by Byron Rempel
The wind blows through her jacket and sweater, pierces her skin and muscles, flows through her bones and out the other side. On the sidewalk in front of the Arts Building it is too frigid to think, but for Dmitri the wind is a spring breeze.
She breathes deep and lines her throat with ice. She has eaten only rice crackers today, she slept only a few hours last night. All she wants is to get out of this cold, out of her problems, past her performance review. Dmitri appears to want to offer help, but he stands in front of her, his bulk blocking some of the wind. She has heard his stories, as a Chair, of academic breakdown. It happens to women, he said, to men, even to Russians.
Anna stares at the Arts Building, a cupola atop it like a turret. The entrance columns want to speak of knowledge and security, but all Anna hears in the winter is their groans under a slippery weight.
Dmitri sneezes and unleashes a cloud of black pepper, and Anna flees for the protection of the grey walls.
[
Audrey shows up on time for her office hours. She plunges into students’ problems and surfaces with what she believes are handfuls of treasure, her glasses askew and grin contagious. Audrey knows style and boys and how to play Renaissance madrigals on a sackbut. But she says nothing when Professor Hill arrives with a yellow bruise shining through her make-up. She stares at it instead.
“You should see the other guy,” her professor jokes.
“Are we all right?” Audrey says.
“Our goblins are breaking down. Our performance is under scrutiny. The ice age is upon us. Otherwise, yes, we’re all right. You?”
Audrey says she is sorry. And that Christophe—sorry again, she means Professor Auguste de Latour—has left a message for her, something about molding the past of the university to shape its future, la Grande McGill. Audrey looks up from her computer when the professor doesn’t respond.
“Did you talk to him?” Anna says.
“He wants to see you outside the university.”
Anna smiles. Audrey isn’t convinced she’s glad. Audrey messes her hair with one hand. She attracts men even as she does everything she can to make herself fade into the scenery: her geek glasses, her formless dresses, her shocking forgetfulness with makeup.
“Such a charmer,” Anna says. She touches her bruise.
[
Jackson Zaporzan in her turret says, what’s it like to always work in the past? Is it like time travel?
“You tell me. You’re the one conserving old buildings.”
“Huh. But I’m improving on the past.”
“Me too.”
Zap spreads plaster over drywall joints. He brags that he saved the original window. A little structural integrity.
“What did you want to be when you grew up?” he asks.
“You mean like a princess or a vet?”
“Is that what you wanted?”
“We all did. Didn’t we?”
“Maybe a romance novelist?”
“Cowgirl. Nurse. Architect,” Anna says quickly.
“Not a history professor.”
“God no.” She hasn’t thought of her architect phase for years.
Anna once believed architecture had answers. Blueprints and expected outcomes. But her father said architects didn’t have any more order or fewer surprises than the rest of us. If she wanted that, she could be a schoolteacher and reap a good pension at the end of it all.
If the boredom didn’t kill her first, Dotty said.
Teaching is safe and solid and thrilling. He should know. You don’t have to teach flying, mind you. You’ll get summers off.
Dotty settled into her chair with a paperback. The best teacher, she said, is the one who won’t tell you anything.
Don’t listen to your mother, Edward said. The hippies got to her.
Anna flew to higher education. She thought herself a rebel when she targeted history. She would find context amid chaos.
That was the answer to her problems. In the past.
But now, in the glorious present, there’s no job security. There’s no guarantee that the thing they hired you for—your mind—would always be around. Does anyone even believe in history anymore?
18. Pleasures of the Flesh
On a day that looked like spring Anna opened the window to air the turret of wood and plaster and man. Halfway up it balked. The walls askew, or the frame too new, or the carpenter had hammered something backwards. Despite the south wind, the afternoon returned to winter.
All day the window refused. The turret frosted. Anna slowed down the damage with a garbage bag and towels. When she needed Zap, when he would be useful, he vanished. She thought: I am not surprised. She thought: disappointed. She rubbed her temple, moved her jaw, curled her toes. Every day the carpenter had filled the turret, one constant in a slippery equation. Not today. Feed Me cleaned his paws.
His truck wasn’t out front. Unopened cans of paint in the turret, and paintbrushes wrapped in plastic. She looked at the texts he’d sent and started to write but erased her words. Didn’t want him to think that... Didn’t want to encourage him. Then she’d never get rid of him.
All she wanted was this room of her own to be complete. And then everything would be complete.
The only reason she could imagine him missing a day was someone in the hospital. Zap himself in the hospital, bandages and tubes and small beeps. Nurses wipe his eyes. In a coma. Hasn’t carried ID, typical. Or worse, false ID. They give him something he’s allergic to. Who would know? Or someone he’s conned in the past exacts revenge. His jaw breaks underneath a baseball bat, unable to speak who he is. Yellow around the eyes, swollen cheeks, unrecognizable even to himself.
Anna was discomforted. She liked the word, the sound, the English countryside it evoked. She hated the feeling. Open
to the winter like that. Walk around your own house in
blanket and wool socks morning and night. She took epic
baths. Conquered a box of Kleenex. Her breath was short and her legs weak. Dmitri said stay home. Three times a day her toes refroze. She would die alone and unremembered in this house. Like her Aunt Pearl, cobwebbed, mumbling inanities about love and loss.
Anna pretended she’d lost track of days. If this was forward or that was backward. And forget History, with a sock puppet head and popsicle toes. And the breath—she could see it—the breath came stunted, her lungs shrunk, her throat bitter. Okay, she wasn’t asthmatic. But a hell of a cold.
The socks and television didn’t help. No one brought her soup. She made her own, one hand on the counter, holding her phone. Bleeps and chimes like hospital monitors, but not the right people. Until the last time it rang she almost threw it in the pot with all the other nutrients, but saw the screen vibrate with faith, hope, charity, and answered with a voice choked and underused.
Christophe didn’t recognize her voice. He wouldn’t, she agreed. Crises and viruses did that.
You can’t do everything by yourself, Christophe said.
Always have, she said.
We will stop this. I will come now. I have a proposition.
Now, Anna said, inside herself. You must tell him. He is too rough. He takes your body like your heart. When she needs a doctor’s hands, a medic, a shaman. Both her hands gripped the counter. He should leave her. Alone. He should never.
“I made too much soup.”
He would be right there.
“Can you bring fresh basil?”
[
Anna chose a big bowl the colour of cream. The fine vegetables were chopped to match the beans so that when the spoon came to mouth it would contain the herbed Tuscan sunshine of the field (no, she’d never been there). She chose the ladle with the organic curve on the handle. Potatoes crumbled on the tongue, carrots with the slightest crunch, the way each pea surrendered with a pop, the smoothness of the little pasta
tubes filled with the juice of tomatoes, and a gentle but insistent background of bacon suffused with the smoke of farmers burning their fields in autumn (no, nor Provence in the fall). And when his bowl was filled almost to the top, she cradled the mix of parmesan and garlic and sprinkled that rawness of the Italian sun over the bounty of the land, and carried the bowl with two burning hands to set in front of Christophe.
He picked up his spoon and slurped. Then made faces as it burned his hard palate.
“You’re not eating?”
“Not so hungry. It should really have basil.”
“You could have asked me to bring some.”
She said she had, but that was all right.
He said she never did, and Anna thought about it and perhaps she’d only thought of asking him, she was feeling lightheaded and not one hundred percent, but she didn’t want to complain.
“You look pale,” he said. “Maybe you could skip a meal or two.”
Anna laughed and made a mental note to go heavier on the foundation and ease up on the starches.
“Did you see Audrey?” she asked. “She told me you had a message for me. The proposition?”
“How would I know where Audrey is?”
He filled his mouth with wine and pink steam bellowed out. He shook his head but could not speak, not yet.
“I wondered. I thought.”
“You should be able to keep track of your assistant, at least.”
“Oh Audrey, she’s a loose cannon.”
“You need help, it’s obvious to everyone. That is why I’m here. I have the offer of security. To help you keep your tenure track.”
He kept slurping the minestrone, and with each spoon he made more noises of protest at its heat. Anna made herself a cupful of the soup, sucked on pasta tubes.
“I will tell you the secret. I came here to transform McGill.”
“And you thought you’d begin with my class?”
“The soup is good. Maybe you should have been a chef…”
“Thank you.”
“…instead of a professor. The Dean hired me for this.”
“For me?”
“For la Grande McGill. It is my concept. It is the university, transformed, inclusive, a new global future for all.”
Anna had heard of le Grand Paris, all the university had. The former French president’s plan to include the surroundings of the city through iconic projects. He’d assembled a huge committee made of architects, geographers, philosophers (this was France), historians. Christophe’s invitation as consultant to that committee had won him this invitation to Montreal, an academic superstar. And now the Dean, and the Chancellor of course, were ready to reveal their plans to bring the outside world into the new Grande McGill, a university for the 21st century, guided by the knowing hand of Christophe.
“You’re an adequate professor,” he said, “and you would be better if you weren’t so concerned only about your students. You will join me on my advisory committee.”
“I don’t think I could find time.”
“If you don’t, you may not be given more time to teach either.”
Anna asked if he’d spoke to the Dean about her, but he only said that it would be better if she minded what she wore more often, something along classic lines, black suits for instance. The clothes were also more forgiving. Perhaps she would be better suited to the administration side? This committee will transform McGill, he said, it will change Montreal, the province, the country. It would be better to dress for posterity.
She followed the trail of soup around his bowl, up his shirt front, to the corners of his mouth. A leaf of parsley hid in his moustache. She reached her hand to his mouth.
He jerked his face away from her hand as if she’d slapped him. He looked around as if to see that others hadn’t seen. “Don’t ever do that,” he said. But he held up his bowl when the minestrone was gone.
“Dis donc,” he said, “when you would join, you could help me even more. Make it convenient for me to stay in the country.”
“The basil,” Anna said. “It really missed basil.”
[
Christophe curled his fingers and tugged, but nothing gave, nothing fell. He put them in front of his face. The stuck window was a trick. A test. He grimaced. Focused on the ceiling while he tried again. The window would not budge for him either. He turned.
“I cannot stay the night.”
“No.”
But he would not fail this test.
He moaned against the window. He wouldn’t leave the window like that. No man could. Even a professor of medieval studies. Because what if the missing carpenter turned up. In time to see Christophe at the window, his brow freckled with sweat and his lips awash with curses, incantations and grunts. The window began to squeak and fight its nature. A centimetre. Another. Until with a great protest it loosed from the frame, screamed mercy and pity, and Christophe let it plummet with the finality of a guillotine.
His hands shook. One trembled across his forehead, and he intoned a litany of Gallic obscenities. Anna stepped back to the doorway.
“Merci,” she whispered.
Christophe whirled around, a sneer sliced across his face. He looked down at his hands for a second, then he kicked his leg through the air and the heel of his black lace-ups shattered
the glass.
Anna froze.
He bent over, filled his lungs like a marathoner. Nobody moved. Anna’s eyes watered. She blamed her sinuses, the north wind. Christophe finally straightened and let out a cold breath. The frost held her to the floor by her toes, even though her heart beat faster and her body was warm inside, even when he took a step towards her and gripped her shoulder.
She kissed him, and he froze. Then his fingers found her hair and before he could think he pulled back her head again, and spun her around against the broken window. “The window was already cracked,” he said. He covered her mouth, and let the cold wind blow across them. His other hand slid underneath her blouse, then into her pants. Anna’s stuffed nose struggled to breathe. They stood among the broken glass, the edges along the frame scratching Anna’s arms, drawing blood from Christophe’s hand.
“You like it,” he whispered close to her ear. “I can feel you wet inside. You’re a bad girl.”
She bit his hand, and he drew it back quickly, cut it further on the glass. “Putain.” He looked at his hand for a second, then drew it across the front of Anna’s neck. He turned her around to face him, and licked his own tinny blood. They were on the floor, and he made love to her that she would never forget.
“To hell with your body,” he said. “I want your soul.”
[
But he didn’t say that. Anna recognized the melodramatic language. Those were the words of the FalconMoor.
He lay lit by moonlight in the sand, his belly full of rabbit. His eyes finally closed, at least one need sated. So deeply did he sleep that it was nothing for me to pull his thin curved scimitar from its leather sheath. I sawed through the rope around my ankle in two thrusts. I was free. I gripped the leather hilt with both hands and felt its weight. And now, as I held it above my head with two hands as if in prayer, the Damascus steel gleamed in the moonlight. I intoned an ancient prayer, and just as the Moor’s eyes opened when the reflected light hit his face, I swung the blade at his throat and sliced it open. When it hit bone I let go. It stayed in his neck, vibrating. Blood flooded the dry desert floor. Then I was on his horse, and rode into the great nothingness.
Oops. That wouldn’t work.
I sawed through the rope around my ankle in two thrusts. I was free. With an infinite quiet I slipped the saddle on the Andalusian Arabian horse. The leather creaked and the horse protested, and I had trouble putting the bit in its mouth. I gathered my skirts and climbed astride the beast like a man. Then I was off, still holding the scim
itar with one hand and clinging on for life with the other. We galloped into the night and collapsed in the morning by a deserted shepherd’s shack on a hill.
I dreamed of being ravaged, and it woke me up. It made me angry because the Moor hadn’t mishandled me once. Of course I saw how he looked at me. His eyes between the fabric of his turban were dark and filled with passion. He may only have stopped himself because of his arm. It took two arms to hold a woman like me. In the morning I woke up, my habit disheveled and my hair spilled on the rocks, loosed from prisons. But it was only my own restless sleep that had done it.
Although I was tired and exhausted, I struggled back on the horse. “You’ll take me home,” I said. Wherever that was. I was a nun covered in grime and dust and smelled like a horse, and my habit was wet with the beast’s sweat. My legs and bottom swelled with sores.
“First of all,” Julia said from the other side of the pond, “you can’t have no dolly with crotch rot.”
Anna had phoned Julia in a small panic. Her hero kept dying at the hands of the nun.
“It’s called fantasy,” said Julia. “Play-time. You don’t want your girls putting down the book to finish the laundry. So we don’t want any smells or funny tastes down there. Keep it in the ‘moist petals’ range, or the warm damp dark haven, or better yet something sweet and desperate, like a lava cake, but don’t use that.”
“Okay,” Anna said, “but I’m more worried about something else. Is he too dangerous? Maybe readers don’t want that. If this is escapism, maybe that’s the first thing they want to escape.”
“Oh they want bad. That’s not the problem. They want daring and confident and incorrigible. Which is horsefeathers, because probably you’re not going to get that in your life, and if you do you’re going to drop the dope. What is different from life, is that in our romances he’s going to change. He’s got to. He’s going from cad to dad. Turns out, he was in love all this time and didn’t want to show it. And you get the best of both worlds. That’s what we want to read. You don’t hurt your real hubby, and you won’t get no bun in the oven from some dirty baker, but you can live out your cinnamon fantasy and keep your petals moist.”