Enthusiasm

by Polly Shulman

  “She’ll be fine, now that you’re here,” said Ashleigh. I straightened back up and kicked her under the table.

  Seth cleared his throat. He looked pale. I felt bad for him. “Well, I’d better be going,” he said, standing up. “Lots of homework this weekend.”

  “Oh, must you? Well, nice to meet you,” said Zach.

  “Bye, Seth, see you Monday,” I said.

  “Tuesday,” said Ashleigh. “Long weekend.”

  “Right. Tuesday.”

  Seth made a pained little bowlike gesture and left.

  “Ashleigh!” I said. “That was so embarrassing. And kind of mean.”

  “Why? You’ve been complaining for weeks about how you need help getting rid of him.”

  “Have you?” said Parr.

  “Yes, she has,” said Ashleigh. “You know it’s meaner to let him keep hanging around when you don’t actually like him. Now I won’t have to chaperone you all the time.”

  Something in that sentence made Zach look at his watch. “Ope! Gotta go. Come on, Ashcan, I’ll give you a ride home,” he said.

  “Thanks, Zach, that’s okay, you don’t have to,” began Ashleigh.

  “Don’t be an idiot—come on—there’s something my sister needs you to do,” said Zach, taking her firmly by the shoulder.

  “What? Oh. Oh! Right, that thing for Sam,” said Ashleigh, grabbing her coat with one hand as Zach propelled her to the door. “Later, guys.”

  Then I was all by myself in the crowded coffee bar with Charles Grandison Parr. He grinned at me, took my hand, and said, “Sweetie! Alone at last!”

  Maybe it was all a big joke, but I noticed his hand was as cold as ice.

  Did it tremble a little? Mine certainly did.

  “Ashleigh can be so embarrassing,” I said. “Sorry! Or, I guess, I mean, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I’m honored that I could be of use to you. Especially to get rid of guys who pester you. Anytime you find a guy troublesome, please feel free to tell him I’m your boyfriend.”

  “You mean it?” I said.

  “You know I do. If you think it’ll help, I’ll even come by and threaten him with my epee—my dueling sword. Speaking of getting rid of guys,” he added, “are you done with your coffee? Would you like to walk down to the river? I see some of the guys from the fencing team heading this way, and I don’t particularly want to hang out with them. I get to see them all the time. I never get to see you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Parr left a tip on the table and helped me into my coat. Nobody had done that since I was a little girl; I fumbled around for the sleeves a bit before he found my arms and lifted the coat around my shoulders.

  It was a warm afternoon for February, the earliest edge of spring. The rain had stopped, leaving a breath of moisture in the air. We walked the six blocks to the train tracks in silence, smelling the river just beyond, and crossed the tracks by the underpass, with its buzzing lights and loud echoes. The other side seemed quiet by contrast, hushed with the soft, deep slipping of the river.

  “Let’s see if anyone’s in the band shell,” said Parr.

  No one was. Everyone else, apparently, remembered it was February.

  We sat down on one of the wooden benches overlooking the river; the band shell kept the worst of the wind off.

  “What are you doing out of school, anyway?” I asked.

  “Ski break, remember? I’m staying with my folks in Steeplecliff. Actually, I was looking for you. I wanted to give you something.” He took a little box out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  “What is it?” I said. I had to take my gloves off to open the box. My hands trembled. I held it carefully, trying not to drop it. Inside was a ring: one side solid silver, the other side silver encasing something black.

  “Does it still fit?” asked Parr. “Try it on. I was worried I might have made it too small—I had to add a strip of silver underneath the onyx. If it doesn’t fit, give it back. I can make it bigger.”

  “You made this?”

  He nodded.

  The ring was too big for my fingers, but it fit my left thumb perfectly. I looked at it more closely. “Wait,” I said. “Don’t tell me it’s my onyx ring! The one that got broken?”

  “I felt terrible about breaking it,” he said. “I thought I should do something.”

  “You didn’t have to . . . You made this? But it’s so beautiful. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  He laughed. “Well, yes. Tons. Most of the important things. One thing I thought I probably couldn’t—but I don’t know, I’m starting to think maybe I can. Let’s see.”

  And he kissed me.

  How cold his lips were—and then how warm. My sixth kiss—but my first. The blue sky, the blue river, his blue drowned look, our breath steaming together into one cloud. My cold fingers—his cold neck, warm under his scarf. I touched his dimple. We kissed again.

  “I take it back,” he said, his voice rough. “You’re right. There’s nothing I can’t do.” He took off my hat and kissed my forehead, my cheekbones, the edges of my face next to my eyes. “I wanted to do that so badly,” he said. “Especially that night.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I said.

  “Why didn’t I? What do you take me for—barge into a girl’s room in the middle of the night and start kissing her? And I wasn’t sure you even liked me.”

  “But I was being so obvious—joining the play and hanging around you all the time helping you rehearse.”

  I was trembling. He hugged me to him and put his chin on top of my head. I heard his voice through my bones. My heart pounded and pounded.

  “You call that obvious?” he said. “You never talked to me unless I said something first. And then there was that Seth person; everyone kept saying he was your boyfriend. I almost gave up.”

  “Oh, God, Seth—he was so awful, I wanted to die. But I thought you had a girlfriend too. Some friend of Samantha Liu’s saw you dancing with a tall blonde at the Columbus dance. She said it was your girlfriend.”

  He drew back and looked at me. “What? You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, that’s what Sam said.”

  He laughed. “Well, she was almost right. I was dancing with an enchanting blonde, but she wasn’t my girlfriend—not then, anyway. Do you really not know who it was?”

  I felt as if I were standing inches from a sheer cliff, balanced over sharp rocks of jealousy. I hid my face against him again. “Sam’s friend thought it was Kayla somebody?” I mumbled into his coat.

  “No, silly! It was you! You really didn’t know? There I was making a gigantic fool of myself, mooning around your house and writing you poetry, and I couldn’t even tell if you had read it. That was the first thing that made me hope: seeing you had my sonnet up on your bulletin board. But you never said anything about it.”

  “But I wasn’t sure you wrote the sonnet for me. I thought it was for Ashleigh.”

  “For Ashleigh!” He drew back again and looked at me. “But it had your name in it!”

  “You mean July? ‘Zero degrees down here, July above?’ That’s what Ashleigh said, but I didn’t believe her.”

  “No, I mean your name! Well, July too—I put it in for the echo—but I’m talking about your actual name, Julia Lefkowitz. Going down the side, the first letters of the lines. It’s an acrostic—fourteen letters, fourteen lines. You mean you didn’t even notice? Wow, I feel silly.”

  Not as silly as I felt. My own name! Right there in the sonnet that the Person of My Heart wrote for me—and I didn’t even see it.

  “Okay, I’m a marshmallow brain,” I said. “Do you hate me now?”

  The answer took a while and was more absorbing than I could have thought possible. Afterward, I no longer knew how many times I’d been kissed.

  Chapter 23

  Bliss ~ Farewell.

  Then followed ten days of unprecedented bliss. Parr found a way to come to Byzantium almost every day, and although the wea
ther retreated into winter again, we barely noticed the cold. We held hands through the thriller and the romantic comedy at the Cinepalace, without noticing a single explosion or kiss (on-screen, at least). We spent hours talking about books in Andrezo’s Diner, the Java Jail’s unfashionable rival, where the coffee was hot, the patrons were scruffy, and the booths had high backs.

  Ashleigh and Ned, who was staying at Forefield over the vacation, sometimes joined us. When they did, the noise level in the diner tripled.

  After Mom’s success with the Gerards, Dean Hanson persuaded the headmaster to offer her a contract for the following year. She informed my father immediately by registered mail. Flush with her settled new income, she turned the thermostat up to 68 degrees, and in her happiness she even converted the Treasures storeroom back into a painting studio, as it had been during the early years of my parents’ marriage. Parr and I spent an afternoon helping her.

  Parr brought me to lunch at his parents’ on the second Saturday of the break. Their house in Steeplecliff had stone walls, low ceilings, and slanted floors; I could tell it was very old.

  “So this is what was fascinating Snip in Byzantium all week! I was starting to wonder,” said Ms. Parr—or Susan, as she told me to call her—with a familiar flashing smile.

  To my great relief, I found that my table manners were not noticeably different from the Parrs’; Charles Grandison Sr.—Chip—even punctuated his points by gesturing with his chicken leg. And to my surprise, he took to me at once, insisting on giving me a tour of the barn out back where he was building a sail-boat. “See if you can get Snip to take an interest,” he told me. “Half his ancestors were sea captains.”

  I found Parr’s room upstairs delightfully revealing. Although he had clearly cleaned up in my honor, he was just as clearly a natural slob. Books, abandoned bird nests, and bits of fencing equipment lay in loosely squared stacks in the corners. He turned out to be an avid bird-watcher. It was the wrong season for the more exotic migrants, but he regaled me with stories of the loves and rivalries of the local crows.

  He had the entire Patrick O’Brian series of naval novels in a heap behind the door and admitted to having read them all—“But don’t tell my dad, it would please him too much,” he said. He lent me the first one after making me promise to keep it away from Ashleigh for a few weeks. “Let her go on sharing Ned’s interests for as long as possible.”

  I found it hard to drag myself to school during that heavenly period. I particularly resented the Thursday afternoon wasted at Sailing. Seth took care to talk to me just as much as ever, as if to prove that there had been nothing particular behind his attentions. But he soon took up with Margaret Barsky, a tall, pretty girl in Ms. Milburn’s third-period bio, who had hair the same color as mine. They appeared regularly as a couple at the Cinepalace and the Java Jail. I often caught her looking at me with triumph tinged with dislike. From time to time, too, I caught a glance from Seth so full of some strangled emotion that I regretted ever having allowed him to think—whatever it was he had thought.

  My father and stepmother mourned Seth’s loss as if he had been one of their own dreamed-of babies. Parr, they pointedly let me know, would never replace him in their affections.

  When Forefield started up again, Parr and I had to sustain ourselves with e-mail for several weeks. Then we had the happy thought of volunteering at the Byzantium Senior Center at the same time on Tuesday evenings. It was a savvy move for college applications—or at least, that’s how I presented it to Dad.

  Yvette Gerard, after her Insomnia experience, found she liked acting as much as her sister did. With some help behind the scenes from Samantha, the twins and Ashleigh seized control of Byz High’s spring musical from the Michelle Jeffries clique. Ash volunteered to compose the music, and after some persuasion, I agreed to write the lyrics.

  With all my new activities, time flew by. It’s April already. The Forefield Spring Frolic is this Saturday. Parr and Ned gave us our tickets as soon as they were printed, and we look forward to producing them at the first sight of Turkeyface.

  Ash has been giggling mysteriously all week, hiding sheets of music whenever I show up at her window. (The tree lost its ice weeks ago, but I have to be careful not to tear the tender young leaves.) I suspect she and Ned may be planning to surprise me with a waltz or a quadrille arrangement of the tune to which Ashleigh set the poem I wrote so long ago, when Parr seemed to me only a hopeless dream.

  So far, Ashleigh’s musical craze has held strong, and Parr and I have high hopes that even when it changes, as it inevitably will, her loyalty to those she loves will not allow her to leave Ned behind.

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No writer could have a warmer friend or a more generous reader than Anna Christina Büchmann, or a keener, more loving husband than Andrew Nahem, who gave me my best joke and taught me everything I know about happy endings. For their insight, encouragement, and generosity I’m greatly indebted also to Nancy Paulsen, my editor; Irene Skolnick, my agent; and Michael Abrams, Mark Caldwell, Eunice Chan, Stacey D’Erasmo, Lisa Dierbeck, Carol Dweck, John Hart, Elizabeth Judd, Katherine Keenum, Eleanor Liu, Anne Malcolm, Shanti Menon, Christina Milburn, Laura Miller, Laurie Muchnick, James O’Shea, Lisa Randall, Jenna Reback, Maggie Robbins, Andrew Solomon, Cindy Spiegel, Jaime Wolf, and Shenglan Yuan. And for their love, support, intelligence, and humor I’m grateful to my family: my brother, Theodore Shulman; my mother and stepfather, Alix Kates Shulman and Scott York; my father and stepmother, Martin and Beverly Shulman; and all the Nahems, especially my niece Emily and my father-in-law, Sam, who was as beloved as he was bald.

  Enthusiasm

  READER’S GUIDE

  Little-known facts about Enthusiasm and Jane Austen

  • Jane Austen’s niece, Anna, wrote a novel called Enthusiasm , which she sent to her aunt. Jane had many encouraging things to say, including suggesting that Anna change the title to Which is the Heroine?

  • The character of Charles Grandison Parr—or Parr for short—was named after Sir Charles Grandison, the hero of Samuel Richardson’s 1753 novel of that name and one of Jane Austen’s favorite literary characters.

  • Jane Austen published her novels anonymously, as was the custom of female writers at the time.

  • Like many of Austen’s heroines, Jane herself turned down an offer of marriage that would have allowed her to live a more comfortable life and be less dependent on her family. In the end, she never married.

  The Life and Legacy of Jane Austen

  Jane Austen (1775-1817) lived her entire life in the English countryside with her mother, father, sister, and two brothers. She never married nor ventured far from the confines of her family’s home, yet she wrote some of the most enduring novels of her time, including Pride and Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, and Emma.

  When Jane Austen penned her first novel in 1789, little did she know that the stories she acted out in her drawing room with her sister and brothers would affect popular culture hundreds of years later. Dozens of movie adaptations of her novels have been made and continue to be popular, starring actors such as Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant. Her writing has inspired other books as well, such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Jane Austen Book Club, and Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Why do you think Jane Austen and her books have endured as long as they have? Why do Jane Austen’s stories translate so well into modern stories?

  2. Have you ever read any of Jane Austen’s books? If so, what similarities and differences do you see between Austen’s works and Enthusiasm?

  3. “There is little more likely to exasperate a person of sense than finding herself tied by affection and habit to an Enthusiast.” Do you know/have known an enthusiast? Were you ever one yourself? Although Julie complains about her friend’s enthusiasm, what admirable qualities can be found in Ashleigh’s exuberance?

  4. If you co
uld produce a movie based on a Jane Austen story, which would you choose and from what angle would you approach it: Comedy or drama? Present day or historical setting?

  5. Have you ever had a crush on the same person as your best friend? If so, what happened?

  6. Throughout the story Julie is careful to point out what a good friend Ashleigh is to her. Unfortunately, Ashleigh’s not always a very good listener. At the same time, Julie is keeping secrets from Ashleigh. Could you still say they are great friends? Why or why not?

  7. Class was an important issue for people in Jane Austen’s time. In what ways does the issue of class/money come up in Enthusiasm?

  8. Do you think Julie handles her relationship with her stepmother well? What could Julie and her stepmother do to improve their relationship?