The Bodice Ripper

by Byron Rempel

  a weapon.

  In a room with fogged windows Anna’s pills wore down. She forgot how she got into this room, or why. A French man with suspect motives. He took her pillbox and its discontents. He struggled to open it but could not.

  At her elbow, four copies of Love Gets Medieval: Torture as Processual Language. The back cover called her “a meticulous scholar, with a rebel’s heart.”

  Why hadn’t Christophe come to get her at the airport? Anna had only one question, but the unsmiling man in front of her echoed questions. What is the destination? How long do you stay? What do you carry besides these pills? She heard them as Zen koans. She breathed in, held it, exhaled. The agent didn’t want practical answers. He wanted her to look within. Did she hide contraband? What kind of rebel was she? What is the sound of one heart beating?

  Anna understood it was no time for meditation. Righteous indignation was more appropriate. Romance heroines, for example, would not tolerate this mistreatment. They would not meditate on riddles, but combat the tormentor with feisty quips. Anna had so far left Christophe thirteen texts and three phone messages. None of them were clever.

  If Christophe had been at the airport how different everything would be. He would understand this man’s accent, a strange southern French lilt. He wouldn’t ask the agent over and over what he was trying to say, or demand where he was born. He would have held her arm at the baggage carousel so she wouldn’t have gone for a ride in the first place. He would have stormed in here, a mistral of vengeance. But until he answered her messages Anna preened in that room, checked her makeup on her phone until the agent thought she took pictures and confiscated that too.

  Back home, back at university, the faculty believed she lived a secret and tumultuous life. Now she almost believed it. She would have anecdotes. We professors are like cats! she would say. We answer to no one.

  Her tormentor saw before him a kitten with her eyes still shut. He had seen many things in his brief career, and hearing a drugged professor plead with him about an academic conference was not going to weaken his resolve. When Anna lied that she was supposed to lead a roundtable on the Impasse Between Material and Symbolic Medieval Torture that afternoon he maintained an uninterested visage. Only last week he had dug out a highly personal collection from a suitcase of a man interested in the same area of study.

  He asked Anna, Where were you going truly? You turn and turn. And every time you pass the baggage men they put themselves on their knees in front of you with devotion, and will not touch you, a battered saint in a vision of loops. Something like that. Anna wasn’t sure about her simultaneous translation.

  “I’m in love with a Frenchman,” she tried finally. “We have to meet.”

  Did the agent’s face melt a degree? He looked directly at her, put down the book. Placed a hand on either side of her chair. “What you have done is very serious. We must return you chez vous. To Montreal. Do you have a husband waiting back home?”

  “I just said, I’m in love with a Frenchman.”

  He raised his eyes. “Yes, but there is a husband?”

  They were back in Zen territory again.

  “If I ever get out of here there will be. And if I don’t, it’ll be your fault I end up sad and alone in some pathetic home for wayward singles.” It was the best she could do for witty repartee, and it had no noticeable effect on the agent.

  “We check on the next plane to Montreal this afternoon. You return. We keep the pills.”

  The agent was long and lean, his uniform sharp at the edges. His eyes were committed to her. He smelled of nutmeg. Anna was sure that she smelled like fear. Her clothes were rumpled and her eyes blurry.

  “You have nothing to fear.”

  He hadn’t said that. She made him say it. The fault of the room, with its limited oxygen. The more she saw how serious her confinement was, how unlikely it was that she would see Christophe or even Paris outside of this airport, the more she surrendered

  to an edited scenario. The agent would ask questions, and she would answer. They would communicate. He would ask, Do you trust me?

  Of course not, she would say.

  You have nothing to fear. Unless you hide something.

  I’m not, she would say. I don’t trust you.

  He touched her shoulder and her body shivered. His grip tightened. But you should trust me. I only…

  Through the tips of his fingers she felt his desire. He could do nothing to hide it. She heard his breathing behind her,

  heavier now.

  Wait, she says. I’ll tell you everything.

  He is in front of her now, holding her wrists. Her hands tremble. In one fluid motion he lifts her from the chair and presses her against the wall. The brick is cold on her back, and his breath hot on her neck.

  What are you hiding? he asks. His hand clutches at her blouse, reaches underneath. His other hand glides between her legs, searching. She struggles against him, but she only feels him hard.

  I can’t return, she says. I’ll die if you send me back there. She tries to touch his face but he pulls her hand away. Don’t make me, she says, and her lips part as his eyes narrow on hers.

  Another agent stuck his head through the opened door. “There’s a noon flight to Montreal.”

  Anna was back in the chair, the agent behind a table, his hand on her book. “You are not thirty-nine,” he said. “Not according to your passport.”

  Anna shook her head. More to clear her thoughts than disagree.

  “No one told you lying is the worst thing you can do here?”

  “It’s not lies,” she said. “It’s words. And let me tell you everything. I’m not a professor. Only an assistant. My real work is… I’m a romance novelist. Les romans à l’eau de rose. I use a pen name. I’m on my way to a meeting with my editor. Julie. Julia.”

  The agent’s eyes were forceful, and dark, and maybe they narrowed. She wasn’t sure how eyes did that. “What are your other titles,” he asked.

  “Under the Spell of Provence,” she said. “Woman in Jeopardy. The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl. The End of the Affair. Secret Dad. The Rancher and the City Girl. Random Acts of Complicated Kindness. Lives of Girls and Women.”

  “Wait,” he said. He stepped out of the room. Anna knew she’d gone too far. That she’d just screwed her chances of making Christophe fall in love with her in the most romantic city in the world. She began to pack her books.

  The agent came back in the room, carrying a small leather bag. He set it down in front of her, unzipped it, and pulled out a book. He placed it in front of her. Le sheikh charmeur et la palfrenière ingénue. The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl.

  “My favourite book,” said the agent. He let his icy face allow the crack of a smile. “I have read it three times. Me and my boyfriend read it to each other before bed. You will sign it?”

  Anna grabbed his pen, began signing her real name, then stopped quick enough to scribble the name on the cover with a flourish and a throbbing heart.

  “I’m flattered,” she said, and she was, she would begin to cry soon.

  The agent picked up the book and held it to his chest. “You may go now.” N’importe quoi, he thought. He’d been ready to let her go anyway. Another delusional academic.

  She touched his hand. Her lies tasted of sugar and vanilla and magic, and within minutes she walked free from the airport and ready for Christophe’s arms.

  [

  This was the Right Bank, the wrong bank. The conference was across the river in the Latin Quarter, with Voltaire and Hugo as neighbours, Baudelaire down the street and his bleeding pen. That university. The one established in the Middle Ages and the model for every after.

  Anna paced in her cell. She’d been happy to find a cheap hotel room, but it had three single beds and no room to move. She’d completely missed the vin d’honneur, but Christ
ophe’s presentation was scheduled in the next hour at the conference. All she wanted to do was collapse on the bed. But the sheets and blankets were relics, so she worried between the bed and a desk and a chair, and missed only a cross and string of beads.

  She took a cab and got out in front of the Notre-Dame, would walk the few blocks to the university. Her fingers were cold. When she walked by a steaming stand on the sidewalk it blew warmth and a smell that she would forever associate with Paris. A man made crepes in sweeping motions, folded them in triangles, slipped them in their pyjamas. She ordered one with Nutella. When Anna bit into it the chocolate erupted and flowed onto her fingers. On the Petit Pont she licked them, in full view of the tourists and bridges and history. She never wanted to leave. There was only one element missing, and he was probably already in the small conference room, clearing his throat and peering over his glasses. Searching for her.

  He would be surprised to see her, thrilled by her spontaneity, her impetuous nature. Her kooky way of dressing. But then not—he would say he knew all along she would come, and they would run out onto the boulevards and terraces…well not run onto the boulevards, that would be crazy with this traffic, even for a woman like herself. And not running through the terraces like a couple of stray dogs with stolen slices of jambon, but lounging, delighting in the warming sun. And that crepe on the bridge. Her fingers. Sweet, and burning, and wet.

  It was warm standing on the bridge. The afternoon sun. She hurried to the Sorbonne. To miss his talk would be unforgivable, and then how would she claim her expenses? In her thirty-ninth year, how could she forgive herself that she had never found and exploited love?

  [

  Christophe walked to the Grand amphithéâtre, his chin up but seeing nothing in front of him. The organizers had changed his venue, probably due to his popularity. But with the last-minute move he’d lose some audience.

  He saw nothing, but had a good idea of what happened around him. Peripheral vision was the trick. Students kept to the side. Professors with their heads up—and so many of them studied their own footwear instead of their theories—should expect an imperceptible nod. Evaluation of rank was paramount at conferences, and those with unrecognizable name tags needn’t be bothered with. Social refinement was absent among so many of them, especially the Americans, or the Germans, or really any academician outside of France. Those outside of Paris were also suspect. In fact, if he had to get specific about it, the only person who knew what he was doing, and how to do it, and why, was the esteemed professor separating the masses in the hallway now.

  He did agree with most of the professors however, that reading books and analyzing numbers were much more enjoyable than talking to people. The last time he was in an elevator he’d learned the man’s complete life history, with digressions into Franco-American relations, in six floors. He had flinched when he first heard the way they’d renamed the conference: Social Networking in the Early Middle Ages.

  Beside the door to the amphitheatre, an enterprising medievalist had set up a table advertising the construction of a brand-new thirteenth-century castle. With its promised “living archaeology” and scheduled visiting hours for tourists, Christophe immediately dismissed it, and the nerdy scholar behind the table, as an unwelcome invasion by Disney. He told the man as much, and sent him packing. He would not sully the doors of his event with spectacle.

  [

  Professor Anna Hill pinned a badge to her navy jacket. “Visiting Guest” it read, which was better than having no badge at all. At least it slowed some of the professors enough to read it as they hurried by. But she didn’t get eye contact. This was the extent of her social networking, and this was early middle age.

  Somewhere—she still hadn’t found the room—Christophe was one of the few men who claimed his presentation would focus entirely on women, through his views on the troubadours’ poems of love. The description said his exploration would include, but by no means be limited to, the existence, performance and sustainability of diverse scholarly, intellectual and material assemblages and topographies re the liminalities of gender and love.

  That was clear enough. But whatever he talked about, she knew he wouldn’t be like the rest of these academic troubadours. Like medieval singers, like much of the pop music she’d heard, all those precious words purported to be about glorious Woman and Love. But they were really about the writer, about what a deft weaver of words was the man. And Woman, the great subject, was only the means to the end of showing off their linguistic and academic power. The respected voices here were predominantly masculine. The women’s voices were muffled. But Christophe was different, and that’s what made him an academic superstar.

  That’s why it was surprising to find, after she creaked open the conference room door, that the seats and the podium up front were empty. She was late, but not that late. She checked the door name and number, but that wasn’t the problem either. Anna sat down on a chair. In a few minutes she got up again and asked people walking by if they knew of the lecture, until finally someone took pity on her, a lost and visiting guest.

  By the time she arrived at the right room and saw Christophe behind his pulpit, the whole of the room cheered at some clever twist of words he employed, and he was already past his conclusion and into discussion.

  “The only thing we know for sure,” he said, and Anna felt his voice amplified by the speakers and echoing through her body, “is that there were no Women in those ages.” The room filled with mumbles and small outcries. Anna smirked. She knew these

  methods, seeking out scandal and provocation to be remembered. “No women, at least not as we understand them, today. If we can even say that.” More guffaws and masculine recognition. “Since the only thing we have to interpret them, the only primary source, is silence.”

  Anna recognized this as nothing new, nothing truly scandalous, since whole other conferences and tomes were built around the absence of women in history. The educated men who’d written all the sources had been whisked away from the company of women at an early age in court. They were left nostalgic and fascinated by those rare creatures. And they feared them too, feared the unseen, their subliminal powers.

  “And if there was no such thing as Woman in the Middle Ages, then today there is no such thing as Gender. It is ever shifting through geography, culture, social contracts, through space and imagined spaces.”

  Maybe it wasn’t his most inspired talk, Anna thought. She’d only seen the question and answers too, which weren’t prepared. But she hadn’t come here to be seduced by logic. They had a date, on a bridge. She took her time getting to the front of the room, waited while his devotees and partisans wore him down with praise, or his French peers argued and jockeyed for position. Christophe was coy with her. He glanced up sometimes, scanned the room. She kept her eyes dark and her lips moist. Finally a space opened and she stood in front of him. He plowed a hand through his hair.

  “Well well,” Anna said, “Enter the Moor.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The Moor,” Anna said. “At the costume party.” She watched him think, scan her visitors name tag, then extend his hand as he looked to the door.

  “Glad you enjoyed the lecture,” he said in English, and shook her hand.

  “I was the nun,” Anna said. “Unpacking Performativity in the Bedroom?”

  “Congratulations.”

  The impression wasn’t the one she’d counted on. More groupie than Amazon. He turned and left the room. She didn’t have his phone number or the place he was staying. She had nothing, nothing but the death of romance.

  [

  Anna’s phone rang as she lay on one of her beds. But it was Julia from the plane. She invited Anna to an evening at what she called secret Paris, and Anna didn’t even make a pretense of being busy or having to check an agenda. She couldn’t find another taxi so kept walking. And when she got to the address behind the Palais-
Royal and K-Mart Kafeteria she found a bistro and there was Julia and two of her romance novelists, tipsy already, and eager to sympathize with Anna’s inability to connect with her man.

  “They’re scared,” Julia said. “Sometimes you have to talk down to men. What our resident webgirl calls Compatibility Mode. You can have it turned on or off. Depends on how much you share.”

  The bistro was sweltering and gilded and potted with palms, a cathedral to French soul food: steak tartare, foie gras, escargots, rabbit, pig’s feet, crême brulée. The hideout wasn’t a secret to anybody, not Parisians nor tourists, though the Americans were kept to the noisy section. Anna hadn’t eaten for twenty-three hours and it didn’t look like the place to start.

  “I don’t have a webgirl. I have a TA girl.”

  “Compatible?”

  “Organized. She insisted I wear heels but I lost one. She’s all intentions.”

  “The road to hell is paved with cobblestones.”

  “Her idea of a romantic escape I guess. Like people who buy your little fantasies.”

  “A Harlequin bought every four seconds. Half of all paperbacks sold. Little fantasies.”

  But both romancers said they wrote fantasies and were proud of it. One said it was a fantasy because the heroine and hero didn’t do it until the final pages. The other writer wrote historical fantasy. Saxons, for the most part. “Lots of rape and pillage. They get it out of the way early in the romance.”

  The women wanted to know what she wrote.

  “Not romances,” Anna said. She wiped her forehead with a linen napkin. “But I do write origin stories. Little dissertations.”

  “Publish or Paris,” Julia said. She urged oysters on Anna. Anna shook her head and felt nauseous.

  After one oyster and four glasses of white wine she found herself walking again, this time while Julia held her arm on the sidewalk. Anna kept asking her where Christophe was, and how he got that way, and what he ate in the winter. Then she discreetly stumbled into a three-hundred-year-old alcove and tried to vomit but her stomach was empty and her heart. Julia waited with her hand on Anna’s back and told people to mind their own bees wax when they stared. She told Anna that the bistro was boring anyway, she was just trying to impress her writers by introducing them to an intellectual. Anna said she was sure she left an impression, and they both laughed, though Anna soon began to cough instead. Julia said she loved to see this side of Paris, the part that tourists don’t see. But Anna had to ask that Julia not make her laugh because she couldn’t bear it, so Julia began telling her instead about the playwright she was divorcing. When Julia said their lovemaking had always been more scripted than improvised, Anna started to laugh and cough again. Then Julia asked Anna if she would like to stay in her apartment and Anna said the offer was too kind but she couldn’t, not in this state. And Julia said exactly in this state. All she needed was a sleep and maybe a cry and the miracle of croissants in the morning. And in the end Anna stayed in the second bedroom and dreamed feverish scenarios of walking lost through Paris in the thirteenth century while a man like Christophe but not stalked her, and she had lost her phone and couldn’t call the police.