BECK, n. This is a word I have used for years without knowing what it meant. I have only ever encountered it in the expression “to be at someone’s beck and call,” meaning to respond swiftly and without question to that person’s orders. This week I wrote “beck and call” into my draft and then stopped to ask, “What’s a ‘beck’?”
(Remind me of this moment if I ever say “please help me I write fiction so slowly.” Say something like “spend less time on the OED.”)
If you thought to yourself “it’s probably related to the word ‘beckon’,” you win the grand prize. A “beck” in this context is a wordless gesture, especially something that represents an order, like nodding or crooking your finger. It’s a shortened form of the verb “beckon,” which I always think of as meaning specifically “gesture at someone to come closer,” but which used to cover other kinds of silent signals (and which maybe still does, depending on the flavor of English you speak).
So anyway, being at someone’s call is one way of obeying their orders, and being at someone’s beck is even more intense—they don’t even have to use words to make you come.
In Capital-R Romance, I continued to work my way through The Penguin Book of French Short Stories, Volume One with Paul Chilton translating Marguerite de Navarre. The translated work is called “The Substitute,” which is very funny because it’s the fourteenth story in the Heptaméron (1558), and the French title is “Le Seigneur de Bonnivet, après avoir fait réussir l’amour d’un Gentilhomme Italien pour une Dame de Milan, trouve le moyen de se substituer à lui & de le supplanter auprès de la Dame qui l’avait auparavant éconduit,” which is more like “The Lord of Bonnivet, after having made succeed an Italian Gentleman’s love for a Lady of Milan, finds a way to substitute himself for the Gentleman and to supplant him in the heart of the Lady who had driven him away before.” That pretty much tells you the whole plot, except the title doesn’t quite get into how Bonnivet is spending years of his life deceiving a guy all so he can rape this woman as vengeance. Ugh.
It’s weird to read a Heptameron story excised from its context—like Bocaccio’s Decameron, these stories are all told by a cast of characters, and they get discussed afterward. I checked the original to see what the Heptameron crew had to say about this story, which seems to present Bonnivet as clever and gallant, and was gratified to find that the women characters are raking him over the coals. The story reads totally differently if you don’t turn the page to read that Longarine is telling the other women to reject men before they even open their mouths.
In small-r romance, I read:
Fly With Me (bi m/het? f, both cis, contemporary, novella) by Hudson Lin. This is a sweet, short read about two Asian flight attendants working routes in Europe and falling in love while they explore Rome, Paris, and London. One of them, Vivian, has an elderly father in a care home and she sends him videos of herself everywhere she goes, and their relationship is so cute. Content notes: sexual harassment, hospitalization.
Sweet Agony (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, erotic) by Charlotte Stein. Whenever there’s a Close Reading Romance post about a book, I have to go read the book, and it’s always so rewarding. Sweet Agony is a Beauty and the Beast retelling with a very light touch—a woman entering a forbidding house alone, a man who believes himself beastly and tries very hard to act like it, a dreamy library—and it’s so tightly focused on the two main characters that it races along, unputdownable. Both characters have such distinctive voices, obvious from the moment they meet and have sharp, sparkling banter through a closed door. From there, they progress to writing each other letters, which, as previously discussed, is my favorite thing. It’s a bold authorial choice to write erotic romance where the characters don’t touch each other for many, many pages, but the conversation and the letter-writing is so sensual and suspenseful that it works perfectly. Content notes: physical and emotional abuse (in both main characters’ pasts), sex, BDSM.
The Night of the Wedding (m/f, both cis and bi, contemporary, erotic, novella) by J. Broson. I got to know these two characters—and they got to know each other—so well over the course of this single night. This is so cozy and real. It’s an interesting companion read with Sweet Agony above, because both are erotic romance, but they operate so differently. Sweet Agony has a contemporary setting, but feels almost magical—Cyrian is able to order perfectly tailored clothes for Molly in a matter of hours after merely looking at her, for instance, whereas in The Night of the Wedding, Bella breaks her high heel and ends up hobbling around in Ari’s too-big shoes. I love both of these approaches to sexy writing, but I especially cherish The Night of the Wedding’s insistence on the tiny details that make it feel so grounded. The stumbles, the giggles, the fact that sometimes going down on a person really hurts your knees, but you love it anyway. Content notes: sex.
And in books that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Natasha Pulley’s historical fantasy The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which does have two love stories in it (one queer!), and a happy ending, but is more about magic and the unraveling (or possibly the raveling?) of intricate mysteries than romance. The prose was gorgeous, the audiobook narrator switched between accents and voices so smoothly, and the tense parts made me freeze perfectly still over a sink full of soapy dishes, like that might somehow help the characters make it out alive.
