A Jane Austen Education (28 page)

Could Austen have grown to love her fiancé-for-a-night, as she later advised her niece to do with John Plumptre? Perhaps. She had known him since childhood, she loved his family, and although he was still somewhat shy and awkward, he had come back from Oxford a far more confident young man than he had once been. But love was no longer the only consideration. The young woman who had lost her chance with Tom Lefroy at the age of twenty had still been only a fledgling writer. The one who rejected her friends’ brother seven years later was now the author of three novels, even if none were published yet. She had come to a fork in the road. In one direction lay marriage, family, security, and perhaps love. In the other lay the adventure of art.

She could not have had both. To marry then, for a young woman, was to become a mother to the exclusion of all else—and at the cost, finally, far too often, of life. Austen’s brother Charles’s wife had four children in five years and died. Austen’s brother Frank’s wife had eleven children in sixteen years and died. Austen’s brother Edward’s wife had eleven children in fifteen years and died. Austen’s mother had had eight children. When Austen thought about the fact that her favorite niece would someday find a husband—this was several years after the John Plumptre episode—she feared for what it would mean. “Oh! what a loss it will be, when you are married,” she exclaimed, telling us everything we need to know about why she never got married herself: “I shall hate you when your delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal & maternal affections.” Cassandra would later remember the letters her sister wrote, “triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom”—the freedom to write, the freedom to create, the freedom to ride her incomparable genius wherever it wanted to go.

That freedom would be tragically cut short. The worst irony of Austen’s death at the age of forty-one, young even for those days, was that she came from a remarkably long-lived family. Of her parents and seven siblings, eight lived past seventy. Cassandra lived to seventy-two. Their mother lived to eighty-seven. Their brother Frank, the sailor, lived to ninety-one, rising to the highest rank in the Royal Navy. The cause of Austen’s untimely demise will never be known. Scholars once suspected that the fatal illness was Addison’s disease, but a closer look at the evidence discredited the theory. Perhaps, if the cause was infection or some other circumstantial factor, a different life—a life lived in Ireland with Tom Lefroy, or on his estate with Harris Bigg-Wither—might well have been a longer one.

A longer one, but a different one. Austen never married, but she did have children, and many more than eight or eleven. Their names are Emma and Elizabeth and Catherine, Anne and Fanny and Elinor and Marianne. Their names are Henry and Edward and Wentworth and Willoughby, Mr. Collins and Miss Bates and Mr. Darcy. They were not long-lived, they are ageless. Had she married Tom or Harris, she might have been happy, she might have been rich, she might have been a mother, she might have even been long-lived herself. She might have been all of these things—but we would not have been who we are, and she would not have been Jane Austen.

It was early in September of my fourth year in Brooklyn. I was halfway through the third and final chapter of my dissertation and had just gone back to teaching. Meanwhile, my friend from Connecticut, the one who had fallen in love the previous year, was already getting ready for his wedding. The big event was planned for November, but he and his fiancée threw a party at their new house the weekend after Labor Day, so all their friends could get to know each other in advance.

His fiancée had grown up in Cleveland, and her best friend from home—like Austen and Martha Lloyd, the woman who shared her house, they were practically sisters—was going to be driving out for the festivities. I had heard that she was coming, and that she was single, but we didn’t hit it off at first. They were playing Sinatra when I showed up, and even though I liked Sinatra, I tried to make an entrance with a snarky comment (“Can we please put on something a little less farty?”) that—shades of Darcy and Elizabeth—only succeeded in making her think me a jerk.

We took our separate paths into the depths of the party, and I had all but forgotten about her a couple of hours later when I found us entangled, out of nowhere—another
Pride and Prejudice
moment—in the midst of an intricate, impassioned conversation. The subject was political; like an Austen heroine, I later discovered, she was testing to see if I had the right values. Slowly, as we stood there hashing it out, it began to dawn on me that the woman I had scarcely glanced at when I came in—I didn’t know how I had managed to miss this—was, as Mr. Darcy put it, one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance. Not just beautiful, in other words, but attractive in a deeply compelling way.

Before the night was out, we were both completely hooked. I stayed for the rest of the weekend, then found myself devastated when we had to say good-bye. But neither one of us was going to let it go. We were five hundred miles apart, but before we knew it we were on the phone for hours at a time, doing exactly what Austen would have wanted us to do: learning about each other, and respecting each other, by listening to each other’s stories.

We talked about our families, painted pictures of our lives, explored our thoughts about everything under the sun. I was paying attention not only to what she had to say, but also to the way that she expressed herself in saying it. The technology may have been updated for the twentieth century, but otherwise it was exactly the same thing that had happened between Elinor and Edward, and all of Austen’s other heroes and heroines, too. I was discovering the temper of this woman’s heart and mind—her “sentiments” and “opinions,” her “imagination” and “observation” and “taste”—and she was doing the same with me. We were developing that mutual regard and esteem that comes from knowledge of a person’s character, not body. The latter we already had—we hadn’t just talked, that weekend—but this was every bit as intimate. In fact, unlike Austen’s young people, we couldn’t even see each other. It was a completely disembodied experience: just two voices meeting in the night, a conversation of souls, a separate little privacy that only we inhabited.

“I’m crazy about her!” I told my friend’s fiancée.

“Keep it together,” she said. “I know she likes you, but if you come on too strong, you’ll scare her off.”

I kept it together, but it was tough. The woman I had met that weekend, I discovered as we whispered in each other’s ears on all those nights, was brilliant, articulate, intuitive, and stunningly insightful. She knew how to talk, and she also knew how to listen. She was cerebral without self-importance, sophisticated without pretension. She had a wicked sense of humor, too, one that Austen would have certainly enjoyed. I told her about someone I once knew who prided himself on his supposedly large vocabulary but who hadn’t known the difference between “impotent” and “indolent,” because he didn’t know what either one of them meant. “I know the difference,” she shot back. “Can’t and won’t.”

She was also very different than me, more so than anyone I had ever been involved with. She had grown up middleclass, but she didn’t have an expensive education and wasn’t on her way to being a professional. She waited tables, like the woman I’d been seeing when I first read Austen and for whom I had had so little respect. She had been a shoeshine girl, had clerked at a record store, and was still slowly finishing her degree at a local public college as she worked full time. What’s more, she had spent time with the kinds of people who I, with my sheltered elitist existence, had scarcely ever even talked to: working-class kids, art-school types, punk rockers, street people, old hippies.

The little Ivy League voice inside my head, which I had gotten from my family, was frantic about how unprestigious this all sounded. The little New York voice, which I had gotten from those fancy friends as well as from my general environment, had contempt for how unimpressive it looked. But I had read
Emma,
and knew that books were not the only way to learn, and I had read
Mansfield Park,
and knew that status and “success,” so called, did not make a person valuable, and I didn’t listen to those voices anymore. I had learned the lessons of Austen’s love stories, and I understood that you should be with someone who isn’t just your mirror image, someone you didn’t see coming, someone who takes you beyond yourself. On just the other side of all those petty fears, I sensed the promise of immense possibilities.

About a month after that initial weekend, she drove out to Brooklyn to see if we really wanted to keep the relationship going, given how completely inconvenient it was. And what we discovered, as we each tried to figure out whether the other person was someone we could fall in love with, was that we already had. It had been coming on so gradually, as Elizabeth Bennet would have put it, that we hardly knew when it began.

 

 

The city never seemed so sweet to me as it did that fall. As I walked along the familiar streets, now utterly transformed, I bore my love for her about with me like an invisible crown. I’d thought I knew what love was meant to feel like, but I realized I hadn’t had a clue. It had always been a thing that I could feel inside me, yet now it seemed like it was everywhere, filling everything, an atmosphere I moved within. I’d also always thought that relationships were something that you chose to have. But I hadn’t chosen this one; it had chosen me. The question of whether I had a loving heart had answered itself.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. There were fights—of course there were. Neither one of us was perfect, certainly not me. When something came up, I still dug my trenches like anyone else. But what saved me, at those times, were two things that I had learned from Austen: that my girlfriend’s perspective was just as valid as mine, however much it killed me in the middle of an argument to acknowledge it, and that if I had done something wrong, then allowing myself to recognize as much—no matter how awful it was to admit it, no matter how humiliating it was to have to lose a fight in which I had invested so much ego—was ultimately going to be good for me.

There would come a moment, after the minutes or the hours of conflict, in the middle of the hard words, when I would catch a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse, not just of the fact that I owed my girlfriend the apology that I knew I’d have to rake up my guts to give her, but that if I managed to cross that burning bridge, there would be something in it for me. I would learn; I would grow. I wouldn’t have to make the same mistake again. I could be a better partner to her in the future, and a better person myself. That glimpse, that was the rope that was lowered into my cave; that was what enabled me to climb back out to sanity and love. And on her side, it was just the same. She helped me learn to say I’m sorry, and she helped me teach her, too.

 

 

That winter, I took her down to Mexico for a kind of relationship honeymoon. She’d told me how she’d loved the beach vacations that she’d taken as a girl, so I decided to surprise her with something extravagant. We went down to a little cabana place on an island near Cancún, where we spent the week lying on the beach like a pair of lizards, wandering the village streets, and racing mopeds along the back roads.

As winter turned into spring, our phone calls began to take on the structure of dates. We’d start by pouring ourselves drinks and catching each other up on the previous couple of days’ worth of news. I’d sit out on the fire escape as the weather got warmer, the smell of lilac wafting up from the yards below. Then we’d each make dinner, sharing jokes and stories all the while, then keep talking far into the night, until we were literally falling asleep in midsentence.

When summer came, I went to stay with her in Cleveland. Some of my New York acquaintances were a little appalled that I was involved with someone who lived in the Midwest. One, that glamorous woman who had broken up with the guy from Ohio because he didn’t dress well enough, ran into me one night. “Are you still going out with that girl from St.
Louis
?” she demanded. When I introduced my girlfriend to another one of those people, the son of a fairly well-known modern artist, he said, “Oh,
I’ve
been to Cincinnati. I thought it was just going to be a bunch of strip malls. But you know, it wasn’t really that bad.”

No, Cleveland (at least
I
knew the difference) wasn’t bad at all. There’s life, I discovered, outside New York. In fact, with the way my girlfriend made it come alive for me, I came to sort of love the place. As we drove and walked the neighborhoods and streets, she peeled back the layers of memory for me—showed me her old houses and old haunts, gave me the backstories, introduced me to the people she’d been telling me about. She was retracing her life, and weaving me into it.

I set up my computer in her living room and started hammering out the introduction to my dissertation, the last piece left. I turned her on to Leonard Cohen, with whom I’d been obsessed since the darkest days of my depression, and she taught me how to drink martinis. I hid about a half dozen presents all over the apartment on her birthday that July, and she baked me fortune cookies with naughty messages inside. Of course, my little gray cat had come with me for the summer—she would curl up on the pillow between us—and when I went back to Brooklyn at the end of August, I left her in my girlfriend’s care, to keep a little piece of me with her.

It wasn’t long before they both were back. By the end of the year, my girlfriend had packed up and moved in with me. Now my city became hers, too. We ate black bean cakes in Chinatown, blini in Brighton Beach, and bowls of flaczki at Christine’s. We watched the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset from the railing of the Promenade. The owner of a shop in Little Italy helped us toast our relationship with tiny cups of fifty-year-old balsamic vinegar that he pulled out from the back of the store, as thick and sweet as maple syrup.