A Lady Under Siege (2 page)

“M’Lady, this siege has attained forty-seven days. The mind can but imagine the loveliness you must have owned when it began. Many say it was your haughty beauty that sparked our master’s obsession, but now you’ve grown thin and pale, my dear. Your beauty is a gemstone in need of polishing. You’re curling up like a worm in vinegar, desiccating like those flowers we call annuals, when autumn brings finality to their natural cycle. But we humans are not annuals, ma’am, mortal though we may be. We’re meant to be hardy perennials, to survive many a season in cycle, to bloom again each spring. Before autumn capitulates entirely to winter, can you not act a sweet, benevolent Lady, and entice your husband to waver from his obstinacy? Can you not convince him to surrender you to us?”

Sylvanne felt weak, and dizzy. She summoned all her strength to answer. “We stay behind these safe walls with good reason, with righteousness as our ally and solace. We do not intend to dismiss these days, forty-seven by your count. A timid surrender now would make mock of our forbearance.”

“But you look so tired, my lovely,” Kent pleaded. “Won’t you come down to the fire and share a morsel? We know you’re eating cold sup these many nights, it’s been weeks since a wisp of smoke has risen from your chimneys. Have reason, Mistress. Think of the suffering you inflict upon the loyalists locked up there with you. Is it your ambition to watch them die, merely for the sake of your own modesty, or your husband’s wounded vanity?”

“I worry more for my husband’s wounded heart. His love for me is what keeps him from parting with me.”

“Fa! And so your husband will die a starveling, and you too, you’ll all die for love, you and everyone else cooped up within. And you, Madame, could save them all. You alone are the singular source of misery within those walls, and the source of ours without. We have no quarrel with your people. We’re neighbours, near enough. Look how we’ve spared the free men, and the villeins, the thanes and tithing men, their wives and children, all citizens of your husband’s modest dominion, who we’ve left in peace to live on as normal, even as we encamp in their midst. That’s on orders from our Lord. We’ve been on faultless behaviour.”

Another soldier, a fat oafish fellow, interjected, “Bloody torture, it’s been, too. A siege without spoils is like dinner with no meat! What point in soldiering without the rape and pillage?”

Kent swivelled about and shouted at him. “Shut it!” Turning back toward Sylvanne, he called out, “Now Madame, if you—Madame? Madame!”

But she was gone.

2

D
erek was drunk again. He leaned against the rickety old picnic table in his backyard and lit a couple of dollar-store candles shoved into wine bottles. He and his bud Ken had managed to lure two college girls home from the bar, and he was trying to create a little atmosphere, hoping to bring a cozy blush to a tabletop littered with empty beer cans, bottles, paper plates and chicken bones.

“You can’t beat candlelight,” he crowed. “It makes you girls look straight out of some Renaissance painting. But girls, girls, girls! In the bar you said you were up for just about anything, am I right? Padding your bohemian resume by slumming with older eccentric-type guys, am I right?” He gestured to a derelict hot tub in the back corner of the yard, filled for the moment with dusty old tires. “Wish my hot tub was up and running—we’d be bobbing for panties by now! Assuming you wear panties—I should check that—”

“I do, but not into hot tubs,” said the drunker of the two girls, Kaitlin by name. She made a playful little show of lifting her short skirt and pretending to wriggle out of her underwear. Derek was mesmerized by the candlelight flickering across her thighs.

“Good answer! I’m liking you more and more,” he grinned. “Shit—I wish that hot tub did work. Have a drink, there’s wine I think”—he rummaged around the table, shaking various bottles experimentally—“two shots of Limona here if we’re lucky, half a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps if we get desperate, there’s Bourbon around here somewhere, and I know there’s more wine in the house—”

“Drop the voice, Derek,” said Ken, busy rolling a joint on the underside of an overturned plate. “You’ll wake the neighbours.”

“Fuck the neighbours! Hurry up and spark that sucker, the girls are getting impatient, aren’t you girls? Remind me your names again—you’re both brunette and gorgeous, I’m having trouble telling you apart.”

“Violetta. She’s Kaitlin.”

“Fantastic names—love em! Look at that beauty of a moon, you two. Matched by you! Oh Luna, Oh Isis, or Toth, or Thoth, or whatever the hell the ancient Egyptians called you, bestow us with your blessings!”

“The Egyptians had ten moon goddesses,” Kaitlin said.

“Whatever!” Derek hooted. “Bloody goddess gridlock was their downfall. Monotheists kick ass, you understand? It’s human nature—big eat small till one God rules all. How do you know about goddesses, anyway? You study them at that high-priced college of yours?”

“She’s on full scholarship,” said Violetta.

“Hurray for you! These days only an idiot would pay for an education, when you can get it for free just going to Google Books and reading the classics. Epictetus, Cicero, de Sade, Dostoevsky, all there, all free!”

“That’s not exactly how it works,” said Kaitlin. “In our course packs they give case studies that aren’t online or anywhere. Like, I’m majoring in development—”

“Development? Of what?”

“You know. The Third World, how to help them, how to improve conditions in places where—”

“Hail Mother Teresa here! Ken, what the fuck! Spark that motherfucker and pass it around!”

“I’m not Mother Teresa,” Kaitlin protested, “But I can’t look at suffering and inequality—”

“Have a glass of wine, my dear. It’s an old joke, but children in Africa are going to bed sober.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Fate handed me this life, I didn’t choose it, just as the starvelings of Somalia didn’t choose theirs. Better luck next time.”

“Next time I’m coming back as Penelope Cruz,” said Violetta.

“I thought you were her,” Ken said, handing her the unlit joint. “Do the honours.”

“Aren’t you sweet?” she purred. “But I do honestly believe in reincarnation. It’s like a karma redistribution mechanism.” She held her long hair back gracefully with one hand while she lit the spliff from a candle.

“Good for you,” Derek applauded. “If it brings you comfort, cling to whatever flotsam bobs along the ocean of your mind. May we all live forever among the harp-playing angels of heaven, and may the afterlife be one giant after party. For now, we’re still in the
party
party, and let’s all get down in the earthly, earthy, deliciously dirty
dirt
of it.”

Violetta held out the joint to him. He took it from her and inhaled ferociously. The girls watched his face puff up pink as diaper rash. He held it in for an eternity, then unleashed a smoky explosion of phlegmy hacks and coughs, exaggerated for comic effect. “Smooooth,” he croaked.

T
HEN FROM A HEIGHT,
from the shadows, came a woman’s voice. “Excuse me, can you be quiet? I have a ten-year-old with school tomorrow.”

It took them a moment to locate her. A second story window in the townhouse next door. There she was—a face, pretty but scowling, thirtyish, blonde hair. Derek extricated his legs from under the picnic table, stretched himself unsteadily to his full height, tilted his head back and snarled, “So who asked you to procreate? The planet’s overpopulated and it’s your fucking fault! Get the kid some earplugs!”

For a moment there was silence. An ambulance could be heard faintly in a distant street. The woman answered, in a low, level voice, “I’d love to keep shouting, but I don’t want to wake my child.” She added, with a quiet, whispered fury, “You’re a monster. You’re not human.” Then she closed the window, and was gone.

“Just ignore her,” Derek said.

“New neighbour?” asked Ken.

“Yeah. Uptight bitch.”

“Cute though.”

Derek shouted up at the empty window, “You’re cute when you’re angry!” In a softer voice he muttered, “Uptight bitch.”

Violetta said, “Maybe we should go.”

Kaitlin made a pouty, disappointed noise.

“You wanna stay?”

She nodded.

“You don’t have to win.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Derek.

“We had a bet—that she was going to get some tonight,” Violetta said.

“Vi!” Kaitlin yelped.

“That’s the spirit,” Derek cried gleefully. “I’m the last man standing, and by candlelight and moonlight on this gorgeous night I could almost be mistaken for George Clooney, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Kaitlin murmured.

“George Clooney doesn’t live in a junkyard,” said Violetta.

“I’ve got grand ambitions for this night,” said Derek, ignoring her. “I’m going to tip all the shit off this table, and you’ll see. Before sunrise, I swear!”

“You want to do it on the table?” asked Kaitlin, giggling doubtfully.

“Oh yeah! There’s something about doing it outdoors, I love it! I’ll put down a blanket. Or get a sleeping bag to crawl into—ever tried it?”

She shook her head.

“Al fresco!” he hollered joyfully. “It’s like hot chocolate on ice cream, only the ice cream’s on the outside and the heat’s all in the middle. Frozen outside, hot inside—I’ve never yet seen those fuckers on the Food Channel pull that one off.”

“I think I’d rather be in the house,” said Kaitlin, glancing up at the window, “so no one’s going to start yelling down at me.”

“Inside can be arranged too,” Derek said. He tilted his head back and cupped his hands for one final shout toward his neighbour’s darkened house. “Thought you killed the party, did you? I don’t think so!”

3

V
oices outside woke Meghan. She looked around uncertainly—after nearly seven weeks she still wasn’t used to waking up in this bedroom, in this house. She hated this place, a drab little townhouse sardined between unkempt neighbours, just around the corner from a stretch of Queen Street East littered with greasy spoons, dollar stores, Money Marts and Laundromats. Seven weeks since she had separated from her husband, and it felt like she had traded lives along with addresses—she had left behind a leafy, upscale suburb, exchanged it for being woken up almost every night, at two, three, or even four in the morning, by
that
.

Do drunks not realize how stupid they sound to others? Of course they don’t, they’re drunk, she thought wearily. It’s the second time tonight that idiot has woken me up. But as she came to fuller consciousness and listened more carefully, she began to realize there was more than just the usual drunken banter going on. They weren’t talking. The noises made her think of the word
rutting
. Grunts and slaps and a wet sound like suction. Like animals do it, a stag and a doe. Outdoors, in nature. Oh my God, are they really doing it outside?

From her window she could see that the candles were extinguished. A giant black slug squirmed on top of the picnic table—a sleeping bag with two bodies inside. Not twenty feet away from where she watched, they were copulating.

She shrunk back discreetly to the edge of the window, peeking like a kid from behind a tree. I can’t believe I’m watching this, she thought, but she didn’t turn away. I have to watch, to tell people how it ends, she told herself, straining to hear the grunts and exhortations coming from below, and fighting an urge to open the window to catch more. A tingle passed through her—the unavoidable titillation in being an accidental voyeur.

The giant slug suddenly rolled off the table onto the wooden plank of the bench seat, and a female screamed, or maybe laughed, Meghan couldn’t be sure, as the bag kept tumbling downward to the ground. The girl Kaitlin wriggled free from the slug’s mouth, and stood naked in the moonlight. She covered her breasts with a forearm, and let her other arm dangle down, hiding her sex from the gaze of the moon Goddesses. To Meghan’s eyes there was no sense of shame in that gesture, it was modest, reflexive, and beautiful. Then she saw her neighbour Derek emerge, looking like Pan, the horny old Satyr, Pan the half-goat, with an erection slapping comically against his belly as he chased his giggling nymph into the house. Meghan watched them disappear, and heard silence give way to the faint and constant electrical hum of the city. She turned away from the window and climbed back under the covers of her bed, wondering if she had really seen steam coming off their bodies. Or had she only imagined that part?