Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (3 page)

Four

B ut it’s not. I’m still here. Shit. It’s morning. Birds singing. The scent of roses wafting through my window. Mrs. Mansfield in my doorway.

Like I said, Shit.

“Good morning, Jane. You look well.”

I turn on my side, so that I am facing away from her.

“Are you well enough to come downstairs and have some breakfast?” She strips the covers off me; guess I don’t have a choice. If this were really like a Jane Austen novel, someone like Captain Benwick would be at my feet reading me Scott and Byron as I recovered from my head injury. But instead I’m subjected to the whims of a frilly blond porcelain doll and her scalpel-wielding henchman.

“Here, let me.” She helps me to my feet.

I take a few tentative steps and feel little of the weakness of the day before. Evidently the healing process in dreams is a swift one.

“Well? You seem infinitely better,” she says.

“I guess so.”

“Good girl. I shall send Barnes to you.” She eyes my face and frowns, swiping her hand across my forehead and then examining her fingers, as if checking for dust on a dresser top. Then she leans over, her face close to mine, but instead of giving me a kiss, she sniffs at my skin, her mouth crinkling in distaste, before straightening her posture and gliding toward the door. “Your face could do with a good washing” is her parting endearment.

Barnes appears within moments, all demure and polite silence this morning. And for the next half hour she furrows her brow in concentration while she laces and buttons me into various layers of clothing and does my hair. I enjoy the pampering, which, come to think of it, is more necessity than pampering. After all, how could anyone get into these clothes alone, especially with the laces and buttons inconveniently located in the back of the garments?

I realize I have not brushed my teeth since God knows when, and I ask Barnes for a toothbrush, hoping that such a thing exists. Thankfully, she produces a reasonable facsimile, albeit a little ratty and with a metal handle, but nevertheless a toothbrush. There’s even a tongue scraper. Using someone else’s dental utensils is only the beginning of the unpleasantness, however. The tooth powder, which when I add a little water becomes a salty, chalky paste, not only makes me gag, but makes my teeth feel like they’re being scoured with Comet. What I wouldn’t do for a minty paste with fluoride. But I think of the doctor’s brown and yellow smile and brush even harder.

After Barnes leaves me, I check myself out in the mirror and again experience that shock of seeing someone else looking back at me.

I arrive downstairs at the breakfast table, drawn by the aromas of freshly baked bread and hot chocolate, but I experience a brief, stomach-churning moment when the first thing I notice on the table is a giant ham glistening with fat. Mrs. Mansfield sees the look on my face and motions to a servant to take away the platter. “Your father,” she says and rolls her eyes. “He plans to spend the day in his atelier”—she draws out the word “atelier” with a sneer—“and you know he will not emerge till dinner. Now, what would you like?”

I think of declining half of what Mrs. Mansfield presses on me to eat, but I decide it’s best not to give her any cause to suspect a relapse. Besides, I figure all that delicious bread and hot chocolate has imaginary calories, another advantage of eating while unconscious.

While I eat, she talks. Mostly about someone named Mr. Edgeworth. “How refreshing,” she says, “to meet with a man whose manners and person are as agreeable as his fortune.” I gather from Mrs. Mansfield’s monologue that the man in question is a widower who inherited his nearby estate from his aunt several months ago. “As if that sour old prune’s death was not favor enough, it was very obliging of her to leave everything to him.”

A young, broad-shouldered serving man briefly enters the dining room to deliver some dish or other, as if there isn’t already enough food here to feed the population of twenty dreams. I think I catch him looking at me for longer than is likely proper for a servant, but I am so conscious of wanting to run into my alleged lover that I’m probably just imagining things. Still, as he bustles at the sideboard I check him out. Long legs. Dark brown hair, somewhat unruly despite the ponytail. He glances my way again—intense brown eyes, almost black—and I smile. He spills a basket of rolls all over the sideboard, his eyes darting to Mrs. M, who is too engaged in her monologue to notice. Definitely clumsy enough to be Barnes’s brother.

He leaves the room, and Mrs. Mansfield asks me what I think of Mr. Edgeworth. I amuse myself by telling her, in perfect ladylike fashion, that I am in perfect agreement with her opinion of him. She opens her mouth as if to speak, her hand, having just dabbed her mouth with a napkin, suspended in its aborted trip back to the table.

She seems to recover and scrutinizes me, eyes narrowed. “It appears that knock on the head has done your mind some good.” Then she launches into an account of the latest news of my siblings and their apparent concern for my well-being. I manage to glean from her talk that I have one sister, recently married to some rich guy and living in another county—“At least one of my daughters does not live only to disoblige me,” she says while buttering her toast—and a single brother studying at Oxford, the mere mention of whom brings a softness to her voice and face that is almost maternal. I think I can guess who her favorite is.

Finally Mrs. Mansfield has exhausted her scintillating supply of family news and encourages me to “take a turn in the shrubbery.”

I’ll take anything I can get if it means getting away from her. This is also my first chance to be alone, other than in my bedroom, since I’ve found myself in this endless dream. Granted, I’ve had long dreams before, and one’s sense of time is always questionable while sleeping. But I’ve never had a dream with such vivid details before. I can smell the herbs and the flowers in the garden, feel the sun and the breeze caressing my skin. And after what seems like at least an hour of walking, I also feel some tightness in my calves and little drops of perspiration on my back. These sensations feel every bit as real as the intense hunger I had last night.

And the touch of that quack doctor’s knife. I shudder and test the bend of my arm, which is stiff and still stings a little. All I have to do is continue to play the part of the dutiful daughter, and it will all be okay till I wake up.

Five

G ravel crunches beneath my shoes as I head back toward the house. That same lonely sound my feet made on that night two months ago when I paced around the gravel path behind Wes’s house, smoking cigarette after cigarette and wondering where Frank was. Or where Wes was, for that matter. Finally I settled into the little niche next to Wes’s front door and waited.

I heard his sneakers slapping on the driveway before I saw him. “Where is he?” I said, startling him so badly he dropped his key with a clatter.

“Courtney. What are you doing here?” He ran a hand through his unruly curls.

“He’s not answering his cell. You said he was on his way here hours ago.”

Wes looked down at the key and picked it up.

“Do you even know where he is?”

Eyes still cast down, he mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

I went all cold inside. “What the hell is going on?”

But all he did was shake his head.

“This is bullshit,” I said, grinding my cigarette under my heel and turning to head back to my car.

Wes grabbed my hand. “Don’t go.”

But I did. I went straight to Frank’s place and let myself in with my key. I searched through his desk drawers, his unmade bed, his piles of dirty laundry. I listened to the messages on his answering machine. I even played TV cop by rubbing the tip of a pencil over the pad of paper that was next to his phone until I could read the address on it, which was vaguely familiar.

When I pulled up in front of that address, I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. I was in front of the showroom of our wedding cake designer. And there was Frank’s ’69 Mercedes parked across the street, “the last handmade car Mercedes made,” as he always pointed out to anyone admiring it.

Not three hours before I’d been bitching to Paula about how Frank wouldn’t do anything for the wedding, how I’d dragged him to a tasting appointment at this very cake designer’s, how I’d begged him to bring her a deposit check with my written list of specifications, which he refused to do. Clearly he’d had a change of heart. It was times like these, when Frank would bring me takeout or massage my feet after a long day, that I’d remember why I fell in love with him. He tried to be all nihilistic and can’t-be-bothered, but inside he was as sweet and vulnerable as anyone.

I parked my car and walked toward the shop with the white curlicue lettering on its double glass doors. Weymouth Wedding Cakes and Confectionery. I’d chosen it because Weymouth was where Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax got engaged, and because this wedding and its reluctant bridegroom needed whatever bit of Austen-mojo I could muster. I had tried to tell Frank that Frank Churchill was this gorgeous guy from Emma who had a wicked sense of humor and a way with the ladies, but my Frank could care less.

The store was all lit up, though it was after business hours; I could see through the windows that a small elderly woman was vacuuming. I tried the door, which was unlocked, and smiled at the woman with the vacuum. “Is Amy here?”

Her worn face creased into a thousand wrinkles as she returned my smile and pointed behind her to swinging chrome doors.

Wait a minute. How would I explain my showing up here? Frank might not only be annoyed that I’d spoil his surprise; he’d know I must have dug around his apartment to find out where he was. Unless, that is, I said I was on my way home from Paula’s, passed by, and noticed his car.

I pushed open the swinging doors, revealing the length of a high-tech chrome kitchen—and at the far end, their backs to me, Amy and Frank, leaning over a gleaming chrome counter as if studying something on it. The list for the cake, apparently. They made no indication of having heard me open the doors; the vacuum cleaner drowned out every other sound.

And then, far away, the vacuum cleaner turned off, and I heard Amy’s low, throaty laughter as Frank put his arm around her slim waist and turned his head to whisper something into her ear, his lips brushing against her skin.

I froze between the two swinging doors. The room got longer, the figures at the other end of it farther away.

Amy turned to face Frank. And then she removed his arm from her waist and slowly tucked a strand of her glossy black hair behind her ear. “It was fun, okay? But I’m not into anything serious.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, running a finger down her bare arm, his full lips curving in a smile.

It was then that I heard myself gasp. It was then that he saw me.

It was then that I remembered Frank Churchill too was a liar.

They say the truth will set you free, but what nobody tells you is that sometimes the truth will also make you miserable. As I stood between those swinging doors, looking into the eyes of that man at the other end of that room, I saw the truth of what marriage to him would be like. I saw a lifetime of pretending I didn’t notice when he flirted with the waitress at Ammo, or fed birthday cake to a woman at my party, or how his eyes inevitably followed the most beautiful woman in the room without even a perfunctory nod to how I might feel.

And so, within the space of a few hours, I was free. Free of my fiancé, and free of my closest male friend. I can still see that whipped puppy look on Wes’s face when he admitted to me that he knew Frank was sneaking out to be with Amy that night yet agreed to lie for him anyway, and how pale he went when I told him I never wanted to see him again.

It was the same look Wes had two months later when I ran into him, just hours before I went to sleep and ended up in this dream. Funny that I haven’t thought much about that day—yesterday, to be exact, despite the illusion of time passing. I haven’t thought much about that day except for the end of it, when I was reading Pride and Prejudice. But now all I can think about is what happened earlier in the day. And the more I think about it, the more I understand why I must have conveniently shelved it.

I can still feel the hot, dusty, L.A. midafternoon stagnation, that airless heat that sent me into a new store off Vermont. I was cooling off in the central air—so much better than the AC in my car or the cheap window unit in my apartment—and looking at a skimpy leather top, wishing I had the right kind of body to wear it. That’s when I felt his eyes on me. Wes, a few feet away, staring. He was holding hands with a petite, pixyish woman, but dropped her hand the second he saw that I saw him.

Then he rushed over to me, leaving her standing by a rack of overpriced tank tops.

“Courtney, I was just thinking about you—”

“How nice for you,” I said, pushing past him toward the back exit, stopping only momentarily to feign interest in the sale rack and slow the pounding of my heart. I glanced behind me, and there he was, only a few feet away, mouth open stupidly, while the pixie remained at the cash register, throwing daggers with her eyes.

“Courtney, I am so sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“I can’t.” He caught up to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

I shrugged it away.

Silence. When I looked up, his gray-blue eyes behind his glasses were moist.

“I’ve been wanting to call—”

“Your friend’s waiting.”

“I have a lot to say to you.”

“Not interested.”

This time I made it to the exit without once looking back, not even as I walked through the parking lot, and not even as I drove off in my car, hands shaking, heart hammering in my ears.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about him on the drive home, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him as I rummaged through my refrigerator trying to decide whether wilted lettuce would do for a salad or if I should allow myself two spoonfuls of Cherry Garcia. And what was really weird was that I kept thinking about how Wes’s eyes looked like they were filled with tears and how I could still feel the touch of his hand on my shoulder and why I’d never noticed how attractive he was before.

Attractive? I had never been attracted to Wes before, and I couldn’t stand him now. So then why could I still smell that freshly scrubbed, citrusy scent of him that was so familiar to me as I brushed past him in the store?

I shakily eased myself into a kitchen chair, my stomach turning cold with fear. Was I so self-destructive that I found myself attracted to a man the second I knew he could hurt me? Frank had lied, and so had Wes. Granted, with Frank I had been willfully blind. But Wes? I never could have imagined it. If only he had told me what he knew, I would have been spared the humiliation of walking into that scene. Frank nuzzling up to Amy in that kitchen, whispering in her ear, running his finger down her arm. The way he looked at me when he saw me watching him. I’d spent two months trying to purge that image from my brain. I’d spent two months trying to stop picturing where they actually did it—against all that gleaming chrome? Or in the unmade bed I’d rummaged through in Frank’s apartment? I’d finally achieved whole days in which I did not replay those scenes. And here I was again, standing in front of those swinging doors.

But even worse was the look in Wes’s eyes. The naked sadness in them. I’d never returned a single one of his calls or emails.

I shot up from my chair, determined to do something, anything, to put Sub-Zero refrigerators, chrome counters, and Wes’s gray-blue eyes out of my mind. That’s when my vision started narrowing toward black and my hands gripped the edge of the kitchen sink. Dizzy, I sat down again. Poured myself an icy shot of Absolut. Much better. Perhaps all this emotional confusion was simply due to my not having eaten since breakfast, if you didn’t count the bag of chips I got from the thief who owned the corner store.

That’s when I decided to order myself a large clam-and-garlic pizza and reread Pride and Prejudice. I would self-medicate with fat, carbohydrates, and Jane Austen, my number one drug of choice, my constant companion through every breakup, every disappointment, every crisis. Men might come and go, but Jane Austen was always there. In sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part.

And so I curled up in bed with Elizabeth and Darcy and read until the familiar words lulled me into calm and peace and harmony, and the next thing I knew I woke up here. But didn’t I also go for a swim, sometime after I ran into Wes and before I took P & P with me to bed? For some reason I seem to remember doing that, too, but now it’s all fuzzy. Maybe I’m mixing up two different days. After all, when had I ever delayed my need for pizza with a trip to the pool? Certainly not since breaking up with Frank. Which was another thing I could say in favor of being single: At least I didn’t have to deal with his disapproving looks.

Right now, I don’t want to think about Frank or Wes. I don’t want to think of all those hours I spent doing laps either, all in pursuit of a body one could only achieve through genetics or surgery or both.