Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict (15 page)

Sandra pulls from the closet a white flowing dress dotted with blue flowers, not full-length, of course, but one that might hang to the knee or a bit above. It is sleeveless as well.

“How’s this?” she asks.

I cannot show my legs; I can hardly imagine showing my arms.

“Perhaps I might pair the black trousers with something a bit colorful? And with sleeves? Half-mourning is preferable to full.” I smile in what I hope is a conciliatory manner, but she looks as puzzled as before.

“Right.” She pulls out a claret-red, long-sleeved bodice with a fold-down collar and buttons. “At least you won’t freeze in the air-conditioning. Or have to worry about shaving legs.” She glances at a watch, a very feminine item that is more a piece of jewelry than a watch, and such a clever idea to have one fastened about the wrist. “Which would make you even later.”

“Of course,” I say, opening the door for her so that I might dress in private and wondering what she means by “air-conditioning” and “shaving legs.” I can now navigate my way around the undergarments and trouser fastenings on my own, but the lexicon of this society is still a mystery.

When I emerge from the bathroom, I look well, having finally succeeded in applying mascara without poking my eye or looking as if I smeared my face with ashes. Sandra awaits me with a ring of keys in hand, her bag slung over her arm.

“By the way,” she says, pressing something on a boxlike object in the window, which silences the loud rushing noise I have been hearing since I emerged from the shower, “your landlord really should do something about this poor excuse for an air conditioner. I was going to offer to blow-dry your hair for you,” she says, indicating an oddly shaped brown object lying on the table, “but no way in this heat.”

It is indeed hot in the room. A trickle of perspiration runs down my back; I hope it does not show. I also hope that the powder-fresh antiperspirant/deodorant which I discovered in the cabinet, and which I applied to my underarms as the label instructed, does its office.

No matter, for within mere minutes we have made it past the wall of heat awaiting us outside and into the plush seats of Sandra’s iridescent dark-gray, instantly air-cooled car, which drives away with barely a sound. This, I realize, must be what she meant by air-conditioning.

In fact, it occurs to me that Paula’s car and Deepa’s, too, must have been cooled in a similar manner; both were, I believe, far cooler than the air outside, though I did not mark it at the time. Perhaps, as the fortune-teller said, I really am asleep to certain things. What else, I wonder, am I not noticing, especially when there is so much to capture my attention in this strange world that I can hardly attend to Sandra’s polite inquiries as to my comfort and the state of my head, and her gentle admonishments that I not allow David to pile too much on me all at once. Instead, I am almost wholly engaged in gaping out the front and side glasses at the rush of exotic brush-headed trees, speeding cars, and oddly shaped buildings rich in glass and gleaming masonry. Though I cannot dispel the disconcerting sensations generated by Sandra’s references to inadequate salary and disobliging landlords and the inferior state of my apartment. I cannot help but conclude that the woman I am supposed to be, Courtney Stone, lives in such a penurious manner that a servant sees fit to advise her on it. Such a reduction in circumstances—for clearly the absence of a servant of my own is indication enough—is mortifying indeed for a gentleman’s daughter.

Yet—can a woman who earns her own bread and is driven to her place of employment, who is attended by a pretty and engaging servant in a car which is clearly superior to that driven by Paula or Deepa, truly be considered poor? Can a woman who has such an abundance of garments, who keeps her own carriage, who commands the use of rooms, not merely a room, of her own be anything but rich? Perhaps not rich in landed, freehold property, such as befits the owner of Mansfield House, nor rich in the manner of Edgeworth, who has two estates and a house in town—but rich as an unmarried woman might be rich. Rich in independence and voluntary solitude and self-will. Rich in determination to discover what riches await me in this wondrous and mysterious adventure called work.

“Here we are,” Sandra calls out cheerily as she turns the car into a drive which descends below the level of the street into a veritable underground house of cars. I cannot believe how many cars are stabled in this brightly lit place, which seems to exist solely to house them. Sandra selects a parking space, as she calls it, and soon we are in a moving room, like the one in Dr. Menziger’s building. When the door opens, some of the people exit, and I move as if to exit as well, but Sandra grabs my arm.

“Not yet,” she says.

The door slides open three more times before Sandra makes a move to leave the room, this time seizing my hand to make sure I do not stay behind. I am greeted by a chorus of voices as both young gentlemen and ladies call out to me, some seated at desks, others rising from their chairs, many with strange objects protruding from their ears.

“Hey, Courtney,” “You’re here!” and “Didn’t think you’d make it in, dude” are among the variety of greetings, all accompanied by smiles, a few by impertinent winks from a couple of the gentlemen, one of whom says, “The wet look is hot on you,” causing my face to heat up without my really understanding why. There is a persistent sound of some sort of machine going brrr-brrr-berrrrup, brrr-brrr-berrrrup, which seems to cease momentarily when one of the ladies or gentlemen taps the device in her or his ear or lifts a rectangular object from a boxlike thing with winking lights and begins to talk into it. I see; this must be another sort of phone, though much larger than the one which is mine, or which I have seen Wes, Paula, and Sandra use.

Sandra propels me past the greeters. “Give her some air, people,” she says good-naturedly, when suddenly she stops moving and I am swept away by a gale force of a man with one of those strange objects in his ear and who appears to be having a conversation with both me and it at once. (My clue to the latter is his propensity to touch the object in his ear when he speaks to it rather than to me.)

Sandra, too, is swept into his wake, and even kisses his cheek, his only response to which is to put his arm briefly around her slim waist and pat her hip with one of his enormous hands. She seems to regard it not, though I am disgusted by such an unseemly treatment of a servant.

“Go easy on her,” Sandra warns him, giving me an encouraging wink before disappearing into one of the rooms made of glass that appear to line the wall of this vast, bustling space filled with large tables and chairs, people talking into the air or I assume into the objects in their own ears, staring into glowing boxes, and clack-clack-clacking their fingers on objects that appear to have all the letters of the alphabet on them. I am so caught up in the spectacle before me and distracted by the myriad of greetings that I do not immediately catch all that the human hurricane is saying.

“Lance? David.” He’s speaking into the air again, his head cocked in a way that makes him look very silly indeed. “Let’s get this wrapped up, okay? Two more weeks, and I’m out. Tick tock. So, are you up to speed yet? Hello . . . Courtney?” He snaps his fingers in front of my face, which is how I realize he is now talking to me. “The day marches on and I’m already buried. I need you to go through my calls and emails. You with me? No, Lance—unacceptable. Are you?”

He’s staring at me, and though the temperature in the room is chill and crisp, I am perspiring. His eyes examine me from behind their black wire spectacles, and their gaze is chill as well.

And then he breaks into a toothy and most disarming smile and instantly envelops me in a tight hug. “Mr.—” I try in vain to extricate myself. “David, I—”

He lets me go and rolls his eyes. “No need for a lawyer, okay? You gave me a scare, that’s all. And you’re okay now, right? Great!”

We’ve now arrived at what I assume must be my worktable, for he is shuffling through about six exceedingly untidy stacks of papers and unearths a pile of smallish pink lined papers, which he waves at me. “The temp they sent couldn’t roll calls or even enter my calendar,” he says, indicating the pink pages with contempt. “This was her idea of keeping track of things. Take care of it and sync up my BlackBerry, will you?”

Am I now to pick fruit? This is a degradation indeed.

He tosses onto the table an object that is rounder and fatter than the phone I have (and which I now realize is still attached to its cord in my apartment). I pick it up; it says “BlackBerry” in small white letters above a windowlike square. I start to laugh.

“I’m glad someone finds this amusing,” he says, his tone quite the opposite of glad. “Now get Angelo for me. Please.”

“Where shall I ‘get’ Mr.—or Miss—Angelo, is it?”

“What?”

“Where would you have me go?”

“Get him on the phone, for Christ’s sake!”

Dear God, I am a servant. There cannot be two opinions on this matter. The abuse, the tyrannical manner. “If you cannot speak to me in a civil manner—”

“Courtney, this isn’t funny.”

“Indeed it is not. I thought I had respectable employment, but I find instead that I am a mere servant.”

“For Christ’s sake, Courtney. If you were a servant you’d do what I asked, not stand here trashing a job that anyone would kill to have.”

A snort of derision from one of the young men manning a nearby worktable calls my attention from David, and his from me.

“Sorry,” says the young man, cheeks flaming.

David addresses me in a lowered tone. “How do you think that makes me feel? Do you have any idea how much I depend on you?”

The large boxlike phone on my worktable begins emitting the brrr-brrr-berrrrup sound. Repeatedly.

“Well?” His arms flail about.

“Sir?”

“Pick up the damn phone!”

My hands are actually trembling as I reach for the boxlike instrument, but as I begin to lift it—

“What’s wrong with you?” he screams.

The box slips from my moist palms back onto the worktable; if only I had a handkerchief. The back of my bodice is now drenched in perspiration, a most inelegant state for one who wishes to assert a modicum of dignity. “Sir, I will not be talked to in such a manner. Good day to you.”

And with that I turn on my heel and, head held high, retrace my steps.

There is utter silence among the watchful ladies and gentlemen, save for the odd sounds the various box phones emit.

David’s voice calls out to me. “You can’t do this to me. . . . Courtney? Please . . . Sandra? Sandra!”

I make my way past the gentlemen and ladies at their desks, avoiding their curious looks and holding my head high, till I reach the wall from which Sandra and I were transported to this room. I wonder whether I might summon the conveyance myself.

“Courtney, what did he do?”

It is Sandra, her gaze sympathetic. I can only shake my head, and then, unaccountably, I am weeping. She makes a move as if to put her arm around me, but I forestall her with a raised hand. What humiliation—first to be publicly set down by the likes of such a creature, and then to lose control of myself, again in full view of who knows how many people.

It is trying enough to pretend I really am this person whom everyone knows as Courtney Stone when nothing about her is in any way familiar to me. But then to be singled out and scolded by such an ill-bred, ungentlemanly person. It is not to be borne.

Sandra offers me a handful of paper handkerchiefs, and I take them gratefully. “Forgive me,” I say, pleased that at least my voice is steady. “I am perfectly well again. If you would be so kind, I wish to go home now.”

“I’m sure he was an ass—he always is—but you know he doesn’t mean it.”

The same words my father used many a time when I was a child weeping over my mother’s scoldings that I was the most unmanageable child that ever was seen, her prognostications that I would never amount to anything as a young lady, and furthermore, her declarations that I would never make a good marriage because no man would tolerate my headstrong ways.

“She does not mean it, Janey girl,” he would say, reaching out to smooth a stray lock of hair from my forehead and offering me his handkerchief to wipe my tears. “She does not mean it.”

“No,” I say to Sandra. “They never do.”

“Can we sit down and talk about this?”

“To what purpose? My mind is made up. I shall quit this place. Now.”

All my life, I have had to bear with my mother’s ire, her lack of affection, her disappointment at my very existence. I had to bear with it, for I could not walk away from her as an unmarried woman any more than I could walk away from her as a helpless child. Not unless I married, or went out as a governess, which she would never allow, and which, to own the truth, I imagined would likely subject me to worse indignities than those I endured in her house.

But now, when I have somehow landed in a world where women, single women, may live on their own, without the rule of their parents, without the dominion of a husband or a brother or even the protection of a lover, where they may be employed and earn their bread, and in professions other than that of a governess or servant or worse, how should I do anything but quit this scene of degradation?

“You’re serious,” Sandra’s voice brings me back to where I am standing. “But how will you live?”

I look Sandra in the eye. “I do not know. I must own that I do not even know how I am to go home.”

“I’ll drive you, of course.” Sandra presses an illuminated circle on the wall repeatedly, and within moments the doors slide open and we are back inside the conveyance. I follow her to her car, and soon we are back on the road.

After several minutes of silence, Sandra says, “Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”

“I certainly shall not.”

“I’m supposed to overlook his faults; after all, I’m in love with him. But you—I can’t say I blame you.”

This is intelligence indeed; she cannot be David’s servant. I cast my eyes as surreptitiously as I can towards her hands, but I spy no wedding ring. Could I be sitting next to the mistress of my former employer?