Austenland

  It was strange creeping through that big house at night, and she had the itchy sensation of being watched or followed.

  “Who’s there?” she asked once, feeling very “Turn of the Screw.” Did someone see her coming from Martin’s? Would she be sent home? Would he be fired?

  No one answered.

  She locked her chamber door behind her and didn’t bother to ring for Matilda as it was so late. It was impossible to do up her corset without help, but she had undressed alone, though somewhat awkwardly, on other occasions. Stripped to her chemise, she melted into the cool sheets. She could smell Martin on her hands, and she gleefully cozied into her pillows, enjoying the sensation of having recently been kissed.

  Of course it meant nothing beyond the fun of it, because she’d given up on men and love, after all, and was quite firm with herself about hoping too much. But it had been nice. And a first for Jane—a harmless fling!

  Tonight, Jane had been kissed. Tonight she thought, Mr. Darcy who?

  Boyfriend #3

  Dave Atters, AGE SIXTEEN

  She really liked this one, the power forward on the high school varsity team and the beginning of her unhealthy infatuation with basketball. She giggled and sighed and dreamed. He said jump, and she leaped. But when he parked his spoiled-boy convertible in front of her house after a date and thrust his hand up her skirt, she pushed him away. When she wouldn’t relent, he ordered her out of the car. At school, he acted as though they’d never met.

  Years later, she considered seeing a therapist about this one until she realized that Dave “Fancy Hands” Atters wasn’t the guy holding her back—the blame really lay with Fitzwilliam “I love you against my better judgment” Darcy. Besides, there’d been the night of Homecoming when she and Molly had spray-painted she-male on the side of Dave’s convertible. That had been fairly therapeutic.

  days 5–6

  JANE COULD SCARCELY WAIT FOR night to come again. Social rules required that the ladies now visit Pembrook Cottage, and then Miss Heartwright had to be invited over to dine yet again. Jane had become the fourth woman in a three-gentleman household. Though the colonel’s smiling eyes often sought her out, and she was able to flay Mr. Nobley verbally at dinner, her attention kept dancing to thoughts of bedspreads on the curtain rod, root beer and television, and a man who smelled of gardens. Something real.

  After Martin’s room, life in the drawing room seemed dulled and fuzzy—waiting for the gentlemen while chatting about nothing, welcoming the gentlemen and continuing to chat about nothing, every topic harmless and dry, everyone holding themselves a careful arm’s distance away.

  What a crock, she thought. What absolute boredom and inanity. It can’t really have been like this. And if it was, why didn’t all those Regency women go insane?

  After a painfully long hour pressed into playing speculation, she declared she would retire and sneaked out to the servants’ quarters.

  She didn’t intend to make out with Martin again. But she did anyway. He was so cute and funny and so-not-Mr.-Darcy. And she felt so light and silly and so-not-typical-Jane. What a last hurrah he was, this tall, coy Englishman who watched basketball. Nothing like her fantasy, nothing like anything she’d done before. She didn’t once try to steer the conversation to the topic of whether he wanted one day to be a father (her oft-used test), and she wasn’t even tempted to daydream about a wedding with that soaring figure by her side. A true miracle.

  The next morning at breakfast, she looked at the gentlemen and felt proud, perhaps even smug. A house full of Regency dreamboats and she chose the root-beer-sipping gardener. Martin was appearing to be a serendipitous answer to her Darcy therapy.

  The third night, by the time she’d arrived at Martin’s apartment, his bedspread was already blocking the window, Stevie Wonder was playing on his CD player (“very superstitious”), and his bedside table was set up with a towel as a tablecloth and a Coke bottle full of fresh lavender.

  “You mentioned your longing for familiar food,” he said, and pulled out a McDonald’s bag.

  They ate the cold meat-product hamburgers and nearly potato-free fries by the light of television static, which had become to Jane more romantic than candles, and traded tragic childhood stories.

  “I was twelve and my mom still wouldn’t let me shave my legs,” Jane said. “One night I stole her razor and shaved in bed. In the dark. Without soap.”

  “I was a punk kid, horribly skinny at age ten, and liked to throw eggs at cars. Yes, I know, the creativity of young boys is inspiring. I made the mistake of hitting the car of Gerald Lewis, the neighborhood’s bodybuilding record holder, who still lived with his mum. He slung me up by my belt on a tree branch eight feet off the ground. I hung there for an hour.”

  Tonight she would definitely leave without so much as a good-bye kiss. She was in this for the company, after all. This was not a reality TV show where the producers, in attorney-approved speech, persuaded the bachelorette to make out with every hunk in the game. Then, as she stood against the door, her hand on the doorknob, he leaned over to kiss her cheek.The salty smell of man deluged her, and she leaped up to reach his lips, wrapping her legs around his middle, separated by oodles of skirt.

  “How tall are you anyway?” she asked.

  “About two hundred centimeters,” he said, his glance flicking from her eyes to her lips. “Six-foot-six to you, Miss American Pie.”

  She held on to his neck and he held her against the door, kissing until they couldn’t breathe. Making out with Martin was perhaps the most fun kissing she’d ever had. His hands seemed impatient, and she marveled at his ability to keep them out of the No Fly Zones. The result was the passion didn’t escalate to frenzy. It was soft and ardent, the focus just on the kissing, just on the pressure of two bodies near, and the exhilarating restraint. For Jane, the thrill and danger felt like an extreme sport.

  “You should probably go,” he said.

  “Mm-hm,” she mumbled, her mouth on his, her hands investigating the girth of his chest.

  She didn’t want to go. He didn’t want her to go, either. She could feel the eagerness in his hands, the speed of his breathing. He groaned regret, but he grabbed her waist and placed her back on her feet.

  “As much as I hate to, I really should walk you to the door.”

  She laughed. She was already at the door—pressed against it, in fact. He turned the knob, letting in the drenched smell of night.

  “Good night, Miss Erstwhile.” He kissed her hand.

  Jane went through the door backward as though she departed from the presence of a king, turned around, and found herself walking crooked.

  The night was perfect, the darkness reclining smooth and full on the garden, as rich as a painting of a classical nude. The leaves churned above Jane’s head. The pale snaking garden paths hinted at movement, at possibilities not seen. All the beauty of the cool autumn darkness seemed too much to comprehend, and her artist’s instinct perked up. She told it to hush—now was not the time to work out how to paint an English night. She was spinning from this unexpected find inside Austenland. A real man. A tall man! Someone to kiss and make her feel sexy and fun. Someone who didn’t insist on more than she could give, who allowed her to live in perfect moments, who made her want to smile instead of fret about future what-ifs. For the first time in years, or perhaps ever, Ms. Jane Hayes felt . . . relaxed.

  She plunged into bed and closed her eyes. And wondered how early she could slip away to see Martin again tomorrow.

  Boyfriend #4

  Ray Riboldi, AGE SEVENTEEN

  Ray was pockmarked and didn’t wash his hair every day, but it didn’t matter, because he was nice. After boyfriends 2 and 3, Jane read Mansfield Park and decided that a kind, quiet guy was the way to go. Ray picked her wildflowers. He gave her the Hostess desserts his mother still packed him for lunch, even the fruit pies, and his constant gaze made her feel luscious.

  After a couple of months, two guys Jane had grown up with
decided Ray shouldn’t be dating out of his Appearance Pool and played a prank involving catapulting dog poop (so original!) into the open roof of Ray’s rusty Jeep.

  “Stay away from girls too pretty for you!” they shouted, tires squealing out of the school parking lot.

  Jane swore she wasn’t involved, but Ray didn’t listen. In the middle of the cafeteria, he ground a premeditated Hostess cupcake into her hair. Hard.

  “How do you like it? Huh?”

  Turned out, he wasn’t that nice after all.

  day 7

  THE NEXT DAY WAS YET another late breakfast, reading in the morning room, a visit from Miss Heartwright, and a stroll with the gentlemen. The “stroll with gentlemen” part should’ve made Jane’s hatted, sideburned fancies race, but she was disengaged now. Her eyes searched the garden for signs of that tall glass of water.

  That afternoon she sat alone in the library, reading an Ann Radcliffe novel, The Italian, her brain straining to keep up with the archaic storytelling. Part of the Experience was the life of leisure, she knew, but she was an adopted New Yorker, an heiress to the Puritan work ethic, and doing next to nothing all day was taking its toll. She had begun to daydream of the oddest things: washing her clothes in the sink when all her building’s laundry machines were occupied; the hot, human smell of a full subway; eating a banana from a street vendor; buying a disposable umbrella in a downpour.

  All the hours she had spent daydreaming of living in Austen’s world, and now here she was pondering the mundane realities of normal life. It seemed too cruel.

  So she decided to hunt Martin down during the day. What was stopping her? After all, he wasn’t a vampire.

  It was pleasant and sunny, though as she strolled the flat, elegant garden, the glare soon made her want shade. The mazelike lines of low hedges were disrupted in the center by a miniature Parthenon that might have been placed, monolithesque, by meddling aliens. In her present mood, she found it unsettling, an obvious falsehood inside the otherwise natural loveliness of flowers and shrubs, turning the garden into a farce.

  Jane spotted a couple gray, squat-hatted heads dispersed through the wilderness areas of the park before discovering a tall gardener pruning growth by a low stone wall. She sat on the wall, opened her book, and paid him no mind. After a few minutes the sounds of clipping stopped, and she felt his gaze on her. She turned a page.

  “Jane,” he said with a touch of exasperation.

  “Shh, I’m reading,” she said.

  “Jane, listen, someone warned me that another fellow heard my telly playing and told Mrs. Wattlesbrook, and I had to toss it out this morning. If they spot me hanging around you . . .”

  “You’re not hanging around me, I’m reading.”

  “Bugger, Jane . . .”

  “Martin, please, I’m sorry about your TV but you can’t cast me away now. I’ll go raving mad if I have to sit in that house again all afternoon. I haven’t sewn a thing since junior high Home Ec when I made a pair of gray shorts that ripped at the butt seam the first time I sat down, and I haven’t played pianoforte since I quit from boredom at age twelve, and I haven’t read a book in the middle of the day since college, so you see what a mess I’m in.”

  “So,” Martin said, digging in his spade. “You’ve come to find me again when there is no one else to flirt with.”

  Huh! thought Jane.

  He snapped a dead branch off the trunk.

  Huh! she thought again. She stood and started to walk away.

  “Wait.” Martin hopped after her, grabbing her elbow. “I saw you with those actors, parading around the grounds this morning. I hadn’t seen you with them before. In the context. And it bothered me. I mean, you don’t really go in for this stuff, do you?”

  Jane shrugged.

  “You do?”

  “More than I want to, though you’ve been making it seem unnecessary lately.”

  Martin squinted up at a cloud. “I’ve never understood the women who come here, and you’re one of them. I can’t make sense of it.”

  “I don’t think I could explain it to a man. If you were a woman, all I’d have to say is ‘Colin Firth in a wet shirt’ and you’d say, ‘Ah.’”

  “Ah. I mean, aha! is what I mean.”

  Crap. She’d hoped he would laugh at the Colin Firth thing. And he didn’t. And now the silence made her feel as though she were standing on a seesaw, waiting for the weight to drop on the other side.

  Then she smelled it. The musty, acrid, sour, curdled, metallic, decaying odor of ending. This wasn’t just a first fight. She’d been in this position too many times not to recognize the signs.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked.

  “Were we ever together enough to require breaking up?”

  Oh. Ouch. She took a step back on that one. Perhaps it was her dress that allowed her to compose herself more quickly than normal. She curtsied.

  “Pardon the interruption, I mistook you for someone I knew.”

  She turned and left, wishing for a Victorian-type gown so she could have whipped the full skirts for a satisfying little cracking sound. She had to satisfy herself with emphatically tightening her bonnet ribbon as she marched.

  You stupid, stupid girl, she thought. You were fantasizing again. Stop it!

  It had all been going so well. She’d let herself have fun, unwind, not plague a new romance with constant questions such as, What if? And after? And will he love me forever?

  “Are you breaking up with me . . . ? ”she muttered to herself. He must think she was a lunatic. And really, he’d be right. Here she was in Pembrook Park, a place where women hand over scads of dough to hook up with men paid to adore them, but she finds the one man on campus who’s in a position to reject her and then leads him into it. Typical Jane.

  Boyfriend #5

  Rahim (last name forgotten), AGE “THIRTY-FIVE” (POSSIBLY FORTY+)

  “You are so lovely,” he told Jane across the perfume counter. She was nineteen, in college, making minimum wage, and she’d just had the worst haircut in her life. Possibly that’s why his compliment felt more important than it was, a gorgeous bird she couldn’t bear to let go.

  For three weeks he took her to restaurants, expensive restaurants, and he paid! In a spree of crazy extravagance, she ordered appetizers and dessert. Then one night he lured her to his apartment, which smelled like oil. Body oil. The kind that pools on skin that hasn’t seen a shower for a week.

  With his eyes half closed, his hand mauled her shoulder, and he said, “I want to make love to you,” in a clumsy swat at romance. She thought of the moment Elizabeth runs into Mr.

  Darcy at Pemberley; by comparison, Rahim’s slippery pawing made Jane laugh. Out loud.

  There was an excruciating pause. She cleared her throat and mumbled an apology as she left.

  day 7, continued

  JANE WORE HER LEAST FAVORITE evening dress to dinner, the green one with the brown trimming that fit like a tent. It didn’t matter. Martin wouldn’t see her, or anyone else for that matter, as she trudged along at the rear end of the precedence beast. She thought she hid her gloom well, and then she got tired of hiding it. In the drawing room, she grabbed a book and slumped as best as her corset would allow.

  “Do sit down to cards with us this evening, Miss Erstwhile,” Miss Heartwright said as the gentlemen joined them in the drawing room. “I can’t bear to have you reading alone again.”

  Jane wanted to glare. Miss Heartwright, even when sitting straight with a Regency woman’s wood-plank spine, maintained an effortless manner, as though she were simply lounging against the sturdiness of her own perfection. And then there was that twinkle in her eye and her impossibly white teeth. Maddening.

  “No, thank you.” Jane was in no mood to banter.

  “Come, you must. Mr. Nobley,” Miss Heartwright said, turning to her favorite of the gentlemen, “help me persuade Miss Erstwhile out of her tortoise shell.”

  Mr. Nobley glanced up from his book. “
If Miss Erstwhile wishes to read rather than play, I will not provoke her.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Nobley,” said Jane, and she meant it.

  He nodded, as though they were co-conspirators. It was a disconcerting gesture from that man.

  “Mr. Nobley,” Miss Heartwright intoned with the sweetest of smiles, “you at least I can entice for a short round of speculation.”

  For her, Mr. Nobley put down his book and joined the card table. The sight of it made Jane declare she would retire early. This time she stopped in her chamber for her pelisse and bonnet.

  It was a relief to be outdoors. In the chill and dark, the world seemed closer, intimate. She shivered and walked until her blood warmed and helped her fight the ache of vulnerability. She wished for Molly, a best friend who’d laugh with her over her Martin mistake and loyally find Jane faultless and everyone else in the wrong.

  She’d meant to avoid the servants’ quarters, really she had, but she was lost in imaginings of some sort of violently gorgeous triumph—she’d be the prettiest one at the ball, all the actors would really fall in love with her, and she’d say no to them all and leave Pembrook Park a whole woman who buries all her teenage fantasies in one fell swoop . . . And she came upon Martin’s window, dark as the sky. No, there was a flicker, a gray haze of light. Did he have the bedspread up? Did he get a new television? Should she knock and apologize for being freak-out Jane and see if they could start over again or just skip to the making out part? In her current state—jilted in England and wearing Regency dress—Jane found she had a difficult time rating that proposal on her list of all-time bad ideas.