A Walk with Jane Austen

by Lori Smith

  The pills themselves are tricky. I don't like how they control me, make me do things I cant do on my own. Tonight I took one, hoping it would be enough to guide me into sleep, but it didn t work; it is a unique kind of torture, being wide-awake, exhausted, and unable to do anything about it.

  Another symptom of whatever I have is that I often wake after several hours of sleep, as though my terribly hard-working Dickensian inner self has decided it is time to make the gruel. (But, oh, just the thought of gruel makes me want to throw up even now.)

  Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping, I imagine there are demons assigned to me, like Screwtape, poking my soul with a big, mean stick as I begin to drift off. They were active this evening, poking away, keeping me desperately awake.

  Not that the things I had to think about were altogether horrible…

  I need a remedial class in dating. Or maybe just in talking to boys.

  Wide-awake, exhausted, and nauseous, I watched the sun just beginning to rise. The fire alarm, which seemed to conspire against me, wouldn't stop going off last night, and I eventually grabbed my white hoodie and climbed down the spiral iron fire escape.

  The lawn was full, and I lurked in the back of the crowd, in pink-and-green-striped cropped-pant pajamas, trying not to wake up all the way. But when I spotted Jack, Paul, and Spencer, I decided waking up wouldn't be so bad and I joined them.

  Jack touched my arm. “Nice stripes,” he said, making me want to curl up with him and be cozy.

  For an hour it was like college. Paul kept getting calls on his cell phone from friends and kept saying, “I'm in England! Do you know what time it is here?” And as a group we decided that Jack should make reparations for something—the Scandinavians and their pillaging, I think—which was all terribly funny to me because by that point, it was around 1:00 a.m., and I'd taken two sleeping pills.

  When they finally let us back in, I was too shy to find Jack and say goodnight. I saw him looking around, maybe for me, and made a subconscious decision to sneak silently back up the stairs.

  There are numerous divergences between Jane and me, of course. One of the most significant is that Jane wrote in some way because she was a great conversationalist, full of wit in a day when wit was prized, a sharp observer of society. I write in many ways from weakness rather than strength—because I am at times a poor conversationalist, because there are things I can't sort out when I'm talking to people and have to put in writing to make anyone else see them.

  When Jane wrote Emma,she told her family that she was creating “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”1 I think she was wrong. Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is the one I have a hard time loving, with all her timidity and fear. She always seems to feel that she really shouldn't be in the room, that she is unworthy of notice, that she is not worth talking to. Perhaps I don't like Fanny because in some ways I share her weaknesses. I have more humor and strength, yet I manage so often to be queen of the socially awkward moment (a trait that, in some part, I come by honestly, as, at some level at least, it runs in the family, although my brother seems to have entirely escaped it).

  I think where I feel closest to Jane is in my singleness—in loving freedom and simultaneously longing for companionship. Jane wanted marriage if she could have a great marriage with real love; she was unwilling to settle for a relationship that was merely a good social move and would give her financial security. She wanted an equal, someone who would be an intellectual rival, who would respect her. She loved her life no doubt. She does not seem to have especially wanted children. But part of her hoped for the unexpectedly, unbelievably good match. Perhaps I am a bit presumptuous, but who could read her books and conclude otherwise?

  Jane Austen essentially created the chick-lit genre. We all know the formula—girl meets guy; girl falls in love with guy; guy breaks her heart; girl meets nicer, better-looking guy with more money, and they live happily ever after. Obstacles abound in Austens stories—lack of money on the part of the otherwise lovely heroine, meddling family members who pull lovers apart because they disapprove of the match— but these things are always overcome by the abundant worth of two good people who truly love each other.

  The love stories in Austen's own life echo these themes but without the “happily ever after” ending.

  Jane's first love, at twenty, was Tom Lefroy. He was a law student from Ireland, the nephew of her dear friend Anne's husband, and Anne may have introduced them. We know little about the relationship really. Much of what we know of Jane's life is from her letters, but her sister, Cassandra, burned many and mutilated more before passing them on to nieces and nephews late in her life. Perhaps Cassandra cut out the juiciest bits or, as Austen expert Deirdre Le Faye suggests, the parts that could have offended one family member or other.2 Either way, there are gaps.

  Jane and Tom spent some time together during the course of a few weeks, over Christmas and New Year's. He was fairly serious, quiet, and very good—maybe a balance for Jane's energetic humor. They bantered over Henry Fielding's Tom Jones,and after a ball, Jane wrote jokingly to Cassandra of “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.”3 She wrote about how the Lefroy household gives Tom a hard time about the attachment, so that when she pays a visit, he manages to hide. But he would pay her another visit, as was the custom, to thank her for partnering him at the ball, and the only fault she could really find with him was that his morning coat was “a great deal too light.”4

  There is much debate these days about just how in love Jane was with Tom and how much this relationship influenced her writing. Some say it was just a flirtation—clearly, in Jane's letters, she is being sarcastic, they say. To me she writes as if there is some depth to her feelings in spite of trying to laugh them off. “I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening,” she writes of their last meeting. “I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.”5 She sounds a little bit like my friends and I as well, telling stories of a romance that fell into the middle of a life that was largely without romantic interest, making much of a little thing. Yet it's easy to imagine her being teasing and sharp with Tom.

  Tom was from a good family but not wealthy. His father had been in the army. He was the oldest son, but it was a large family, eleven children with five daughters ahead of Tom, and he was made to feel that the future of the family was on his shoulders.6 He was expected to do well, to do much. Though the attachment seems to have been mutual, Anne and her husband stepped in and quickly sent Tom home. The family history is that Anne Lefroy was forever frustrated with Tom over this, his leading Jane on when he knew there was no chance he could propose.7

  Tom eventually married someone with an appropriately large fortune, had seven children, and went on to become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.8 He was no Darcy—not heir to great estates or wealth—but clearly his family had expectations Jane did not meet. If Jane wrote about family interference, she'd learned it firsthand. Tom may have adored her and she him, but she hadn't enough money to qualify. Most likely Jane never saw him again.

  When it ended, Jane wrote to Cassandra: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over—My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.”9 She was joking, of course. How deeply she felt the joke we will never really know. But her heart had been engaged for likely the first time.

  No doubt this relationship and her repartee with Tom fueled her writing. Mine will be fueled in part by things like climbing quietly back up the stairs when I really just wanted to say goodnight.

  The course of true love never did run smooth and all that. Yet should it be abandoned at that first halting difficulty? At this point in my life I am willing to err on the side of giving it more opportunity to prove itself true. Jack and I wandered through Oxford on an absolutely perfect seventy-something afternoon like tourists, taking pictures. We made our way slowly
through town—first Trinity College, then the Bodleian, and then our real destination of Magdalen College, where Lewis taught, which the guidebook calls “perhaps the most typical and beautiful Oxford college.”10

  Magdalen is gorgeous and immediately became one of my favorite places. It took us awhile to figure out the lay of the land, and we wandered into one of the fifteenth-century cloisters, with detailed fretwork in the archways, wonderful gargoyles, and a view of the bell tower just beyond where the college choir sings every May Day morning. Jack was taking my picture in one of the arches when a young guy, a tourist, offered to take our picture together and pronounced it “beautiful.” So there it was—the first somewhat awkward record of a friendship.

  We wandered out from the cloisters into an expanse of open sun and manicured lawn, the imposing New Building—“new” being relative, as it was new in 1733—directly ahead and on the right, a ways off, a lovely flower garden bordering Holywell Mill Stream and a little bridge over the river leading to Addisons Walk. The walk is about a mile round, often by the river, through a bit of wilderness where they sometimes graze the college flock of deer. It's here where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson walked, talking about faith, just before Lewis converted.

  Jack and I hung out on the bridge for a while, looking at the flowers, watching the water birds. Jack took a picture of me on the bridge; I generally hate pictures. They often manage to catch my weak chin at just the wrong angle so it looks like I have no chin at all. But my new theory is that one shouldn't strive to be beautiful. It's something to just be good-looking enough, and if you really smile in pictures and forget to worry about what you look like, they turn out surprisingly well. And maybe that state of mind worked. This one caught the infectious grin that was becoming my natural state.

  We started talking as we walked into town, and for the nearly four hours we were together we just talked. I'm not sure that these kinds of conversations can be accurately re-created (or perhaps that I'm capable of re-creating them). They are about small things that take on great importance because all of a sudden this other person has become the most important person in your life, at least for today, probably for tomorrow, and—if you're both lucky—maybe for a long time after that.

  Over Frappuccinos, Jack said somewhat awkwardly, “Since you write about singles stuff, I should tell you, I.…urn.…1 actually just started kind of seeing someone in North Carolina. Not that I'm not enjoying hanging out, but I wasn't expecting to meet someone. You know, this other thing just started, and I.…1 wasn't looking for anything.”

  “Oh—well, I really appreciate your telling me,” I said, mustering confidence and calmness, like I had been expecting this. “That means a lot.” I then proceeded to say something awkward, about a friend who had flown up from Atlanta to take me to dinner, as if to prove that I had relationship ties in the South as well. Inside I smarted. What was I thinking? Argh. And so what if there's a girl in North Carolina? Im here now and you like me, right?

  Jack said he and this girl had just started going out; their relationship wasn't really defined yet; he didn't know what was going to happen with it. But he wanted me to know. In some way that seemed very honorable, and somehow strange, and ultimately irrelevant. Serious enough to tell me and not serious enough to actually be anything. I was rattled and determined to see this as somehow chivalric.

  We moved on to things that can take months to get to in the course of everyday dating—his uncertainty about marriage and kids, my eagerness for them downplayed—trying to display it in the best possible light.

  Then we wandered through Christ Church Meadow for a while, all the way down the broad, gravel walking path to the River Isis and back, talking about all the stuff of life we have in common. He asked me what I wanted or enjoyed. I talked about renting a villa in Italy and inviting my friends, wanting to be fluent in Spanish and French and Italian, wanting to learn Greek and Hebrew and understand the cultural and historical setting of Jesus and write about those things, wanting to figure out how to really help the poor.

  He understood everything.

  In so many places our desires and goals seemed the same, or at least coming from such a similar place.

  “There are so many things I want to do. I'm afraid life wont be long enough,” I said.

  Jack replied slowly, “Well, you know, you don't have to do everything now.”

  I seemed to be perfecting a certain eau de travel and realized that the smells on this trip were all wrong. When I first opened my suitcase, I found a printed note saying that the TSA had inspected my bag and everything might not have been put back in the right place. It smelled horrible, like one of the paint compounds from my dad's hobby room where he works on his airplane models. I thought, Great, they've used some kind of chemical in my bag to detect traces of bombs, and now all my clothes smell. But it turned out to be my Professional Firma Nail Extra Strength Base and Top Coat (a manicure kit is a must), which had leaked into its small plastic zippered bag and somehow managed to infect all of my clothes. Ugh.

  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 sig
nificant 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.