She plunged into bed and closed her eyes. And wondered how early she could slip away to see Martin again tomorrow.
Boyfriend #5
Ray Riboldi, age seventeen
Ray was pockmarked and didn’t wash his hair regularly, but it didn’t matter, because he was nice. After Boyfriends #3 and #4, Jane readMansfield Parkand realized that a kind, quiet guy was her sincerest desire. Ray picked her wildflowers. He gave her the Hostess desserts his mother still packed in his lunches, even the fruit pies, and his constant gaze made her feel luscious.
After a couple of months, two emotionally immature boys who Jane had grown up with decided Ray shouldn’t be dating out of his Appearance Pool and played a prank involving catapulting dog poop (so original!) into the open roof of Ray’s rusty Jeep.
“Stay away from girls too pretty for you!” they shouted, tires squealing out of the school parking lot.
Jane swore she wasn’t involved, but Ray didn’t listen. In the middle of the cafeteria, he ground a premeditated Hostess cupcake into her hair. Hard.
Turned out, he wasn’t that nice after all.
Day 5
The next day was yet another late breakfast, reading in the morning room, a visit from Miss Heartwright, and a turn in the gardens that involved no soil or vegetable maintenance whatsoever. Taking a “stroll with gentlemen” should’ve made Jane’s hatted, sideburned fancies race, but she was fully disengaged now. In fact, walking in the rear behind their tall hats and tails, she felt proud, perhaps even smug. She was rubbing shoulders with a couple of Regency dreamboats but chose a root-beer-guzzling gardener. Martin was appearing to be a serendipitous antidote to her Darcy obsession.
She paid no attention to whatever new story Miss Heartwright was telling Mr. Nobley about London, busying herself instead by scanning the grounds for any sign of that tall drink of water.
When they entered the shade of the wooded area, Miss Charming said, “Ooh, I do hope the forest isn’t full of wolves,”using fear as an excuse to press herself tighter to Colonel Andrews.
“Never fear, Miss Charming,” he said. “I should think no prey is particularly alarmed by our nearness. We have the gait of well-fed predators.”
The subject of predators apparently interested Miss Heartwright, and she sped up to walk beside them and list her favorites, leaving Mr. Nobley alone.
Jane felt a subtle warm indication of attention and looked back. He was watching her again. Just the sight of him made her feel so vulnerable, her heart pounded, and something unnamable rose up in her throat. She didn’t like that he could have such an effect on her, especially after how rude he’d been in their last conversation.
“Miss Erstwhile—” he started, but there was a kindness in his voice, and that was even more intolerable.
“Excuse me,” she said, pivoting to return early to the house.
Instead of feeling relief at her escape, she felt regret—for her own rudeness, but perhaps even more for any missed opportunity to speak again with that man. But she reminded herself that he was an actor, and after seeing his true coldness and disregard for her, she couldn’t bear his fake caring. And even more (could she admit it to herself?) she couldn’t bear it if she’d misread him. With white knuckles, she clung to the memory of his unkindness, making it bigger and bigger inside her, as if trying to protect herself from any potential wonderfulness.
Besides, while Martin was out there somewhere, trying to pretend with Mr. Nobley felt as uncomfortable as trying to follow a movie’s plot while someone blasted a podcast in her ears. So, to pass the time till dinner and then Martin, she hid in the library, reading an Ann Radcliffe novel,TheItalian, her brain straining to keep up with the archaic storytelling. What a crock, she thought. What absolute boredom and inanity. It can’t really have been like this. And if it was, why didn’t all those Regency women go insane? Currently “maybe Austenland won’t be that wonderful” was winning over “maybe Austenland will be so heartbreakingly exquisite I’ll end up in a basket-making cult.” And that, too, was a relief.
Part of the Experience was the life of leisure, she knew, but she was an adopted New Yorker and an heiress to the New England Puritan work ethic. Doing next to nothing all day was taking its toll. She had begun to daydream of the oddest things: washing her clothes in the sink when all her building’s laundry machines were occupied; the muggy-locker-room smell of a full subway; eating a thrillingly affordable banana from a street vendor; buying a disposable umbrella in a downpour. She had a sudden craving for Vietnamese food. Whenever she ordered from her favorite spot, they sent two free spring rolls, and it twinged her with sadness because she didn’t have someone to share them with.
Spring rolls, Jane? Right now? All the hours she had spent in the mundane activities of her life daydreaming of living in Austen’s world, and now here she was inside it while daydreaming about the mundane. It seemed too cruel.
Becoming increasingly desperate for a distraction, she decided to hunt Martin down during the day. What was stopping her? After all, he wasn’t a vampire.
It was pleasant and sunny, though as she strolled the flat, elegant garden, the glare soon made her want shade. The mazelike lines of low hedges were disrupted in the center by a miniature Parthenon. She snorted at the sight. She knew it had been in vogue to create fake ruins in Regency gardens.But in her present mood, she found it unsettling, an obvious falsehood inside the otherwise natural loveliness of flowers and shrubs, turning the garden into a farce.
Jane avoided the wilderness areas of the park, where the garden-turning quartet still wandered. She spotted a couple gray, squat-hatted heads that didn’t belong to her quarry, before finally discovering a tall gardener pruning growth by a low stone wall. She sat on the wall, opened her book, and paid him no mind. After a few minutes the sounds of clipping stopped, and she felt his gaze on her. She turned a page.
“Jane,” he said with a touch of exasperation.
“Shh, I’m reading,” she said.
“Jane, listen, someone warned me that another fellow heard our music playing last night and might have told Mrs. Wattlesbrook. I have to be especially cautious. If they spot me hanging around you . . .”
“You’re not hanging around me, I’m reading.”
“Bugger, Jane . . .”
“Martin, please, you can’t cast me away now. I’ll go raving mad if I have to sit in that house again all afternoon. I haven’t sewn a thing since junior high when I made a pair of shorts that ripped at the butt seam the first time I sat down, and I haven’t playedpianoforteever except one-handed tunes my friend Molly taught me, and I don’t know how to just relax and do nothing, so you see what a mess I’m in. And now that Miss Heartwright is around, both gents are occupied and I’m the odd one out, and it’s humiliating.”
