A Lady Under Siege

20

Meghan rang the doorbell and waited impatiently, clutching the handle of a large leather art portfolio. She glanced at her watch. Cutting it too close, she thought. She decided she could still make her ten o’clock meeting if she limited her chat with Derek to three minutes. Another minute passed, another ring of the bell and knock upon his door for good measure, and she was preparing to bolt, when the door opened, and there stood Derek, groggy-eyed and rumpled in pyjama bottoms and a tee shirt, bed-head hair hanging limp like seaweed exposed at low tide.

“Good morning, I have a meeting I can’t be late for, so I’ll keep it short,” she began. “I’m speaking to Thomas now. I just wanted you to know I was there at your daughter’s bedside, I took it all in, despite Sylvanne’s indifference—”

“Come in, come in,” Derek muttered sleepily, stepping back and bidding her enter with a half-hearted wave of his arm.

“I don’t have time,” Meghan told him. “Let me say this: Thomas, I’m glad you’re giving her fruits and veggies, that’s a great start. Now the next step, get that crazy doctor away from her! He doesn’t know what he’s doing! He’s killing her. That whole system of medicine he practices, of trying to balance the four humours—it’s all bullshit, it’s been discredited a long time ago. Now we worry about germs and bacteria, which are like tiny little bugs you can’t see, but they’re having a field day in that nasty wound on her arm that your doctor keeps poking and gouging at daily. Just clean it up and leave it alone! Boil some water, let it cool to lukewarm, and clean out that wound, clean it thoroughly, I want all the pus gone. Then wrap it in clean linen, and keep it wrapped. Change the linen twice a day. Don’t let the pus build up, pus is bad, not good! And no more bloodletting, she needs all the blood she’s got, poor thing! You hear me?”

“What the hell is this about?” Derek grumbled. “I haven’t had my coffee—”

“It doesn’t matter, Derek. Thomas will get it, that’s what matters.”

“Thomas has left the building,” Derek mumbled.

“No, let me finish!” Meghan insisted. “I’m not speaking to you, I’m speaking to Thomas. This is important. Thomas, I think you need to sit Sylvanne down, and tell her the full story, so I can give a proper diagnosis. What are the symptoms, where does Daphne hurt, how often does she have a bowel movement, spare no detail. Do you hear me? I hope you hear me.”

“Remember I told you it was cute, this weird little mania of yours? It’s not cute. Not at seven in the morning.”

“It’s after nine. I’m sorry Derek, I’ve gotta run.”

She scurried down his steps to the street, the sound of her heels clattering on the concrete sidewalk as she hurried to her car. She heard Derek call out, “It’s not cute—it’s creepy!”

A MINOR TRAFFIC ACCIDENT involving a bicycle courier had snarled traffic, and by the time the elevator doors opened on the eleventh floor, Meghan glanced at her cell phone and saw she was twelve minutes late. She hurried past reception down a curving carpeted path between cubicles, and poked her head into the conference room, to find that Jan was the only person there. “Debra told me if you were more than ten minutes late to forget it. Now what do we do?” she asked. Debra was their boss.

Meghan picked up the phone on the conference table and punched in Debra’s extension. “Debra? So sorry. Traffic was an absolute bitch.” When she hung up Jan said, “That was very brave—using the phrase absolute bitch when speaking to one.”

Meghan laughed. “The meeting’s still on, she’ll be here in a sec.” She laid out her designs on the table and waited. A sec turned into five minutes. Jan said, “She’s doing it deliberately, to let us know she’s the alpha male around here.”

“I thought you’d say alpha bitch,” Meghan whispered.

In an even lower whisper, Jan replied, “I was going to, but she might stick her snout through that door any second.” Then she asked brightly, at normal volume, “How are you, anyway? How are the dreams? Still under siege? Did you meet your Thomas yet?”

“I have, in fact.”

“What’s he like?”

“He looks exactly like Derek, my neighbour.”

“What, the hunky drunk next door? The midnight flasher?”

“The very same.”

“You’ve been dreaming of your neighbour this whole time?”

“There’s more to it than that. Much more. Incredibly more. It’s complicated—”

“I saw him once, when I helped you move in—”

“I know, you told me. You think he’s cute.”

“Shaggy-cute. A woolly bohemian. And Thomas looks like him?”

Meghan nodded. “Thomas is in better shape. He’s more serious. He carries himself better,” she said.

“Always the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“The dream man is always better than reality.”

“Jan. It’s not a joke.”

“Of course not,” Jan replied. “I need to get a second look at your neighbour, see what we’re dealing with here.”

“You’ve already seen him.”

“I glimpsed him in his back yard, from your deck. He waved. Had a nice smile. Since then I’ve only heard about him from you. Is he still acting like a complete jerk?”

“Not always. Betsy and he are like best buddies now. He gets along with her better than I do.”

“She’s missing her dad,” Jan said.

“Who’s utterly preoccupied with his prize student, and the baby she’s so kindly growing for him.”

“Men are such idiots.”

“Most of them,” Meghan agreed.

“And what about Thomas, is he an idiot too?”

“No, actually.” For a moment she pictured him in Daphne’s room, tending to his sickly daughter by dim candlelight. “In my dreams he’s kind of…” she paused, searching for just the right word to describe him. “Admirable.”

“I thought you were going to say hot,” Jan teased.

“Jan, I beg you, take it seriously,” Meghan scolded her. She was surprised to hear Sylvanne in the tone of her own voice, and in the odd phrasing. I beg you.

“I’ve been very supportive up until now,” Jan protested. “But if you’re going to tell me that after all this, the man of your dreams looks just like your neighbour, well I’m telling you sister, now is the time to rejoice and give thanks that he’s been gift wrapped and delivered almost to your front door.”

“More the back door, actually,” Meghan replied. She began to tell Jan the story of the shattered pane of glass, and had reached the part where she first noticed the sloppy clump of bandages wrapped around Betsy’s finger, when Debra suddenly arrived, sailing into the boardroom without so much as a nod of greeting and setting herself straight to the task of assessing the designs Meghan had laid out on the table top. They were cover designs for a novel called Enemies with Benefits, all variations on an image of two teary women commiserating. In one they were in a swank cafe while handsome men circled like predators, in another they sat cross-legged facing each other on a comfy couch, with a box of tissues between them half-buried in a pile of scrunched-up used ones. Debra wasted no time in giving her opinion.

“This work is not to your usual standard, Meghan.”

“I think it’s true to the book,” Meghan defended herself. “The book is all about women processing, and here we see women processing.” In truth she had barely flipped through her galley copy, she’d relied on the blurb prepared for the catalogue.

“But there’s more to it than that,” Debra said sternly. “We talked about this, I’m certain. I’m sure I told you what I’ve been telling everyone—Bridget Jones was about one woman, Sex and the City was about four, well, this one splits the difference and is about two. Two best friends comparing sex lives—bright, gorgeous young women in their twenties who expect the men they meet to measure up to their high standards, to be their intellectual and emotional equals, and yet they wind up navigating an urban wasteland of eternal adolescents, Game Boy addicts and porn freaks eager to subject them to every bizarre sex act known to man.”

“Like that show Girls?” Jan said.

Debra winced. “Yes. But we can’t say that, we have to differentiate it. We’re expecting this book to be huge, the film rights have already brought six figures. It’s for a new generation of women who think Sarah Jessica Parker is a wrinkled old hag. It’s edgier, more explicit—there are passages of severely kinky sex, enough that men might be tempted to read the thing too. But, Meghan, I see nothing in your designs, nothing here at all, to alert people to that.”

“Maybe she could be stirring a cup of tea with a riding crop,” Meghan suggested, with just a hint of sarcasm.

“You don’t get it,” Debra rebuked her. “These girls don’t drink tea, they chug Red Bull.”

“Do you really think men will wade through pages of women’s chatter for a few bits of kinky sex?” Meghan asked.

“It’s more than a few pages. And we have to let them know. Give them the option.”

“We should change the title, to something that really zeros in on the no-strings-attached sex they’re having,” Jan interjected. “Saying friends with benefits to describe a relationship is something women do. It’s a cute pun, to make the point that they keep ending up having sex with men they don’t even like, but we need a stronger word than benefits. Something funny yet depraved, so men will sit up and pay attention. They love depravity. Any hint of it and men rent the DVD.”

“Then they fast forward through it,” Meghan asserted. “Novels don’t have fast forward.”

“It’s like that website that tells you to the second where the naked bits are in every movie ever made,” Jan added. “Men search that. They memorize it like sports statistics.”

Debra directed their attention back to the design. “Think of it as a movie, because it’s going to be one soon enough,” she intoned. “You’re designing a movie poster to lure men as well as women to the local Cineplex.”

“Think kink,” Meghan said.

“Exactly. A Helmut Newton kind of thing, only more contemporary, realistic but influenced by computer animation. And I need it by Thursday.”

She turned on her heels and left the room, taking all the tension with her. Jan and Meghan exchanged looks of relief. Then Meghan sighed deeply. “She told me I’m slipping,” she worried. “First time for that.”

“She’s stressed. Everyone is. She has no more clue than we do what they’re plotting upstairs. The whole imprint could be shut down tomorrow, and she’d be on the street with the rest of us. We’re still young and adaptable enough to land on our feet, but she’s fifty-six, divorced, and higher up in the food chain, where chances of a lateral move are slim to none right now.”

Meghan gathered up her papers into her portfolio and suddenly felt a wave of self-pity wash over her. “At least her kids are grown,” she sighed. “I’ve got a child to worry about, I’m getting divorced, too. I’m thirty-one, but I feel fifty-six.”

Jan gave her a gentle hug. “There there,” she said soothingly. She looked into Meghan’s face. “Your eyes do look awfully tired. I’d say try to get some sleep, good old-fashioned restful sleep, if that’s possible. Can’t you take a break from those dreams of yours?”

Meghan shook her head. “I wouldn’t even want to. It’s hard to explain, but now that I’ve met Thomas, I feel I have a purpose. I promised I’d help him cure his daughter. I used to dread going to sleep, now all of a sudden I can’t wait. I can’t stand the suspense.”

“What do you mean, you promised him?”

“I did promise. I told him I’d help him, through Derek. Don’t look at me as if I’m nuts, please—you’d understand totally if you could see how desperately, pitiably ill Daphne looks, lying on her bed. Her skin is grey in colour, and translucent, I swear. My biggest worry is that I’ve reached her too late, that I’ll sleep tonight and discover she’s passed away.” The thought of it made her eyes moisten. “I couldn’t bear it,” she said, fighting back tears.

“Girl, get a grip,” Jan said. “Whatever happens in that world, this is the one you live in. Concentrate on making this one work.”

“You do think I’m nuts.”

“Let’s just say I’m worried about you. How was your session with Anne? Was it any help? Did she have any insight?”

“No, not really. I’m seeing her again in a few days. She wants me to be her guinea pig.” She forced herself to smile. “I’ll be fine. I know what needs doing. I’ll go home and do it.”