The Jane Austen Book Club Page 2

  Light poured like milk over the porch. Several large winged insects hurled themselves against the screens, frantic to find it, follow it to the source. This resulted in a series of thumps, some of them loud enough to make Sahara growl.

  “No animal passion,” said Allegra.

  Sahara turned. Animal passion. She had seen things in the kennels. Things that would make your hair stand on end.

  “No passion at all.” Prudie repeated the word, but pronouncing it as if it were French. Pah-see-ohn. Because she taught French, this wasn’t as thoroughly obnoxious as it might have been.

  Not that we liked it. The month before, Prudie’s beautician had removed most of her eyebrows; it gave her a look of steady surprise. We couldn’t wait for this to go away. “Sans passion, amour n’est rien,” Prudie said.

  “Après moi, le deluge,” Bernadette answered, just so Prudie’s words wouldn’t fall into a silence that might be mistaken for chilly. Bernadette was really too kind sometimes.

  Nothing smelly outside. Sahara came away from the screen door. She leaned into Jocelyn, sighing. Then she circled three times, sank, and rested her chin on the gamy toe of Jocelyn’s shoe. She was relaxed but alert. Nothing would get to Jocelyn that didn’t go through Sahara first.

  “If I may.” Grigg cleared his throat, held up his hand. “One thing I notice about Emma is that there’s a sense of menace.” He counted off on his fingers. He wore no ring. “The violent Gypsies. The unexplained pilferings. Jane Fairfax’s boat accident. All Mr. Woodhouse’s worries. There’s a sense of threat hovering on the edges. Casting its shadow.”

  Prudie spoke quickly and decisively. “But Austen’s whole point is that none of those things is real. There is no real threat.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve missed the whole point,” said Allegra.

  Grigg said nothing further. His eyelashes dropped to his cheeks, making his expression hard to read. It fell to Jocelyn as hostess to change the subject.

  “I read once that the Emma plot, the humbling of a pretty, self-satisfied girl, is the most popular plot of all time. I think it was Robertson Davies who said so. That this was the one story everyone was bound to enjoy.”

  When Jocelyn was fifteen, she met two boys while playing tennis at the country club. One of them was named Mike, the other Steven. They were, at first glance, average boys. Mike was taller and thinner, with a prominent Adam’s apple and glasses that turned to headlights in the sun. Steven had better shoulders and a nice smile but a fat ass.

  Mike’s cousin Pauline was visiting from New York, and they introduced themselves to Jocelyn because they needed a fourth for doubles. Jocelyn had been working on her serve with the club pro. She wore her hair in a high ponytail that summer, with bangs like Sandra Dee in Take Her, She’s Mine. She had breasts, pointy at first, but now rounding. Her mother had bought her a two-piece bathing suit with egg-cup shaping, in which Jocelyn was exquisitely self-conscious. But her best feature, she always believed, had been her serve. Her toss that day was perfect, taking her to full stretch, and she spun the ball into the service court. It seemed she couldn’t miss. Her spirits, as a consequence, were high and wild.

  Neither Mike nor Steven spoiled things by being particularly competitive. They split games sometimes, and sometimes they didn’t; no one really kept score but Jocelyn, and she did so only privately. They traded partners. Pauline was such a little snot, accusing people of foot faults in a friendly game, that Jocelyn looked better and better by comparison. Mike said she was a good sport, and Steven said she wasn’t a bit stuck-up, not like most girls.

  They continued to meet and play after Pauline went back home, even though three was such an awkward number. Sometimes when they rallied, Mike or Steven would try to run from one side of the net to the other to play on both teams at once. It never worked and they never stopped trying. Eventually some adult would accuse them of not being serious and throw them off the court.

  After tennis, they’d change into their swimsuits and meet at the pool. Everything about Jocelyn changed with her clothes. When she came out of the women’s locker room, her movements were cramped and tight. She’d wrap a towel around her waist and remove it only to slip into the water.

  Still, she liked when they stared; she felt the pleasure of it all over her skin. They came in after her, touching her under the water, where no one could see. One or the other would swim down to put his head between her legs and surface with her knees hooked around his shoulders, the water from her ponytail streaming into the cup over her breast. One day one of them, she never knew which, pulled the knot of her top loose. She caught it just as it began to drop. She could have stopped this with a word, but she didn’t. She felt dangerous, brazen. She felt all lit up.

  She had no desire for anything further. She didn’t actually like Mike or Steven that much, and certainly not in that way. When she lay in her bed or the bath, touching herself more intimately and successfully than they did, the boy she pictured was Mike’s older brother, Bryan. Bryan went to college and worked summers as a lifeguard at the pool. He looked the way a lifeguard looks. Mike and Steven called him the boss, he called them the squirts. He had never spoken to Jocelyn, possibly didn’t even know her name. He had a girlfriend who rarely got wet, but lay on a beach chair reading Russian novels and drinking Coca-Cola. You could tell how many she’d drunk from the maraschino cherries lined up along her napkin.

  In late July there was a dance, and it was girl-ask-boy. Jocelyn asked Mike and Steven both. She thought they knew this, assumed they would talk about it. They were best friends. She thought it would hurt someone’s feelings if she asked one and not the other, and she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She had a strapless sundress to wear; she and her mother went out and bought a strapless bra.

  Mike showed up at her house first, in a white shirt and a sports jacket. He was nervous; they were both nervous; they needed Steven to arrive. But when he did, Mike was shocked. Hurt. Furious. “You two have a great time,” he said. “I got other things to do.”

  Jocelyn’s mother drove Jocelyn and Steven to the club and wouldn’t be picking them up again until eleven o’clock. Three whole hours had to pass somehow. Glass torches lit the pathway to the clubhouse, and the landscape flickered. There were rose wreaths and pots of ivy animals. The air cool and soft, the moon sliding down the sky. Jocelyn didn’t want to be with Steven. It felt like a date now, and she didn’t want to date him. She was rude and miserable, wouldn’t dance, hardly talked, wouldn’t take off her cardigan. She was afraid he might get the wrong idea, so she was trying to clarify things. Eventually he asked some other girl to dance.

  Jocelyn went out by the pool and sat in one of the lounge chairs. She knew that she’d been unforgivably mean to Steven, wished she’d never met him. She wasn’t wearing stockings and her legs were cold. She could smell her own Wind Song perfume mixing with the chlorine.

  Music floated over the pool. “Duke of Earl.” “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “There is a house in New Orleans.” Bryan sat down on the end of her chair, making her blood skip. Probably she was in love with him.

  “Aren’t you the thing?” he said. The only light around them came from under the water and was blue. He was turned away, so she didn’t see his face, but his voice was full of contempt. “There’s a word for girls like you.”

  Jocelyn hadn’t known this, hadn’t even known there were girls like her. Whatever the word was, he didn’t say it.

  “You had those boys in such a fever. Did you like that? I bet you liked it. Did you know they used to be best friends? They hate each other now.”

  She was so ashamed. She’d known all summer there was something wrong with the way she was behaving, but she hadn’t known what it was. She had liked it. Now she understood that the liking it was the wrong part.

  Bryan gripped one of her ankles hard enough so that the next morning she had a bruise where his thumb had been. He slid the other hand up her leg. “You asked for this,” he said. “You know yo
u did.” His fingers grabbed at her panties, pushed them aside. She felt the slick surface of his nails. She didn’t tell him not to. She was too ashamed to move. His finger found its way inside her. He shifted his weight until he lay over her. He was wearing the same bay aftershave her father had worn.

  “Bryan?” His girlfriend’s voice, over by the clubhouse. “True Love Ways” playing on the turntable—Jocelyn would never like Buddy Holly again, even though he was dead, poor guy—the girlfriend calling. “Bryan? Bryan!” Bryan slid his finger out, let go of her. He stood up, shaking his jacket into place and smoothing his hair. He put his finger into his mouth while she watched, took it out. “We’ll catch up later,” he told her.

  Jocelyn walked down the watery path through the torches and out to the road. The country club was in the country, up a long hill. It took twenty minutes to drive there. The roads twisted and had no sidewalks and were surrounded by trees. Jocelyn started home.

  She was wearing sandals with one-inch heels. She’d painted her toenails, and in the moonlight, her toes looked as if they’d been dipped in blood. Already there was a raw spot on the back of one heel. She was very frightened, because ever since camp she’d lived in a world with communists and rapists and serial killers. Whenever she heard a car coming, she stepped away from the road and crouched until it passed. The headlights were like searchlights. She pretended she was someone innocent, someone who hadn’t asked for anything. She pretended she was a deer. She pretended she was a Chippewa. She pretended she was on the Trail of Tears, an event Sylvia had recounted in vivid if erroneous detail.

  She thought she’d be home before her mother left to pick them up. All she had to do was go downhill. But in the beam of a passing car, suddenly she didn’t recognize anything. At the bottom of the hill was a crossroads she never came to, and now she was going up, which she shouldn’t be doing, even for a short time. There were no street signs, no houses. She kept going forward only because she was too ashamed to go back. Hours passed. Finally she found a small gas station, which was closed, and a pay phone, which was working. As she dialed she was sure her mother wouldn’t answer. Her mother might be out, frantically looking for her. She might have packed all her clothes into the car while Jocelyn was at the dance, and moved away.

  It was midnight. Her mother made a horrible to-do about it, but Jocelyn convinced her that she’d only wanted some fresh air, some exercise, the stars.

  But I think what we’re supposed to see,” said Prudie, “is not the lack of passion so much as the control of it. That’s one of Jane’s favorite themes.” She smiled and her lips waned.

  We exchanged secret looks. Jane. That was easy. That was more intimate, surely, than Miss Austen would wish. None of the rest of us called her Jane, even though we were older and had been reading her years longer than Prudie.

  Only Bernadette was too good to notice. “That’s very true,” she said. She had her fingers laced and was fiddling with which thumb should be on top. “Sense and Sensibility is all about that, and it’s Austen’s first book, but then she returns to it in Persuasion, and that’s the last. An enduring theme. Good point, Prudie. Knightley is violently in love—I believe those are the words used, violently in love—but he’s so much the gentleman that even this can’t make him behave badly. He’s always a gentleman first. Jocelyn, your tea is excellent. So flavorful. I could swear I was drinking the sunshine itself.”

  “He’s a scold,” Allegra said. “I don’t find that so gentlemanly.”

  “Just to Emma.” Grigg sat with one foot resting on the other knee. His leg was bent in two like a chicken wing. Only a man would sit that way. “Just to the woman he loves.”

  “And of course that makes it all right!” Prudie cried out. “A man can do anything to the woman he loves.”

  This time it was Sylvia who changed the subject, but she was acting as Jocelyn’s agent; we saw Jocelyn look at her just before she spoke. “Forget Knightley,” she said. “Emma’s the hard one to defend. She’s adorable, but she’s also an unrepentant snob.”

  “But she’s the only one of Austen’s heroines who gets the book named after her,” Jocelyn said, “so I think she must be the favorite.”

  One of the dogs in the kennel was barking steadily. There was a long enough pause between outbursts to trick us into thinking each was the last. The barks were frayed—deceptively, cunningly weary. What fools we were, poised there above our books for a silence that would never come.

  “I do believe the fog is rising.” Allegra’s tone expressed satisfaction, her lovely mobile face joy. The moon shone down unimpeded, but its time was coming. Out over the fields the air was beginning to seep. Between barks we heard the sound of a distant train. “Didn’t I say so, Mother? Didn’t I say we should meet in town instead of out here? We’ll be lucky to get home now. Nothing more dangerous than these country roads in the fog.”

  Grigg was instantly on his feet. “I should probably go, then. My car’s not too reliable. I’m not used to driving in the fog.”

  Bernadette, too, was standing.

  “Please, no,” said Jocelyn. “Not yet. We’re in a hollow here. On the road there’ll be no fog at all. The moon is so bright. I have refreshments, please stay for them, at least. I’ll get them right now. We haven’t even talked about Harriet.”

  In her junior year Sylvia transferred to Jocelyn’s high school. They hadn’t seen each other since camp, had written two letters each, the first very long, the second much less so, and then both stopped writing. But this was neither one’s fault more than the other’s, and they were excited to find each other again, sitting in Mr. Parker’s English class only two rows apart, equally bewildered by what was the deal with Ibsen. It was an enormous relief to Sylvia to discover that she already knew someone at her new school.

  Now it was Jocelyn who was the expert, knowing where you were allowed to smoke, and who was cool to hang out with, and who, even if you secretly liked them, would make your reputation suffer. She had a boyfriend with a car and quickly arranged a boyfriend for Sylvia so they could all go to the movies together, or the shopping center, or the beach on weekends when the weather was nice enough. When they were out as a foursome, mostly Sylvia and Jocelyn talked to each other. Daniel and Tony drove, and when they went to the movies, Daniel and Tony paid.

  Tony was Sylvia’s boyfriend. He was a swimmer, and during the competitive season, he shaved every hair off his body so he was smooth as plastic. Sylvia got him at this time, somewhat marked down. After they’d been dating several weeks, he let his hair grow back. It was lovely hair, soft and brown. He was a good-looking guy.

  Jocelyn was dating a boy named Daniel. Daniel had an after-school job at a bike shop called Free Wheeling, and adult responsibilities. His youngest brother was retarded, a Mongoloid child with big ears, sticky affections, and a careless gravity so powerful the rest of the family had fallen into orbit about him.

  Jocelyn had quit the country club right after the dance. Even so, she made the tennis team her junior year, in the fourth spot. The first and second girls were ranked sixth and eleventh in the state; it was a powerful team. No one in the school cared about girls’ sports, though. More people came to see the boys’ team play, when they weren’t nearly so good, and no one, even among the girls, thought this wasn’t the way it should be.

  One day during an away match Jocelyn noticed Tony sitting in the stands. It had begun to cloud; the match stopped and started and stopped for good. “I came because of the weather,” Tony told her. “Daniel asked me to drive you home if it rained.”

  This was a lie. Ten minutes after they left the courts it was pouring so hard that Tony couldn’t see. He pulled over to wait for it to ease up. Jocelyn was still sweaty from the match, and he kept the heat going for fear she’d chill. The car steamed like a teakettle, the windows coated so no one could look in. Tony began to write with his finger in the water on the glass. I love you, he wrote. Again and again. All over the driver’s-side window and above th
e steering wheel. He hadn’t said a word. The rain clattered on the roof, bounced on the hood. Tony’s face was white, his eyes unnaturally large. Silence inside the car and the din without.

  “Sylvia couldn’t come with you?” Jocelyn asked. She was still hoping the words on the windows weren’t for her.

  “I don’t care about Sylvia,” Tony said. “I don’t think you care about Daniel.”

  “I do.” Jocelyn spoke quickly. “And Sylvia is my best friend.”

  “I think you like me,” Tony said.

  Jocelyn was dumbstruck. She couldn’t think of a single thing she’d done that might give that impression. “I don’t.”

  The weather hadn’t let up, and the windows were still sealed with steam. Tony began to drive again anyway, inching forward, peering through the I love yous written above the dash. They were already filling in. He accelerated.

  “Don’t drive if you can’t see,” Jocelyn told him. She herself could see nothing of the road, only the rain sliding by in sheets. There was a crash of thunder right above.

  “I can’t sit here with you and not kiss you,” Tony said. “If you won’t let me kiss you, then I have to drive.” He accelerated again. The car tipped as he left the shoulder, righted as he straightened. “That was a close one,” he observed. “There was a tree right there.” He accelerated.

  Jocelyn was squeezed into the door on her side, holding on with both hands. Once again she was barely dressed—short, short tennis skirt, sleeveless shirt cut away from the shoulders. Why, in these situations, was she always so disadvantageously clothed? Tony began to sing. “In the chilly frozen minutes oven certain tea, I long to be . . .” He was completely unhinged, so nervous he couldn’t even carry a tune. The speed of the car, the crash of the thunder—nothing frightened Jocelyn as much as his singing.

  She snapped the radio on to the pearly voice of the d.j. “ . . . out to a special, special lady in the South Bay.” Tony singing, the heater puffing, rain and more rain. Thunder.