The Jane Austen Book Club Part 4

He said how touched he was. He swore he'd never take it off, and then he tried to take it off and he couldn't. His finger began to swell and turn odd colours. We went to the restroom of the pub and tried to soap it loose, but it was too late, the fin-ger far too swollen. We asked for b.u.t.ter and got it, but that didn't work either. His face was now turning an odd colour as well, sort of a fishy white. You know how pale the Irish are; they never go outdoors there. We went back to the hostel and I tried to take his mind off it by f.u.c.king him, but this was only a temporary diversion. His finger was round as a sausage and he couldn't bend it anymore.

So we went looking for a taxi to take us to a hospital. By now it was about three in the morning; the streets were dark, cold, and silent. We walked several blocks, and he was actu-ally starting to whine, like a dog. When we did finally find a ride, the driver spoke no English. I made siren sounds and pointed, again and again, to the finger. I pantomimed a stetho-scope. When you picture this, you have to picture me very drunk. I don't know what the driver thought initially, but he did get it at last, and then the hospital turned out to be less than a block away. He coasted forward and let us out. He was saying something as he drove off. We couldn't understand it, but we could guess.

The hospital was closed, but there was an intercom and we spoke on it to someone else who didn't speak English. He begged us to be intelligible and then gave up and buzzed us in. All the hallways were dark, and we walked down several un-til we saw some lights in a waiting room. I used to have dreams like that, dark hallways, echoing footsteps. Labyrinths that twisted and circled, with the directions printed on the walls in some alien alphabet. I mean I had the dreams before this hap-pened, and I still have them sometimes: I'm lost in a foreign city; people talk, but I can't understand them.

So we followed the light and found a doctor, and he spoke English, which was a bit of luck, really. We explained about the ring and he stared at us. "You're in internal medicine," he said. "I'm a heart surgeon." I was prepared to go back to the hostel rather than put up with such embarra.s.sment, but then it wasn't my finger. (Though it was my ring.) But Conor- that was his name-was not leaving.

"It hurts more than I can say," he said. Which is sort of a koan, if you think about it. Anyway, I was thinking about it.

"You're drunk, yes?" the doctor asked. He took Conor away and removed the ring, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it off by force. Appar-ently this was astonishingly painful, but I slept through it in the waiting room.

Afterward I asked Conor where the ring was. He'd left it in the doctor's office. I pictured it lying in one of those blue kidney-shaped dishes. Conor said it had been badly dented in the removal, but I'd made it myself, so I was the tiniest bit hurt that he'd forgotten it. I would have gone back for it if the doc-tor hadn't been so cross. "I wanted you to have it as a keep-sake," I told Conor.

"I guess I'll remember you, all right," he said.

The phone rang in the kitchen and Allegra went to answerit. Daniel was on the other end. "How's your mom doing, sweet-pea?" he asked.

"Bueno.She's lovely. We're having a party. Ask her yourself," Allegra said. She put the phone downand went back into the liv-ing room. "It's Dad," she told Sylvia. "It's a guilt call."

Sylvia went to the phone, carrying her wine. "h.e.l.lo, Daniel." She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the dark, her gla.s.s in one hand and the phone in the other. The rain was loud; one of the gutters on the roof emptied right outside the kitchen.

"She'll hardly speak to me," he said.

Sylvia hoped she wasn't being asked to intercede. That would be too much. But she knew how Daniel loved Allegra; she couldn't help feeling sorry for him, order herself as she would to stop. The refrigerator gave one of its funny rattles; the familiar-ity, the hominess of the sound nearly undid her. She pressed her gla.s.s against her face. A moment pa.s.sed before she could trust herself to speak. "Give her time."

"I have someone coming on Sat.u.r.day to look at the upstairs shower. You needn't be there, I'll come and deal with it. I'm just giving you fair warning. You and Allegra. In case you don't want to see me.

"It's not your house anymore.

"Yes, it is. I'm leaving the marriage, I'm not leaving you. As long as you're in the house, I'll take care of the house."

"f.u.c.k off," said Sylvia.

There was a burst of laughter from the living room. "I'll let you get back to your guests," Daniel said. "I'll be there between ten and twelve Sat.u.r.day. Go to the farmer's market, buy those pistachios you like so much. You won't even know I've been by, except that the shower will be fixed."

Corinne joined a writing group that met once a week. She hoped it would function as a kind of deadline, forcing her to work. She did seem to be spending more time at the computer, and occa-sionally, Allegra heard the keys. Corinne's mood had improved, and she talked a lot at dinner now about point of view and pac-ing and deep structure. All very abstract.

The writing group met at a Quaker meeting hall, and initially there'd been some question, the Quakers being so kind as to allow the use of their s.p.a.ce without remuneration, whether the group shouldn't honour Quaker principles in the work they brought there. Was it right to accept this gift and then share work with violent or unwholesome themes? The group decided, after much discussion, that a work might need to be violent in or-der to espouse non-violence effectively. They were writers. They, of all people, must resist censorship in whatever guise. The Quak-ers would expect no less of them.

The other writers in the group became important to Corinne, so much so that Allegra minded that she was evidently never to meet them. She heard about them, but only in abridged versions. The critique circle was built on trust; there was an expectation of confidentiality, Corinne said.

Corinne was not good at keeping secrets. Allegra heard that one woman had brought in a poem on abortion, written in red ink to represent blood. One man was doing a sort of French bed-room farce, only without any actual humour to it, and the text messily annotated with arrows and cross-outs, so it was no plea-sure to read; yet week after week he reliably turned in another plodding chapter of c.o.c.ks andcuckoldings. Another woman was writing a fantasy novel, and it had a good plot, ticked right along, except everyone in it had amber eyes, or emerald or amethyst or sapphire. Nothing the other members said could persuade her to subst.i.tute brown or blue or not mention the G.o.dd.a.m.n eyes at all.

One evening Corinne said casually over dinner that she was going out that night to a poetry reading.

Lynne, from her writing group, was reading an erotic set at Good Vibrations, the s.e.x-toy store. "I'll go with you," Allegra said. Surely Corinne didn't ex-pect her to stay home while racy poetry was being read aloud in a landscape of whips and d.i.l.d.os.

"I don't want you making fun of anyone." Corinne was obvi-ously very uncomfortable. "You can really be severe when you think someone has no taste. We're all just novices in the group. If I hear you make fun of Lynne, I'll know that I'm probably ridiculous, too. I can't write if I think I'm being ridiculous."

"I would never think you're ridiculous," Allegra protested. "I couldn't. And I love poetry. You know that."

"You love your sort of poetry," Corinne said. "Poems about trees. That's not what Lynne will be reading." Corinne never ac-tually said that Allegra could go, but Allegra did, since she was now anxious to prove that she could behave, in addition to get-ting some glimpse of Corinne's other life. Corinne's real life, as she sometimes thought. The life she wasn't to be any part of.

Good Vibrations had set up fifty chairs, of which seven were taken. Inflatable crotches hung on the walls behind the podium in various stages of openness, like b.u.t.terflies. There were cabi-nets in which corsets and strap-ons had been scattered together. Lynne was charmingly nervous. She read, but she also talked about the issues, personal and artistic, that her poetry raised for her. She'd just finished a piece in which a woman's breast spoke in several stanzas about its past admirers. The poem had a formal structure, and Lynne confessed that she wondered whether this was really the way to go. She begged her audience to regard it as a work in progress.

Even the breast spoke in a poetry-reading voice, with that lilt at the end of each line, like Pound or Eliot or whoever it was who had started the unfortunate custom. The audience clapped at the hot parts, and Allegra was careful to clap, too, although what she found hot was apparently different from what others found hot. Afterward she went with Corinne to congratulate Lynne. She said how much she'd enjoyed the evening, as blameless a state-ment as anyone could make, but Corinne shot her a sharp look. She could see that her presence was making Corinne unhappy. She had forced her way in, when she'd known Corinne didn't want her. Allegra excused herself to use the bathroom. She took her time, washing her face, combing her hair, and all on purpose so that Corinne could talk to Lynne without Allegra there to hear.

That weekend Sylvia and Jocelyn came down for a dog show at the Cow Palace and Allegra met them for lunch. Corinne had been invited, but the words were suddenly flowing, she'd said, she couldn't risk stopping. Jocelyn was in a very good mood. Thembe had taken Best of Breed, the judge noting his great reach and drive, as well as his beautiful topline. He would com-pete in Hounds in the afternoon. Plus, Jocelyn had in her pockets the cards of several promising studs. The future looked bright. The Cow Palace was thunderous and odorous. They took their lunches to the picnic tables so as not to eat in front of the dogs.

It was a great relief to Allegra to be able finally to tell someone about the poetry reading. She remembered particularly choice lines; Sylvia laughed so hard she spit her sandwich into her lap.

Afterward Allegra was contrite. "I wish Corinne would let me in a bit," she said. "She's afraid to belaughed at. As if I'd laugh ather."

"I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem," Jocelyn said. "'Your twin eyes.'

Don't most people have twin eyes? All but an unfortunate few? You think it shouldn't matter. You think how nice the sentiment is and how much work went into it. But the next time he goes to kiss you, all you can think is 'Your twin eyes."'

"I'm sure Corinne's a wonderful writer," Sylvia said. "Isn't she?"

And Allegra said yes! She was! Wonderful! In fact, Corinne had yet to show Allegra a word. The books she liked to read were all really good books, though.

"The thing is," said Allegra, and in Jocelyn's experience, good things rarely followed those words, "if she had to choose between writing and me, I know she'd choose writing. Should I mind that? I shouldn't mind that. I'm just sort of an all-out person, myself."

"The thing is," Sylvia answered, "she doesn't have to choose. So you never have to really know."

When Allegra got home, much to her surprise, she met Lynne just leaving the apartment. They stopped for a moment on the step to exchange pleasantries. Allegra had walked several blocks uphill from the only parking place she'd been able to find-she might as well have left the car in Daly City-and was hot, cross, and out of breath. But she managed to say again how much she'd enjoyed Lynne's poetry.

This wasn't a lie. She had thoroughly en-joyed it. "I brought some cookies by to thank you both for com-ing," Lynne said. "I was so happy to find Corinne working. She's such a talent."

Allegra felt the bite of jealousy because Lynne had seen Corinne's work. Even the woman who wrote abortion poems in red ink had seen Corinne's work. "Wonderful stories," Lynne said, hitting the first syllable of "wonderful" like a gong. "Her piece about the r.e.t.a.r.ded boy? 'Billy's Ball'? Like Tom Hanks in that castaway thing, only genuinely moving."

"Corinne wrote a story about a r.e.t.a.r.ded boy?" Allegra asked. And she hadn't even changed his name?

Corinne wouldn't do such a thing.Our secrets. Trust me.

Lynne covered her mouth with her hand, smiling through her fingers. "Oh! Everything that happens in critique is absolutely cla.s.sified. I so shouldn't have said that. Of course, I thought she'd have shown you.

You have to promise you won't tell. Please don't tell on me." She persisted with such a distasteful, flirty girlishness that Allegra made the promise just to make it stop.

Allegra went inside, walked into the study, where Corinne was still working at the computer, and watched her hit Sleep, the words disappearing from the screen in the time it took Allegra to cross the room. "No more writer's block?" she asked. One touch on any key would bring the words back.

"No," said Corinne. "The muse has returned to me.

That night Corinne asked for a story even though they hadn't made love. Allegra propped herself up on the pillow and looked at her. She had her eyes closed, an ear poking through the hair on one side of her head. Her chin tilted upward, her neck a snowy slope. Her nipples visible through her tank top.

Seductive inno-cence.

Allegra said: 5. There was this girl I knew in high school who got preg-nant. I liked her when I first met her, and I felt sorry for her when she got pregnant-you should have heard the things boys said about her. But by then I didn't really like her much anymore. There's a whole middle to the story, but I'm too tired to tell it.

Allegra had gotten drunk. She didn't think she was the only one. She could see that Prudie had flushed cheeks and gla.s.sy eyes. The Pet.i.t Syrah had disappeared like magic, and Jocelyn had sent her to the kitchen for a bottle of Graffigna Malbec and to see how Sylvia was doing since she had never come back after Daniel's phone call. When Allegra stood up, she knew she was drunk.

Sylvia was sitting in the dark kitchen with the phone back in its cradle. "Hey, darling," she said, and her voice was fine.

There was no need for such a charade, especially in front of Allegra. "How do you take it so calmly?"

she asked. "You hardly seem to care." She knew she was out of line. She could hear her drunk, out-of-line voice coming out of her mouth.

"I care."

"You don't have to hide it. No one out there will think any worse of you if you throw a gla.s.s or scream or go to bed or tell them all to get the f.u.c.k out."

"You'll have to let me be who I am, dear," Sylvia said. "Do you know where we were when Daniel told me he wanted a divorce? He'd taken me out to dinner. To Biba's. I'd always wanted to go to Biba's, but we'd never been able to get in. So that's what just occurred to me. That he had to make a reservation way in ad-vance and then pretend for weeks that everything was okay. Such a thoughtful way to dump your wife."

"I'm sure he wasn't planning the evening like that! I'm sure he didn't know what he'd say or when he'd say it. Some people do things without planning them all through like you."

"You're probably right. A person's no more sane falling out of love than falling into it, I guess. Thank G.o.d it's raining. We didn't get enough rain this year."

Sylvia's face was dimly reflected in the kitchen window. Alle-gra thought how she was seeing both sides of her face at once. Her mother had been such a pretty woman, but after holding her own for quite some time, she'd aged all of a sudden a few years back. You could see how the aging would go on now; you could see where the hammer would hit next.

Allegra knelt unsteadily and put her head into her mother's lap. She felt her mother's hands combing through her hair. "What do we know about it, you and I?" Allegra asked. "We're not the sort who fall out of love, are we?"

Allegra got up when she was sure Corinne was sleeping, and went into the study. She emptied the wastebasket onto the floor. There wasn't much, and what there was had been torn into tiny, despairing bits, none looking as if they'd come from Corinne's printer. Allegra found the word "Zyzzyva" embossed on one piece. She persisted, sorting by colour, until she had three piles. She was wearing nothing but the knee-length T-shirt she slept in, so she dragged a blanket out of the linen closet and lay on the floor, swaddled, piecing bits of paper together.

"We must regretfully pa.s.s on the story you ye sent us," she read at last. "'Billy's Ball' has much to recommend it, and al-though it didn't seem exactly right for us, we would be willing to see other work from you in the future. Good luck with your endeavours, the Editors."

Fifteen minutes later: "We are returning your story 'Good-bye, Prague' to you as we are only interested in lesbian material. We highly suggest you familiarize yourself with our magazine. A subscription form is enclosed. Thank you, the Editors."

Ten minutes later: A form rejection-"does not suit our pur-poses at this time"-but someone had penned a single sentence across the bottom in ballpoint ink: "Who among us has not tor-mented ants?"

Allegra swept the pieces up, mixed them back together, dumped them into the wastebasket. She felt as if she'd been stripped and then strip-mined. So Corinne's desire to keep her away from her writing friends had nothing to do with Allegra's sarcastic tongue. How unkind of Corinne to make her feel that she was the one at fault.

Of course, this small unkindness was nothing compared with the betrayal of trust. It had begun to rain, but Allegra didn't know that until she went outside. She hardly felt it even then, though she was wearing only her T-shirt. She walked three blocks to her car, drove two hours to her parents' house- longer than usual, because she'd forgotten to bring money for the bridge toll (forgotten even her driver's license) and she had to pull over to the side, get out undressed as she was, to talk about this. Eventually she was waved through, such was the per-suasive power of crying uncontrollably when you were practi-cally naked.

It was after three in the morning when she arrived home, soaking wet. Her father made her a cup of hot milk; her mother put her straight to bed. For three days, she got up only to go to the bathroom. Corinne phoned several times, but Allegra re-fused to speak to her.

How dare Corinne write up Allegra's secret stories and send them off to magazines to be published?

How dare Corinne write them so poorly that no one wished to take them?

It wasn't Jane Austen's fault that love went bad. You couldn't even say she didn't warn you. Her heroines made out well enough, but there were always other characters in the book who didn't finish happily-Brandon's Eliza inSense and Sensibility; inPride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, Lydia Bennet; inMansfield Park, Maria Bertram. These were the women to whom you should be paying attention, but you weren't.

Allegra was trying very hard not to express any of Corinne's opinions, but every time she spoke, Corinne's words came out. Corinne was in no mood to praise a writer like Austen, who wrote so much about love when the world was full of other things. "Everything in Austen is on the surface," Allegra said.

"She's not a writer who uses images. Image is the way to bring the unsaid into the text. With Austen, everything is said."

Prudie shook her head vigorously; her hair flew about her cheeks. "Half of what Jane says is said ironically. Irony is a way of saying two things at once." Prudie was trying to express some-thing she hadn't completely worked out yet. She opened her hands, like two halves of a book, clapped them closed. Allegra was mystified by the gesture, but she could see that whatever Prudie was trying to say, it was something she deeply believed. "The thing you've said and that opposite thing you've said at the same time," she cried out. She had the carefully constructed dignity of someone drunk. Prudie's dignity always felt slightly manufactured, so the difference was a subtle one. A tiny slur, a bit of spit.

"Yes, of course." Of course, Bernadette had no more idea what Prudie was going on about than Allegra did. She was just choos-ing agreement because it seemed more polite than opposition, even when one had no idea what point was being made. "And I think it's her humour that keeps us reading her two centuries later. At least, that's what I respond most to. I don't think I'm alone in this. Tell me if I'm alone in this."

"People like a romance," Grigg said. "Women do, anyway. I mean, I do, too. I didn't mean that I didn't."

Sylvia came back into the room. She stirred the fire so that it threw off sparks, spinning like pinwheels up the flue. She added another log, crushing the life out of what little flame had re-mained. "Brandon and Marianne," she said. "At the end, doesn't.i.t feel just as if Marianne's been sold? Her mother and Elinor, both pushing so hard. It reads as if she fell in love with Brandon, but onlyafter she married him. He's been such a good man that her mother and Elinor are determined he'll get his reward."

"But that's my point," Prudie said. "Janeintends you to feel that uncomfortableness. The book ends with that marriage and the thing Austen isn't saying about.i.t.

Sylvia sat down next to Allegra, which forced Grigg to move aside. "It just makes me sad. Marianne can be self-centred and all, but who really wants her sobered up, settled down? n.o.body. n.o.body could ever want to see her be anything but exactly what she is."

"Do you want her with Willoughby, then?" Allegra asked.

"Don't you?" said Sylvia. She leaned forward to address Prudie. "I think you should let Jocelyn drive you home tonight. Don't worry about your car. Daniel will bring it round in the morning." There was a silence. Sylvia put her hand over her mouth. "I'll do that," said Allegra. "I'll bring you your car."

When Allegra finally rose from her bed, only three days after she'd fled her apartment in nothing but her T-shirt, she drove to the Vacaville skydiving school. At first she was told that no one would take her. She had no appointment; she knew the rules. And if she was back because of the broken arm, they weren't re-sponsible for that; there were certain forms she might remember having signed. She needed to go home and think it through, they said. She needed to make an appointment and come back after she'd thought more about it.

Allegra argued. She laughed a lot, so that no one would get the wrong idea about her mood and intentions. She flirted. She let the men flirt back. She told them that this was a skydiving emergency, and finally, Marco, who'd been one of her instructors and was apparently still unclear on her s.e.xuality-not that she hadn't told him often enough, but her behaviour today had obvi-ously raised the question again-agreed to be her tandem mas-ter. Tandem was not what she wanted; she was definitely in the mood for solo, but solo wasn't happening.

Allegra put on the ridiculous orange suit and they went up. Marco clipped himself to the back of her shoulders and hips. "Are you ready?" he asked, and before she could answer, he'd pushed her out.

There was a smiley-face sticker inside the plane, just where you put your hand before you jumped. The words "Go Big" were written in marker beneath.