A Walk with Jane Austen (29 page)
Read A Walk with Jane Austen Online
Authors: Lori Smith
This is what I have come to know as my downward spiral. In such a descent, everything is bad, everything around me, and I cannot pull myself out of the emotional morass.
The airline didn't announce my gate for another hour then made a special point of noting that said gate was the absolute farthest one from the main terminal and that all passengers should be aware of the fifteen-minute walk. The air smelled like toast, which made me gag; even now I'm convinced that if there were a national smell in England, it would be the smell of toast. Forget English breakfasts, everyone eats charred white bread they've scraped with butter or maybe Marmite.
When I had finally checked my e-mail the night before, the late news was on. It had been nearly an entire week, which was killing me because the last time I'd been able to check was Saturday in Bath, so I was intrigued to find that I had an e-mail from some William Denby person with the subject line AUSTEN AND JORDAN.
I didn't recognize the name, but I thought it sounded legit, so I opened it and realized (duh) it was from Jack. I skimmed his note, and it seemed a bit formal and not quite what I hoped for, and I didn't want to discover that, so I left it. Instead I drank a glass of wine with Niki, Gill's cousin, whom I'd been staying with and told her all about Jack. We talked about how Christian guys can be weird and noncommittal and how she was dating someone who didn't go to church and wondered if maybe we really did have to go outside the church to find someone normal who actually wants a relationship. Niki told me it was, unfortunately, all the same in England.
When I was fuzzy from exhaustion, sometime around midnight, I went back and read Jacks e-mail. He asked a ton of questions (good), told me a little about Jordan (good), said he'd had a bit of a hard time adjusting at first in Jordan because he'd had such a good time in Oxford (good). Said we'd had such a “great crew” in Oxford (hmm…). Asked if maybe I would want to get together for lunch (lunch?!) when he got back from spending a week in North Carolina, where, he pointed out, he was seeing his new niece and going to his nephew's birthday party.
The e-mail felt chummy, or purposely distant, and far too formal. It lacked warmth. It lacked any sign of the intimacy we'd established. He even signed it with his whole name, though perhaps that is excusable in his case because of the potential of name confusion. He seemed not to remember that I would still be in England.
So
,I thought,
overall pretty good, though perhaps not as good as I would like it to be.
He had written, he was interested in my trip, he sounded like maybe he missed me, and he did want to see me even if only for lunch.
I wrote back and told him tiny bits about the trip, told him I “so enjoyed hanging out with him in Oxford,” would love to do lunch, but would he rather come over for brunch or dinner sometime?
Then I went to sleep.
When I checked my e-mail the next morning, there was nothing. Standing in line at Heathrow, I was determined that Jack must have been going to North Carolina to see that girl he was dating, and the questions began spinning.
Why else would he need a whole week to see his new niece and go to his nephew's birthday party? If he were really into me, why would he send an e-mail instead of calling? Did he assume I wasnt in England anymore? Why would he only want to do lunch? He might as well just come out and say he's not interested. Arghl
Perhaps my perspective was a bit skewed, as I was apparently disgusted with all of humanity (especially male-anatomy-nose-wearing French circus people). Perhaps I could wait to see what he says in the next e-mail before entirely giving up hope. I was nearly determined, however, that he was one of those horrible Christian guys who would never know what he wanted or would never step up to the plate to make it happen. I couldn't abide that, and I suppose I would have no reason to abide that as no initiative would be taken and nothing would ever happen.
After the day in Oxford, facing the possibility that this was all rubbish (and laughing at myself at the same time for thinking it is rubbish because he e-mailed me and wanted to get together for lunch), I felt the reassurance of warm, very good memories of this trip even if all of this fell through. And that calm moment at Evensong, in the intensity of hearing the choir sing, “…of whom shall I be afraid?” I believed that.
I still do.
So Oxford was my own again; sometime during my walk by the river, I believed I could love it simply for my own sake without always tying it to memories of Jack.
Niki took me grocery shopping, and I bought two large tins of golden syrup for making treacle tart and a huge thing of Marmite for Gill, which I have since decided was a very bad idea, and I have vowed I will never buy anything heavy again when I travel. Directly south of St. John, with just 650 miles left till landing in D.C., I was especially thankful for the sun in Oxford, even though my pen kept leaking and my fingers were now black like Jo March's in
Little Women.
The Return to Ordinary
There is mercy in every place;
And mercy, encouraging thought!
Gives even affliction a grace.
—W
ILLIAM
C
OWPER
One thing I love about Austens books as opposed to the movies is that she tells us a little more about how the characters’ lives turn out. The movies tend to end with a wedding, and that's that, as though there is nothing more worth telling. But in the books we learn, for instance, that Wickham was never allowed to visit Pemberley, that Darcy and Bingley continued to be great friends and their wives the closest of sisters, that they all helped to contribute to Lydias upkeep but Lydia never felt that she was given enough. We know that Elinor and Edward were quite content in the Delaford parsonage after they redecorated everything and that Lady Russell and Captain Wentworth forgave each other and put their differences aside.
Among the small things I want to tell you is how I've developed an addiction to English tea—always with milk, of course, never with half-and-half, like a good little Anglophile. I've almost given up coffee altogether.
I have a new niece—Sweet Isa, my brother and sister-in-law's daughter. She has my eyes. Or rather, she has my brother's eyes with my sister-in-law's coloring, and she looks a little like me. She has a way of looking very seriously at the world when there is not a grin on her face. On the night she was born, I drove to the hospital and could almost feel my world changing for hers, the circle of life and all. Perhaps it is inappropriate to think about death on the night a baby is born, but that is what it made me think, how all of us only overlap for such a short period of time really.
I miss the monks. A necklace I made in Bath—silver and pale pink beads on a black cord, with a cross I bought at the abbey—is one of my favorite things. I have even, from time to time, made cheese and onion sandwiches. On the first morning I got home, I woke up at five thirty and put in a CD I got at Magdalen College on my last day in Oxford— “Oh be joyful in the Lord all ye lands,” it begins, the “Jubilate Deo” of the
Book of Common Prayer
and Psalm 100—and just lay there in the sun remembering, full of every goodness.
I suppose you will want to know the end of my story with Jack.
In spite of my doubts at Heathrow, I came home glowing. Partly because of just being in England I'm sure, but largely because of Jack. My friends knew I had met someone before I told them just by the look on my face. I was deeply happy and incredibly pleased with the world.
I think maybe love always dies, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised by this. I don't mean genuine love, the
agape
or
phileo
love New Testament writers describe. Because genuine love isn't really feelings, not the thing that makes the entire world seem far more fascinating, everything funnier and brighter and more interesting than before. It is that at the beginning, and then that fades and life takes on a more normal hue.
In the best cases, maybe the feelings come and go, and you can expect to revisit them frequently over the course of a relationship, or maybe they continue in a deeper if slightly less urgent form. I don't know. Maybe I know very little about it at all really.
The feelings between Jack and me died a long and torturous death. At least mine did. I never really ascertained what his were. From my perspective, it seems that they could have been quickly and cleanly put out of their misery with one honest admission on his part. He chose instead to sort of leave them out in the cold on their own to see if they might be able to survive. Eventually they starved to death.
It was a little more than a week after I got home before I heard from him. He wanted to do lunch, which I thought was a sure sign that he was going to break bad news. So I put on my jeans and ironed my hip little black sleeveless shirt and put on my favorite garnet earrings and necklace and left for the Town Center. I'm sure I looked like the nervous wreck I was. I'd had a month to imagine him as the most perfect man I ever met, and this was where those dreams would hit reality.
It was all a bit awkward. He had copies of the pictures of us together from Oxford, but I didn't know what to say about them because I had no idea what they meant. At the end, after I had picked through my salad, he opened up about his state of mind.
He was overwhelmed. School was starting again, and he wasn't sure about how he was going to pay the bills, or exactly what he wanted to do after he graduated. He wasn't sure he'd be able to stay in school full time. He said he needed time to figure out things. I was determined to be patient and understanding, not to pressure him, so I just tried to be supportive and didn't ask the questions I should have—like, “What does this mean for us?” and, “Are you still seeing the girl in North Carolina?”
I didn't want to push, so all those things were left under the surface. I heard him asking for time; I backed off.
I told myself,
He doesn't owe me anything. I dont want to add stress to his life. I want him to call me when he feels like calling me
y
get together if he feels like getting together.
And part of me still knew it would all work out. This was just a little delay.
I trusted him to tell me if he was still dating the North Carolina girl. He'd been so open about her before that I didn't think he had reason to hide anything. So we left and he said something like, “I'll be in touch.” And I believed him. I went home and began waiting—waiting for him to get his life figured out, waiting for him to find paying work, waiting for him to make time for me.
All of my nice, reassuring, mature internal dialogue quickly devolved into
Why havent I heard from him?
A month was enough to break my heart, or to place me squarely in limbo, which is officially worse than a broken heart. I could give you all the lurid details (not that any of them are actually lurid): the waiting for e-mails, the horrible not knowing, the hating him and loving him and being patient with him and finally giving up.
I moved on and started going out with other guys almost immediately—lots of other guys, actually, by my standards. I didn't really want to just sit around and wait for Jack and didn't particularly want to be readily available when he suddenly decided that he'd made a mistake and couldn't afford to let me go. Getting your heart to move on is another matter though. I was sad to have lost his friendship, to feel like I had made this great friend and lost him just as quickly, sad that we never explored what might have been. And no one else I met was very captivating.
We met for coffee in October at my favorite place. I wore my brown T-shirt and long jeans with my three-inch spiked boots and plum corduroy jacket. I was running a low-grade fever, as I had been for weeks; the half of my face that was getting blasted by the heater flushed a bright red.
When we met, everything was stilted, with none of the familiarity we'd shared in Oxford. Eventually, staring at the floor, the table, and his tea, Jack said, “So I wanted to let you know, I, uh, have continued to keep in contact with that person in North Carolina.”
I froze. I didn't want to be angry, but I was. I wanted to ask, “Does she know you call her ‘that person in North Carolina ?” But I was afraid of what I might blurt out, so I didn't say anything.
There were other meetings, more intense, and very honest conversations—things that got my heart riled up at various points over the following months. But, and maybe this could have been predicted, Jack never pursued me.
Eventually, with time, his change of heart became to everyone's satisfaction, including my own. I confess to crafting a little speech à la Elizabeth Bennet so that, when he came back, I could tell him precisely why I wasn't interested. But he didn't come back, and as much as I'd like to characterize him as one of
those
Christian guys—the kind who just don't commit, who are still growing up at forty—I could only really conclude that he wasn't interested
enough.
As Mr. Collins would attest, those we love necessarily begin to lose their value in our eyes when they don't return our affection, and such was the case with Jack. The more I thought about what happened, if I
held it in my mind a certain way, I could see weaknesses and incompatibilities, at least enough to make me content.
So the adoration went away, and the anger went away too.
My life returned to stasis, but with a new understanding of the kind of companionship that's possible and with a hope of finding someone who wants that kind of dear friendship, to the kind you don't,
wont
,just throw away.
In the meantime, something else was happening in my life of greater significance.
By October, a couple months after getting back, I could no longer pretend to be healthy. My body plummeted into another round of debilitating exhaustion. I was tired all the time. I couldn't sleep well— couldn't rest—and could only work for four hours or so, and this was on the good days.
By November, I'd resigned myself to another round of doctor visits. My family doctor said my face looked a little funny, asked if I had ever had Bell's palsy, and then said, “It will probably always be a mystery why you feel bad.”
So when the infectious-disease specialist also could find nothing wrong, I cried and went to see a chronic-fatigue specialist, beginning to resign myself to the fate of a strange illness no one understood.
To my great relief, in March I was diagnosed.
Lyme disease.
All the exhaustion, all the fatigue, all the brain fog and struggling to keep up with life for the last six years suddenly had a name; it had all
been due to a tiny deer tick that infected me with the
Borrelia burgdor-feri
bacteria when I was backpacking or in the country picking berries with a friend. For years it thrived, wreaking havoc with my life, even throwing off my autonomie nervous functions, my heart rate, and my breathing. It turned out that most people never know they've been bitten by a tick, and I was one of them. I'd had a small ring on my leg that I thought was a spider bite. So I slipped through the cracks. For years.
The intervening six months are slightly fuzzy. But I remember going to church in tears, overwhelmed at the grace of just having a name for this illness—a name that wasn't laziness or lack of motivation—and to think there was a bacteria alive inside my body, something we could fight and hopefully kill, to think that maybe I could be healthy again. This idea was like seeing the heavens open and having God offer me back my life, a gift I'd given up hoping for. The truth is I'd given up praying for actual healing. I'd only been praying for a doctor who would be able to help me manage whatever this illness was. So I went to the altar, and a man named Joe prayed with me and anointed me with oil, and I cried.
And then I plunged into a darkness I never expected, brought on by the antibiotics fighting the bacteria in my body.
My days became very, very small. For weeks all I could do was lie on the couch and rest or mindlessly watch TV and then go to bed at night, in my very quiet house, in my empty bed, where I still couldn't sleep. I felt like someone was holding my head under water, and I could do nothing about it. I felt like I was living in the shadow of death.