The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Prudie missed our next meeting. Jocelyn brought a card for everyone to sign. She said it was a sympathy card, which we had to take her word for, as it was all in French. The front was sober enough—a seascape, dunes, gulls, and drift. Time and tide or some such cold comfort. “I was so sad to hear that she had to cancel her trip to France,” Sylvia said, and then looked away, embarrassed, because that was hardly the saddest part.

  Jocelyn spoke up quickly. “You know she’s never been.”

  We had, most of us, also lost our mothers. We spent a moment missing them. The sun was blooming rosily in the west. The trees were in full leaf. The air was bright and soft and laced with the smells of grass, of coffee, of melted Brie. How our mothers would have loved it!

  Allegra leaned over and picked up Sylvia’s hand, traced around the fingers, let it go. Sylvia was looking uncommonly elegant tonight. She had cut her hair as short as Allegra’s and was dressed in a long skirt with a Chinese-red fitted top. Applied a plummy lipstick and had her eyebrows shaped. We were pleased to see that she’d reached that drop-dead stage of the divorce proceedings. She was on her feet and dressed to kill.

  Allegra was, as always, vivid. Jocelyn was classic. Grigg was casual—corduroys and a green rugby shirt. Bernadette had already spilled hummus on her yoga pants.

  The pants were spotted with olive and blue flowers, and now there was a hummus-colored spot as well on the ledge of her stomach. You could go a long time without noticing the stain, however. You could go a long time without looking at her pants. This was because she’d broken her glasses sometime after our last meeting and patched them together with a startling great lump of paper clips and masking tape.

  It was possible they weren’t even broken. It was possible she’d merely lost the little screw.

  The meeting was held at Grigg’s. Some of us had wondered whether Grigg would ever be hosting us, and some of us had thought he wouldn’t be and were already cross about the special arrangements men always expected: how they never made the big meals, the holiday meals, how their wives wrote their thank yous for them and sent out the birthday cards. We were working ourselves into something of a state about it when Grigg said we should have the Northanger Abbey meeting at his house, because he was probably the only one in the group who liked Northanger Abbey best of all the books so far.

  This was not a position we could imagine anyone taking. We hoped Grigg wasn’t saying this just because it was provocative. Austen was no occasion for displays of ego.

  We’d been curious about Grigg’s housekeeping. Most of us hadn’t seen a bachelor pad since the seventies. We were picturing mirror balls and Andy Warhol.

  We got chili-string lights and Beatrix Potter. Grigg had rented a cozy brick cottage in a pricey part of town. It had a tin roof and a porch overhung with grapevines. Inside was a sleeping loft and the smallest wood-burning stove we’d ever seen. During February, Grigg said, he’d heated the whole place with it, but by the time he’d chopped the logs into the tiny splinters that would fit inside, he didn’t need a fire anymore; he’d be sweating like a pig.

  There was a rug by the couch that many of us recognized from the Sundance catalogue as something we ourselves had wanted, the one with poppies on the edges. The sun glanced off a row of copper pots in the kitchen window.

  Each pot held an African violet, some white, some purple, and you have to admire a man who keeps his houseplants alive, especially when they’ve been transferred into pots with no holes for drainage. It made us begrudge him the rug less. Of course, the violets could all have been new, bought just to impress us. But then again, who were we that we needed impressing?

  The wall along the stairs was lined with built-in bookcases, and these were stuffed with books, not just upright, but teepeed across the tops of other books as well. They were mostly paperbacks, and well read. Allegra went to check them out. “Lots of rocketships in this collection,” she said.

  “You like science fiction?” Sylvia asked Grigg. From her tone of voice you might have thought she was interested in science fiction and the people who read it.

  Grigg wasn’t fooled. “Always have,” was all he said. He continued to arrange cheese wedges on a plate. They made a sort of picture of a face when he was done, a cheese-wedge smile, two pepper-cracker eyes. We may have just been imagining that, though. He may have been laying out the cheese with no artistic intent.

  Grigg had grown up in Orange County, the only boy in a family with four children, and the youngest. His oldest sister, Amelia, was eight when he was born, Bianca was seven, and Caty, who was called Catydid when she was little and Cat when she was older, was five.

  He was always way too easy to tease. Sometimes they told him not to be such a boy and sometimes not to be such a baby. It didn’t seem to leave a whole lot of things for him to be.

  If Grigg had been a girl, his name would have been Delia. Instead he was named after his father’s father, who’d died just about the time Grigg was born and already no one seemed to remember him very well. “A man’s man,” Grigg’s father said, “a quiet man,” which was a movie Grigg had seen on television and so he always pictured his grandfather as John Wayne.

  Even so, it was hard to forgive the name. Every year at school, the first time his new teacher would take attendance, she would call for Harris Grigg instead of Grigg Harris. All year Grigg anticipated the next year’s humiliation. And then he found out that his grandfather’s real name was Gregory and that his parents had known this all along. Grigg was just a nickname and not a family name, not until Grigg’s own parents had made it one. He repeatedly asked them why, but never got an answer he felt settled the question. He told them that from then on he, too, would go by “Gregory,” but no one ever remembered, even though they could remember to call Caty “Cat” easily enough.

  Grandpa Harris had worked for the electric company as a lineman. It was a dangerous job, Grigg’s father told him. Grigg had every hope of having a dangerous job himself someday, though more secret agent than crack utility worker. His own father was a meter reader and had been in the hospital four times with dog bites. He had two shiny scars on the calf of one leg and another scar somewhere no one saw. The Harrises had never owned a dog, and as long as his father was alive they never would. Grigg was five the first time this was explained to him, and he still remembered his reaction, how he thought to himself that his father couldn’t live forever.

  Grigg was the only one of the children with his own bedroom. This was a continual source of resentment. The room was so tiny the bed barely fit and his chest of drawers had to be put in the hall. Still, it was all his. The ceiling slanted; there was a single window, and wallpaper with yellow rosebuds, which Amelia had picked because the room had been hers until Grigg came along. If he’d been a girl she would have gotten to keep the room.

  When the wind blew, a branch tapped against the glass like fingers, but that surely wouldn’t have scared Amelia. Grigg would lie in the dark, all by himself, and the tree creaked and tapped. He would hear his sisters laughing down the hall. He knew when it was Amelia laughing and when it was Bianca and when it was Cat, even if he couldn’t hear the words. He guessed they were talking about boys, a subject on which they had nothing pleasant to say.

  “You girls go to sleep now,” his mother would shout from downstairs. She often played the piano after the children were in bed, and if she could still hear them over her beloved Scott Joplin, then they were too loud. The girls might respond with a temporary silence, or they might not bother. Individually they were governable. As a unit, not so much so.

  Grigg’s father couldn’t stand up to them at all. They hated the smell of his pipe, so he smoked only in his toolshed. They hated sports, so he went out to his car to listen to games on the radio. When they wanted money, they flirted for it, straightening his tie and kissing his cheek until, helpless as a kitten, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Once Grigg did the very same thing, blinked his heavy lashes and pouted his lips. Cat laug
hed so hard she choked on a peanut, which could have killed her. Amelia had heard of that happening to someone, and how would Grigg have felt then?

  Grigg was always being laughed at. He’d been the only boy in his first-grade class who could go all the way around the world in jacks, but that, too, turned out to be a social misstep.

  One day when he was in the fifth grade, Grigg’s father stopped him after breakfast. “Come out back with me,” he said, in a low voice. “And don’t tell the girls.”

  “Out back” meant the little room his father had made for himself in the old toolshed. Out back was strictly invitation-only. There was a lock on the door, and a plaid La-Z-Boy Grigg’s mother hated and wouldn’t have in the house. There was an old Tupperware dish with an endless supply of Red Hots. Grigg didn’t like Red Hots much, but he ate them when they were offered; they were still candy, after all. Grigg was happy to hear that the girls were not invited, were not even to be told. It was not an easy thing, keeping a secret from three older sisters while still making sure everyone knew there was a secret being kept, but Grigg had studied with the masters, who were the girls themselves.

  Grigg went to the toolshed. His father was waiting, smoking a cigarette. There was no window in the shed, so it was always dark, even with the lamp on, and the smoke was thick; because no one knew about secondhand smoke then, no one thought anything about it. The lamp had a bendable neck and a glaring bulb, as if someone was about to be interrogated. His father was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with a stack of magazines in his lap.

  “This is strictly boy stuff,” his father said. “Top-secret. Got it?”

  Grigg took a seat on an upended apple crate, and his father handed him a magazine. On the cover was the picture of a woman in her underwear. Her black hair flew about her face in long, loose curls. Her eyes were wide. She had enormous breasts, barely contained by a golden bra.

  But best of all, unbelievably best, was the thing unhooking the bra. It had eight tentacled arms and a torso shaped like a Coke can. It was blue. The look on its face—what an artist to convey so much emotion on a creature with so few features!—was hungry.

  This was the afternoon that made a reader out of Grigg.

  Soon he had learned:

  From Arthur C. Clarke, that “art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.”

  From Theodore Sturgeon, that “sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.”

  From Philip K. Dick, that “at least half the famous people in history never existed,” and that “anything can be faked.”

  What Grigg liked best about science fiction was that it seemed to be a place where he was neither alone nor surrounded by girls. He wouldn’t have continued to like it as he grew, if it really had been as girl-free a world as he initially thought. His first favorite author was Andrew North. Later he learned that Andrew North was a pen name for Andre Norton. Later still he learned that Andre Norton was a girl.

  Grigg didn’t tell us any of this, because he thought we wouldn’t be interested. “Those books with rocketships on the spine were the first books I fell in love with,” is what Grigg said. “You never do get over your first love, do you?”

  “No,” said Sylvia. “You never do.”

  “Except for sometimes,” said Bernadette.

  “I was at a science fiction convention when I first met Jocelyn,” Grigg told us.

  We all turned to look at Jocelyn. Perhaps one or two of us had our mouths open. We would never have guessed she read science fiction. She had certainly never said so. She hadn’t gone to any of the new Star Wars movies, and she’d never stood in line for any of the old ones.

  “Oh, please.” Jocelyn made an impatient brushing motion with her hand. “As if. I was at the Hound Roundup. Same hotel.”

  The evening had hardly begun and already there was a second story we weren’t being told.

  Almost a year earlier, Jocelyn had gone to Stockton for the annual meeting of the Inland Empire Hound Club. In celebration of a whole weekend free from dog hair (not that Ridgebacks were great shedders: they kept their hair to themselves more than most dogs, this was one of their many attractive features), Jocelyn packed a great many black clothes. She wore a black beaded vest under a black cardigan. Black slacks and black socks. She attended panels entitled “Sight Hounds: What Makes Them Special?” and “Soothing the Savage Beast: New Modification Techniques for Aggressive Behaviors.” (Which was sad, as the proper quote was about savage breasts. Now that would be a panel!)

  On the same weekend and in the same hotel was a science fiction convention known as Westernessecon. In the lower-level conference rooms, science fiction fans were gathering to talk about books and mourn dead or dying TV shows. There were panels on “Why We Once Loved Buffy,” “The Final Frontier: Manifest Destiny Goes Intergalactic,” and “Santa Claus: God or Fiend?”

  Jocelyn was taking the elevator from the lobby to her room on the seventeenth floor when a man got on. He wasn’t young, but he was considerably younger than Jocelyn; that was a rapidly growing category. There was nothing to draw Jocelyn’s attention to him, and she paid him no further notice.

  A trio of young women came on behind him. All three had chains in their noses, spikes on their wrists. They wore cuffs on their ears as if Fish and Wildlife had tagged and then released them. Their faces were powdered the color of chalk and their arms were crossed over their breasts, wrist spikes on top. The man hit the button for the twelfth floor and one of the women for the eighth.

  The elevator stopped again and more people entered. Just as the door was shutting, someone outside clapped it open and more people pushed in. Jocelyn found herself crushed against the back of the elevator. The spikes on one young woman’s bracelet caught on Jocelyn’s sweater and left a snag. Someone stepped on her foot and didn’t seem to realize it; Jocelyn had to wiggle out from under and still there was no apology. The elevator stopped again. “No room!” someone at the front said loudly, and the door closed.

  The chalk-faced woman to Jocelyn’s right was wearing the same red dog collar that Sahara sported on dressy occasions. “I have a collar just like that,” Jocelyn told her. She intended it as a friendly gesture, a hand across the waters. She was trying not to mind being trapped at the back of the elevator. Jocelyn didn’t normally suffer from claustrophobia, but she was seldom this squeezed and her breath came fast and shallow.

  The woman made no response. Jocelyn waited for one, and then a brief, inconsequential humiliation came over her. What had her crime been? Her age? Her clothes? Her “Dog is my copilot” name tag? Everyone except Jocelyn and the not-young-but-younger-than-Jocelyn man got off at the eighth floor. Jocelyn moved forward, picking at the snag in her sweater, trying to pull it inside, where it wouldn’t show. The elevator resumed its ascent.

  “She was invisible,” the man said.

  Jocelyn turned. “Excuse me?”

  He appeared to be a normal, agreeable man. Lovely, heavy eyelashes, but otherwise quite ordinary. “It’s a game. They’re vampires, and when you see one of them holding her arms crossed like that”—the man demonstrated—“then you should pretend you don’t see her. She’s invisible. That’s why she didn’t answer you. Nothing personal.”

  This made it sound as if it were all Jocelyn’s fault. “Being a vampire is no excuse for being rude,” Jocelyn told him. “Ms. Manners says.” Of course Ms. Manners had said no such thing, but wouldn’t she probably, if asked?

  They’d arrived at the twelfth floor. The elevator hummed and clanged. The man debarked, turned to face her. “My name is Grigg.”

  As if anyone would know whether Grigg was a first or a last name without being told. The door slid shut before Jocelyn could answer. Just as well. “What a bunch of freaks,” she said. She said it aloud in case there was someone still in the elevator with her. The feelings of invisible people were of no moment to Jocelyn, though Ms. Manners probably wouldn’t like that, either; Ms. Manners was a h
ard woman.

  Jocelyn left an unimaginative demonstration by a pet psychic—“He wants you to know that he’s very grateful for the good care you take of him”; “She says she loves you very much”—and went to her room. She showered, just to use the hotel soap and lotion, shook her hair dry, slipped into her black linen dress, left her name tag on her cardigan on the bed, and took the elevator to the top floor. She stood at the doorway of the hotel bar, looking about for someone she knew. “I was in Holland and Italy and Australia last year,” an attractive woman at a table near the door was saying, “and every time I turned on a television, some version of Star Trek was on. I’m telling you, it’s ubiquitous.”

  There was an empty stool at the bar. Jocelyn occupied it and ordered a dirty martini. She couldn’t find a familiar face. Usually she didn’t mind being out alone; she’d been single too long to care. But here she felt uncomfortable. She felt that her dress was wrong, too tasteful, too expensive. She felt old. Her martini arrived. She drank from it, in a gulp. Another gulp. And another. She’d finish as quickly as possible and leave, look for dog people in the lobby or the restaurant. The bar was headachingly noisy. There were a dozen conversations, high-pitched laughter, a hockey game on the television set, hoses spitting and ice machines crushing.

  “All I’m saying is, it would take a thousand years to bring an animal species to full consciousness,” a man near Jocelyn said. “You suggest otherwise and you lose me.” He was speaking so loudly Jocelyn thought there was no need to pretend she hadn’t heard.

  She leaned in. “Actually I would have enjoyed something a bit more lizard-brain,” she said. “The perfect grammar, the British accent, for God’s sake. The boringly endless list of thank yous. As if they aren’t all just waiting for the chance to hump your leg.”

  Now, that was an inelegant thing to say. Perhaps she was already just a tiny bit drunk. The room did a leisurely spin. Drink in haste, repent at leisure, her mother had always told her. An ad for a poetic sort of running shoe came on the television.