The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Even Bernadette was silent with disapproval. The rain drummed on the roof, the fire sputtered. The women looked at their hands or at the fire, but not at one another. It was Allegra who finally spoke. “Good as the secondary characters are, I do think Austen gets better at them in her later books. The women—Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and that other one—are kind of a mishmash. Hard to keep straight. And I loved Mr. Palmer’s acid tongue, but then he reforms and disappears very disappointingly.”

  In fact, Allegra had instantly recognized herself in the sour Mr. Palmer. She, too, often thought of sharp things to say, and she said them more often than she wished. Mr. Palmer didn’t suffer fools and neither did Allegra, but it wasn’t something she was proud of. It didn’t spring, as Austen suggested, from the desire to appear superior, unless lack of patience was a superior quality. “Plus”—Allegra allowed herself one more moment’s irritation over the silencing of Mr. Palmer—“I do think Sense and Sensibility stretches our credulity at the end. I mean, the sudden marriage of Robert Ferrars and Lucy Steele! The later books are more smoothly plotted.”

  “It requires some hand-waving,” Grigg agreed. (That stern moment of silence utterly lost on him! What would it take?) “You see, of course, the effect Austen’s going for, that moment of misdirection, but you wish she hadn’t had to go to such lengths for it.”

  The Austen-bashing was getting out of hand. Sylvia looked to Jocelyn, whose face was stoic, her voice calm but firm. “I think Austen explains it very well. My credulity remains unstretched.”

  “I don’t have any trouble with it,” Sylvia said.

  “Perfectly in character,” said Prudie.

  Allegra frowned in her pretty way, chewing on a fingernail. You could see that she worked with her hands. Her nails were short, and the skin around them rough and dry. You could see that she took things to heart. Hangnails had been teased loose and then stripped, leaving painful peeled bits by her thumbs. Prudie would have liked to take her somewhere for a manicure. When your fingers were long and tapered like that, you might as well make the most of them.

  “I suppose,” Allegra conceded, “if the writer’s not allowed to pull an occasional rabbit out of a hat, there would be no fun in writing a book at all.”

  Well, Prudie thought, Allegra would be the one to know where writers found their fun. Prudie herself had no problems with girl-on-girl. She opened her mouth to tease Allegra about her book-writing girlfriend, which would certainly make this point, as well as alert Grigg to the lay of the land.

  But Grigg was agreeing again. Really, he had become very agreeable where Allegra was concerned! He was seated next to her on the couch, and Prudie tried to remember how this had come about. Had it been the only seat left, or had he schemed for it?

  Usually Allegra managed to work her sexuality into any conversation. This was a point of contention with her mother, who thought it rude to press sexual details onto slight acquaintances. “Your paperboy doesn’t need to know,” she’d say. “Your mechanic doesn’t care.” Allegra would never believe that homophobia wasn’t at the bottom of this. “I won’t be closeted,” she declared. “It’s not in my nature.” But now, just when the information might be usefully shared, she was suddenly, irritatingly silent on the subject.

  “How’s Corinne?” Prudie asked impishly. “Speaking of writers.”

  “Corinne and I have gone our separate ways,” Allegra answered, which Prudie then remembered she’d been told. Allegra’s face had turned to stone. But that business with Corinne had been months ago, surely. Prudie trusted that it wasn’t too sensitive a subject to be raised now. No one had told her they were never to mention Corinne’s name, because she was certainly capable of holding her tongue when necessary.

  Grigg was flipping through his enormous complete-works-of. Why did men always have to have the biggest books? It wasn’t clear he’d even heard.

  While Allegra liked to describe herself as a garden-variety lesbian, she knew that the truth was more complicated. Sexuality is rarely as simple as it is natural. Allegra was not entirely indifferent to men, just to men’s bodies. She was often attracted to the men in books; they seemed, as a rule, more passionate than the women in books, though actual women seemed more passionate than actual men. As a rule.

  Allegra was aroused most by passion itself. Poems of the confessional sort. Vistas, all kinds, even swampy. Swelling music. Danger. She needed to feel to feel alive.

  Adrenaline was her drug of choice. This was not something she talked much about, and especially not to people who knew her mother. Sylvia believed in being careful, though she also believed that being careful was often not enough. She saw the world as an obstacle course. You picked your way across it while the terrain slipped about and things fell or exploded or both. Disasters arrived in the form of accidents, murders, earthquakes, disease, and divorce. She’d tried to raise sensible, cautious children. During the high school years, when Allegra knew that Sylvia had been congratulating herself on her daughter’s good appetite, good grades, sweet friends, sober habits, Allegra had been cutting herself.

  Allegra and Corinne met in a small plane on Allegra’s twenty-eighth birthday. She’d spent the night with her parents, and her dad had made her waffles in the morning. Then she’d left, telling them she was meeting friends back in the city. Instead she’d gone to a tiny airport in Vacaville for an appointment she’d made months earlier. This was her very first solo jump. She hesitated at the last minute, with the sky roaring past her—she wasn’t insane—and wondered whether she was going to go through with it. She was more afraid than she’d been on her first tandem jump. She’d been warned of this, but it still surprised her. If she could have backed down without anyone’s knowing, she would have. Instead, merely to save face, she threw herself out. She pulled the cord too soon. The instant she did, she wished she were free-falling again. That was the best part, and she saw she would have to do this again, and better next time. The chute opened, jerking her upward, taking her breath, the straps compressing her breasts. She grabbed the cords, pulled herself into a better position. How odd, to be minding the uncomfortable straps at the very moments in which she was plunging to earth from a plane. “That’s one small step for a man, and it’s a bit hot in this spacesuit.”

  The fall became quiet, contemplative. She was surprised at how long it seemed to last, how she experienced each second of it with such clarity. She came down hard, landing on her butt and then tipping so that she crushed the point of her elbow, and her butt hurt immediately, but she didn’t feel her elbow at first. She lay, looking up, with the chute spilled behind her. Clouds floated, birds flew. Her blood was still plummeting deliciously. Corinne and the tandem master drifted over her. Allegra could see the bottoms of Corinne’s boots, which meant Corinne was in the wrong position. Like Mary Poppins.

  Allegra tried to stand, and as she tipped herself upright, a white-hot wire shot through her arm. Her ears were full of sea sounds; her eyes were full of light. There was a smell like tar. She took a step, pitched forward into the void.

  She came to with Corinne speaking. “Are you all right? Can you answer me?” The words passed over like the shadows of birds, and then the darkness spread silently out from those shadows. The next time she awoke, she was in Corinne’s arms.

  It was an irresistible way to meet. By the time they got to the hospital they were partners in crime. Sylvia mustn’t be told about the jump, but Allegra was still too faint, too fading in and out, to trust herself on the phone with her mother. “Don’t tell her anything,” Allegra said. She remembered how she’d broken her foot years before, in kindergarten, falling off the monkey bars. She’d spent a night in the hospital and Sylvia had stayed the whole time, sitting by the bed in one of those awful plastic chairs, never closing her eyes. Allegra would have said she was closer to Daniel than to Sylvia—even within the family there was something guarded about Sylvia—but now, with her arm hurting horribly, she wanted her mother. “Make her come.”


  She lay on the gurney, her mind drifting over the white swirling contours of the ceiling like snow. Corinne punched her cell phone and then picked up Allegra’s unhurt hand while she talked, stroking it with her thumb. “Mrs. Hunter?” Corinne said. “You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Allegra’s. Allegra is fine. We think her arm is broken, but I’m here at the Vacaville Kaiser with her and she’s going to be fine.” Corinne described, in great detail, an unfortunate chain of events. A friendly dog, a boy with a ball, a pebbly patch of road, Allegra on a bicycle. Sylvia bought it all. These things happened, even when dogs were friendly, even when bike helmets were worn. Allegra had always been so careful to wear her bike helmet. But sometimes it just didn’t matter how careful a person was. She and Daniel would be there as soon as they could. They’d hope to thank Corinne for her kindness in person.

  Allegra was impressed. Anyone who could lie as effortlessly as Corinne was someone to keep on the right side of. You would want her lies told for and not to you.

  But Corinne turned out not to be the thrill-seeker Allegra assumed. Later, when Allegra mentioned some ideas that might add a touch of adrenaline to their lovemaking, Corinne was unreceptive. She’d been skydiving only as an antidote to writer’s block. She’d hoped to shake something loose. She saw the void as the blank page; she was throwing herself onto it. The skydiving had been a metaphor.

  But it hadn’t helped, and she would be a fool to repeat the experiment. “You broke your arm!” she would say, as if Allegra didn’t know this. Corinne kept herself on the ground, at safe speeds, inside her apartment, drinking cups of fretful tea. She was a dental hygienist, but not a passionate one—she’d chosen it because it seemed like a job that would allow her time to write. Really, she lived the most boring life, though Allegra was totally in love with her before she saw this. The only part of Corinne that Allegra had seen clearly in those hours at the hospital when she was flying on painkillers and falling falling falling in love was the lying.

  Sylvia had uncorked a nice Petit Syrah, something that went well with cheese and crackers, the rain and the fire. Jocelyn had drunk just enough to feel companionable, not quite enough to feel witty. She was holding up her glass so the firelight came through it. It was a heavy, faceted crystal, a wedding gift once, now unfortunately clouded by thirty-two years of hard water in the dishwasher. If only Sylvia had taken proper care.

  “Sense and Sensibility features one of Austen’s favorite characters—the handsome debaucher,” Jocelyn said. “She’s very suspicious of good-looking men, I think. Her heroes tend to be actively nondescript.” Twirling her glass so the ruby-colored wine rose in thin sheets and fell again. Daniel was a nondescript man, though Jocelyn wouldn’t say it and Sylvia would never concede it. Of course, in Austenworld, that was all to his credit.

  “Except for Darcy,” Prudie said.

  “We haven’t gotten to Darcy yet.” There was a warning in Jocelyn’s voice. Prudie took it no further.

  “Her heroes have better hearts than her villains. They’re deserving. Edward is good people,” said Bernadette.

  “Well, of course,” in Allegra’s smoothest, most melodious tones. Probably only her mother and Jocelyn would know how impatient such an obvious point made her. Allegra took a gulp of wine so big Jocelyn could hear it going down.

  “In real life,” said Grigg, “women want the heel, not the soul.” He spoke with great bitterness, eyelashes pumping. Jocelyn knew a lot of men who believed this. Women don’t want nice men, they cry out over beers, to any woman nice enough to listen. They condemn themselves loudly, lamenting their uncontrollable, damnable niceness. In fact, when you got to know these men better, lots of them weren’t as nice as they believed themselves to be. There was no percentage in pointing this out.

  “But Austen’s not entirely unsympathetic to Willoughby in the end,” Bernadette said. “I love that bit where he confesses to Elinor. You can feel Austen softening just the way Elinor does, in spite of herself. She won’t allow that he’s a good person, because he’s not, but she lets you feel for him, just for a moment. She has to balance it on a knife edge—too much and you’ll be wishing him with Marianne after all.”

  “Structurally that confession bookends the long story Brandon tells her.” Another writerly observation from Allegra. Corinne might be gone, Jocelyn thought, but her ghost certainly remained, reading Allegra’s books, making Allegra’s points. Perhaps Jocelyn had been too hard on Allegra earlier. She’d neglected to factor in Corinne when calculating the loss of Daniel. Poor darling.

  “Poor Elinor! Willoughby on one side, Brandon on the other. She is quite entre deux feux.” Prudie had a bit of lipstick on her teeth, or else it was wine. Jocelyn wanted to lean across and wipe it off with a napkin, the way she did when Sahara needed tidying. But she restrained herself; Prudie didn’t belong to her. The fire sculpted Prudie’s face, left the hollows of her cheeks hollow, brightened her deep-set eyes. She wasn’t pretty like Allegra, but she was attractive in an interesting way. She drew your eye. She would probably age well, like Anjelica Huston. If only she would stop speaking French. Or go to France, where it would be less noticeable.

  “And Lucy, too,” Bernadette said. “Something about Elinor. Everyone wants to tell her their secrets. She encourages intimacy without meaning to.”

  “Why doesn’t Brandon fall in love with her, I wonder?” Jocelyn asked. Jocelyn would never second-guess Austen, not in a million years, but that was the match she would have tried to make. “They’re perfect for each other.”

  “No, he needs Marianne’s animation,” said Allegra. “Because he has none of his own.”

  Corinne craved confession. Where Allegra wished to be teasingly intimidated before lovemaking, Corinne wished to be soothed with secrets afterward. “I want to know everything about you,” she said, which was just what a lover should say, and roused no suspicions. “Especially the things you’ve never told anyone.”

  “Once I say them, they’ll change,” Allegra protested. “They won’t be secrets anymore.”

  “No,” said Corinne. “They’ll be our secrets. Trust me.”

  So Allegra told her:

  1. There was a special class at my grammar school. A class for retarded children. Sometimes we saw them, but mostly they were kept away. They had a different recess, a different lunchtime. Maybe they only came for half the day.

  One of these children was a boy named Billy. He carried a basketball wherever he went, and he sometimes talked to it. Nonsense, gibberish. I used to think that he was only aping human conversation, that he didn’t understand it involved actual words and people who talked back. He wore a hat, squashed down on his head, which made his ears stick out like Dopey in Snow White. His nose ran a lot. It made me unhappy to think about him, or about any of them. Mostly I didn’t.

  One day I saw him at the edge of the playground, where he wasn’t supposed to be. I thought he’d get in trouble if anyone else saw him. The teacher for the special class always seemed to be shouting at someone. So I went up to him, congratulating myself the whole time on how caring I was, how I could talk to Billy just as if he were a real boy. But when I got close I saw he had his penis in his hand. He showed it to me, laid it flat along his palm for me to look at. It twitched there, like it was being poked with pins. I went back to my friends.

  A few weeks later, there was a day when my father picked me up after class. He was distracted by something; I felt ignored. So I told him how there was this boy at school who’d made me look at his penis. An older boy. Daddy was more upset than I’d bargained for; right away I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. He demanded the boy’s name, stopped to look the family up in the phone book at the drugstore, drove over to their house, banged on the front door. A woman came. She had braids like a child, but gray hair; it struck me as odd. She wore those winged glasses. Daddy started to talk and she started to cry. But angrily at first. “None of you give a damn about us,” she said. I wasn’t used to people swearing, so I was shoc
ked. And then she wasn’t angry anymore; it was more like despair. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “I expect you to talk to your boy—” Daddy was saying, when Billy appeared behind her, holding his stupid ball and muttering. Daddy stopped mid-sentence.

  Daddy had a younger brother who was retarded. He died when he was fifteen, hit by a car. I’ve always been afraid that I wouldn’t love a child unless it was beautiful. I’ve always been afraid to have children because of that. But Daddy says his mother loved her retarded child best. She always said that a mother’s love goes where it’s needed.

  After his brother died, Daddy tried to get his mother to go out more. He and Mom tried to take Grandma to movies and concerts and plays. But she usually said no. He would drop by to see how she was doing, and she’d be sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window. “I can’t think of a blessed thing I want to do anymore,” she’d say.

  So Billy was standing behind his mother, talking to his basketball with more and more agitation in his voice. Daddy was apologizing, but Billy’s mom was having none of it. “What do you know?” she asked. “With your pretty little girl going off to college one day. Marrying. Having more pretty children for you.”

  We got back in the car and drove home. Daddy said, “I wouldn’t have added to that woman’s troubles for anything in the world.” He said, “You must have known there was an important part of the story you were leaving out.” He said, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have handled things very differently.” “Go to your room,” he said. I hadn’t known I could make him that angry. I was afraid he’d stopped loving me. He wouldn’t take my hand. He wouldn’t look at me.

  I couldn’t defend myself, even to myself. I tried. I thought about how I’d had no idea he would get so upset, no idea she would get so upset. I didn’t know there would be tears. I wouldn’t have said a word if I’d known. But why had I said a word? I’d just been idly angling for attention. I hadn’t told Daddy that Billy was retarded, because I knew I’d get more attention doing it the other way. I hadn’t even minded when Billy showed me his penis. It seemed kind of friendly.