by Byron Rempel
“I see.”
“Between two boys.”
“You don’t mean a tussle, surely.”
“This one. Boys were led to the fisticuffs over ideology.”
For years Anna had taught the thrills and spills of History with the full intention of provoking a reaction from her students. Never once had a brawl broken out over her methodologies.
“No one was hurt?”
“Security was there. Complaints about noise already made. Boys peacocked.”
“Thank god for peacocks. So that was it?”
“Of course, this tassel only drew more people.”
“Ah.”
“Audrey took the opportunity to instruct the entire floor, which, I refer to a student’s notes I have, first veered toward freedom of speech. As these things do.” Dmitri Bushnov adjusted his tie.
“Youth,” Anna said.
“And then a sharp left turn towards the dilemma of abysmal Teachers’ Assistants’ salaries.”
“Neither the place nor time. But then everyone went home?”
“Then without much further prompt, she began to organize.”
Anna winced. “Not that nature deficit disorder she goes on about?”
“She was ready to march them up Mount Royal, say our sources. Only there was snow. The slush. Winter happened since you left. Somehow—the record here is sketchy—lack of interest in outdoor history lessons led her to attempt a walk-out protest for the entire history department.”
“She doesn’t look it, but she’s a passionate thing.”
“She does look it. In my day, they would have gulaged her.”
Or made a statue of her, Anna thought. In the day. She didn’t find it difficult to imagine a marble Audrey eager to point out the future in a public square.
“I don’t need to go on, yes?”
“Yes,” Anna said. Clearly, nobody saw Anna with tenure in her future. At least she had that research grant coming up. Maybe she’d be able to escape to a dark library in Spain.
“As it is, she has been temporarily suspended. Only because there is an official complaint. Numbers of sexual harassment charges are bandied about our halls.” He quoted: “The effect of which impairs that person’s work or educational performance where it is known—or ought to be known—that the conduct is unwelcome.”
“I need her,” Anna blurted.
Dmitri nodded. “Protocol is necessary. They like the protocol. Exoneration of the respondent. Form A-09, Vexatious Behaviour. All unpleasant.” He smiled for the first time.
“What was the complaint?”
“I cannot say with assurance, only to say it was a boy. We have to investigate the romantic attachment accusations.”
“As these things do,” Anna said.
[
Anna stood up from her computer and forgot why she had come to the kitchen.
She took off her sweater. Botticelli nymphs danced on her refrigerator, a postcard from Audrey. Who still sent postcards? Most of her international correspondence came from her assistant. In the Uffizi basement, this last visit. A restorer boyfriend. Grey around the edges and only spoke Italian but otherwise functional, Audrey informed her, and Anna turned her ears aside. But next to Audrey’s postcard now was one she’d brought back herself, from Paris. A turn-of-the-century postcard of the new Eiffel Tower, with a boxy biplane in flight over it. Not as garish as Audrey’s.
Anna opened the refrigerator door. She looked inside blankly, closed it, opened it again. The dishes were done.
“Tea,” she said. She took out the milk and left the door open for a good thirty seconds before a cool draft reminded her.
At her desk, the wisps of steam from her teapot only brought back des cafés terrasses, of cobbled streets in morning fog, of the misty things that might have been. But she got to work. She studied a list of all the body parts mentioned in Tristan und Isolde, and how they were mentioned without gender, and how collar bones and throats got particular attention, being some of the few erogenous zones ever spotted at medieval parties. Then she realized her computer screen was steamed from the tea.
Outside, the early snows of October fell wet and thick.
Life beguiled more than any words she could fit on the screen. Pigeons filled the window. Behind them, a young sunset brushed Mount Royal, coloured the trees now dipped in cloud dust. At six o’clock. Like that sunset she saw from the Pont des Arts, across from the Louvre. And it was still too hot at her desk. The air was old in this stuffy room. She got up to try the ancient window again, but needed something to prop it up. She picked up the closest book—no, that one she might need. She picked up another and began to look through it, checked it didn’t have any notes of remarkable insight or expository clarity wedged among its otherwise grey pages. Then she read it, a small section on courtly love as an eroticization of nobility, because there was something there that could tweak her paper. The light from the snow reflected on the book, with the rare and perfect intrusion every few minutes of sun blinks through the imperfect blown-glass window. All its distortions conspired to create a dance of ultraviolet on the page, to make this author’s ponderous text brighten, literally, and come alive, and this was the thing for her paper, she had it now, there.
A dull crack sounded through the wall. Anna looked around, but she wasn’t too surprised. The house shifted and cracked in arctic lows, protested as much as Anna.
She sat back down in front of the screen and studied her words but thought of Paris. And she forgot all the pages she had read in that illuminated book, and instead she wrote,
He saw me from across the room. His glance told me to stay where I was and not move. I couldn’t anyway. He waved a necklace. I was unable to get out of the bed, and when I tried I limped so badly I fell to the tiles.
“I am the Falconer,” he told me. His horse stayed where it was without a command.
In a disused Spanish monastery, filled with Andalusian horses, hares, wild boars digging up trees and truffles, swallows in the courtyards, and mourning doves, rain fell on the empty fountain tiles.
Anna found herself a little breathless. Words came too easy, like theft from the blind. And they came with matched baggage, a shady guilt. Historical romance appeared to need little more than a few upswept capes, a horse and some vague past. Julia on the plane, she’d quoted Flaubert, of all people—his desire to escape “inside a subject of splendour.” Well. If romance editors could fly around and quote Flaubert, Professor Anna Hill could go around and plot sexual tension. She was a little concerned at how a horse got into a monastery bedroom, more so than how the girl had got there. After a little reflection she thought it best to leave them both there for now. But where had the heroine got that terrible limp?
Anna tapped a pen on her forehead until she had something of a tattoo in spilled ink. A limp would need a cane. Did heroines use canes?
Her fingers lay on the keyboard. A letter repeated itself thirteen times before she noticed. jjjjjjjjjjjjj. Distant taps. Like some students in her history class who typed out their lives online. The taps regular like a cane, but a cane that navigated a cobblestone street. In Spain.
A woman did not go unnoticed in Las Naranjas. A young woman with egotistical red hair was an apparition. And a young woman with a cane, tap-tapping her way through the cobblestones—my appearance would become legendary. And entirely unforgettable for him, Florio.
Where had that come from? Florio? Was that even a name?
I did not walk in beauty like the night—my cane was a spotlight. The appearance of Scottish hair in a Spanish monastery—disused or not—and my tap-tap-tapping of it, mocking the Andalusian dances, lit my entry and burnt it on the minds of both caliphs and slaves forever.
There have been various canes carved and stolen for me. They have sat in a corner of my rock-hewn bedroom, beside the grand fireplace. I will onl
y use one, even though I admire the handiwork of my courters—the twists of the branches, the nods to antiquity of Grandfather’s cane. Beasts and flora burst from the tops. A museum of Spain takes root in that corner.
Anna looked behind her. She had to print this out and study it later. Nobody watched her write this stuff. She could do this all afternoon and nobody had to know. The printer oozed out the pages, and she quickly scooped them together. Aside from the soup of past, present and future tenses, it read all right. Compared to other romances. None of which she had read. Except for the one. Saw it at the Montreal airport bookstore when she finally escaped Paris. Bought it. For research. She breezed through it, then inserted it in a pile of academic discourses. Now she found it again.
She stood up in front of the window and pulled out the thick romance. Another crack from the roof made her jump. Maybe the hot room was too much of a contrast for the frozen roof. She wrenched open the window one more time and wedged the book underneath it.
Another crack exploded next to her ear. Anna jumped away from the wall. The pigeons flew away too. On the thick single pane a circle of snow clung to a corner, and patiently began its descent. She inched toward the window. Maybe the new roof snow melted in the sporadic sun. She looked up outside, but saw nothing. And one more time she wrenched the old window further up, picked up the book, enough to worry her head out and hold the window with her shoulder. Sometimes these roofs collapsed.
The next snowball hit above her ear.
She may have screamed, she couldn’t say, but the shock made her forget the window, and it squeezed down on her shoulder. She was pinned with her head and shoulders and one arm out the window in pigeon poop three stories above the earth, ready for her roof to cave in, her article unedited, no make-up, hair unwashed (after she discovered she’d used conditioner as shampoo in Paris the whole time), and to her surprise, a ponderous romance novel still in hand.
“Hey!”
Now people yelled at her.
“Professor Anna Hill?”
It was the neighbour. With his disastrous timing and worse raccoon coat. “Go away,” Anna whispered, and waved the book. A few students stopped and gaped at where Zap stared. The young mouths hung open as if the words they knew were too laden with knowledge. But slight clouds of breath floated from their lips and swirled to Anna’s window. Snow began to sneak down her cheekbones. What lunatic had thrown a snowball at her?
“Jackson Zaporzan,” he said. His voice boomed up three floors. “More commonly Zap. We broke into your house together.”
“Oh brother,” she said.
“Your Gothic neighbour. Have they locked you in the attic?”
Huge flakes landed on her neck, bit her with a thousand frozen teeth.
“I need some air. I have to go in now. Goodbye.”
Zap grinned through his beard. “I need to talk to you about the house.” He looked up at her, at her turret. Her hair was a red blossom on an ivy wall. A squirrel’s tail hanging from a tree.
“What do you see,” Anna said.
“Your tower.”
“Why my tower?”
“It’s fallen apart. Your cornices are critical, your slate tiles have slipped, and one of these days they’ll knock out a student. You’ll want to avoid those kinds of lawsuits.” Zap flipped a coin in his hand.
“Slate?” Anna said. She regretted it. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t tell me. All right? My head is frozen. I refuse to get hypothermia in my own house. I’ll wriggle back inside now. In the future you could use a telephone like the majority of Western civilization. Goodbye.”
Anna went nowhere.
“Would you prefer,” Zap shouted, in the middle of the intersection beside the house, “that I call the fire department, or if your door is open should I ascend into your turret?”
Anna didn’t answer. No one had ever asked her that before. She gave a push towards the window, and tried to slip sideways. But she didn’t get back into the house, and only managed to give herself deeper scratches on her caught arm.
Zap watched as her free arm flapped the book in the air.
“Maybe you should let that book drop. Your arm’s gonna fall off. You might need it to push up the window.”
Lovely. The new neighbour was a born stage manager. A controller, a director: a man.
Anna pushed up with her back on the window. Nothing. Except a pain burned up her spine. She expressed it out loud.
“What?” Zap asked.
“I’m…” Now the book weighed forty pounds. Soon she would cry. With a crowd below. Her tears dangerous icicles.
“Drop the book.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll catch ya.”
“I need it. I found a reference I can use.” The last said for the benefit of the student crowd gathered underneath her turret. A girl pointed her cell phone at her, took a picture. Had he said catch you?
“What page?”
Anna was sure her eyelashes were stuck together. And her neck itched. Where the snow melted.
“What page is the reference? I’ll mark it after you drop it.”
She lifted the book to scratch her neck. Why she had chosen such an immense romance she couldn’t imagine. She still confused weighty with serious. Her neck felt better with the book on it. But now the arm twisted behind her head was tired.
“Is that yoga?”
She had to stretch her arm now before it cramped. She let the book rest on her shoulder, held it there with her head and let her arm stretch. The book slipped. Her hand shot back to hold it, caught it by the inside pages. Her fingers wet and cold. If she couldn’t move, neither could the book. She flipped it, caught it by the covers. Smiled. And with a good twist that aggravated her back and arm and neck, she lay the book on the snowy windowsill.
“You can all go home now,” Anna said. “The show is over.”
On top of the mountain, the sun blipped and disappeared. A gentle wind blew a swirl of snow onto Anna’s face. The pigeons on the next window leapt into the air a made a little snowstorm of their own. One landed on her windowsill.
Anna screamed.
“That’s my girl,” Zap said. He called out to the bird.
Perfect. Frozen in her own home, her eyes pecked out by a pigeon. Ghastly photographs posted by some student.
“Shoo. Shoo.”
The bird shuffled away, jumped on top of the book. The romance jiggled but didn’t slip. But now the pigeon wanted to come inside the house. Anna shouted at the thing, waved her free arm, hit the book. The pigeon flew off, but now the book waltzed on the snow, made two rotations before it teetered on the edge, then began to fall.
With her last frustrated bit of strength, Anna made a grab for it, caught one page. “Ha,” she said.
“Lot of work for one book,” Zap commented. The students around him murmured about the relative merits of literature.
It was a big book. The page began to tear.
“No!”
She watched it tear. She watched her reputation tear all the way down the side of the page. And then it was free. The book flapped its pages like a baby bird kicked from the nest. Anna felt her stomach lighten. The receipt from the bookstore escaped, a loose feather. Six excited pigeons took off from another windowsill. And then, with a thud, the book landed in a pile of slush beside the crowd. A car splash added to its misery. A student fished it out and wiped the glossy cover on his parka sleeve.
“The Dragon’s Breast ?” he said.
“Page one hundred and sixty-nine,” Anna called out while she waved her strip of torn paper. “It’s a deconstruction of the parameters of romance.” It didn’t sound as scholarly as she had hoped. She swore to abandon her Falconer forevermore.
5. Special Operations
Her mother at her suburban doorstep: pulled up the collar of her cardigan, tucked a
bottle of furniture polish under her arm.
“Squirrely,” Dotty said. “Nutty as a fruitcake.”
She’d told Anna to rush over. To meet an Auntie Pearl she’d never seen, who’d moved back to town.
“Oh she can be pleasant to have tea with, if you can ever figure out what she says,” Dotty said.
But the aunt was gone already, Anna was too late.
“She romances her life. I never heard her tell a straight story. And that was before her wires started to short-circuit and they put her in this Assisted Life Centre.”
Anna was sure she had room in her agenda for those higher altitudes peculiar to Alzheimer’s patients or the blissfully senile. She’d looked for a volunteer cause since last year, but still hadn’t found the right one. “I could go say hi,” she said.
“You’ll find scrambled eggs, over easy. But,” Dotty said, and her voice dipped a few notes. “She is our burden. Every family, they have one member with a tenuous link to reality. L’artiste de la famille, like your French friends say. She’s ours.”
“My French friends?”
“Don’t get her on the Mosquitoes,” Dotty said. “She claims she flew with the Fairy Commandos.”
“I’ll put some coffee on.”
“The worst rumours are the ones we spread about ourselves,” Dotty said. She didn’t elaborate, but waited for her daughter to offer any news of herself.
They sat in the nook for an hour. They always took their coffee breaks there. Dotty started after Babyboy Quince was old enough to sleep through them. Back then she sat there alone and gazed out the window, watched Anna dig up her garden, the flowers intact. She always tried to unearth something. Dotty let her. The garden wasn’t Dotty’s obsession. She hated the dirt. Claimed she’d always been an eco-gardener. Believed the earth was better left to its own devices, to decompose what lay beneath.
“I’m sorry you missed her. She had to rush off. The busiest woman I know.” Dotty pointed to her couch. A plastic leg reclined on the cushions.
“She looks like you said.”
“Don’t be a goose. She forgot it, poor dear. Loses it around the edges.”