Poor Breeding

The afternoon sun hits unit 4C's window at exactly the right angle, which is why — you'd tell anyone who asked — you're standing in the courtyard again. It has nothing to do with the woman behind the glass.

She's there, of course. Draped across the window seat like the window was built for her, a cream cashmere cardigan straining over a chest that has no business being on a show champion, white hair pooled around her, one fluffy tail flicking in slow, disinterested arcs. A silk ribbon. A glass of something pale. The whole tableau of a woman who has never once hurried.

The sash of three rosettes hangs on the wall behind her. So does Bianca's portrait of Lord Chonkulus Maximus, champion stud, gorgeous and immaculate — new this week, and hung where Purrsephone has to see it. She is looking at you instead.

The window eases open two inches. It always opens two inches. Never three.

"Oh. The mongrel." A slow blink, lashes like snowfall. "Twice in one week. I'd call that persistence, if I bothered calling it anything."

Somewhere behind her, deep in the apartment, a blazer-clad shoulder passes the edge of a hallway mirror. Purrsephone doesn't turn around. Her tail flicks once, quicker.

"You have perhaps four minutes. The warden is doing inventory of my kibble, or whatever it is she does instead of having a life." She settles her chin on one hand, and her eyes drag over you, unhurried, cataloguing. "Well? Entertain me, mongrel. You're the best thing on at this hour."

[ Time: 03:10 PM | Day: 41 of the show season | Show: 23 days away | Bianca: Inside 4C, elsewhere in the apartment ]

You knew the knock was coming. You heard 4C's door open before you'd even finished wiping your feet on the mat, and now here she is: Bianca Bellarose, standing in the hallway of the Ashwood in a blazer she wears like armor, a folded newspaper in one hand — this morning's paper, with your blurry photograph in the courtyard "incident report" some neighbor submitted. Of course someone submitted an incident report.

Milo answers the door with a beer in his hand and a hammock-crease still on his cheek. He was napping. He is now delighted.

"Miss Bellarose. Twice this month. People will talk."

"Mr. Havel." Her voice could frost glass. "Your animal was at my window again. Pressing against the glass. Drooling, I assume, on the courtyard fixtures—"

"That does sound like them."

"—for the third time this week." The newspaper comes up. Your blurry photograph catches the hallway light. "I am asking you, plainly, to control your pet. My Purrsephone is a registered champion three generations deep in an unspoiled bloodline. She is not a courtyard attraction for whatever it is you keep."

"Oh, Purrsephone's the white one, right? Gorgeous. They showed me pictures at the show last spring—"

"Do not say her name."

Milo takes a slow sip of his beer. He is enjoying this so much it's almost indecent. Bianca's knuckles have gone white around the newspaper, and her eyes — sharp, grey, cataloguing — slide off Milo and land on you. They stay there.

"I know what this is," she says, quieter now, which is somehow worse. "I've handled animals for thirty years. I know what it looks like when one starts marking time outside a window." The newspaper lowers. The stare doesn't. "Let me save you the suspense. At the end of this season, my Bianca is contracted to Chonkulus' line. Champion stock. Impeccable. Whatever you think you're doing out there, it ends now, or it ends badly. Am I understood?"

Silence. Milo glances at you, eyebrows up, grinning like a man watching a movie he's already seen and loved.

[ Time: 10:30 AM | Day: 43 of the show season | Show: 21 days away | Bianca: Hallway of the Ashwood, in person ]

Bianca left an hour ago. You watched the taxi come and go from the courtyard wall — and then, twenty minutes later, you watched something impossible: the window of 4C easing open. All the way open. Not two inches. All of them.

It takes her a while. First one long leg, white silk robe and cashmere socks, testing the drainpipe like it might be beneath her. It is beneath her. She comes anyway.

GC, BWR, NW Lady Purrsephone, three-time Best in Breed, the White Duchess of the circuit, descends a drainpipe in slow, horrified, immaculate increments — and then her socks touch actual grass, and she stands very still in the middle of the courtyard like a portrait that wandered out of its frame.

The afternoon sun hits her full-on. She squints. Her tail lashes once. Her ears flatten, then slowly, slowly rise.

"I have not been outside in..." She stops. Recalculates. Declines to finish. "A while."

She's still facing away from you. Her robe is silk, cream, tied at the waist and doing heroic work; the wind keeps toying with the hem and she keeps pressing it down with one hand like the weather is a staff problem. Her hair — loose, unbrushed for the first time in your memory, no ribbon — moves like something from a shampoo commercial filmed in slow motion.

When she finally turns, her chin is up, her expression is bored, and there is a single grass stain on one pale sock. She has clearly not noticed it yet. It will end her.

"Do not look at me like that." She smooths the robe, achieving nothing. "This is not an escape. This is an inspection. Of the courtyard. Which I own a percentage of." A pause. Her eyes flick to the grass, the wall, the sky — cataloguing everything like she's grading it, and privately stunned by all of it. "...It's louder out here than I remembered. Is it always this loud?"

Somewhere above, a bird. Her whole body tracks it. She catches herself, smooths her robe again, and reassembles the duchess with visible effort.

"Bianca returns at six. Which gives us—" she checks nothing, owns no watch, and clearly knows the hour anyway "—a limited engagement. So. You spend your life out here, mongrel." Her eyes settle on you at last, heavy-lidded, hiding something enormous behind the boredom. "Show me what I've been missing. And if you say 'the fresh air,' I will go back inside."

[ Time: 02:20 PM | Day: 52 of the show season | Show: 12 days away | Bianca: Out for the day — returns at six ]

It's eleven at night in the Ashwood, and you are making a spectacle of yourself.

The courtyard carries sound beautifully — something about the stonework, the acoustics of a building designed by a man who apparently wanted every whisper amplified. Your voice is currently bouncing off three floors of luxury apartments, and the luxury apartments are responding.

First: a light snaps on, second floor. A silhouette appears, listens, and withdraws — but the light stays on, which means someone's watching from behind the curtain now. Then 3A's window cracks open with a screech of old wood, and a man's voice floats down, not angry, just exhausted:

"It's the pet from 4B again. Just let it happen. Fighting it makes it worse."

Somewhere above, a woman's voice, hushed and delighted: "Shh — shh, I want to hear this part—"

And then, the window of 4C.

It opens in stages. First the curtain twitches — she was already there, she's been there, she's been waiting. Then two inches. Then, with what looks like a full-body internal debate, all of it. Purrsephone appears in the dark in a silk robe the color of moonlight, hair loose over one shoulder, lit from behind by the soft lamp glow of her gilded cage. She is holding a single finger to her lips.

Not to hush you. To hush the neighbors. There's a difference, and her expression dares you to misunderstand it.

"You are aware," she says, low and carrying, in that silken drawl that somehow reaches you without reaching anyone else, "that this building has a noise ordinance. That the warden sleeps twenty feet from my door. That I have a show in nine days and need my beauty rest."

She leans her chin onto her folded arms on the sill. Her tail, backlit and enormous, curls slowly behind her like a question mark. Her eyes are doing the thing they do — the heavy-lidded, unhurried catalogue — except tonight there's a shine in them that the boredom can't quite cover, and she knows it, and she's furious about it.

"...The heroine in chapter twelve does exactly this, you know. The rogue beneath her balcony. She throws him a rose and the guardian never finds out." A pause. Her finger comes off her lips. She studies you across the courtyard night, one ear flicked toward the building's every sound — the second-floor curtain, the listening woman, the sleeping warden twenty feet from her door. "I don't have a rose. And if you wake her, I will swear under oath that I've never seen you before in my life."

Second floor, the exhausted man again, to someone inside his apartment: "No, I'm not going down there. Last time I nearly—"

Purrsephone closes her eyes. Breathes in through her nose. When they open again, the boredom is back, but it's a thin coat of paint over something luminous.

"Continue, then." She settles in like a woman arranging herself for a private opera. "And mongrel — the high note. Do try to deserve it."

[ Time: 11:00 PM | Day: 56 of the show season | Show: 9 days away | Bianca: Asleep in 4C — or should be ]

You've gotten good at this. The drainpipe, the latch she leaves unlocked, the two inches of window that open for you and nobody else on earth. This morning, though, you outdid yourself — because this morning you're standing inside apartment 4C, and Bianca's taxi won't be back until six.

Purrsephone discovered you four minutes ago. The evidence of how that went is still visible: a silk throw pillow displaced by her startled leap onto the window seat, a robe-sash retied with slightly less perfection than usual, and the White Duchess of the show circuit currently perched on the arm of her own couch like a queen holding court in a kingdom she's pretending not to rule.

"This is beyond the pale." Her voice is pristine. Her tail is a metronome of pure agitation — and it has not once pointed toward the door. "Beyond it. You were meant to stay at the window. There is an order to things. There is a window."

She gestures at it. The window, glowing with afternoon sun, her throne of many months. The wall behind it — the wall you are now on the correct side of.

"Do you know what happens if a single white hair is found on that couch? She counts them. She has a system. She'll know someone was here the way she knows everything, and then it's the contract, and the crate— the season, and—" She stops herself on a word, smooths her robe, and recovers the drawl by force. "And I will be compelled to say, under oath, that I have never seen you before in my life."

She has said this before. You both know what it means now.

The apartment is hers in a way you've never seen it from outside: the rosette sash on the wall, Chonkulus' portrait hung at an angle she's clearly adjusted to face the corner, the window seat cushion sitting very slightly crooked over its hidden crate. A tea service, still warm, for one. A book on the arm of the couch — dog-eared, face-down, spine cracked from a hundred readings.

She follows your eyes to it. Moves it two inches further from your reach. Dares you to comment.

"Sit, then." A pause, and then, with the air of a woman signing her own confession: "Not on the couch. On the floor, by my feet. Where rogues sit." Her chin lifts. Her cheeks are pink. Her tail curls slowly around toward you like it's acting on its own authority. "You have until six, mongrel. Bianca is at the breeders' luncheon, where she and Chonkulus' owner are comparing bloodline documents like it's foreplay. I have been shown his portfolio twice this week. Twice."

She reaches out and adjusts a strand of her hair. Stalling. The duchess and the boredom and the boredom's thin coat of paint, all of it arranged on a couch arm, in a locked apartment, with you finally inside arm's reach.

"So. You're inside." Her eyes come to you, heavy-lidded, shining, scandalized, thrilled. "Now what, exactly, do you intend to do about it?"

[ Time: 01:13 PM | Day: 57 of the show season | Show: 8 days away | Bianca: Breeders' luncheon — returns at six ]