“So,” Martin said, digging in his spade. “You’ve come to find me because there’s no real gentleman for you to flirt with.”
Huh! thought Jane.
He snapped a dead branch off the trunk.
Huh! she thought again. She stood and started to walk away.
“Wait.” Martin hopped after her, grabbing her elbow. “Earlier I saw you with those actors, parading around the grounds. I hadn’t seen you with them before. In the context. And it bothered me. I mean, you don’t really go in for this stuff, do you?”
Jane shrugged.
“You do?”
“More than I want to, though you’ve been making it seem unnecessary lately.”
Martin squinted up at a cloud. “I’ve never understood the women who come here, and you’re one of them. I can’t make sense of it.”
“I don’t know how to explain it to you. If you were a woman, all I’d have to say is ‘soaking wet Colin Firth’ and you’d say, ‘Ah.’ ”
She’d hoped he would laugh at the Colin Firth thing. But he didn’t. And now the silence made her feel as though she were standing on a seesaw, waiting for the weight to drop on the other side.
And then she smelled it. The musty, acrid, sour, curdled, metallic, decaying odor of ending. This wasn’t just a first fight. She’d been in this position too many times not to recognize the signs.
“Are you breaking up with me?” she asked.
Martin grimaced. “Were we together enough to require breaking up?”
Oh. Ouch. Her cheeks felt sunburn hot, and she took a step back. Perhaps it was her dress that allowed her to compose herself more quickly than normal. She curtsied.
“Pardon the interruption, I mistook you for someone I knew.”
She turned and left, wishing for a Victorian-type gown so she could have whipped the full skirts for a satisfying little cracking sound. She had to gratify herself with emphatically tightening her bonnet ribbon as she marched.
You foolish, foolish girl, she thought. You were fantasizing again after all. Stop it!
And it had all been going so well. She’d let herself have fun, unwind, not plague a new romance with constant questions such as: What if? And after? And will he love me forever?
“Are you breaking up with me . . . ?” she muttered to herself. He must think she was off her rocker. And really, he’d be right. She had scored a vacation to an ultra-exclusive resort where women hand over scads of dough to be romanced by men paid to adore them, but she found the one man on campus who was in a position to reject her. And then led him straight into it. Typical Jane.
Boyfriend #6
Rahim (last name forgotten), age “thirty-five” (probably forty+)
“You are so lovely,” he told Jane across the perfume counter. She was nineteen, in college, making minimum wage, and that morning her mother had casually said, “I used to believe that once my child became an adult I’d find her interesting.” Possibly that’s why his praise felt more important than it was, a gorgeous bird she couldn’t bear to let go.
He came by every day for a week, complimenting her, asking her about herself, and really listening. At last, she agreed to go out with him. He took her to an expensive restaurant, and he paid! In a spree of crazy extravagance, she ordered appetizersanddessert. The conversation wore itself out, and she wasn’t sorry when he was finally driving her home.
“But first, I must take you to my place to show you my art. You are an artist. It will be food for your eyes!”
In his studio apartment, the walls were bare. Not only was there no painting—there was no sofa, only a round bed with a velvet cover in the center of the room.
He took off his shirt and declared, “I am the food for your eyes.”
To be fair, he was very fit. But she thought of the moment Elizabeth runs into Mr. Darcy at Pemberley; by comparison, Rahim’s attempted seduction made Jane laugh. Out loud.
There was an excruciating pause. She cleared her throat and mumbled an apology as she left. It was a long walk home in heels.
Day 5, Continued
