The Jane Austen Book Club Part 5

They slid through the air. The wind was rough, Marco close. But she got what she wanted. Blue sky above, brown hills below. Behind her, the university stretching out its vast agricultural fields of unnatural tomatoes, burrowing owls, dairy cows. Some-where to the east, her parents were having lunch. Her parents, who loved her. Marco pulled the cord, and she heard the para-chute spinning out, felt it catching. Her parents who loved her and her brothers and her nieces and each other, and they always would.

Dear Miss Austen:

We must regretfully inform you that your work does not suit our current needs.

In 1797, Jane Austen's father sentFirst Impressions to a publisher in London named Thomas Cadell.

"As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you," he wrote. He asked what it would cost to publish "at the Author's risk," and what advance might be offered if the ma.n.u.script were liked. He was prepared to pay himself, if necessary.

The package came back immediately, with "Declined by Return of Post" written across the top. The book was published sixteen years later. Its t.i.tle had been changed toPride and Prejudice.

In 1803, a London publisher named Richard Crosby bought a novel (later t.i.tledNorthanger Abbey) from Jane Austen for ten pounds. He advertised it in a brochure, but never published it. Six years pa.s.sed.

Austen then wrote to Crosby, offering to replace the ma.n.u.script, if it had been lost and if Crosby intended to publish it quickly. Other-wise, she said, she would go to another publisher.

Crosby wrote back, denying that he was under any obli-gation to publish the book. He would return it to her, he said, only if she returned his ten pounds.Northanger Abbey was not published until five months after Austen's death.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this li-brary. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book init.

MARK TWAIN.

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, with-out genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow.. . . All that interests in any character [is]: has he (or she) the money to marry with?... Suicide is more respectable.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

May

CHAPTER THREE.

in which we read Mansfield Park with Prudie

Her perfect security in such atete-a-tete...was unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarra.s.sments. (MANSFIELD PARK)

Prudie and Jocelyn had met two years before, at a Sunday matinee ofMansfield Park. Jocelyn was sitting in the row behind Prudie when the woman to Prudie's left began a whispered monologue to a friend about high jinks at some local riding stable. Someone was sleeping with one of the farriers-a real cowboy type, boots and blue jeans and a charm that seemed un-studied, but anyone who could gentle horses knew perfectly well how to get a woman into bed. The horses, of course, were the ones to suffer.

Rajah was not eating at all. "Like he thinks he'shers," the woman said, "just because I let her ride him from time to time."

Prudie was pretty sure this was about the horse. She hadn't spoken up. She sat and seethed over her Red Vines and thought about moving, but only if it could be done without an implied ac-cusation; she was, ask anyone, courteous to a fault. She was just beginning to take an unwelcome and distracting interest in Ra-jah's appet.i.te when Jocelyn leaned forward. "Go gossip in the lobby," Jocelyn said. You could tell that she was not a woman to be trifled with. Send her to deal with your cowboy types. Send her to feed your oh-so-sensitive horses.

"Excuse me," the woman responded resentfully. "Like your movie is so much more important than my real life." But she fell silent, and Prudie didn't really care that she was offended, an of-fended silence being just as silent as a flattered one. This silence lasted the whole movie, which was all that mattered.

The gos-sipers left at the credits, but the true Janeite was truly gracious, and stayed for the final chord, the white screen. Prudie knew without looking that Jocelyn would still be there when she turned to thank her.

They talked more as they threaded through the seats. Jocelyn turned out to like fiddling about with the original story no better than Prudie did. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word.

You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.

The movies, as everyone knew, had no respect for this. All the characters had been altered-f.a.n.n.y's horrid aunt Mrs. Norris was diminished simply by lack of screen time; her uncle Mr. Bertram, a hero in the book, was now accused of slave-dealing and s.e.xual predations; and all the rest were portrayed in broad strokes or reinvented. Most provocative was the amalgamation of f.a.n.n.y with Austen herself, which sc.r.a.ped oddly at times, as the two were nothing alike-f.a.n.n.y so shrinking and Austen so playful.

What resulted was a character who thought and spoke like Jane, but acted and reacted like f.a.n.n.y. It made no sense.

Not that you couldn't understand the screenwriter's motiva-tion. No one loved Austen more than Prudie, ask anyone. But even Prudie found the character of f.a.n.n.y Price hard going. f.a.n.n.y was the prigin your first-grade cla.s.s who never, ever mis-behaved and who told the teacher when anyone else did.

How to keep the movie audience from loathing her? While Austen, by some accounts, had been quite a flirt, full of life and charm. More likeMansfield's villainous Mary Crawford.

So Austen had given Mary all her own wit and sparkle, and none of it to f.a.n.n.y. Prudie had always wondered why, then, not only f.a.n.n.y but also Austen seemed to dislike Mary so much.

Saying all this took time. Prudie and Jocelyn stopped at the Cafe Roma to have a cup of coffee together and examine their re-sponses more minutely. Dean, Prudie's husband, left them there and went home to reappraise the movie in solitude while catch-ing the second half of the 49er-Viking game.

On her first reading,Mansfield Park had been Prudie's least favourite of the six novels. Her opinion had improved over the years. So much so that when Sylvia picked it for May, Prudie vol-unteered to host the discussion, even though no one is busier than a high school teacher in May.

She expected a lively exchange and had so much to say herself, she'd been filling index cards for several days in order to re-member it all. Prudie was a great believer in organization, a nat-ural Girl Scout. She had lists of things to be cleaned, things to be cooked, things to be said. She was serious about her hosting. With power-responsibility.

But the day began, ominously, with something unexpected. She appeared to have picked up a virus in her e-mail. There was a note from her mother: "Missing my darling. Thinking of com-ing for a visit." But then there were two more notes that had her mother's return address plus attachments, when her mother hadn't mastered attachments yet. The e-mails themselves read, "Here is a powful tool. I hope you will like," and "Here is some-thing you maybe enjoy." The identical "powful tool" message came again in another e-mail. This one seemed to be from Susan in the attendance office.

Prudie had planned to send out a reminder that, because of the heat, the book club would meet at eight instead of seven-thirty that night, but she didn't wish to risk spreading the infec-tion. She shut down without even answering her mother's note.

The predicted temperature for the day was a hundred six. This, too, was bad news. Prudie had planned to serve a compote, but no one was going to touch anything hot. She'd better stop by the store after work and get some fruit for a sherbet. Maybe root beer floats. Easy, but fun!

Dean lurched out of bed just in time to kiss her good-bye. He was wearing nothing but a T-s.h.i.+rt, which was a good look for him, and how many men could you say that about? Dean had been staying up at night to watch soccer. He was in training for the World Cup, for those games that would soon be shown live from whatever time zone j.a.pan and Korea occupied. "I'll be late today," he told her. He worked in an insurance office.

"I've got book club."

"Which book?"

"Mansfield Park."

"I guess I'll skip that one," Dean said. "Maybe rent the movie.

"You've already been to the movie," Prudie answered. She was a tiny bit distressed. They'd been to it together. How could he not remember? Only then did she see that he was teasing her. It was a measureof how distracted she was, because she was usu-ally quick to catch a joke. Anyone could tell you that.

"How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chrono-logical order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the princ.i.p.al events of their reigns!"

"...and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and distinguished philosophers."

(MANSFIELD PARK).

Prudie gave her third-period students a chapter ofLe Pet.i.t Prince to translate- "Laseconde planete etait habitee par un vani-teux"-and took a seat in the back of the cla.s.sroom to finalize her notes for book club. (The secret to teaching was to place yourself where you could see them but they couldn't see you. And nothing was more deadly than the reverse. Chalkboards were for chumps.) It was already way too hot. The air was still, with an odour faintly locker-room. Prudie's neck was streaked with sweat. Her dress was fastened onto her back, but her fingers slid on the pen. The so-called temporary buildings (they would last no longer than Shakespeare's plays) in which she taught had no air-conditioning. It was hard to keep the students' attention in May. It was always hard to keep the students' attention. The temperature made it impossible. Prudie looked about the room and saw several of them wilted over their desks, limp as old let-tuce leaves.

She saw little sign of work in progress. Instead the students slept or whispered among themselves or stared out the windows.

In the parking lot, hot air billowed queasily over the hoods of cars. Lisa Streit had her hair in her face and her work in her lap. There was something especially brittle about her today, the aura of the recent dumpee. She'd been dating a senior and, Prudie had no doubt, pressured daily to give it up to him.

Prudie hoped she'd been dumped because she hadn't done so rather than dumped because she had.

Lisa was a sweet girl who wanted to be liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college, when being likable became a plausible path to that. Trey Norton said some-thing low and nasty, and everyone who could hear him laughed. If Prudie rose to go see, she believed, she'd find Elijah Wallace and Katy Singh playing hangman. Elijah was probably gay, but neither he nor Katy knew it yet. It was too much to hope the se-cret word would be French.

In fact, why bother? Why bother to send teenagers to school at all? Their minds were so clogged with hormones they couldn't possibly learn a complex system like calculus or chemistry, much less the wild tangle of a foreign language. Why put everyone to the aggravation of making them try? Prudie thought that she could just do the rest of it-watch them for signs of suicide or weapons or pregnancy or drugaddiction or s.e.xual abuse-but asking her to teach them French at the same time was really too much.

There were days when just the sight of fresh, bright acne or badly applied mascara or the raw, infected skin around a brand-new piercing touched Prudie deeply. Most of the students were far more beautiful than they would ever realize. (There were also days when adolescents seemed like an infestation in her other-wise comfortable life. Often these were the same days.) Trey Norton, on the other hand, was beautiful and knew it- wounded eyes, slouched clothes, heavy, swinging walk.Beaute du diable. "New dress?" he'd asked Prudie while taking his seat today. He'd looked her over, and his open a.s.sessment was both unsettling and infuriating. Prudie certainly knew how to dress professionally. If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-f.u.c.king-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a suit? "Hot," he'd said.

He was angling for a better grade than he deserved, and Prudie was just barely too old to be taken in.

She wished she were old enough to be impervious. In her late twenties, suddenly, unnervingly, she found herself wis.h.i.+ng to sleep with nearly every man she saw.

The explanation could be only chemical, because Prudie was not that sort of woman. Here at school every breath she took was a soup of adolescent pheromones. Three years of concentrated daily exposure-how could this not have an effect?

She'd tried to defuse such thoughts by turning them medici-nally, as needed, to Austen. Laces and bonnets. Country lanes and country dances. Shaded estates with pleasant prospects. But the strategy had backfired. Now, often as not, when she thought of whist, s.e.x came also to mind. From time to time she imagined bringing all this up in the teachers' lounge. "Do you ever find yourself.. ." she would begin. (As if!) She'd actually been s.e.xually steadier her first time through high school, a fact that could only dismay her now. There was nothing about those years to remember with satisfaction. She had grown early and by sixth grade was far too tall. "They'll catch up," her mother had told her (without being asked, that's how obvious the problem was). And she was perfectly right. When Prudie graduated, most of the boys had topped her by a couple of inches at least.

What her mother didn't know, or didn't say, was how little this would matter by the time it happened. In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper onJulius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter, or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your home-work. Every boy in the school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go f.u.c.king nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

Meanwhile, at restaurants, the beach, the movies, men who should have been looking at her mother began to look at Prudie instead. They brushed past her in the grocery store, deliberately grazing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They sat too close on the bus, let their legs fall against her at the movies. Old men in their thirties whistled when she walked by. Prudie was mortified, and this appeared to be the point; the more mortified she became, the more pleased the men seemed to be. The first time a boy asked to kiss her (in college) she'd thought he was making fun of her.

So Prudie was not pretty and she was not popular. There was no reason she couldn't have been nice.

Instead, to bolster her so-cial position at school, she'd sometimes joined in when the true outcasts were given their daily dose of torment. She'd seen this as a diversionary tactic at the time, shameful but necessary. Now it was unbearable to remember. Could she have really been so cruel? Someone elseperhaps had tripped Megan Stahl on the as-phalt and kicked her books away. Megan Stahl, Prudie could now see, had probably been slightly r.e.t.a.r.ded as well as grind-ingly poor.

As a teacher Prudie watched out for such children, did her best for them. (But what could a teacher do?

No doubt she made things worse as often as she made them better.) This atonement must have been the real reason she'd chosen the career, although at the time it had seemed to be about loving France and having no inclination for actual scholars.h.i.+p. Probably every high school teacher arrived with scores to settle, scales to tip.

Precious little inMansfield Park supported the possibility of fundamental reform. "Character is set early." Prudie wrote this on a notecard, followed it with examples: Henry Crawford, the rake, improves temporarily, but can't sustain it. Aunt Norris and cousin Maria are, throughout the book, as steadfast in their mean-ness and their sin as f.a.n.n.y and cousin Edmund are in their pro-priety. Only cousin Tom, after a brush with death and at the very, very end of the book, manages to amend.

It was enough to give Prudie hope. Perhaps she was not as horrible as she feared. Perhaps she was not beyond forgiveness, even from Jane.

But at the very moment she thought this, her fingers, slipping up and down her pen, put her in mind of something decidedly, unforgivably un-Austenish. She looked up and found that Trey Norton had swung about, was watching her. This was no sur-prise. Trey was as sensitive to any lewd thought as a dowser to water. He smiled at her, and it was such a smile as no boy should give his high school teacher. (Or no high school teacher should attribute such things to the mere act of baring one's teeth. My bad, Jane.

Pardonnez-moi.) "Do you need something, Trey?" Prudie asked. She dropped the pen, wiped her hands on her skirt.

"You know what I need," he answered. Paused a deliberate moment. Held his work up.

She rose to go see, but the bell rang."Allez-vous en!" Prudie said playfully, and Trey was the first on his feet, the first out the door. The other students gathered their papers, their binders, their books. Went off to sleep in someone else's cla.s.s.

"This chapel was fitted up as you see it, in James the Second's time."(MANSFIELD PARK)

Prudie had a free period, and she walked through the quad to the library, where there was air-conditioning as well as two com-puter stations with Internet access. She wiped the sweat from her face and neck with her hand, wiped her hand on her hem, and looked at her e-mail. Kapow to the offers to consolidate her debts, enlarge her p.e.n.i.s, enchant her with X-rated barnyard ac-tion, provide craft tips, recipes, jokes, missing persons, cheap pharmaceuticals. Kapow to anything with a suspicious attach-ment; there were six more of these. Deleting all this took only a minute, but it was a minute she begrudged, because who'd asked for any of it? Who had the time? And tomorrow every bit of it would be back. She hadla mer a boire.

Cameron Watson settled into the terminal next to her. Cameron was a slope-backed, beak-nosed kidwho looked about eleven but was really seventeen. He'd been in Prudie's cla.s.s two years before and was also a neighbour from three houses over. His mother and Prudie were members of the same investment group. Once this investment group had seen some heady returns. Once fibre-optics companies and large-cap tech stocks had hung like grapes from a vine. Now everything was a shambles of despair and recrimination. These days Prudie saw little of Cameron s mother.

Cameron had told Prudie that he had a friend in France. They e-mailed, so he wanted to learn the language, but he'd shown no apt.i.tude, although his excellent homework made Prudie sus-pect the French friend did it for him. Clearly bright as a bee, Cameron had that peculiar mix of competence and cluelessness that marks the suburban computer geek. Prudie went to him with all her computer problems and did her best, in return, to genuinely like him.

"I'm afraid to send anything from home just now," she told him, "because I've been getting e-mails that seem to've come from people in my address book but didn't. There are attach-ments, but I haven't downloaded them. Or read them."

"Doesn't matter. You've been infected." He wasn't looking at her, leaning into his own screen. Mouse clicking. "Self-replicating. Tricky. The work of a thirteen-year-old kid in Hong Kong. I could come clean it up for you faster than I could tell you how."

"That would be so great," Prudie said.

"If you had DSL I could do it from home. Don't you hate be-ing so-geographical? You should get DSL.".

"You livethree houses from me," Prudie said. "And I spent so much money last time out." (Cameron had advised her on every purchase. He knew her setup better than she did.) "Just two years ago. Dean won't see the need. Do you think I could get a sub-stantial upgrade without buying a whole new computer?"

"Don'tgo there," Cameron said, apparently not to Prudie but to the screen. Although it might have been to Prudie. Cameron liked Dean a ton and would hear no criticism about him.

Three more students walked in, ostensibly on a research as-signment. They punched up the catalogue, wrote things in their notebooks, conferred with the librarian. One of these students was Trey Norton.

There was a second boy, whom Prudie didn't know. One girl, Sallie Wong. Sallie had long polished hair and tiny gla.s.ses. Good ear for languages, lovely accent. She was wear-ing a blue tank top with straps that crossed in the back, and her shoulders gleamed with sweat and that lotion with glitter all the girls were using. No bra.

When they went into the stacks, they went in three differ-ent directions. Trey and Sallie met up immediately somewhere in poetry. Through the gla.s.s window of the computer station, Prudie had a clear view down four of the aisles. She watched Trey take Sallie's hair in his hands. He whispered something.