My Jane Austen Summer

by Cindy Jones

  "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.

  Fifteen

  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.

  To: Lillian Berry

  Sent: July 3, 5:45 A.M.

  From: Karen Adams

  Subject: More Pictures

  Lily,

  I don't hear from you very often so I imagine things must be going better. I thought I'd save bad news for your homecoming but so much has happened that I don't think it would be right not to tell you. Also, I'm worn out from dealing with it alone. It would really help me cope if we could talk.

  I confronted Sue about the pictures she left out for me to find. She put one picture by the phone, one in the bathroom, and one on the mantel. The woman is twisted, Lily. She told me I had a problem. Me? When I spoke to Dad about it, he asked me to back off, that this had been hard on Sue as well as us. Can you believe it??!! I just want to scream. Anyway, I took the pictures to show Greg and to scan for you.

  Do you think Mom knew? I can't believe she did. But the relationship has been going on for years. I just don't know what to think.

  I'm still planning to attend the wedding, just to keep the lines open. Sue has a daughter who will be there. Not surprisingly, Sue and her daughter are estranged--information I got from Dad. So it will be a lovely event that I'm sure you're sorry to miss. Greg will be there to support me. He's been great.

  I feel like we've lost both parents.

  I miss you,

  Karen

  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 mustache. 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.

  Sixteen

  Having spent the drive to London imagining Philippa Lockwood, I now prepared to meet her in the flesh. Somewhere within the teeming warren of the hospital, Willis's beloved stood at her grandmother's bedside, dreaming of her happy future with Willis. She persisted in her mistake, oblivious to the fact he'd spent days in the attic with me, introduced me to the roof, and made love to me in the music room.

  In the hospital, Vera approached the information desk while I watched people coming and going, any one of whom could be Philippa. I walked the brightly lit halls like a spy, studying the block and diamond pattern in the tile floor, breathing the mix of chemicals and sick body odors. Fortunately, I had no appetite to lose; I hadn't eaten much lately and my clothes felt loose. Vera looked nervous, too.

  "Do you have the lease?" Vera asked.

  "For the last time, yes." She'd asked every five minutes, as if she had no memory.

  Vera looked at the numbers on the doors and then the paper in her hand. She stopped and my stomach lurched. I'd harbored a fear of the horror behind hospital doors from my childhood service projects, delivering whatnots to elderly patients in declining stages of death and deca
y. Now the door concealed a new horror: my competition. A sensible person would have fled. I, on the other hand, having accepted the role of Other Woman, entered the room. At first, it seemed I had nothing to fear. A very thin young woman wearing tight jeans stood facing the bed, her back to us, coaxing Lady Weston to eat.

  Nigel and Willis had been right. Lady Weston could hardly speak, so frail the part below the sheets didn't stick out in the places you would expect, no indication she had an awareness of things going on around her. She was busy getting ready to die and our festival concerns were inappropriate. I knew immediately I wouldn't press a legal document on this woman.

  "Philippa," Vera said. "I bring greetings from Nigel." The young woman turned at the sound of her name. I gawked at her.

  "Vera," she said. "How thoughtful of you to come." Outwardly gracious, I sensed something private cautioning us not to make a habit of showing up here. I studied her for what made her different from the rest of us. Her scoop-necked sweater did not come from the mall. It fit as though by magic, its shade of blue from a palette reserved for aristocrats. Every shift of her torso struck a pose; each movement released a fragrant breeze of her natural scent and revealed a new aspect of her perfection: white teeth, thin wrists, soft brown earlobes. Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked. She looked for Randolph, who spoke with a doctor in the far corner of the private room while Vera and I stood against the wall like peasants, both chairs filled with Philippa's and Randolph's things.

  As hard as I tried, I couldn't imagine Willis telling her about me.

  Philippa returned to her task, coaxing Lady Weston to eat applesauce. "If you don't eat, they'll come and stick more tubes in you, Nana," she said, in a British head voice, blatantly denying Lady Weston's prerogative to die in peace. "You won't like that." Philippa glanced at Randolph, still huddled with the doctor. "Would you like me to get you a pudding, Nana? Would that be better?"