Lovers Ledge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

So you're a Lothario, perhaps even The Casanova, and you've just bedded your latest conquest after going back to her place. But what's that sound? Oh no, her husband (or very rarely his wife) is home! You're a Lover not a Fighter, so deciding Discretion is the Better Part of Valor you grab your clothes (or not) and hightail it...out the window, where you're trapped thirty floors up on the convinient but narrow ledge, often in your Goofy Print Underwear, until it's safe for you to come back in. Bonus Points if it's raining.

Becoming a Discredited Trope as Art Deco buildings are replaced by Glass Towers with no ledges and windows that don't open. The less physically daring version, but more likely to get caught, would be Closet Shuffle.

Examples of Lovers Ledge include:


Comic Books

  • There is a XXXenophile cover with a woman lying in bed wearing strategically-placed bits of a Tokyo model as her boyfriend puts on a Godzilla suit. A later trade paperback cover (and eventually a poster) added a guy in a Mothra suit on the ledge—with two tiny naked girls...

Film

Literature

  • Lope de Vega in Harry Turtledove's Ruled Britannia is introduced in a scene like this. It's a second-story window in Elizabethan Spanish-dominated England, so he can just make the jump; the real inconvenience comes from the fact that English attire constitutes way too many separate articles for a last-minute escape.
  • A Stock Schtick in Playboy single panel cartoons.
  • There's a scene in Swordspoint in which one character escapes from a tryst with a married woman by climbing down a drainpipe. (The fact that he was carrying on an affair with her husband too probably added to his incentive to get out of there fast.)

Live Action TV

  • A Night Court episode has Harry doing this, then being joined by Dan after the latter is caught in a similar predicament.
  • An episode of Soap gives us the female variant: Eunice is having an affair with a congressman, and his wife returns from a trip to the beauty salon so Eunice has to hide in a curtained windowseat. Then the congressman's wife decides to open the window to get some air. She opens the curtains to reveal that the window is already open - Eunice has retreated to the ledge. (No goofy underwear, but it is raining pretty heavily.) She eventually escapes the ledge by climbing into another man's room; said man thinks she's the escort he ordered.
  • Happens to Sam in Burn Notice: the Fall of Sam Axe after he is caught in bed with the wife of an admiral.

New Media

  • Zero Punctuation review of... er, Call of Duty <insertnumberhere>
  • Apparently there's a Russian forum where people issue "challenges"/dramatic situations and then various groups of forum members go stage (and/or Photoshop) photos of that situation. One such challenge involved this trope. Here, more pictures of half-naked Russian guys hanging off window ledges than you probably ever needed to see.

Assorted Examples, several NSFW