Following Austen

35: Saturday

When you deal with regular insomnia and fatigue you reach a point at which your sleeping and waking self are very much alike—the main differences being that when you are “sleeping” your eyes are closed and when you are “awake” you are ever so slightly more coherent.  Such was my state of being on Saturday morning.  On these horrible days, I have trouble eating anything and a flight of stairs can seem insurmountable.  I find myself in a kind of stupor where time seems to act out of character—I may be doing nothing but daydreaming, or looking at a book without actually comprehending words, or shutting my eyes to pretend to rest, and hours pass in the space of what should be fifteen minutes.

Jack’s small words that morning were incredibly attentive and kind.  He wished me good morning—such a small thing—more than once with so much energy and attention, with such a kind look, if you saw it I think you would forgive me for feeling it to be significant.  There is a way couples talk to each other, and Jack had started talking to me, looking at me, that particular way.  To be so far at the end of myself and to be met with this warmth of affection made me feel warm and loved.

But I knew (and felt rather spitefully) the insecurity of all the looks and all the good-mornings-es.  There was still the girl in Georgia.  We were still officially just hanging out, whatever the hell that meant.  I knew there was nothing solid to back up all of these small goodnesses and so I did not always reply in kind.  I’m afraid at times I gave him little meannesses in return.  I was generally guarded, attempting to be stalwart Eleanor and not betray the depth of my feelings.  At one point, he looked at me with warmth, and all I could say in my exhausted stupor was how bad my allergies were.  We sat drinking tea at a patisserie on our way downtown to meet Simon for lunch, and I told him he and my roommate would probably have a lot in common, in a teasing way that could have implied that I’d like to set them up.  I was almost daring him to say something, to tell me with words what his actions and looks had been saying all week.  He was not entirely functional that day either, but he didn’t slip.  He said nothing substantial, nothing to give me false hope.

When we were alone close to St. Mary’s, he looked at me and said, “Well, it’s been great hanging out with you this week.”  And I thought, so that’s it.  And then said, with far less warmth than I felt, and with a chilled heart, “Yeah, it’s been great.”

34: St. Aldates

There is a woman who walks St. Aldates and the Folly Bridge at night. Tonight was the second time I saw her.  She mumbles and shuffles, rather well dressed for someone who may be crazy, in a matching long skirt and blouse.  She works her hands together and looks at the ground and sort of hunches along.  I wanted to know what she was talking about, and if anyone ever listens to her.  I wonder, does she have children, and do they know this is how she spends her evenings—does she have friends?

Our loud group passed her on the way to the Head of the River pub, after our farewell banquet in Wadham College’s four-hundred-year-old dining hall.  I was in my favorite red Ann Taylor dress.  It’s sleeveless and cut in to bare all of my shoulders, and falls to mid-calf, grazing my minimal curves.   I got to see that instant look of the best kind of surprise on Jack’s face when I walked out on the lawn in it.

As we walked—together in the crowd, as always—to dinner, he said, “We should get pictures together,” so there we are in my album, looking couplish, standing on the manicured lawn of the Wadham quad.

I laughed that night like I hadn’t laughed in ages—healing laughter.  Stacey got a Long Island Iced Tea and they doubled the alcohol for her.  The rest of us didn’t need much motivation; our hearts were limber.

I spent an hour that afternoon back at the spot by the river, laying in the sun, off to the side a bit because there was a group of college girls right where I wanted to be.  I drifted in and out of sleep, afraid that I could actually sleep soundly there in the middle of the afternoon, and not wake up until the evening sky was grey and I had missed everything.  When you live like this—awake and exhausted almost all the time, you can never tell when sleep will come.  You sort of have to obey it whenever it wants to make an appearance, but here I was denying it again.  I would pay for it later, as the unending laughter had me fighting off dry heaves, which were making regular appearances every morning now.

In England they shut down all of the pubs at 11:00 p.m. for some reason, as the result some horrible law.  When they kicked us out we split up into smaller groups and wandered slowly back up through town, passing Christ Church again, curtains blowing by an open pane, past lines of people on Cornmarket waiting for the midnight release of the new Harry Potter book, up St. Giles, always the quiet heaviness of the Oxford college buildings playing the counterpoint to our lightness.  I walked next to Jack, close and connected somehow in spite of the fact that we didn’t touch—him with his arms crossed, me occasionally letting my hand hang free by my side.  We didn’t stop laughing—nor I trying to conceal the occasional dry heaves—until we got back to Wycliffe, and then with the sad realization that this was the end of our party.

Tomorrow we would go our separate ways. Simon would go back home to a job he wanted to leave, Paul to a busy practice, Jesse to Wales to check out a graduate program, Stacey to work with Muslim youth in northern England, Jack to Jordan for research for his masters degree, me to a quiet Benedictine monastery in Hampshire, near Jane’s home.  I had no idea what to expect, but I longed for the peace of the monks.

33: Punting

Thursday afternoon I went punting with a huge group from Wycliffe.  Jesse gave up his excellent spot in a boat so that five of us girls could go together.  We hung out in the gorgeous sun eating strawberries (or straw-bries if you’re going to say it the British way) and cream, each of us taking turns to try to not tip the boat over, and managing to go further than anyone else.  It was all lovely.

Stacey wanted to know how long Jack and I had been dating, and kept going on about our obvious connection, and how great that God would bring us together like this.  I tried to change the subject, to give her a quick, “We just met, actually, and we’re just hanging out.”  But she was resolute.  So I endured (and not entirely without enjoying them) a series of wouldn’t-it-be-wonderfuls and speculations on her part about what exactly God was doing and how everything would work out amazingly.

We ran back and took showers and rushed to a little Italian place to meet the gang for dinner.  Jack saved me a seat.  And that seemed to be the end of our trying to avoid each other.

Hold it gently...

I feel compelled to say something about the nature of blogging and what's been happening here.  I began to write, thinking I had something that might be publishable and might have legs. It's hard for me to tell until I get a good bit of writing done, and this one proved stronger the further I got into it.  Then I thought I would post it online, to help generate an audience for it and help find a publisher or create enough enthusiasm to sustain a self-published title.  The response has been positive and not so small as to be insignificant.  (Actually, the numbers look good.)

What has surprised me is how deeply personal it's all become.  I suppose that shouldn't have been a surprise--it's a memoir, after all, including a story about something like falling in love.  It's about romance in a surprisingly Austen-esque sort of fashion, because this relationship grew quietly, largely out of conversation and character.

So I've been sharing some of those intimate conversations and thoughts, because that is the stuff this was made of.  I think good books--and good blogs--have to be personal.  But somehow, the blog feels much more personal, makes me feel more vulnerable.

There are a few classes of readers:  my dear friends, those who don't know me at all, and those I know but would never share this amount of detail with.  The first two don't bother me.  My friends will love me no matter what, and those I don't know are safe at a distance.  It's the third group that has been giving me occasional panic attacks.

I hope you'll know that this is my heart, and hold it gently.

About the title...

One of the things my agent wanted to tweak was the title, Following Austen, which I happen to love. Actually, what I really love is the subtitle: Notes on an Ordinary Life--because that's what this book is really about. Nothing happens and so much happens, all at the same time. It is sort of an anti-Frey memoir (for those who have been following the scandal with James Frey's Million Little Pieces) in that it's about the smallness of what happens. There's no point in attempting to create big drama because it's all about the quiet drama of everyday life.

Anyway, Beth thinks the title may be too impersonal. And she may be right. So, I've been playing around with other ideas, and came up with...

Me and Jane:  One girl's journey following Jane Austen's life through England in search of love, adventure, and faith

I think the subtitle is far too long.  Eeesh.  Send along any thoughts you have.

32: Baroque candlelight

Somehow I ended up in Jack’s group for dinner, sitting next to him, and by the end of the meal, after trading a few small sharpish sort of comments and a lot of laughter, we were friends.

Four of us decided on a whim to go to a rather expensive Baroque candlelight concert at Exeter College Chapel.  The chapel dates from the 1300’s—small and simple on the outside, with a traditional steeple at one end.  Inside, there are icons painted around the bottom of the walls with what looks like real gold.  From about eight feet up the walls are gorgeous stained glass, images of biblical stories clear to the top.  We sat listening to the cello and harpsichord, the readings from Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…”) and Queen Elizabeth (“I have the heart and stomach of a king…”), trying to sort out which stories were which in the glass.

We got ice cream and stood on the bridge over the Isis, and I thought I might pass out from exhaustion.

As we walked back, I said to Jack (the others had not been part of our conversation for a while), “I’m not sure exactly what I said to you this morning, and I’m even less sure about what you heard.”  He laughed a little.  I was determined to say my piece, “I just want to make sure I didn’t communicate that I’m not interested, because I am.”

“I appreciate that,” he said.  And quietly, “No, I just heard you say that, you know, you were feeling emotional and needed some space.”

“Good.”

“You know, it’s like I said,” he continued, “This other thing just started, and I didn’t expect to meet someone—especially someone I had so much in common with.  I’m sure you weren’t expecting to meet anyone either.”

“No, I wasn’t,” I lied through my teeth.  What’s a girl to do?

Back in the Wycliffe lobby, I practically whispered, “So then, I’m like, are we just hanging out or what?  And I know I don’t need an answer to that question now.”

But Jack answered me anyway.  “Yeah, we should view it that way, and not feel like we need to sit together in lectures all the time or spend all our time together.  You know, I just don’t know what God’s going to do with this.”

And I thought yes, in some sense that’s true, but in some way doesn’t it just come down to what Jack wants?

We sat in the common room with Simon and laughed until about midnight, when I headed upstairs.  I felt oddly light and clear knowing that, officially, there was nothing going on.  Like somehow I could just relax and enjoy whatever it was we had, without putting expectations on it.

31: Catastrophe

I made the decision to talk to Jack.  I was looking for reassurance.  I wanted him to know that I was a mess, temporarily, but I was really okay.  I had the sense that perhaps this was a mistake, but when I am overwhelmingly tired and emotional, and begin to feel that something must be done, I am compelled to do it and have a hard time thinking it through.

I waited on the lawn for him to finish breakfast, my eyes still streaming as I sat on a green plastic chair under a tent and tried not to make eye contact with anyone, shakily drinking my cappucino.  Who knows what I looked like.  As I walked through Wycliffe, people sort of stared like there was something funny about me.  For myself, I felt like I hadn’t entirely made it into the real world that day, and I couldn’t help it, and couldn’t do anything about what other people thought about it.

Who knows what Jack was expecting.  Certainly not me in the state he found me in.  I told him that the last couple days had been intense, that I wasn’t sleeping well, that I was feeling emotional and couldn’t process things, that if I laid low today that was why.

He said, “Wow, I don’t really know what to do with that.”

I laughed through tears, “Yeah, most guys don’t.”

And as I began to sense that assurance would not come, he said, “I’m glad you said something, because I’ve been thinking, we need to make sure we’re getting everything we’re supposed to out of this week, meeting everyone we’re supposed to meet.  It probably would be good if we didn’t spend so much time together.”

Buck up little camper, I thought.  Of course, I agreed, it would be good to not spend so much time together, not sit together all the time, take a step back.  But inside I felt the full weight of the blow.  I thought I had given him reason to think I was a bit crazy.  And I was.

I imagined him discussing this with the other guys, all of them wondering at my instability, and longed to hang out with a girlfriend who could help me put it all right again, at least in my head.

I got a sandwich from down the street and ate lunch by myself, on the library steps.  I made plans to go to dinner with someone else and felt skittish and insecure all afternoon.

30: Croissants

Wednesday morning I sat looking out the window of a patisserie, streaming and sniffling, trying to eat a chocolate croissant.

I woke to the darkness of 3:30 a.m., after just three or three and a half hours of sleep.  I lay for hours in the quiet of the growing gray light coming in through the window, listening to the birds, wondering at everything that had happened—the way Jack and I fit, the perfection of it all—turning things over and around in my mind.  I was in awe at the certainty of it, having never felt so strongly about someone in so short a period of time, for reasons which seemed incredibly sound.  I wanted to go to breakfast alone, to not have to exert the energy to talk to strangers—to talk to anyone.

The patisserie is on a small, quiet street full of restaurants, a pub, a sandwich place, a florist.  There is a full window along the front, with a bar alongside. By 7:30, when I sat down with everything—cranberry juice, cappucino, water, and 2 chocolate croissants—I began to sense just how much trouble I was in.  I was devastatingly tired.  My brain couldn’t quite sort things out.

I started to cry and couldn’t stop—not a loud, shaking, full-on cry, but a quiet stream, as though God had turned the faucet on low.  I was afraid of the surety I felt. I thought that I could never have imagined Jack so well.  I was overwhelmingly grateful.  And I was positive that I would never be able to sort out my emotions through so much exhaustion.  So I let myself cry, and tried not to worry about what the owner or the lady at the table nearby would think. I was not entirely functional.

29: Cubans

On Tuesday evening, my stinky feet and I put on our flip-flops and sweat pants and went out on the side lawn to smoke Cubans with Jack and Paul.  We sat in the wet grass, the evening still glowing with the luminescent late blue hour, the hour of dusk that many believe to be holy.  (I am among them.)  As the sky lost its glow we were lit by nothing but the lights from the windows of Wycliffe Hall.  Jack and I were smoking, and I was drinking orange juice from a can, discovering that orange juice and cigars are a fairly horrible combination.  Paul, raised in a good strict Assemblies of God home, chose to abstain.  “Smoke a cigar and go to hell?  No, I don’t think so,” he laughed.

We talked about how I had only just discovered that I grew up with a view of the world where there were good people (Christians) and bad people (everyone else).  I finally realized that I had been looking down at the world all these years, and saw that we are all loved the same, and all flawed the same—all of us equal before God. That God could be just as present at a party where guys were smoking joints in the driveway as he was at my Bible study—present in a different way, but still present and reaching.  When you see the world that way, anyplace can be holy.

Jack believes that Jesus at a party would have stood out, would have obviously been different.  Paul and I think He would have been incredibly comfortable, would have made other people comfortable because He loved them.

Paul’s brother was an alcoholic, until one day Jesus miraculously healed him.  Paul kept trying to talk him into getting treatment, and his brother tried from time to time, but it didn’t stick, and he kept saying he knew that God would just heal him, and one day He did, and he hasn’t had a drink since.  Before his brother had been healed, he was walking down the sidewalk and a woman handed him a tract about Christianity.  And he told Paul he knew that she wasn’t a Christian—obviously—because she was wearing pants.  All of us, to some degree or other (and to our regret), inherited this pattern of horrible injustice to the grace of God.

I felt free to say what I really think to Jack, free to disagree with him, because he is genuinely interested in what I think.  He hears me out not for the purpose of belittling me, but to better understand me, and maybe even adjust his own thinking.  I haven’t always felt that way with the men in my life.

About 11:15, when Jack and I were light-headed from smoking, and our seats were wet, we headed in and called it a night.  I fairly floated up the stairs.  It’s not just any guy, after all, who could sustain such an earnest conversation about God’s grace.

28: B-oh, oh, oh

The smells on this trip were all wrong.  When I first opened my suitcase there was a printed note saying the TSA had inspected my bag and everything might not have been put back in the right place.  It smelled horrible, like one of the paint compounds I would smell in my dad’s hobby room where he works on his airplane models.  And I thought, great, they’ve used some kind of chemical in my bag to detect traces of bombs and now all my clothes smell.  But it turned out to be my Professional Firma Nail Extra Strength Base and Top Coat (a manicure kit is a must) which had leaked into its small plastic zippered bag and somehow managed to infect all of my clothes.  Ugh.

My underwear were in an old ditty bag from my backpacking days, which infused them with the rather bad and strong smell of cheap plastic.  In a moment of inspiration, wondering at my own excessive preparedness, I pulled out dryer sheets from my laundry supplies and stuffed one into my ditty bag and spread a few throughout my clothes.  But I began to sicken at the smell of the dryer sheets, spicy and overwrought, which still didn’t cover the bad-rubber-chemical smells my clothes had acquired.

And then there was my lovely new green slip-on tennis shoes.  I knew they might be a problem because they make my feet hot, and sure enough, by Tuesday evening, a foul case of foot odor was brewing.  I’m not typically the foot odor type.  Seriously.  But I was starting to feel like the odor wafting up from the region of my ankles surrounded me in a pungent Linus-like cloud.

I felt like I was walking around with a mixture of cheap rubber, dryer-sheets, hint of “Firma Nail” and strong dose of foot odor.   Very attractive, no doubt.