A Walk with Jane Austen (4 page)

I felt unmoored. I found a new church. I went to a singles’ Bible study with dreadfully long hours of teaching. I continued to go on Sundays because my faith—my relationship with God—was incredibly important to me, but I felt like I couldn't relate to most of the people there and wondered if they could understand me—sad, struggling to believe.

I longed for a life outside the stuffy, often sickly sweet, and sometimes nonintellectual spirituality of the evangelical Christian world. I hated that I had gone to a Christian college, worked for Christian organizations. I began to feel that any group of professional Christians would provide unexpectedly stellar examples of incompetence and, at times, pure meanness. I wanted out. I desperately wanted to go back and rewrite my life—to go to a state school, get a master's degree, study abroad, survive in the “real” world.

I had not married. As a somewhat conflicted semifeminist, I had dreamed of and planned for and wanted marriage since I was a lanky, brown-skinned girl winning faux beauty contests at friends’ birthday parties. I ached for the meaning and compassion a husband would provide, for the chance to make my own family.

Everything in my life was dark, stifling. I needed light and air.

If nothing else, I knew I could be brave. I went to counseling. I gave myself permission to feel the badness of it all. I reached out to friends.
I learned things about myself that I didn't want to know—that I could be passive-aggressive (when you try to stuff away your emotions, they have a way of leaking out elsewhere), that I was holding other people responsible for my emotional well-being. I decided to give myself grace and determined to change.

I went to a specialist, who found a thyroid imbalance that had been kicked off by the virus four years before. He gave me a prescription, and very slowly I began to feel better. I got more rest and had fewer lost days.

I saved thousands of dollars and determined to leave my job and write for a year, to see if I could make it. I started going to an Anglican church that I love. I started to date again—a blind date, a guy I asked out, a guy I asked out because he wouldn't stop talking (always a bad sign), a friend who flew up from Atlanta. I was out of my comfort zone in so many ways, forcing myself to engage with the world again, to try. Within six months, if not a new person, I had at least worked my way into a new perspective on life, with hope and possibilities, with a more independent me I rather liked.

In January I gave my notice. In February I walked away from meetings and coffee breaks and lunch breaks and paid vacation and health insurance to the gloriously terrifying world of writing full time.

I felt like the jasmine plant in my sunroom that nearly died from lack of water and then sprouted blossoms on dead-looking branches. There I sat, blooming—having willed my way into a new life, having stepped off the cliff into freelance hell only to find it daunting but very, very good. I was still terrified. But I loved life. Like blossoms that were completely unexpected.

The smell of exhaust fumes immediately transported me to Paris. There was something about being young and stepping alone out of the Metro and smelling what I could only identify in that moment as the scent of
joie de vivre
,all the refined activity of the gracious city with its cafés and little dogs, glorious museums and wide boulevards.

My first experience of Oxford had felt dark and oppressive. I looked through the windows of the bus from Heathrow, hoping for signs of romance and spires, but felt only heaviness.

Today dawned sunny and seventy-something—perfect—and my backpack quickly began to stick to my T-shirt with sweat as I headed south, down Banbury Road into Oxford's city center. There are thirty-six colleges in Oxford, and college buildings, chapels, and quads are spread throughout the city, a jumble of imposing buildings interspersed with more commerce than I imagined. Broad Street and High Street
and Cornmarket are lined with shops—sandwich places, mobile phone stores, fast-food joints, bookstores, tourist shops.

While in college, I'd visited Cambridge once with my parents. I'd been studying in a little beach town on Spain's Atlantic coast—a difficult trip where eight of us stayed with an American family whose marriage seemed to be breaking (or had already broken) and whose house was torn apart, mid-remodel. I remember a half-finished stairway to the second floor, construction debris everywhere—Sheetrock, nails, plaster. The roof was open. The husband slept on a mattress in the mess. Our teacher slouched along with his Mexican accent and got angry with me for drinking
tinto de verano
,which is just Sprite with a little wine. (Our Baptist credo precluded any kind of alcohol.)

I had yet to master the art of bathing suits that looked good on me, or style in general, and spent four weeks with the awkwardness of trying not to be awkward in a foreign country, compounding my sweet-smart, somewhat-unsophisticated-and-insecure persona. I was cowed at the prospect of not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. So when my parents met me in Madrid for a short European tour, I was alternately thrilled to see them and moody-mean.

I hold in my mind a little-visited string of wonderful memories and embarrassing moments from that trip. My parents and I rode a gondola over gorgeous Barcelonas evening lights. We sat in a street café drinking red wine, in pain after walking around literally all of Paris (my mother was most in awe at the self-cleaning bathrooms at the Arc de Triomphe). In Scotland, we struggled to find a tiny fishing village someone on the plane had recommended to me, and when we did arrive there, discovered it to be, well…tiny. I was embarrassed at the time because of my parents’ solid American tourist mentality.
They arerit
even attempting to be good Europeans
,I thought. They wanted fat-free creamer for their coffee and real American ham instead of
jamon Serrano
and generally talked loudly and shared food in restaurants in distinctly American ways.

Looking back, I am embarrassed for myself, my little aggressions, my lack of grace.

It was in the middle of that trip that we visited Cambridge: cool and quiet and somehow comforting. Gorgeous college buildings and chapels were softened with mist. We watched punters on the River Cam and had tea in a cozy shop—small tables, ham sandwiches with butter and grated cheese. It was lovely, I was charmed, and I expected Oxford now to be the same.

But Oxford disappointed me with its contrasting noise, dirt, and general commotion.

At the center I found the Bridge of Sighs, the copy of an ornate covered Venetian bridge that looks incredibly romantic in pictures but really just connects one college building to another. Then the Bodleian Library, founded in the 1300s—one of the worlds largest—and the round Radcliffe Camera or Rad Cam with its domed top. I eyed the café behind the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, one of the prettiest spots in town, and made my way down to get a look at the Thames— or the Isis, as they call it here.

On the descent of St. Aidâtes, I wandered through a bit of meadow by Christ Church Cathedral and began to be enthralled.

I wondered how Jane felt when she arrived here, a child in the midst of the bustle of college life. She came to Oxford when she was seven years old, away from home for the first time to attend boarding school with her sister, Cassandra.
¹
She was young to leave home, but
the two girls were attached, and as her mother said later, “if Cassandra's head had been going to be cut off Jane would have hers cut off too.”
²
Perhaps they traveled with their brother James, who was already enrolled at St. Johns College, or perhaps their father took them. Their great witty uncle Theophilus, then ninety,
³
was Master at Balliol College and may have been given the charge of looking after them from time to time. He must have seemed more than ancient to tiny Jane.

Perhaps, I decided, I will come to love Oxford's dirt the way I love Paris's fumes: /
am not without hope.

I'm afraid at times I'm morbidly silly. I generally lose the ability to think and act with good sense around guys I could be interested in— just like any good chick-lit heroine, I suppose, but not promising for one who aspires after Austen. My emotions have changed so much in the course of one day. This morning I bumped into a terribly good-looking stranger on the stairs. I was timidly setting off to explore Oxford, in my green T-shirt and matching sort-of-coolish walking shoes and almost knee-length jean skirt with the ruffle (ever so slightly trailer trash but darn cute) when a guy carrying a huge suitcase appeared. I was in his way. I could easily have gotten out of his way if I hadn't been a bit dumbfounded. But there was the jet lag. I wasn't thinking entirely correctly. I took him in immediately—dark wavy hair, green eyes (or were they brown?), great smile, white shirt, bit of a tan— and went on my way with a much lighter heart. I'm afraid I'm looking too much for small, life-changing moments, and when you look for them too closely, you are apt to create them out of nothing at all.

One guy my friends knew of who seemed acceptably interesting, if American, was planning to be in Oxford this week at a program that sounds remarkably similar to the program I am in. He is a friend of Emilie's fiancé, John, and Emilie is a very good friend of my very good friend Jordan (which sounds confusing, but really this connection is simpler than it sounds). Jordan was going to a party at Emilies, she mentioned that I was getting ready to leave for Oxford, Emilie remembered Johns friend.…and thus the plotting began.

What we heard from John was that this guy, Frederick Kent is his name, is a lawyer (smart!) and very orthodox. That combination among the single Christian population can be a bit difficult to find. And he is in Oxford, so he must have some sense of adventure, right? And I determined that he would be good-looking, although John gave us frustratingly little information about his appearance.

So as I packed, I wondered exactly what Frederick Kent might be like and just how much potential he might have. When my father dropped me off at the airport at an insanely early hour for my 8:10 a.m. international flight, I wandered through the airport picking out guys— the incredibly good-looking guy I would never have a chance with, the business traveler with a big belly, the Buddhist monk, the devout Muslim with his wife and children, the gawky teenager with his MP3 player—looking at them and thinking,
Ah, Frederick Kent!
and having a little laugh at their expense (or perhaps my own).

Of course, I have decided that the good-looking guy on the stairs must be Frederick, although I suspect this is all very Lydia Bennet of me.

Tonight I walked home with someone entirely different, who is now not a stranger and already feels like he could be much more than a friend. His name is Jack.

I attempted to rule him out. Of course, a single woman who wants to be married has, ironically, no sharper skill than that which rules out potential suitors before fully understanding their character. But I am already afraid that all of my efforts in that vein will be unsuccessful.

One day, after I left my job to write full time, I sat in the tiny sunroom of my town house at the café table squinched into the corner by the french doors, reading psalms and thinking about the utter truth of Jesus. In my exhaustion, his character—his complete truth, the kind I have never experienced—was clearer and more important and more true to me than it had ever been. I sat daydreaming in the sun and lost myself in it.