Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (13 page)

“Jane?”

I come back to myself and Sydney Gardens and feel the hot tears running down my cheeks. James’s face is full of concern.

“I think I’m remembering something.”

Then, I realize I’m holding his hand and, as in my memory, I hold it against my cheek. “Forgive me,” I say, and run, without knowing why.

Twenty-three

I half run, half stumble my way out of Sydney Gardens, vaguely aware of scratching my arm on a branch and almost crashing into a woman who seems oddly familiar but whose bloodred ribbons on her bonnet are the only thing about her that make an impression on my brain.

All I can think about are those mind-flashes; no, memories, which is what I have to call them. With every passing day, the lines are becoming less distinct between Jane and me.

I have no idea how I end up in front of the print shop, which is just a few blocks from Mary’s aunt’s house, but recognizing it is what brings me back to some sense of my surroundings. I realize I’m looking, or at least going through the motions of looking, at the same placid landscape I’ve seen in the window every day since my arrival, and I can taste a salty trickle of sweat from my upper lip. Yes, the print shop, like the one where Anne Eliot and Admiral Croft had their chat. Connecting where I am to Persuasion calms me down somehow, makes order out of chaos. I realize I am parched with thirst, no doubt from running so fast. Suddenly I notice passersby looking at me curiously, and I realize my bonnet is not sitting straight on my head and I’m breathing heavily.

It suddenly strikes me that Jane’s almost-affair with James has a chilling familiarity to it. Didn’t I do something similar myself within days of learning about Frank’s infidelity? That is, after spending the first two days in an immobilized stupor on Paula’s futon. But on the third day, when she managed to drag me to an art opening, I proceeded, with vodka-fueled confidence, to flirt with the nearest young guy who happened to smile at me.

His baby face, tousled hair, and gangly frame made him look suitably harmless. What caught me off guard was his wicked sense of humor. “Someone should really clean that up,” he whispered to me as we stood in a crowd trying to make sense of an installation that consisted of what looked like a couple of horse turds and a broomstick lying on a sheet of Mylar. I exploded in laughter, which set us off on a giggling fit that took me right back to junior high school, when teachers would separate me from my friends for laughing in class.

To escape the disapproving looks of our fellow art lovers, Evan—that was his name—and I sidled outside to laugh unencumbered, share cigarettes, and flirt. I agreed to go back to his apartment for a drink, when drinking was clearly the last thing on our minds.

At his place, a rabbit warren of Ikea castoffs, beanbag chairs, and laundry strewn over mattresses on the floor, Evan gazed at me in wonderment when I casually mentioned living alone in my one-bedroom apartment. Apparently a woman who actually had a roommate-less, parent-less living situation was a new kind of experience for him. He, on the other hand, had left his mother’s house in Portland to crash in the already overpopulated apartment of a high school friend. Said roommates were out at a big party that night. Evan was only twenty-three, so that explained his perspective somewhat. He was also amazing in bed, which I wasted no time discovering that same night.

Drunk on a surge of ego gratification, I fell asleep with a smile on my face. I didn’t need Frank. I was an empowered woman, free of encumbrances. But when I woke up the next morning and stumbled into Evan’s bathroom, almost tripped over a pile of scuzzy towels on the floor, and then looked in the mirror, the pasty skin and bloodshot, mascara-smudged eyes of the woman staring back at me looked anything but empowered and free. I still had that gaping hole inside where my certainty about Frank used to be. And so I retreated from Evan’s place as fast as I could, promising to call but knowing I wouldn’t.

I realize my breathing is now back to normal, and after retying my bonnet and blotting my face with a handkerchief, I’m ready to walk the last few blocks to Mary’s aunt’s house.

When I enter the house I manage to ward off Mary’s anxious questions. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We just had a little chat; he only wanted to ask about his sister.”

After a fortifying cup of tea, I go upstairs to dress for the ball in the assembly rooms, and Mary sends Hortense, her maid, to help me dress and fix my hair. But first, a hot bath, which entails the usual heaving, sweating servants hauling buckets of steaming water up the stairs and then hauling the used water down the same route. Once again, I swallow my guilt, refusing to join the ranks of the unwashed whose bodily odors, inadequately camouflaged by perfumes, assault my nose on a daily basis.

Learning to like living in such an odiferous environment, I suppose, must be an acquired taste, not unlike those rare, expensive cheeses that my high school boyfriend, the German exchange student who was the first guy to cheat on me and break my heart, used to favor for breakfast. The one he loved the most, I remember, smelled like unwashed feet. He used to hold it in front of my face and laugh when I wrinkled my nose in disgust. He claimed that he too used to hate the cheese as much as I did. But one day he surrendered to its smell, and it had been true love ever since.

I didn’t stay with Gerhard long enough to fall in love with his cheese. Nor do I intend to stay here long enough to fall in love with body odor.

After I am laced and buttoned into underclothes and gown, Mary helps me choose accessories. “The pearls, dear; they make you look like purity itself.” If she only knew. However, I have to admit that I look pretty fabulous. Or more accurately, that the face smiling back at me from the mirror looks fabulous, the pale skin accented by the flush of excitement that has rushed to my cheeks, and the frothy fabric of my off-white gown falling in folds that are about as flattering as an empire-waisted dress could ever be.

For a moment I wonder if I have the right to take pride in this appearance, but before I allow myself to fall into the spiraling abyss of that thought, another, more disturbing one, takes over: How in the world am I going to dance?

I put a lacy wrap around my shoulders and focus on making my way down the steps without tripping on my train, right hand firmly gripping the polished wood of the banister. And I decide that tonight will be another adventure into the exotic unknown, even if I can’t dance. After all, no one can make me get on the dance floor.

Mary is already waiting for me in the entrance hall; I’ve been too caught up in my own vanity and worries to notice how pretty she looks.

“Your hair, Mary. It really suits you.”

She half moves her hand toward her shiny brown hair, which is woven through with cream-colored ribbon, and then busies herself with arranging her shawl. “That is Hortense’s work. Today she was most insistent.”

“I love it.”

Instead of moving toward the door, Mary sits down on one of the padded benches in the entrance hall.

“Aren’t you ready to go?” I say. “Or is something wrong?”

“Mrs. Randolph and your cousin should be here at any moment.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Jane, do you not recall my promising your mother that we would certainly not consider venturing to any balls or parties without Mrs. Randolph?”

“Mrs. M—I mean, my mother—won’t know who does or does not go to the ball with us. I never thought for a moment you took that promise seriously.”

Mary, who has been removing her fan from her bag, freezes in midmotion. “Upon my honor, I cannot believe you are of such an opinion.”

I sit down on the opposite bench and take a deep breath. “You mean to tell me a thirty-year-old woman is not old enough to be a chaperone herself?”

“Not a thirty-year-old woman wearing ribbons in her hair and a white gown that makes her look three-and-twenty. Even if I were to agree to such a scheme—which I would not for reasons of propriety as well as honor—can you imagine what your mother would say if she were to hear of your pretending you were on the shelf in order to go unchaperoned to a ball?”

“Did you do everything your mother told you to do?”

Mary looks thoughtful for a moment. “I believe I tried to do so.”

If I did everything my mother wanted me to do, I’d be an MBA married to an MD and driving to PTA meetings in an SUV. As if I would ever have an interest in corporate finance, let alone be caught dead owning a gas-guzzling instrument of global warming.

At that moment, Mrs. Randolph and Susan arrive, the former kissing me on both cheeks, holding my face between her gloved hands and telling me how pretty I look, and the latter wearing a fake smile that I return in kind. I suppose there’s not much I can do about the chaperone situation. Not that I mind spending time with Mrs. Randolph, but the daughter—I have only a moment to grumble inwardly, because before I know it I am being led to a bona fide sedan chair. It’s an upright rectangular contraption just big enough for one person, something right out of a book on ancient China, and manned by two men, one squat and bowlegged, the other of storklike proportions, who evidently expect to carry me to the ball in it. Assuming this must be some kind of joke, I hesitate at the door, if it could be called such, of the chair, but I see Mary, Mrs. Randolph, and Susan stepping into their own individual chairs as if they do such things every day. And not a smirk among them.

Mary notices my hesitation. “Do not trouble yourself, Jane. You shall be perfectly safe.”

She smiles at me encouragingly, and I can do nothing more than acknowledge her with a nod. I feel the gloved hand of one of the footmen on my elbow, and I enter the chair and sit on its padded cushion. Before I know it I am lifted off the ground as if I weighed nothing and carried through the streets at an alarmingly fast pace.

The chair carriers must be even stronger and far more agile than they look, as there is surprisingly little jostling, especially considering the disparity of their heights and builds. I alternate between guilt at being carried by servants, like some potentate, and rushes of excitement as I delight in the sensation of what almost seems like flight.

When we pause at a street corner, I hear the labored breathing of the bowlegged, shorter chair carrier, and I am tempted to insist he stop the chair so that I can apologize for my disgusting bourgeoisieness and ask if the chair carriers have a union. But the chair begins moving rapidly through the streets again, and before I can become the first chair-union organizer in Bath, I am set down beside a building where dozens of other chairs are sitting, passengers are alighting, and scores of gowned and gloved women are taking the arms of men in light-colored knee breeches and white stockings, all moving toward the entrance of the building, which is of the customary light golden Bath stone, a smaller version of the Greek temple style of the Pump Room. My companions join me and I can barely make an intelligible reply, caught up as I am in the spectacle before me.

We enter through the wood-and-glass doors and make our way down a carpeted entrance hallway flanked by marble pillars and illuminated by crystal chandeliers. I am surrounded by the conversation and laughter of the other arrivals and am almost swept away by the crush of the crowd. I feel Mary’s hand slip through my arm and her warm breath in my ear as she shouts into it that such a crowd is quite unusual for this time of year.

When we enter the ballroom, the sight of all the dancers sends fresh fear through my veins. What was I thinking? How could I imagine I could pull off this evening? I, the person who never dances at parties and has to be dragged to the floor at clubs—especially after that New Year’s Eve party when I danced with Frank (I’d had so many Grey Goose martinis that I would have danced naked in the center lane of the 405 during rush hour). How could I ever forget him backing away from me, mouth twitching, eyes bulging, and collapsing on the floor in convulsions of laughter. “A scorched chicken attempting flight” was how he characterized my efforts. Even a gallon of martinis couldn’t soften that particular humiliation.

Even so, as I look around the ballroom at the grandeur of the vast columned space and its sparkling chandeliers, the soft candlelight glowing golden on the gowned and waistcoated dancers, my worries fade. So what if I can’t imagine being able to duplicate their steps without tripping over my skirt or wrap or both. I never thought I could embroider either.

Mary squeezes my hand. “It is lovely, is it not?”

It is. The candlelight casts a flattering glow on everyone in the room, from the servants and old gentlemen in their powdered wigs and the young men with their hair au naturel, to the women, octogenarians and rosy-cheeked teenagers alike, clad in the uniform empire waistlines and long gloves, necks glittering with diamonds, gold, and pearls. This is the perfect light for a woman forced to appear in public without makeup.

Even the smell of body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles. I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom. Is that Jane’s sensibility, I wonder, that’s responding to this particular mélange of scents? Or am I, my real self, responding to something else? Certainly I don’t need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pick up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.

Mrs. Randolph stops to talk to a woman who is all dark-green feathered turban and jutting bosom, and Susan is snagged by the woman’s daughters. After enduring a quick introduction, I steer Mary deeper into the crowd and farther away from our chaperone. Mary cranes her neck as her eyes search the crowd. “I am determined to find you a partner.”

“Mary, I don’t think—”

“Jane. It would be shocking if I were to allow you to leave this assembly without putting that new gown to the use for which it was intended.”

The musicians strike the first note of the next song from their perch above the floor, and I watch as a young man with sandy brown hair and a dimple in his cheek leads a shy-looking woman onto the floor. Long lines of couples form on the floor and begin turning and crossing one another in graceful, carefully choreographed figures, and I am so mesmerized by the synchronized elegance of the dance that I forget about Mary, that is, until she half falls against my arm and I grab hers to steady her.