A Walk with Jane Austen (7 page)

The Church of England was everywhere in Jane's day, a social norm. Everyone went to church. Everyone believed or feigned belief. Which led
to other problems, like rectors who cared more for their incomes than their congregations, and sermons that were perhaps sufficient to entertain or simply endure on a Sunday morning but lacking in spiritual depth. One has only to imagine the torture of being part of Mr. Collins's flock to begin to grasp the weaknesses (evils?) of the church system in Jane's day.

One thing I know Jane and I would agree on is the ridiculousness that the church can bring out, if not encourage, in people. I believe sometimes that as a group, while trying to be good, we do not exert enough effort toward being normal.

Austen understood this. Even in her day, faith was sometimes used as a cloak for ridiculous behavior. She didn't spare anyone like this. For her, it seemed nearly as serious as a moral failing.

There's a lovely spot in the grass by the River Cherwell. If you wander through University Parks heading southeast and continue through a few gates, you will find it. Apparently the Oxford dons used to lay out naked here. Academic dons and nudity don't naturally go together. Today, thankfully, everyone is clothed. It sits in a crook of the small river, so there is water on two sides; there are huge trees and expanses of sun. It's mostly quiet, groups of people talking and solitary people sleeping. A loud crowd of tourists has managed to get a punt stuck in the grass by the bank, and two ten- or eleven-year-old boys have stripped down to their shorts trying to work up the courage to jump in.

Jack and I sat with our quiet conversation in the midst of the summer commotion. I'd never felt so comfortable, so at home, just sitting and talking.

“So what do you think you'll do when you finish grad school?” I asked.

He hesitated a minute. Everything about him was easy—slow and calm. “I'm not really sure,” he said. “I felt called to do this program, and I love it, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do when I'm done. I think it may have something to do with writing.”

We talked about my writing and his sisters, and he said something about his grandmother calling him William. It was the second time I'd heard him refer to himself as William, and it was like an evil prick in the middle of all this pleasantness. I had to say what I'd been debating.

“Does…urn, does your family call you William?” I willed out the words.

“Yeah, how did you know that?”

“It's just that you were talking about your family a couple times and I thought…you said…‘William.’” I fumbled.

“Actually, everybody calls me William,” he said. “My real name is Jack William—it's a family name—but everybody calls me William. When I registered for the school here, I gave them my full name, and they started sending me stuff as Jack, and I never corrected them. I'm not sure why. I like it, and I thought it would be kind of fun, and it reminds me of Lewis, I guess. I don't know.”

“Well the weird thing is”—alarms were going off in my head but it was far too late to stop—“I probably shouldn't tell you this.”

“No, go ahead,” he said.

“Well, you kind of remind me—I mean you look a little bit like an old boss I had, and his name was William, and he was sort of, urn, horrible. He lied a lot or most of the time. He was really one of the most horrible people I've ever known. I'm not sure if he knew when he was
telling the truth. I ended up confronting him about some things, and he fired me and lied about the whole thing to make it look like it was my fault. It was more complicated than that, and I didn't handle everything as well as I could have, but it was really horrible.”

“Well then, by all means,” he said in his gentle southern accent, “call me Jack.”

“IVe dealt with people like that before,” he said. “Actually, there was one situation where I ended up having to confront a guy who was really high up, a guy we were working with—he was a CEO, actually, and the way it happened ended up being in a public forum, but I had to say something because he had to be called on it. I was really worried about it, and I didnt want to come off as arrogant, but it had to be done. Anyway, so Fm not your boss, but Fve confronted him.” And he laughed—not in a mean laughing-at-me way, but in an its-all-really-okay way. His saying that made me relieved. Still a tiny bit creeped-out and skeptical, but relieved.

We talked about our common perfectionism, which he seems to be a little further along at mastering, and about my trying to accept and really believe Gods grace. He told me about the orphan he loves in South Africa and about how that's when God's grace really broke through for him. A life-changing experience of loving a little girl who didn't want to be loved and didn't deserve love, but Jack loved her anyway, wholeheartedly. At that moment God said to him, “This is how I love you.” And that stuck.

We talked about how both of us have a hard time relaxing—the perfectionism thing—and Jack said, “You seem perfectly relaxed now.” And I was. And I was insanely, cautiously happy.

Jane makes me think of my own small meannesses. (How much of our lives are spent being mean to one another in small ways?)

I met the dashing stranger from the stairs today. The one I imagined to be Frederick Kent—the friend of a friend's friend's fiancé or something crazy like that. And I greeted him with a series of small meannesses under the guise of politeness. I introduced myself, but with that brief look in my eye and turn of my head and little bit of archness that told him I was already closed to him, that he did not entirely measure up.

I dont know why. Perhaps I was feeling insecure. I probably came across to him as a little arrogant. It was all silly. And to the casual observer it would have seemed just two people meeting each other. But I think he knew I had closed the door on him in that brief period of time.

As it turns out, our theological bents are quite different, and the vibe just wasn't there. To be honest, I am now consumed elsewhere, so maybe I wanted him to not really be a match.

A guy friend told me once that he can tell within thirty seconds if he wants to seriously date a girl. I was deeply offended. I mean, is it really all that superficial? The sound of her voice, he said, and the way she looks—his impression after that thirty seconds is never wrong.

I make those snap judgments myself but admit often to being wrong (Jack, for example) and actually being pleased to be wrong. I love the surprise of finding incredible potential where first I could see none.

And today I seemed determined to find no potential at all where first I imagined loads.

Fickle, fickle woman.

He is not Frederick anyway.

So Frederick Kent is still safe out there somewhere, a bastion of smart, orthodox—and in my imagination very good-looking—potential.

At 11:42 p.m., I still couldn't sleep. My room was Spartan, but not in the quaint old-English-hall way I expected, more in an old-1970s-furniture-and-dirty-orangish-brown-carpet way: institutional cream walls, a dirty blue blanket on a bed that upon close inspection looked like someone had at some point been sick on the middle of the box spring and it was never cleaned.

I've not slept well for so long that I no longer really know how to fall asleep. My exhausted body doesn't actually get sleepy anymore, perhaps because I've had to fight being tired so much to get through the days that my brains reaction to being worn out is to send adrenaline to stem the tide. So I alternately sink into sleep and jerk awake in
what feels like panic. But mostly I lie in bed awake, thinking about things, waiting for sleeping pills to kick in.

The pills themselves are tricky. I don't like how they control me, make me do things I cant do on my own. Tonight I took one, hoping it would be enough to guide me into sleep, but it didn t work; it is a unique kind of torture, being wide-awake, exhausted, and unable to do anything about it.

Another symptom of whatever I have is that I often wake after several hours of sleep, as though my terribly hard-working Dickensian inner self has decided it is time to make the gruel. (But, oh, just the thought of gruel makes me want to throw up even now.)

Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping, I imagine there are demons assigned to me, like Screwtape, poking my soul with a big, mean stick as I begin to drift off. They were active this evening, poking away, keeping me desperately awake.

Not that the things I had to think about were altogether horrible…

I need a remedial class in dating. Or maybe just in talking to boys.

Wide-awake, exhausted, and nauseous, I watched the sun just beginning to rise. The fire alarm, which seemed to conspire against me, wouldn't stop going off last night, and I eventually grabbed my white hoodie and climbed down the spiral iron fire escape.

The lawn was full, and I lurked in the back of the crowd, in pink-and-green-striped cropped-pant pajamas, trying not to wake up all the way. But when I spotted Jack, Paul, and Spencer, I decided waking up wouldn't be so bad and I joined them.

Jack touched my arm. “Nice stripes,” he said, making me want to curl up with him and be cozy.

For an hour it was like college. Paul kept getting calls on his cell phone from friends and kept saying, “I'm in England! Do you know what time it is here?” And as a group we decided that Jack should make reparations for something—the Scandinavians and their pillaging, I think—which was all terribly funny to me because by that point, it was around 1:00 a.m., and I'd taken two sleeping pills.

When they finally let us back in, I was too shy to find Jack and say goodnight. I saw him looking around, maybe for me, and made a subconscious decision to sneak silently back up the stairs.