My Jane Austen Summer (17 page)

S
ixby complained I was preoccupied when he arrived to brainstorm our follies act. "You need to snap out of it," he said when I failed to respond. "We need a clever act."

I didn't want to snap out of it. I wanted to be alone with Willis in my recent memories. "How about a one-woman show:
The Lost Letters of Jane Austen
?" I said absently, as I added numbers on my pad.

"Ooh, I've never done a one-woman show," he said, leaning back in Claire's chair, flipping through his book. He'd dressed in Regency breeches and white cotton shirt--on his day off, his jacket flung on the chair. "What would Magda say?"

Magda was busy at the moment, putting up a fight. Hard to believe she would fight for scruffy old Archie. But sometimes it seemed Magda was winning, displaying her exotic charms, exposing an inch of firm brown flesh as she abandoned her modest garb in favor of tight jeans and cropped tops. Omar's comment: "Forget scarves and veils. The attire-oppressed
women of the world are on hold while the future of Archie Porter is decided." And Vera worried that since Archie had moved back into his own rooms with his wife and children, Magda clearly had more time on her hands to pursue her funding goals.

Sheila's campaign suffered on the appearance front although her loose black pants and paisley tunics performed the public service of concealing her motherly midriff bulge. However, on another battlefront, Sheila was the Mother of His Children, a winning strategy she engaged at every opportunity, launching the children in the ballroom where they talked during scenes, the pub where they screamed, and the Freezer where they jumped on the furniture. Sheila's tactics were hard to ignore.

Accelerating her own battle plans, Vera urged me to prepare a real lease and business plan for Lady Weston by the end of the week. I tried to make her understand that Randolph would have to sign it this time around. I wanted to discuss this with Willis but he was still absent. He'd never been away this long and I had no way to reach him. The secretary at the church said he'd gone to London and she didn't know what his plans were.

"What are you doing?" Sixby asked, standing and walking to my desk where he sat on the corner.

"I'm calculating the proceeds from the teas."

"How much?"

"I'm still adding. I'll let you know." I suspected an exchange rate mistake because the total was running well over six thousand dollars so far. We charged twenty GBP per person for tea and sold scone mix the volunteers packaged and donated, but the total seemed high. If we held a tea every Wednesday, we could clear over fifteen thousand dollars before the end of August. Unless the volunteers grew tired of providing scones.

"I know." Sixby snapped his fingers. "Why not borrow one of your roommate's gowns," he said. "We can go up to my room and improv: Anhalt and Amelia Unchaperoned."

Sixby's remark made me realize how my life had changed. In a previous version of me, an uplifting piano sonata would have been playing in my head as I basked in the attention of this handsome actor. A month ago, I would have jumped at the chance to improv with Sixby. Back then Sixby was Shakespeare, Darcy, and all the male protagonists I'd ever fallen for rolled into one. Now, Willis was all I could think about. And Willis was nothing like Sixby. My Jane Austen sat on the other side of the desk making an alphabetical list of all of the unsavory men in her novels. She'd gotten as far as Mr. Collins.

"What's the book?" I asked Sixby.

"Love poetry. I've been contemplating the mysteries of love." Sixby sighed. "Shall I read?" he asked.

"Only if you are very quick," I said, ready to run upstairs again. Willis could have returned in the last hour.

"Here's a good one," he said, marking the place with his finger. His exquisite voice conveyed the poet's apology over the grave of a lover who'd been dead fifteen years. As the last syllable resonated, a lovely minor tone, I knew exactly how the poet felt. "'Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?'"

"Beautiful," I said. "You made me forget where I am."

"Emily Bronte." He closed the book. "I know how to reach you," he said, smiling, activating his dimples. "Have you ever been in love?" he asked. "Rather personal question, no?" He paused. "You needn't answer. Just curious." He reached for my hand but I stayed where I was. My feelings existed between me and Willis and no one else. Private and serious,
deep and considered, to speak of them with Sixby would be a profanity. I didn't answer.

"As for me," he said, "I'm afraid I'm too much a master of my emotions to experience the spontaneity of love."

"That's so sad," I said, employing mild sarcasm so My Jane Austen would know I was not falling for his line.

"Oh, it's very sad." Sixby laughed. "I can't tell you how many women have offered to help me."

My Jane Austen put her list down and stood, as if she would leave.

"But
you
, Lily." He gestured with both hands. "You're different. Let's try something," he said. "Stand up while I read. Close your eyes and feel a character, an alter ego building in your imagination."

I closed my eyes, conjuring Willis while Sixby read, sounding more and more like Willis. The delivery was so beautiful that I let go, carried away to the roof, the wind in my hair, the escape to the music room, and the presentation of the cookie. Willis stepped toward me, his hand outstretched; I felt Sixby's lips on mine yet the footsteps continued. And then the worst possible thing. Willis looked in at the door. Willis, who never ventured into the office. Our eyes met. My face burned.

"Oops. Wrong room," Willis said, vanishing as quickly as he'd appeared.

"Oh God," I said, hitting my head.

"We seem to have a knack for that," Sixby said, finally releasing me, oblivious to my distress. "That wasn't
me
by the way." Sixby cleared his throat.

"Who then?" I asked, angry.

"I confess; I was the dead guy in Emily Bronte's poem." He picked up his book. "But you see; this may work," he added.
"Next time you must borrow one of your roommate's lovely gowns and meet me in my room for some wicked improv."

∗ ∗ ∗

I climbed the stairs to the attic, mentally rehearsing the explanation I'd been kissing Emily Bronte's dead guy, each step a reprimand. When I saw Willis, he was sitting at his desk, staring into space. When he saw me, he lifted the cover of his laptop.

"Did he bite her?" I asked.

He straightened and looked just past me. "Yes, he did."

I stood in front of him, his desk between us. "Where have you been?" I asked.

"London," he said, feigning preoccupation with his keyboard although he hadn't turned it on yet. "I've got a lot of work to do." He pushed the laptop's power button. His expansive reading selections sat abandoned in a stack on the floor, replaced on the shelf by serious spines that said Thomas Merton, Soren Kierkegaard, and Bishop N. T. Wright. Luminaries gathered, I assumed, to support him in the resumption of his thesis. I watched him pretend to be interested in his screen until he squinted, hands still poised on the keyboard, and looked up. "Why?" he asked.

I could resolve this simple comedy of errors by articulating a calm response. But I shivered, and surging emotion threatened to overwhelm the place my voice should control. "Willis," I said, borrowing poise from My Jane Austen, who looked more dead than usual at the moment. Willis continued staring into space. My Jane Austen opened one eye and waited for me to speak. "What you don't know about what you just saw in the office"--I inhaled, my voice slipping--"is that Sixby and I were rehearsing for the Founder's Night Follies."

Willis grimaced, glancing down immediately. I crossed my
arms. Priests should be more forgiving. "I have no interest in Sixby," I said, wishing to see his screen, unable to believe that he could type anything other than random keys under the circumstances. "Willis, this is important to me. There is nothing between me and Sixby. What you saw was theatre."

Willis stopped typing. "I believe you." He shrugged.

He didn't believe me at all. "Why are you doing this?" My protagonist voice got shoved aside, bullied by my default tendency to break down and cry.

"Doing what?" he asked, feigning perfect calm, utter reserve.

"Being so cold." Clearly, I could walk out. Part of me wanted to leave him, the early rumbling of thunder beat in my chest and I considered allowing the conflict to escalate, the pain to tear into me. Where were the people who found such happiness in the music room?

"What were you doing in London?" I asked.

Willis sighed, pushing his chair back. He looked different; he'd gotten his hair cut. He reluctantly raised his head; his expression revealed someone stuck in a difficulty. "Same things I always do," he said. "Collect mail, pay bills, water plants."

He hadn't been breaking up with his Someone Else. "Willis," I said.

He looked up briefly, the chair creaking. "Don't," he said, slowly shaking his head, closing his eyes. He was leaving me, closing doors we'd just opened. He'd gone to London for the big dose of
her
, necessary to counteract the effect of his great indulgence with
me.
And now he needed a reason to pull back from me. If he could just get a foothold in the opposite direction, he could backtrack and regroup, and my apparent bad behavior with Sixby provided the traction he needed. How could he be so indecisive?

"It doesn't matter," he said.

How could anything between us
not
matter? As if floods didn't matter. Or murder. "What doesn't matter?" I asked. "When you go, you take the air with you." I swallowed. "Color and light follow you out the door. When you're gone, my world is dead.
That
doesn't matter?"

He slumped in his chair, folding arms across his chest.

I couldn't keep the words down; they erupted like nature, out of my control. I sighed, speaking to the top of his head. "Willis, I love you."

In the ensuing silence, I pulled the green plastic chair opposite Willis and sat, my knees touching his legs, and took his hand. He offered his other hand, not speaking, not professing love he couldn't deliver. The torn expression on his face made me realize his struggle wasn't entirely about me. His conflict existed before he met me. He'd come to Newton Priors to resolve his issues in the solitude of this attic. I distracted him. The vampire novel and I together provided a safe haven where Willis could relax and forget the strife for a time. But cosmic soul mate notwithstanding, I'd managed to miss the iron wall dividing him. "What's her name?" I stopped breathing. Willis took his hands back and I braced myself, sensing that even in this foreign country where I barely knew anyone, I would recognize her name.

He looked me straight in the eyes for the first time. "Philippa Lockwood."

Not just a name but a whole world of obstacles.

"That explains a lot," I said. "Did you think I'd never find out?"

Willis breathed deeply and I sensed his relief. His arms reached for me, lighter, having shifted some of their heavy burden onto my shoulders. He pulled me onto his lap and when he kissed me, I felt not only his affection, but gratitude.

I
set aside the lease I'd prepared for the next day's trip to the hospital as Omar walked into the office. "Go without me and save a seat," I said. "I'll be there in a minute."

"It's not just a lecture," Omar said of the evening's panel discussion, billed as "The Fanny Wars." "Sheila got a babysitter so she could go. And Magda will be there." Omar tapped his knuckles on my doorframe the way my boss once punctuated his gentle warnings. "You don't want to miss it."

"Save me a seat," I said. Even sequestered two floors above the Archie Wars, I grasped the dramatic possibilities of Archie, Sheila, and Magda in the same room. My Jane Austen was surely on-site already with an unobstructed view of the parties. All the same, once Omar left, I clicked on the e-mail I'd been ignoring for days, unwilling to sacrifice my happiness to the misery in Texas. But, now, one more hit could hardly matter. I clicked on Karen's message, "More Pictures." The page took forever to come up.

"Lily?"

Sheila Porter loomed in my doorway, a child in her arms and two more around her feet. She'd taken noticeable pains with her hair and makeup and I wanted to weep for her desperation. "Yes. Sheila. Hello," I said.

"Lily, I'm so sorry to bother you," she said, squinting from the pain of bothering me, "but could I leave the boys in here with you for just a bit?"

"Well, I--" I choked. "What happened to the babysitter?"

"She's delayed."

"How delayed?"

"Just a few minutes. I told her to fetch the children from you, here in the office."

"Well, it's all set then."

"If you don't mind." She squinted again and I didn't see any way out. "Thanks awfully, Lily." She closed the door.

The older boy grinned at me. One of the twins stood at the door crying and the other yanked an orange electrical cord as the e-mail radiated in my face. I grabbed the cord from the baby's hand and sat him in my lap as I read.

The baby slid off my lap and toddled over to his crying twin, tears mixing with mucus running from nose to mouth. I wanted to sit on the floor and cry with him. Older brother amused himself at Claire's desk, drawing on her blotter. "No," I said too emphatically, taking the pen away and setting him on the floor.

The e-mail had been sent a full week ago. I'd managed to
ignore reality for an entire week, which meant the wedding was only days away. If I stopped now, ignored the pictures she'd added as attachments, I might recover with minimal damage. But I clicked on the first picture and waited. The shot Karen had described filled the screen: my dad kissing Sue at a New Year's Eve party. No mistaking the shirt, my Christmas present to him, dating the shot precisely. Her arms clasped behind his neck, his hands on her lower back, behaving badly while the cancer grew in my mother. The damage done, I began shivering from the inside out.

I clicked on the second picture, then rose to fetch Sheila's oldest boy from Nigel's desk. He pulled paper and notebooks from a bottom drawer. I relocated him to the front of the office where I could see him while the next picture filled my screen: Sue standing near a "Welcome to California" sign, like a thousand other vacation pictures in family scrapbooks. Posing in a sundress, Sue smiles suggestively at the photographer. One arm extends toward the little Karmann Ghia my father drove, the car my mother called his "mid-life crisis." He
sold
the car ten years ago.

The oldest boy had found a highlighter and drew long fluorescent lines on his brother's arms. "Oh no, you don't," I said, swiping the marker from his hand, ignoring his startled expression. Both boys cried.

Unable to stop with the pictures, I clicked on the last link. My head felt hot, my insides like lava as though I might vomit, while the oldest boy made noise at Claire's desk. The last picture was obviously older, the color faded. Sue's hair is darker and permed; her eyes still have the spark of youth I recognized in younger pictures of my mother. They are sitting at a restaurant table, his arm around her shoulders, her head leaning toward him, his mouth forming a word beneath his mustache. Sue had included this shot because of the mus
tache. My father had a mustache in his late forties. My father knew Sue at least twenty-five years ago.

The office door opened and I looked up at the babysitter. The twins were sitting on the floor crying. The oldest boy called, "Felicity!" from Claire's desk, where he rattled a box of breath mints in welcome. The babysitter ignored me, picking up a twin, staring strangely at the oldest boy. "What are you doing?" she asked him. She left the baby and grabbed the mints out of the oldest boy's hand.

"What happened?" I asked, turning my chair, still reeling from the emotional burden of an affair conducted over my entire lifetime.

"Sit still." Felicity spoke calmly, ignoring me.

"Iwanmymummy." The child began crying.

"He's pushed a mint up his nose," Felicity said, scowling. "At least one."

"No," I said, as if it couldn't have happened, as if I'd been paying attention.

"Be still," Felicity said. "I can't see it." She poked up his nose and the child screamed. "Oh shit," she said.

"How about if I ask him to blow his nose?" I said. I found a tissue and held it up to the child's face, demonstrating how to blow. Then I tried counting: "One, two, three, blow!"

"Mummeee," he cried, and I wanted to cry, too. Then a mint dropped on the floor. Mints were rolling all over the desk and it could have been one of those.

"Did that come from his nose?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I didn't know how she could be sure.

"Mummeee," he wailed.

∗ ∗ ∗

When I arrived at the Fanny Wars panel discussion, one of the men was citing Lionel Trilling's famous comment,
"Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of
Mansfield Park
."

The audience laughed; a few clapped or made comments.

"With all due respect." A woman pointed her pen and took the microphone they passed among themselves. "I keep going back to John Wiltshire's essay suggesting Fanny is a radically traumatized personality, thanks largely to the abuse of Mrs. Norris and neglect of everyone except Edmund. Fanny turns inward, creates a life for herself from her reading, an intense inner world that cannot be reciprocated by those around her."

Someone else took the microphone and said, "Jane Austen's own mother thought Fanny insipid." The audience laughed. "But seriously," the new speaker continued, "I think Jane Austen messed up on this one."

Sheila was there for the discussion, sitting alone.