The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  2. One time we went to a museum where there were paintings by van Gogh. I liked how thick they were. Daddy said that artists paint the way they actually see, or maybe he said something else, but I heard it that way. I thought about van Gogh looking out from his eyes at a world thick like that. I’d never wondered if I saw the world the way everyone else did or if I saw something better or wrong or different. How would you know? How would van Gogh say, Does everything look sort of thick to you? He wouldn’t even think to say it.

  The next day I lay out on the grass in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.

  3. My parents believed children should have lots of free time. They believed in dreaming. I had piano lessons briefly, but they didn’t take, and I didn’t do after-school sports or anything until I was in high school. I read a lot and I made things. I looked for four-leaf clovers. I watched ant colonies. Ants have very little unscheduled time. Places to go, people to see. I adopted a particular nest, out by a stepping-stone in Mom’s mission garden. I was very good to my ants at first. I brought them bits of cookies with sprinkles; I landscaped with shells and thought how I’d like to find a shell so big I could climb inside, go exploring.

  I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn’t fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Anyway, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have been like a basketball court.

  I imagined political upheavals, plots and coups d’état, and I reported on them. I think I may have been reading a biography of Mary Queen of Scots at the time. Did you read those orange biographies as a child? The ones all about the childhoods of famous people, and the last chapter would be the accomplishments that made them famous? God, I loved those books. I remember Ben Franklin and Clara Barton and Will Rogers and Jim Thorpe and Amelia Earhart and Madame Curie, and one about the first white child born in the Roanoke colony—Virginia Dare?—but I guess that must have all been made up.

  Anyway, there was this short news day for the ants. I’d run out of political plots, or I was bored with them. So I got a glass of water and I created a flood. The ants scrambled for safety, swimming for their lives. I was kind of ashamed, but it made good copy. I told myself I was bringing excitement into their usual humdrum. The next day, I dropped a rock on them. It was a meteorite from outer space. They gathered around it and ran up and over it; obviously they didn’t know what to do. It prompted three letters to the editor. Eventually I torched them. I was always way too interested in matches. Things got a little out of hand and the fire spread from the anthill into the garden. Only a little, not as bad as that sounds. Diego came and stamped it out, and I remember crying and trying to get him to stop, because he was stepping on my ants.

  But what a horrible, heartless queen I turned out to be. I will never seek the presidency.

  4. There was this boy I fucked when I was twenty-two, just because he wanted it so much. He was a student from Galway, and we met in Rome and traveled together for three weeks. On our last night together, the night before I had to go home, we were in Prague. We went to dinner and then out to the bars, and I drank until I was wetly sentimental, and demanded an exchange of tokens. He gave me a photograph of him holding a cat. I forced my silver ring onto his finger. It caught at the knuckle, but I pushed it down.

  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 colors. We went to the restroom of the pub and tried to soap it loose, but it was too late, the finger far too swollen. We asked for butter and got it, but that didn’t work either. His face was now turning an odd color 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 fucking 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 actually 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 stethoscope. 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 until 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 happened, 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 embarrassment, 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, screwing it off by force. Apparently 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 doctor hadn’t been so cross. “I wanted you to have it as a keepsake,” I told Conor.

  “I guess I’ll remember you, all right,” he said.

  The phone rang in the kitchen and Allegra went to answer it. 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 down and went back into the living room. “It’s Dad,” she told Sylvia. “It’s a guilt call.”

  Sylvia went to the phone, carrying her wine. “Hello, Daniel.” She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the dark, her glass 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 familiarity, the hominess of the sound nearly undid her. She pressed her glass against her face. A moment passed before she could trust herself to speak. “Give her time.”

  “I have someone coming on Saturday 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.”
r />   “Fuck 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 Saturday. 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 occasionally, Allegra heard the keys. Corinne’s mood had improved, and she talked a lot at dinner now about point of view and pacing 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 space without remuneration, whether the group shouldn’t honor 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 order to espouse nonviolence effectively. They were writers. They, of all people, must resist censorship in whatever guise. The Quakers 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 bedroom farce, only without any actual humor to it, and the text messily annotated with arrows and cross-outs, so it was no pleasure to read; yet week after week he reliably turned in another plodding chapter of cocks and cuckoldings. 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 substitute brown or blue or not mention the goddamn 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 sex-toy store. “I’ll go with you,” Allegra said. Surely Corinne didn’t expect her to stay home while racy poetry was being read aloud in a landscape of whips and dildos.

  “I don’t want you making fun of anyone.” Corinne was obviously 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 actually said that Allegra could go, but Allegra did, since she was now anxious to prove that she could behave, in addition to getting 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 butterflies. There were cabinets 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 statement 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 compete 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 be laughed at. As if I’d laugh at her.”

  “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 enjoyed it. “I brought some cookies by to thank you both for coming,” 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 retarded boy? ‘Billy’s Ball’? Like Tom Hanks in that castaway thing, only genuinely moving.”

  “Corinne wrote a story about a retarded 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 classified. 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 innocence.

  Allegra said:

  5. There was this girl I knew in high school who got pregnant. 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 glassy eyes. The Petit 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.