I Dated Jane Austen

Her hands were cold. She held them out for me as I stepped into the parlor. “Mr. Boyle,” announced the maid, and Jane was rising to greet me, her cold white hands like an offering. I took them, said my good evenings, and nodded at each of the pairs of eyes ranged round the room. There were brothers, smallish and large of head, whose names I didn’t quite catch; there was her father, the Reverend, and her sister, the spinster. They stared at me like sharks on the verge of a feeding frenzy. I was wearing my pink boots, my “Great Disasters” T-shirt and my Tiki medallion. My shoulders slumped under the scrutiny. My wit evaporated.

“Have a seat, son,” said the Reverend, and I backed onto a settee between two brothers. Jane retreated to an armchair on the far side of the room. Cassandra, the spinster, plucked up her knitting. One of the brothers sighed. I could see it coming, with the certainty and illogic of an aboriginal courtship rite: a round of polite chit-chat.

The Reverend cleared his throat. “So what do you think of Mrs. Radcliffe’s new book?”

I balanced a glass of sherry on my knee. The Reverend, Cassandra and the brothers revolved tiny spoons around the rims of teacups. Jane nibbled at a croissant and focused her huge unblinking eyes on the side of my face. One of the brothers had just made a devastating witticism at the expense of the “Lyrical Ballads” and was still tittering over it. Somewhere cats were purring and clocks ticking. I glanced at my watch: only 17 minutes since I’d stepped in the door.

I stood. “Well, Reverend,” I said, “I think it’s time Jane and I hit the road.”

He looked up at the doomed Hindenburg blazing across my chest and smacked his lips. “But you’ve only just arrived.”

There really wasn’t much room for Cassandra in the Alfa Romeo, but the Reverend and his troop of sons insisted that she come along. She hefted her skirts, wedged herself into the rear compartment and flared her parasol, while Jane pulled a white cap down over her curls and attempted a joke about Phaetons and the winds of Aeolus. The Reverend stood at the curb and watched my fingers as I helped Jane fasten her seat belt, and then we were off with a crunch of gravel and a billow of exhaust.

The film was Italian, in black and white, full of social acuity and steamy sex. I sat between the two sisters with a bucket of buttered popcorn. Jane’s lips were parted and her eyes glowed. I offered her some popcorn. “I do not think that I care for any just now, thank you,” she said. Cassandra sat stiff and erect, tireless and silent, like a mileage marker beside a country lane. She was not interested in popcorn either.

The story concerned the seduction of a long-legged village girl by a mustachioed adventurer who afterward refuses to marry her on the grounds that she is impure. The girl, swollen with child, bursts in upon the nuptials of her seducer and the daughter of a wealthy merchant and demands her due. She is turned out into the street. But late that night, as the newlyweds thrash about in the bridal bed--

It was at this point that Jane took hold of my arm and whispered that she wanted to leave. What could I do? I fumbled for her wrap, people hissed at us, great nude thighs slashes across the screen, and we headed for the glowing “EXIT” sign.

I proposed a club. “Oh do let’s walk!” Jane said. “The air is so frightfully delicious after that close, odious theatre--don’t you think?” Pigeons flapped and cooed. A panhandler leaned against the fender of a car and drooled into the gutter. I took Jane’s arm. Cassandra took mine.

At the Mooncalf we had our wrists stamped with luminescent ink and then found a table near the dance floor. The waitress’s fingernails were green daggers. She wore a butch haircut and 3-inch heels. Jane wanted punch, Cassandra tea. I ordered three margaritas.

The band was re-creating the fall of the Third Reich amid clouds of green smoke and flashing lights. We gazed out at the dancers in their jumpsuits and platform shoes as they bumped bums, heads and genitals in time to the music. I thought of Catherine Morland at Bath and decided to ask Jane for a dance. I leaned across the table. “Want to dance?” I shouted.

“Beg your pardon?” Jane said, leaning over her margarita.

“Dance,” I shouted, miming the actions of holding her in my arms.

“No, I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid not.”

Cassandra tapped my arm. “I’d love to,” she giggled.

Jane removed her cap and fingered out her curls as Cassandra and I got up from the table. She grinned and waved as we receded into the crowd. Over the heads of the dancers I watched her sniff suspiciously at her drink and then sit back to ogle the crowd with her black satiric eyes.

Then I turned to Cassandra. She curtsied, grabbed me in a fox-trot sort of way and began to promenade round the floor. For so small a woman (her nose kept poking at the moribund Titanic listing across my lower rib cage), she had amazing energy. We pranced through the hustlers and bumpers like kiddies round a Maypole. I was even beginning to enjoy myself when I glanced over at our table and saw that a man in fierce black sideburns and mustache had joined Jane. He was dressed in a ruffled shirt, antique tie and coattails that hung to the floor as he sat. At that moment a fellow terpsichorean flung his partner into the air, caught her by wrist and ankle and twirled her like a toreador’s cape. When I looked up again, Jane was sitting alone, her eyes fixed on mine through the welter of heads.

The band concluded with a crunching metallic shriek, and Cassandra and I made our way back to the table. “Who was that?” I asked Jane.

“Who was who?”

“That mustachioed murderer’s apprentice you were sitting with.”

“Oh,” she said. “Him.”

I realized that Cassandra was still clutching my hand.

“Just an acquaintance.”

As we pulled in to the drive at Steventon, I observed a horse tethered to one of the palings. The horse lifted its tail, then dropped it. Jane seemed suddenly animated. She made a clucking sound and called to the horse by name. The horse flicked its ears. I asked her if she liked horses. “Hm?” she said, already looking off toward the silhouettes that played across the parlor curtains. “Oh yes, yes. Very much so,” she said, and then she released the seat belt, flung back the door and tripped up the stairs into the house. I killed the engine and stepped out into the dark drive. Crickets sawed their legs together in the bushes. Cassandra held out her hand.

Cassandra led me into the parlor, where I was startled to see the mustachioed ne’er-do-well from the Mooncalf. He held a teacup in his hand. His boots shone as if they’d been razor-stropped. He was talking quietly with Jane.

“Well, well,” said the Reverend, stepping out of the shadows. “Enjoy yourselves?”

“Oh, immensely, Father,” said Cassandra.

Jane was grinning at me again. “Mr. Boyle,” she said. “Have you met Mr. Crawford?” The brothers, with their fine bones and disproportionate heads, gathered round. Crawford’s sideburns reached nearly to the line of his jaw. His mustache was smooth and black. I held out my hand. He shifted the teacup and gave me a firm handshake. “Delighted,” he said.

We found seats (Crawford shoved in next to Jane on the love seat; I wound up on the settee between Cassandra and a brother in naval uniform), and the maid served tea and cakes. Something was wrong--of that I was sure. The brothers were not their usual witty selves, the Reverend floundered in the midst of a critique of Coleridge’s cult of artifice, Cassandra dropped a stitch. In the corner, Crawford was holding a whispered colloquy with Jane. Her cheeks, which tended toward the flaccid, were now positively bloated, and flushed with color. It was then that it came to me. “Crawford,” I said, getting to my feet. “Henry Crawford?”

He sprang up like a gunfighter summoned to the O.K. Corral. “That’s right,” he leered. His eyes were deep and cold as crevasses. He looked pretty formidable--until I realized that he couldn’t have been more than 5-3 or 4, give or take an inch for his heels.

Suddenly I had hold of his elbow. The Tiki medallion trembled at my throat. “I’d like a word with you outside,” I said. “In the garden.”

The brothers were on their feet. The Reverend spilled his tea. Crawford jerked his arm out of my grasp and stalked through the door that gave onto the garden. Nightsounds grated in my ears, the brothers murmured at my back and Jane, as I pulled the door closed, grinned at me as if I’d just told the joke of the century.

Crawford was waiting for me in the ragged shadows of the trees, turned to face me like a bayed animal. I felt a surge of power. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch but, in keeping with the times, I settled for “cad.” “You cad,” I said, shoving him back a step, “how dare you come sniffing around her after what you did to Maria Bertram in ‘Mansfield Park’? It’s people like you--corrupt, arbitrary, egocentric--that foment all the lust and heartbreak of the world and challenge the very possibility of happy endings.”

“Hah!” he said. Then he stepped forward, and the moon fell across his face. His eyes were like the birth of evil. In his hand, a riding glove. He slapped my face with it. “Tomorrow morning, at dawn,” he hissed. “Beneath the bridge.”

“Okay, wiseguy,” I said, “okay.” But I could feel the Titanic sinking into my belt.

A moment later, the night was filled with the clatter of hoofs.

I was greeted by silence in the parlor. They stared at me, sated, as I stepped through the door. Except for Cassandra, who mooned from behind her knitting, and Jane, who was bent over a notebook, scribbling away like a court reporter. The Reverend cleared his throat, and Jane looked up. She scratched off another line or two and then rose to show me out. She led me through the parlor and down the hall to the front entrance. We paused at the door.

“I’ve had a memorable evening,” she said and then glanced back to where Cassandra had appeared at the parlor door. “Do come again.” And then she held out her hands.

Her hands were cold.