A Walk with Jane Austen (10 page)

I made the decision to talk to Jack, looking for reassurance. I wanted him to know that I was a mess, temporarily, but I was really okay. I sensed that this was perhaps a mistake, but when I am overwhelmingly tired and emotional and begin to feel that something
must
be done, I am compelled to do it.

I waited on the lawn for him to finish breakfast, my eyes still streaming as I sat on a green plastic chair under a tent and tried not to
make eye contact with anyone, shakily drinking my cappuccino. Who knows what I looked like; I felt like I never entirely made it into the real world that morning and couldn't help it.

And who knew what Jack was expecting—certainly not me in my fragile state. I told him that the last couple days had been intense, that I had not been sleeping well, that I was feeling emotional and couldn't process things, that if I lay low today that was why.

“Wow,” he said. “I don't really know what to do with that.”

I laughed through tears. “Yeah. Most guys don't.”

As I began to sense that assurance would not come, he said, “I'm glad you said something because I've been thinking, we need to make sure we're getting everything we're supposed to out of this week, meeting everyone we're supposed to meet. It probably would be good if we didn't spend so much time together.”

I felt the full weight of the blow. I had given him reason to think I am a bit crazy. And I am. Of course, I agreed. It would be good to not spend so much time together, take a step back, hang out with other people. But inside I thought,
Buck up, little camper.

I imagined him discussing this with the other guys, all of them wondering at my instability, and longed to hang out with a girlfriend who could help me put it all right again, at least in my head.

I got a sandwich from down the street and ate lunch by myself on the library steps. I made plans to go to dinner with someone else and was generally awkward all afternoon, thinking,
Perhaps this Big Thing will end up being nothing after all I will go back to my quiet little life.

One topic every Austen biographer must address is her quiet, seemingly eventless life, which is how Jane's brother described it in his first biographical sketch and how her nephew characterized her. To her
brother Henry, she was the homebound sister, and to nephew James, she was dear Aunt Jane—funny, charming, full of life, and no doubt unquestionably talented. But what really happened in her life? And so the biographers dig and find love, heartbreak, family conflict, the loss of her beloved childhood home, periods of great financial insecurity, dear friends, and tragic deaths. “Her life was not without event,” they say.

And I think,
Of course.
How many of our lives would people judge as entirely unremarkable—lives in which perhaps love fails, careers are made or broken, deep friendships and family relationships endure, tragedy is in some form or other inescapable, and the future is murky. These are our realities, and that's where Jane specialized: the drama of ordinary life, lives not inflated beyond recognition and not with unbelievable goodness or incredible tragedy. Just mothers and fathers, sisters, friends. Pesky neighbors and rich neighbors and neighbors who like you but still want to get the better of you. At times, ridiculous clergy. Good-looking, weak-charactered men; good-hearted plain men; unbelievably rich men with character faults all their own. Fabulous romantic beginnings that may end up being nothing after all. Everyone's foibles on display, with a bit of grace for nearly every character.

Somehow I ended up in Jack's group for dinner, sitting next to him, and by the end of the meal, after trading a few small sharpish sorts of comments and a lot of laughter, we were friends once again.

Several of us decided on a whim to go to a Baroque candlelight concert at Exeter College Chapel after dinner. On the sides, from about eight feet up, the walls are gorgeous stained glass, images of biblical stories clear to the top. It reminds me of a heavier version of Paris's glorious, tiny Sainte-Chapelle. We sat listening to the cello and harpsichord,
the readings from Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…”) and Queen Elizabeth (“I have the heart and stomach of a king…”), trying to sort out which stories were which in the glass. It was lovely.

We got ice cream and stood talking on the bridge over the Isis, and I was afraid I might pass out from exhaustion.

Walking back, I said to Jack, “I'm not sure exactly what I said to you this morning, and I'm even less sure about what you heard.” He laughed a little. I was determined: “I just want to make sure I didn't communicate that I'm not interested, because I am.”

“I appreciate that,” he said. And quietly, “No, I just heard you say that, you know, you were feeling emotional and needed some space.”

“Good.”

“You know, it's like I said,” he continued. “This other thing just started, and I didn't expect to meet someone—especially someone I had so much in common with. I'm sure you weren't expecting to meet anyone either.”

“No, I wasn't.” I lied through my teeth. What's a girl to do?

Back in the lobby, I practically whispered, “So then, I'm like, are we just hanging out or what? And I know I don't need an answer to that question now.”

But Jack answered me anyway. “Yeah, we should view it that way and not feel like we need to sit together in lectures all the time or spend all our time together. You know, I just don't know what God's going to do with this.”

I thought,
Yes, in some sense that's true, but doesn't it just come down to what Jack wants? Isn't that how God generally directs in these situations? And how could he want the girl in North Carolina instead of me?

We sat in the common room with Spencer, laughing until about midnight when I went upstairs. Jack smiled at me when he said goodnight, said it was a nice night and he'd had a good time. It was.

Officially, nothing is going on between Jack and me.

Strangely, that feels remarkably good. And still, I am treasuring these days and these simple conversations.

Perhaps I should make an effort not to see everyone else's faults so clearly. I love everyone close to me, and as for everyone else, I am naturally inclined rather not to like people, to just be content with my small group of lovely friends.

All of my wash has gone slightly gray, and I'm afraid that I dropped underwear on the lawn and they will be pinned to the notice board in the morning. We were sitting outside for a couple of hours with a group, talking, waiting for the washing machines. I just wanted Jack to myself, but he was so incredibly happy to be with people.

I think he is predisposed to love everyone he meets, to want to know everyone. He is like Bingley and Jane; he looks around and sees only good. I look around and catch ridiculous tendencies and sometimes am just too tired to put forth the effort not to be bored. I have been considering the character flaw to be his, but I suppose it must be my own.

Biographers sometimes wrestle with Austen's complex character— the good Christian girl with the biting wit, with the ability to see and desire to expose the laughable and ludicrous. Most of the things that surprise them are in her letters to her sister, Cassandra, where (and perhaps the only place) she could freely say whatever she wanted.

Maybe this doesn't surprise me because of my own experiences. My closest friends and I, if unquestionably faithful, are not overwhelmingly or unnaturally good—at least not blandly so. Our conversations range from incisive devotional thoughts to solving poverty to the creepy, ogling married guys buying us drinks downtown. It's no surprise to me that Jane's life encompassed both as well—that she had a capacity for devotion as well as an ability to wryly, if at times harshly, engage the world around her.

She was not quick to love people outside her little circle, and that is a failing with which I can easily sympathize—one that, at some level, surely comes from some kind of insecurity. Oh well. It is much more fun to be annoyed with Jack and his determinedly loving everyone than to ponder my own failings.

There is a woman who walks St. Aidâtes and the Folly Bridge at night. Seeing her for the second time, I notice how she mumbles and shuffles, rather well dressed for someone who may be crazy, in a matching long skirt and blouse. She works her hands together and looks at the ground and sort of hunches along. I wanted to know what she talks about and if anyone ever listens to her. I wondered, does she have children, and do they know this is how she spends her evenings? Does she have friends? Our loud group passed her on the way to the Head of the River pub, after our farewell banquet in Wadham College's four-hundred-year-old dining hall. I was in my favorite red Ann Taylor dress that's sleeveless, cut in to bare all of my shoulders, and falls to midcalf, grazing my minimal curves. I got to see that instant look of the best kind of surprise on Jack's face when I walked out on the lawn.

As we walked to dinner—together in the crowd, as always—he said, “I was thinking, we should get pictures together.” So there we are, looking couplish, standing on the manicured lawn of the Wadham quad.

I laughed that night like I hadn't laughed in ages, healing laughter. Lily got a Long Island Iced Tea, and they doubled the alcohol by mistake. The rest of us didn't need much motivation; our hearts were limber.

I had spent an hour that afternoon back at the spot by the river, lying in the sun. I drifted in and out of sleep, afraid that I could actually sleep soundly there in the middle of the afternoon and not wake up until the sky was gray and I had missed everything. When you live like this—awake and exhausted almost all the time—you can never tell when sleep will come. You sort of have to obey it whenever it wants to make an appearance, but here I was denying it again. I paid for it later, as the unending laughter had me fighting off dry heaves, which have been making regular appearances every morning.

In England they shut down all the pubs at 11:00 p.m. for some reason, as the result of some horrible law (which I understand they have now changed). When they kicked us out, we split up into smaller groups and wandered slowly back through town. We passed Christ Church again, curtains blowing by an open pane, passed lines of people on Cornmarket waiting for the midnight release of the new Harry Potter book, walked up St. Giles, always the quiet heaviness of the Oxford college buildings playing the counterpoint to our lightness. I walked next to Jack, close and connected somehow in spite of the fact that we did not touch—him with his arms crossed, me occasionally letting my hand hang free by my side. We didn't stop laughing, nor did I try to conceal the occasional dry heaves, until we got back to Wycliffe, and then with the sad realization that this was the end of our party.
Everyone leaves tomorrow. Spencer goes back home to a job he wants to leave, Paul to a busy practice. Lily is going on a missions trip to work with disadvantaged youth in London, Jack to Jordan for research for his masters degree, me to a quiet Benedictine monastery in Hampshire, near Jane's home.

have no idea what to expect, but I long for the peace of the monks.