A Walk with Jane Austen (9 page)

My underwear were in an old ditty bag from my backpacking days, which had infused them with the tang of cheap plastic. In a moment of inspiration, wondering at my own excessive preparedness, I pulled out dryer sheets from my laundry supplies and stuffed one in there and spread a few throughout my clothes. But now I began to sicken at the spicy, overwrought smell, which still didn't cover the bad rubber/chemical tinge my clothes had acquired.

And then there were my lovely new green slip-on tennis shoes. I knew they might be a problem because they made my feet unusually hot, and sure enough, a foul case of foot odor was brewing. I'm not typically the foot-odor type. Seriously. But this wafted up from the region of my ankles and surrounded me in a Pigpen-like cloud.

Even my lips became less than lovely. The special ChapStick I had bought for the trip smelled pungent like medicine, and my cheap trashy-sparkly lip gloss hinted of chemicals rather than berries.

So my stinky feet and I put on our flip-flops and sweatpants and headed out on the lawn to smoke Cubans with Jack and Paul.

We sat in the wet grass, the evening glowing with the luminescent, late blue hour, the hour of dusk that many believe to be holy. (I am among them.) Eventually, we were lit by nothing but lights from the windows.

Paul, raised in a good, strict Assemblies of God home, chose to abstain. “Smoke a cigar and go to hell? No, I don't think so.” He laughed.

We talked about grace and alcohol, about how Jesus might have acted at a party, about Paul's brother, who had been an alcoholic and then was miraculously cured.

I told Paul and Jack about only recently discovering that I grew up with a view of the world where there were good people (Christians) and bad people (everyone else) and how I'd finally realized that I had been looking down at the world all these years and knew that we are all loved the same and all flawed the same—all of us equal before God. That God could be just as present at a party where guys were smoking joints on the back porch as he was at my Bible study—present in a different way, but still present and reaching.

When you see the world this way, any place can be holy.

All ofthat talk of some other girl in North Carolina has been forgotten.

I don't know exactly what it means to fall in love or what I think about that, so I'm not sure how to talk about what has been happening between Jack and me. Fundamentally, I believe that
love
is a verb, that it is doing things you may not feel like doing and giving and listening and generally putting someone else in front of yourself. Perhaps it's not possible to make that kind of commitment for a lifetime without an initial rush of emotion. Sunday night after we met, when we went to Evensong and to the pub and walked home talking about our families and mornings and evenings, I knew this had potential. Last night I thought it could be serious. And tonight I know—well, I'm not sure exactly what—perhaps that he is The Guy I Never Thought I Would Meet.

My perception of time has changed. There are so many significant moments, so many in each day that the days feel stretched into weeks, and I don't doubt that by the end of the week, I will feel like we've known each other for six months. The contrast between days in Oxford and days at home—which can pass distractedly with a couple loads of laundry, a movie, and a Target run—makes me feel the malleable subjectivity of time.

Unlike other relationships I've had, my love for Jack seems to have depth and stability, to be founded on mutual faith and genuine respect, honest intellectual conversations, strong doses of humor and comfort. So our attraction has something solid on which to play. It's all rather Austenian.

In some ways, this Big Thing is a combination of hundreds of tiny important things. If alone they are small, together they are undeniable, pointing to something true and sound, of incredible value—pointing to us.

At least, it seems that way to me.

I am, actually, afraid that people will look back on my own scant love life someday and assume that nothing ever happened, that my heart was never touched. And I wonder if my life will turn out more like Jane's life or like the heroines’ lives in her books.

I sat looking out the patisserie window, streaming and sniffling, trying to eat a chocolate croissant.

I woke to the darkness of 3:30 a.m., after just three and a half hours of sleep. I lay awake through the gradual graying of the sky coming in
through my open window, listening to the birds, turning things over and back again in my mind—bits of conversations, the way Jack and I fit, the perfection of it all. I was in awe at the certainty of it, having never felt so strongly about someone in so short a period of time, for reasons that seemed incredibly sound. I wanted to go to breakfast alone, to not have to exert the energy to talk to strangers—to talk to anyone.

By 5:15, my body was desperate to be asleep again. This is the hardest kind of sleep to fight—everything heavy and weighty; I am held to the pillow as if by some kind of great force. But I fought it anyway because I didn't want to sleep through things. I sat up and stretched on my bed in the soft dawn, trying to make sense of the world without success.

Jack caught me on my way out, just when I was hoping I wouldn't see him. He must have been watching for me and was eager to talk about some passages he was reading to follow up on our conversation of the night before. I told him with some regret that I needed to be alone. Part of me wants him to just disappear. I am too tired to be in love.

The patisserie is on a small, quiet street full of restaurants, a pub, a sandwich place, and a florist. There is a full window along the front, with a bar running across it. By the time I sat down with everything— cranberry juice, cappuccino, water, and two chocolate croissants—I began to sense just how much trouble I was in. I was devastatingly tired.

I started to cry and couldn't stop—not a loud, shaking, full-on cry, but a quiet stream, as though God had turned the faucet on low. I was afraid of the surety I felt. I thought I never could have imagined Jack so well. I was overwhelmingly grateful. And I knew I would never be able to sort out my emotions through so much exhaustion. So I decided to let myself cry.

Jane may have loved, but she never married. You could say her love life was a comedy of errors if it wasn't also a bit tragic and somewhat scant. In addition to her letters, we have recollections from various family members—her brother Henry, her nephew James, and nieces Anna and Caroline. They also recorded some of her sister, Cassandra's, memories of Jane, which she never wrote down. Altogether not a clear picture, but enough to piece together several relationships that did not work out.

After Tom Lefroy, her friend Anne's dashing nephew, there was Revd. Samuel Blackall,
¹¹
a somewhat ridiculous clergyman Anne invited to visit and hoped Jane would form an attachment with (perhaps a model for Mr. Collins?). Jane could never see him as anything but laughable—“a peice of Perfection, noisy Perfection himself.”
¹²
Blackall got the hint and did not return to Hampshire, though he would have liked to. Jane wrote to Cassandra, “It is therefore most probable that our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me.”
¹³

The next significant relationship was with a man from the neighborhood, Harris Bigg-Wither,
¹⁴
the younger brother of Jane's dear friends. Jane was just about to turn twenty-seven, old enough to no longer expect to marry—Anne's age when
Persuasion
begins. Harris was an excellent and prudent match, set to inherit the large Manydown estate—ironically the place where Jane had danced so happily with Tom Lefroy—though he was awkward and shy and stammered.
¹⁵
He proposed one night when Jane and her sister, Cassandra, were visiting. She accepted him, then apparently stayed up much of the night reconsidering, withdrew her consent in the morning, and hastily left the house in disgrace. It seems there was money but no love, and for Jane
that would never do. The match would have given her “all worldly advantages.”
¹⁶
Almost any other woman of Jane's age in this situation would have accepted Harris and hoped to learn to love him, or determined to live without love, but Jane could not.

There are rumors of another, of a man Jane and her sister met when vacationing at the seaside in Devon. He expressed some interest, which Jane apparently returned. But though the sisters expected to hear from him, they only received news of his death. The details of this relationship are especially murky. They met one summer, and he asked to see the girls the next summer, which doesn't sound terribly promising. But it seems that Cassandra thought he would pursue Jane and expected him to be successful. Either way, what we do know is that he died unexpectedly, and the girls never saw him again.
¹⁷

There were others—occasionally rich, sometimes flirtatious, one who may have proposed and another who thought about proposing and never did—but there was no one else Austen seemed to have been genuinely interested in.

Austens nephew made light of these romantic experiences, praising Jane's imagination and musing that her heart had never been touched, and her brother Henry doesn't mention them at all. But no woman who has fallen in love at twenty or contemplated marrying a man she didn't truly love can believe that Jane was emotionally removed from these situations. They may seem small and unimportant, but no doubt her heart was involved to some degree or another.

I started dating at sixteen: Miller, a great-looking guy from my small, overwhelmingly Baptist school. Blond hair, blue eyes, football player. Nice. He played King David in one of our high-school dramas when he was a sophomore and I was in ninth grade, and I fell in love
with him in the “man after Gods own heart” role. That year I asked him to be my escort for homecoming. It wasn't a dance—we never had any dancing because according to Baptist doctrine dancing is sin—but a ceremony between basketball games (our homecoming was in January) where all the class representatives walked out, for some reason in this case in matching long skirts carrying fake flowers. I got the biggest zit I've ever gotten right on the top of my nose, and he walked with me across the gym floor, and I didn't know what to say to him. Two years later we were dating. He gave me such sickly sweet gifts—a necklace that said “Someone Special” (which I still have), a big white teddy bear carrying a red heart—that I had to call it off.

Ten years later, after several college near misses, after dating the wonderful preacher's boy from our church whom I had little in common with, I dated Brian. From time to time, I thought I would marry him. We dated a year, and then he broke my heart and continued to flirt with me for a year at work. Devastated me would get my hopes up and have them crushed, get my hopes up and have them crushed again, over and over. Finally he moved to North Carolina. We sat outside at Anita's, the cheap Mexican place right by Route 50, before he left. He cried and held my hands as we talked about saying good-bye. And then he left. And finally I moved on.

Now, after a years-long drought, here I am in England, unable to finish my chocolate croissant.

At some point, every relationship becomes quotidian. It becomes about the daily things, the mundane and menial things; sometimes those menial things, completely unimportant to others, have the greatest effect on our happiness. Especially at the beginning of a relationship, I think, we as women sift through this daily stew of conversations and mannerisms like tea leaves, looking for signs of future happiness or disappointment, love or loneliness. It is a skill we acquire in junior high and never lose.