by Byron Rempel
Anna had only been away from the University a few days and already her head felt liberated from the mother country. In the world of the FalconMoor, she was sure that the motives and groping would all be straightforward.
Part II:
Hot Bacon
And at the heart of it all,
The lure that makes war an addiction for some people –
That hot bacon smell of pure contradiction.
— Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
10. The Risky Journey Bath
“You place the unbaked chapatti over the dog bite,” Sanjay says, bent halfway over the counter. He watches the curtains over his shoulder. “Leave it for fifteen minutes.”
“It’s not so much the dog bite,” Anna says. “I think he only managed to scratch me with his claws. The frostbite on the other hand…”
“Then, peel off the chapatti and offer it to another dog. This is the moment. If he disdains it, you were attacked by a mad dog.”
Sanjay shows more interest in Anna’s wilderness injuries than anyone else. No one has taken responsibility. Not even Anna. Until she gets an apology from someone, anyone, she will pretend they don’t exist.
“How is the short story Sanjay?” Anna cradles her bottle of Sunlight detergent. The only way to get him off that track is to discuss their mutual difficulty with words. She hasn’t told anyone except Julia about her future as a best-selling romance novelist.
Anna cooks for one, but the dishes have an invasive root system. The ground must be cleaned before growth. Everything must be in order. When things are unresolved she sits down to write and fails.
Deeply nested in her computer lies the late article on Illuminating Embodied Qualities of Gender in Cathar Medieval Erotics for the Journal of Medieval Nitpickers, unseen, unmodified, unerotic. Within lie cocoons of research with folded wings. They chew on wit. They feed on irony. They make claims about socially unintelligible gender and the inherent instability of romance in the material-semiotic realm. They unpack performativity in the historic irony of marriage, of heteronormative performance in the Marxist model, of tragic liminalativity and gendercoloniality. They are so weighted they will not fly.
“The short story evolves,” Sanjay says. “You have heard of Flash Fiction? So. I thought of you today. Yes I did. I read the newspaper. Research for my story.”
Anna looks at the front door of her house. There is no line up of people bringing casseroles and wool slippers.
“It was in the Wanted Men and Women. Here it is.” Sanjay pulls a torn piece of newspaper from under the twenty-dollar bills.
“‘I need a specialty man,’” he reads. “‘Awfully intelligent, yet able to enjoy simple pleasures like TV and vegetable chips.’ Those are not so good for you as you think,” Sanjay says. “I continue. ‘He should look like Nikola Tesla and have the grace and manners of Cary Grant, but not know it. He should be strong…’”
There are mumbles from the back room.
“‘…but never use his strength against me. He should protect me and let me be free. He should never leave, and never have been left himself. He should cry and show his vulnerability but have the determination of El Cid.’”
“That girl wants it all,” Anna says. “But I only need this Sunlight.”
“Miss Hill, this is not you who wrote this, with reference to Spanish heroes? Because this specialty man—this man that you write of, Miss Hill: is me.”
When your local depanneur owner knows about your Man Trouble, thinks Anna, when he picks out Wanted men like horoscopes… Sanjay beams, his gapped teeth shine.
“You and I,” Sanjay begins, his hand fathering her shoulder. Anna hears clucks behind a curtain in the back room, spies the flash of a yellow plastic butterfly hair clip. “You and I, we are writers. We understand.”
“Good night Sanjay.”
“These historical men you pursue. These knights in sparkled armour. El Cid the Kid. The bad boy you edit to a good man.”
The bell tinkles as Anna leaves.
“Don’t forget the chapatti,” Sanjay says. He follows her to the door and hands her a bag of them. “Go get your man,” he calls out into the snowflakes. “Your great Northman hero!”
Anna walks up her stairs alone.
And hungry. Too long at the hairdressers with her head in the sink, her toes in the air. The shampooer sculpted and the receptionist hurried a decaf espresso, clients murmured and hair dryers blew siroccos through fountains of youth. Women lay like recently retired caryatids, stone hair loosed and restored by conservationists.
Anna does her best work at the hairdresser. She pays people to fuss over her. Then her brain unlocks, all theory and abstraction and hypothesis. Would Christophe respect her as a brunette? Does her red hair stand for moral degeneration and witchery, or does it give her more of the Virgin Queen vibe, fierce and fit to conquer the world? Should she straighten her hair like that impossible slim girl beside her? Her romance nun did nothing, but remained irresistible to men. Not like these women in stages of disassembly. Makeovers were not for history professors. The stylist gasped and pointed to the woman in the mirror: What hair! Tamed and framed, Anna said. She left a huge tip.
At her door she peeks at the neighbour’s house to make sure he isn’t spying on her. She backs down a few steps to see if he’s in the front window. Checks her door and mail slot for grand apologies, confessions, assurances. Nothing. Her fingers find the icy key. She locks the cold out.
“Anna.”
A man’s voice, top of the stairs. She doesn’t breathe. A strange timbre.
“How must I spend these hours without you.”
She should know this voice.
“All day you are at the baths.”
“The baths? I got my hair done.” Her voice is too high.
“Let me see you, creature of the North.” His gaze envelops her, despite her resistance. She loves the bad boys.
Anna does not panic. Only a few days ago she came home to find the Moor waiting. She washed his feet of the desert. Everything went well until the Mother Superior started to worry about Plague and infection. He disappeared soon after, and Anna cut the Plague out. The story was a romance, for god’s sake. But this is not the Moor. Three things disconcert:
The man’s costume, or lack of it; he chose Anna’s over-loved housecoat to wrap himself in;
The evidence that even though he is short, big-headed and wears a sword, the housecoat fits him better than it does her;
He is Attila the Hun, and he smells of battle.
“I have lit the fire. Come lay your body next to mine. You shiver.”
Her coat falls to the floor. The fireplace has permanent plastic logs. Attila the Hun wipes the drippings of barbecued horseflesh from his beard. The smoke in the apartment isn’t too heavy, and bends the light into puzzles reminiscent of a bazaar. From a far alleyway, a musician’s lament drifts through her windows. Anna collapses on the couch and her plastic shopping bag spills out Sunlight.
“This place is a refugee camp,” she says.
A horde of clothing and footwear invades the chairs and handles and corners of her house. Dishes and leftovers totter on the kitchen counter. He entertained his generals here. But they are gone now. He alone remains, a wild beast with facial scars. A retired rock star in eye shadow. When she wants to put her feet on her coffee table, she sees he has busted it up to roast his lunch in the middle of the living room.
He pulls her off the couch. Although he is more sedentary these days and prefers to rule with his head, not his hand, his grip still overwhelms.
“I cannot leave without you. I would come to steal you away.” He unbuttons her blouse, brushes cut hair from her shoulders. Rough hands tickle. “Why do you pursue education when you have me? All day I sit here, think of nothing but how lucky your students are to study your lips as they form multisyllabic bu
zzwords.” Attila bends to her neck, breathes hot breath of lust on her throat.
“Post-intentional,” Anna murmurs. “Unessentialistic. LGBTIQQIAAP. Heteronormatively Transandrogynous.”
Playing house with Attila isn’t easy. But he knows what he wants. And what he wants, other than Western Europe, is her. He plans ambushes on her vulnerability with maps and diagrams and counselors. He outlines the fortresses he will build for her nestled along the banks of the Rhine. Anna’s toes tingle. He is a man obsessed. In the past she would have labeled that as emotional instability, but in him—he pulls her atop him now with the same ease and familiarity with which he saddles a horse—in him it is strength. And the way he clasps her waist, floating her… some would try to convince her that protectiveness was control and abuse. His voice rumbles in her ear, demands marriage and a son for his Empire. He promises escapes to Constantinople and Budapest, shopping excursions in Rome and Paris. But they come from such different places—she, Montreal’s West Island, he, a boiling river of blood in Dante’s seventh circle
of hell.
Afterwards, sprawled and breathless, Anna wonders if she could dress him among the shops of Paris. Attila in her housecoat, bone in one hand and pitcher of wine in the other. Could she tame him, tease out the tortured boy? Wasn’t he a romantic at heart? Hadn’t he accidentally founded Venice when people fled to the lagoon islands to escape his sword?
“Look what I have discovered.” Attila turns on the radio. “It is a blast from the past.” Squeaky voices from Motown pour from the speakers, claiming love is as easy as one, two, three.
He can move. Anna jumps up from the bed to join him. She shakes her hair and jiggles her hips until they laugh on the rug.
“Hunny,” Anna says, “maybe we should take a bath.”
[
By Hunnic standards it is an extravagance, but Attila is fascinated by Anna’s customs. Now bubbles explode through his chest hair, water steams from pipes on command, and an array of candles softens Anna’s complexion. The heat forces her to open a window and shiver at the cool air on her skin. She holds out a white cake. He bites.
“Wait, wait,” Anna says, “You clean yourself with it.”
Attila takes another bite.
She wants to ask him so many questions: Do you care about me? Am I a fling? Why didn’t you lay waste to Rome? But whenever she tries to reach out, he retreats.
“Then, when we are dry,” Attila says, “you will lie with me again.”
“Maybe you’d like to shave.”
“When we are born,” he says, “our cheeks are burned with a hot iron. We shave but once. And we are bathed by the gods when it rains.”
He reaches for her thigh. Wind blows cold through the open window. His fingers slide to her knee, over and underneath, then down her calf to her foot. Anna exhales slowly so nothing will change.
“I would plunder no more, for this. They can keep the treasures of Rome.”
“Maybe a few trinkets?”
The cathedral bells of Anna’s cell phone launch into a jubilant chorus. The lovers ignore the noise and believe the angels rejoice, though Anna does let out a relieved sigh when they stop. She remakes her vow to always leave it on vibrate. Ten seconds later, as her lips part for his, her doorbell chimes in distinct ecclesiastical tones.
“Oh dear,” she says. More historical suitors lined up at her door. She’d have to tell them.
“I’m already seeing someone,” she’d say.
“Who?”
“The Scourge of God. You’d better go.”
The door chimes ring again. She knows who it is. The neighbour. All the better. She would send Attila to answer. And that damn carpenter would blurt a kafuffle of blather, lean on the door frame and try a sardonic leer. Attila in that open robe nursing a Sambuca. He’d go crazy to hear Anna’s name in another man’s mouth. Words would lead to shoves, then a bloody massacre involving the Sword of Attila and rancid yak butter.
The doorbell stops. Her bathwater is tepid. Attila disappears with the bubbles. She will dine alone tonight, Indian takeout, lick her fingers of butter chicken, a sexy bachelorette on a little Saturday night.
[
Only when the last pink curry sauce is cleaned with a swipe of nan does she think to check her phone. She had silenced it, wished it muzzled forever. Locked away in her turret, she doesn’t want to hear any more about Christophe stealing the hearts of her class, or her mother’s twisted recipes for toe soup, or the neighbour’s promises of renewal.
When she listens to the message it’s no surprise, more Dotty and her inexplicable family policies. “Pearl needs new underwear, and you can get yourself some at the same time. Maybe replace that ratty housecoat of yours.”
And a text. Dotty doesn’t text.
“I was at your door. You were busy.”
Anna grumbles about her neighbour and his open-door policy until she sees it isn’t from him.
“Oh shit.”
She looks at the clock. It’s too late to call Christophe. Is it too late to call him?
She calls him. Her forehead is wet. Must be the curry spices. Her heart, too much food, acid reflux. No one answers.
“It is late,” he says finally.
His voice is deeper at night. I’ve waited so long, Anna wants to say. “Sorry,” she says. Her voice sounds like a child. She says it again, like a professor. “You saw my door.”
“Ah,” he says. “That door.”
“I had it repaired. It works now.”
“It is full of locks.”
“You wouldn’t believe the kooks in the neighbourhood.”
“The kooks.”
“I was occupied,” she says. Her stomach makes her grimace. “Was it important?”
“Things can wait. I am glad to hear you are okay.”
“I didn’t say I was okay.”
“I heard of the…toes.” He makes it sound sexy.
“What happened to you?”
“At the skiing? Dmitri said you had gone home. That you abandoned the ski trip, it was too much for you. He called, but you didn’t answer. The guide, the Thorbert, he was competitive.”
“I’m sorry,” Anna says, and hates that she says it. She should know better than to wait for an apology from the French. Algeria still waited.
“I took your class.”
Anna bends over on her couch. She should probably hang up. “Uh-huh.” Something like a burp escapes her mouth. This is not the cute meet she imagined.
“The students asked about you.”
“Sorry,” she says. “But Dmitri, I talked to him from the hospital.”
“Oh about Dmitri. He offered his sympathies. About your research grant getting turned down.”
Well at least somebody finally apologized, or something like it.
“My what? My Spain?”
She watches her tenure track fade before her eyes, like the trails of a skier in a snowstorm.
11. The Limit for Wounded Alpha Males
The sky threw everything it had at the city, and still people refused to believe the gods of winter were malevolent and fickle. Rain, sleet, freezing rain, pellets, hail, snow. Perhaps there were a thousand words for what fell from the sky. Anna left her stone tower in the early morning, her toes wrapped and her boots shuffling across the ice.
But inside Chez Eaton and the underwear department things were just as slippery and depressing. On one side she picked through horribly functional underwear for her aunt, on the other, the being and nothingness of seductive lingerie she’d probably never need. One side already past; the other her inevitable future. She soon left with nothing but an unflattering and comfortable housecoat.
Failing at love she’d got used to. But she’d never failed in her studies. Grants and exams and papers fell as blessings, as tender first snowflakes of fall,
as the misty rain of summer nights. She opened her laptop and stared at another paper, Slut-Shaming in Post-Intentional Phenomenology. If she wanted to preserve any kind of professionalism, The Journal of Medieval Whosits should see this next week. That looked doubtful. She wiped the screen of fingerprints. Behind the file she’d buried other work files, the rejected grant application, next week’s class notes. She kept wiping the screen, rubbing it like Aladdin’s lamp. Three wishes would be sweet: a finished article, tenure without trial, Christophe come to take her away from all this. She rubbed harder. No knock at the door. Papers and tenure unchanged. No lightning-bolt moment. No one picking out underwear for her, no assisted living.
With one fluid click, she made all her work disappear. What was left on the shiny screen was a title: The Falcon of the Moor. Underneath, its unflappable nun Angeles. The nun currently dabbed at the gruesome wounds of the Berber Moor with Egyptian cotton, and only now discovered him to be one-armed, which Anna considered the limit for wounded alpha males.
He cried out when I gingerly cleansed his chest wound, cursing the one that did this in the tongue we nuns but dimly understood. He sat up and swept my balms and lotions off the table with his one hand, then took hold of my shoulder to push me out the door. But he never pushed. The one-armed Moor could not let go. For all of his privileged life he had kept the common mortal at bay; none ventured near him without elaborate ritual or drawn sword. Now this Christian — this infidel woman! — deigned to reach inside his body, to venture with crude Gothic methods to pull at the vile sickness that tore at his chest.
Anna rocked from side to side, guided by a distant beat from Al-Andalus. When she wrote academic work she rocked back and forth, as if she could urge herself forward. But who wouldn’t sway for a one-armed falconer? He had a sizable stump. The falcon loved to perch there. She scrolled down. The Moor made a speedy recovery, all the better to abduct the nun and make a run for it across his known world, Medieval Spain and the Almoravid dynasty. They were in that vague no man’s land between Toledo and the Kingdom of Castile.