Anna escaped again to yesterday. Above the beaches of Normandy she became her father, searched for emergency landings by moonlight. And it seemed clear to her that the romantic fault line lay with her father. For taking off like that. The idea seemed clear until the gravity of the past pulled the plane down, and the sky lightened. This was a new day. Things would be different in Paris. Everything. If she could find her other shoe. She’d need that shoe. In Paris. She could buy some. Shoes.

  Anna succumbed to fatigue in that so-desired Elysian Field, and the side of her head stuck to the plastic window. The camouflage sleep mask caught in the tangle of her hair to create a loopy topknot. Her eyes were kohled from tears. She immediately dreamed of French cathedral bells. She could not tell if they were for a wedding or funeral.

  The bells tolled and softly popped.

  And through it all, a voice rose, sometimes of her father, or the priest, from this day forward, to have and to hold, “…Paris out the left window,” the pilot said over the speakers. The plane made an abrupt shift toward earth, and Anna’s ears popped open. Morning came to France. Anna saw the plane’s interior pulsate with a virginal glow, as if she and all the other passengers had drawn out expectations from the City of Light, and faith and dreams haloed their heads, hope burst from their breasts, a Medieval manuscript of très riches heures come to life. She squinted out the window into the golden haze below in a search for the twin towers of Notre Dame.

  “Good morning,” Julia said cheerily. “You were out for a good fifteen minutes. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Paris?”

  “The air. Pollution makes it yellow. Glows like Chernobyl.”

  Anna stepped into Charles de Gaulle airport and began to cough. She had persevered until then, had maneuvered down the plane aisle and into
the airport with only one high-heeled shoe. The other had disappeared, another of her father’s magic tricks. Repeated inquiries and a search by the aircrew had done nothing to bring it back. And by the time she was off the plane, the only help Anna had from Julia was a crumpled business card in her palm, which when smoothed out revealed a diamond as its logo. She remembered a “goodbye” somewhere, although it seemed Julia had stepped off the airplane in midflight, and trusted her own wings to take her away.

  At the luggage carousel Anna hauled off the first of her two suitcases, the smaller vintage one, with no gallant offers of help. She would have refused anyway. She had to open the suitcase right there to get a pair of shoes, and would not want strange men to catch sight of any flimsy underwear, or what she believed was an even flimsier research paper. But there were no shoes in that suitcase, they were all in the one that still hadn’t appeared. Anna stood up from her search. The airport swayed and pixilated around the edges. She checked her watch, which for some reason was now faceless. The vin d’honneur for the opening session of the conference was this “afternoon” at the Sorbonne, that much she remembered. She wondered if her fingers would make air quotes around “afternoon” when she told Christophe this story. She wondered if the French used air quotes. Anna steadied herself on a luggage cart. She would have to close her eyes in the hotel room for a while. She would have to. She would.

  She didn’t have to wait that long. As she watched the slow motion arrival of her second suitcase Anna lunged toward it in stuttered phases. The bag proved to be made of lead, and magnetic, so that her arm followed the suitcase, and her body thereafter, until she found herself on a carousel of horses in a medieval fair, like the merry-go-round she wanted to see at the base of the Sacre Cœur, while she fluttered her hand at her loyal subjects on the sides. Her fingers came up to her forehead to sweep away what she believed was stray hair, and then the other passengers watched her one shoe dangle on her heel, until she disappeared through the rubber curtains.

  2. Social Networking in

  the Early Middle Ages

  “This is you,” the man said. He held the book in his hands like