Meeting Mr. Rochester
Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
—Jane Eyre, Chapter XII
As in every major life transition since middle school, starting a new job meant it was time to reread Jane Eyre. I paid special attention to the part where she pragmatically reassures herself that if she dislikes life at Thornfield, she can simply advertise again. I wasn’t entirely sure I really wanted to be working back in publishing, especially another test-prep company with no trade books to play with, but when the worst-case scenario is “I’ll do something else afterward,” trying uncertain things becomes much less daunting. Plus, I like office work: maintaining files and answering phones, sticking to schedules and proofreading and proofreading and proofreading—being a competent person in a low-stakes job isn’t a bad way to spend a year or two.
My new boss, Eric, had been an assistant editor at my last publishing company, and now he essentially ran the production department at LightBulb Publishing. In our first stint as coworkers, Eric was jovial and effortlessly social, one of the office’s popular people. He’d also still been in a hard-partying phase of life and I was already on the verge of becoming Marian the Librarian. I had been eager to please at our old company, and stubbornly independent when it came to my work. His casual demeanor masked a detail-oriented mind with exacting standards. He was a tad micro-managey, and I was overconfident to the point of defiance. He found me annoying and bossy. I found his pug obsession weird and his management style aggravating. I once beat him in an office Scrabble tournament with the word “ratlines,” and it took him two years to deliver the Chipotle burrito that he owed me. We were mismatched from the start.
But three jobs, two Brontë novels, and a few years later, I was more comfortable in my skin (and grateful to have a job) and he was more willing to trust my judgment, so we got along much better. He was funny, and exasperatingly precise. The longer we worked together, the more I found myself craving his approval, and even occasionally receiving it.
We worked side by side with a cubicle wall separating us, communicating mostly by Gchat since the office had an open floor plan. Sometimes we all had to listen while he argued over the phone with his live-in girlfriend. Our friendly professional relationship started to blur after about eight months. Gchat conversations that began with work-related questions devolved into terrible pun competitions and long, winding conversations punctuated by wisecracks and inside jokes. I would stifle laughter and listen for the sound of Eric’s chuckle emanating from the other side of the flimsy wall. Every day around two o’clock, he and Sheryl and I would go down to the bodega in the lobby for soda and candy bars. We took long walks on our lunch hour, exploring Lower Manhattan in the September sunshine. Trinity Church, Battery Park, the East River Esplanade, where we debated whether the South Street Seaport’s resurgence was the future or the demise of the city we both loved. He would ask me what I thought of a new “invention” of his—cupcakes, but bigger; or coffee but like, frozen; or a pie, but with chicken in it; or a feedbag for humans, and act astonished and confused when I laughed. Eric was prone to inventing the already extant, including cake, the Frappuccino, and chicken pot pie. Jury’s still out on the feedbag.
Eric and I got into the habit of leaving notes and drawings for one another when we dropped off projects or paperwork at one another’s desks. He made me a “gold star” out of a post-it to show my mom. I fashioned a medic alert bracelet out of paperclips and a file label (because of his advanced age, thirty-five) and left pretend messages from his mom when he was out of the office. “Eric, it’s your mother, please call so we can discuss your inheritance. It’s canceled.” “Eric, this is mom, we just found out that either you or your twin brother was born evil. The test results are coming back today. Call me.” “Eric, we’ve just realized we live in Staten Island, send help.”
I still thought my enthusiasm for seeing him at work every day was purely friendly until my annual reread of Jane Eyre over the holidays. As always, I was struck by Jane and Rochester’s banter, but now I noticed something new.
I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a sharp lookout. It had formerly been my endeavor to study all sides of character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid.1
I was leaning against the headboard of the bed in my parents’ guest room, and suddenly I found myself thinking of Eric. But why? I saw plenty of bad in Eric. He was the world’s most annoying writing partner; it took us four hours to write a page of website copy because we fought over every word. Nobody was more critical of my writing than he was. We never agreed. He blamed the Internet for the world’s ills, while I agreed with introverts everywhere that it is a lifesaver. And he was a boy. Since falling for Preeti, the only dates I’d gone on, even halfheartedly, had been with women, and I had begun to wonder if I was even into men anymore. I did have to admit he was generous, prone to nice gestures like buying me a soda on our walks or remembering to ask how my latest non-date with Preeti had gone. And he might be disturbingly fixated on his pug, but at least he lavished love and affection on her. But these questions were all academic—he was spoken for. And so I shrugged the thought of him away. I couldn’t imagine what had even made me think about him in the first place. Then Charlotte Brontë tapped me on the shoulder.
The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint: the friendly frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him. I felt at times as if he were my relation rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.2
I told her to shut it. We squabbled constantly! He wasn’t my type! I’d never even stopped to consider whether I found him attractive, which meant I probably didn’t! She pressed on:
And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others.… But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say former, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled.3
Oh noooooo. For the first time in sixteen years I threw Jane Eyre off my bed and onto the floor, then turned out the light with a huff. That night I dreamed about passionately kissing Eric somewhere outside by a large body of water. I could feel his skin under my hands and his fingers in my hair. Abruptly I woke up and turned the light back on. “What is happening,” I said aloud. My copy of Jane Eyre was still on the floor. I picked it up and stuffed it into my suitcase. “Shenanigans,” I said, flipping my pillow to the cool side and trying to go back to sleep.
Back at work the following Monday I gave Eric a wide berth. I clicked into the chat window with Preeti that was always peeking from the corner of my screen.
“I think I have an inappropriate work crush.”
“That’s great!” she wrote, undoubtedly relieved. “Who is she/he?”
She agreed about the red flags of the girlfriend, the age difference, and his general flirtatiousness (he was a world champion schmoozer). Plus he was my boss, though it was not a particularly formal office. Ironically, talking about Eric brought Preeti and me closer again, briefly. And I kept talking to Eric about Preeti to throw him off the scent, just in case he had any idea that I was leaning on his desk for any reason other than reviewing the latest production schedule. A month or so later, when Preeti shut the door to a potential “us” for good, I slumped down in the extra chair at Eric’s desk to mope about it, and caught myself surreptitiously gauging his reaction for signs of relief.
Look, Jane Eyre did not prepare me to be rational about this! Charlotte Brontë made me believe it was entirely possible for a man with no earthly reason to be in love with me to be harboring a great and eternal passion without any external sign of it. Despite all my growth and maturity and life lessons and under-control laundry pile, I was still basically in seventh grade, confronted with the temptation to pass Eric a note with two boxes on it: “Do you like me? Check yes or no.” Naturally, I was not up to the task of resistance or patience or any other rational response to ambiguous romantic feelings and very bad timing (quoth Jane Eyre, “I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature”4).
I began to ask leading questions, like, “What would you do if you were seriously into someone who was in a relationship? If they really wanted to break up with the other person and be with you, they would have done it by now, right? Hypothetically?” I examined his “Not necessarily” response for signs that he had understood my meaning and was signaling me with a reply in code. He hadn’t, and he wasn’t. These are not proud moments in my life.
Somewhere in there, we actually got work done, and I enjoyed it more than ever. Even the tedious copywriting assignments we sparred through were pleasant. “Sometimes I think your curse is that only I’ll ever know how funny you are,” he said to me once. One afternoon I saw a card at The Strand with a picture of a pug in jail on the cover, and I snapped a picture and texted it to him. That was the beginning of us, really.
It was a simple start, but it soon became a constant stream of text-based conversation about everything and nothing. I felt guilty, but not so guilty I could stop myself from replying to “I’m going to Coney Island with my friend Bob to look for the Russian Mafia, pray for me” with “I’ll light a candle to the patron saint of carnies for your safe return” and fishing for updates the rest of the day. Sometimes I swore off texting him for good and deleted his number, or changed his name to “Worst Idea Ever” in my phone. But he always made his way back in. It’s his responsibility to put a stop to it, I rationalized. He’s the one with the girlfriend. In April, I finally heard I’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for two reasons—one, that I would have time to develop my writing and stay in the city, and two, I could put an end-date on yet another hopeless fixation. It backfired when I started planning an epic last-day-at-LightBulb scene for Eric and me. I’d walk him down to Battery Park where we’d have a Statue of Liberty view, and pour my heart out in a bold gesture before going bravely off to grad school and leaving him behind forever. That was my plan. Not for it to magically work out, but for it to explode dramatically, six months down the line. Girl Who Trod on the Loaf style.
But I have never been able to keep a secret; even someone as oblivious as Eric couldn’t be blind to junior varsity flirting tactics forever. I was out of town at a cousin’s wedding in June when I got a text from him.
“Can I ask you something crazy? Am I the person you’ve been talking about being into, the one who has a girlfriend?! Stop laughing!”
I wasn’t laughing. My hands were shaking. I tried to imagine what someone who was capable of playing it cool would do.
“… what makes you ask that?”
“I just had a Usual Suspects moment looking at all this stuff on my desk. Stop laughing!”
I briefly tried to distract him by admitting I’d never seen The Usual Suspects so he would get caught up in an overreaction to my ignorance of movies released before my time, but he bounced back quickly, so I had to admit it was true. “Funnily enough, yeah. Sorry.”
“Wow.”
My family was in the middle of touring a nineteenth-century courthouse-turned-museum and I dawdled in the gift shop waiting for another response. Was he angry? Was he repulsed? Was he breaking up with his girlfriend? I decided to keep things light (and crib from The Office).
“I hope this will make things extremely awkward from now on.”
“Haha,” he replied.
Mortified, I texted our coworker Sheryl, who had been treated to a running play-by-play of my infatuation for months, “omg he knows,” and was gratified by her rapid “!!!!!!!” response.
Somehow we got through the rest of the inevitable “let’s stay friends” conversation; there was no windswept declaration of love. No lightning, no garden, no proposal. Apparently those only happen in books. Sometimes you really do have to take the job in Ireland (or in this case, graduate school in Morningside Heights) and not look back. But I was gratified to hear (or rather read) him drop the banter and say sincerely that he really liked me, that he thought we’d be good together, but he was with someone. “Of course, and I respect that,” I assured him insincerely, “Just… you know… feelings.” Eloquent, Pennington. Lord Byron is facepalming in his grave.
When Jane Eyre was disappointed in love, she painted an imagined portrait of the beautiful Miss Ingram, the woman Rochester was rumored to be in love with, then drew herself in stark charcoal, softening no harsh flaw and permitting no vain embellishments. I tried to do the same with words when I got home to my laptop—lecturing myself on my folly, my hubris, pointing out that whatever complaining Eric did at work, he still went home to someone else, who’d known him for years longer than I had, and in ways I didn’t. I couldn’t in good conscience vilify her, since I didn’t even know her. I was totally in the wrong here. What right did I have to confess my feelings to him, anyway? But then, what right did he have to ask me about them?! You don’t have to consider yourself a flirtatious person to know that constant daily texting with a woman who is not your girlfriend is probably inappropriate—he had to be either more invested in “us” than he was letting on, or less scrupulous than I had thought. It wasn’t the first or the last time that reconciling his words and his actions would be a challenge.
I deleted his number from my phone (again), cleared our conversation history (… again), removed him from my Gchat list (… for probably the fifth time). I resolved to be a more moral individual and an exemplary professional at work. No more giggly lunchtime walks. No more midafternoon trips to the bodega. I could buy my own soda. My emails became formal and concise, and when he teased me about my tone, I smiled enigmatically, a martyr of love. I sat on the other side of Sheryl in our status meetings. I took the elevator alone and went straight home after work instead of lingering by reception so we could ride down together.
I was so eager to put the whole embarrassing revelation behind me, I accepted a date with a guy I’d been talking to on Twitter. That June, free pianos painted by New York artists were stationed in parks all over the city by a nonprofit called Sing for Hope. Twitter guy and I tried and failed to meet up at two different pianos (it turned out I’d been playing and singing at the one in Grand Army Plaza while he waited patiently by the Prospect Park carousel). I felt bad about wasting his time, so I agreed to go with him to a vegan restaurant in Park Slope. His name was Alex, and he was a very kind music critic and poet.
After our dinner and a walk through Prospect Park, my feelings for him were lukewarm at best—he was on the rebound from his first marriage and a little too sincere. But the next day at work, I Blanche-Ingramed the heck out of him for Eric’s benefit. I inflated the “connection” we’d had and made it sound like a magical evening, something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel, but where nobody has to die. It turns out being Rochester is way easier than being Jane.
I saw Alex again, and again; too soon and too often. The next day he met me at the Bell House (an old factory turned music venue near the Gowanus Canal) for an Old 97’s show, and the day after, we watched a movie on my couch. That weekend we went to a Brooklyn food fair, then took the East River Ferry to Governor’s Island. We wandered around holding hands. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed myself, and knew I was playing with fire. I’m no Rules Girl, but two people fresh from failed relationships (even one-sided ones) have no business going all in on the first at-bat, to scramble a metaphor. Some guys give you relationship lip service (“I really see this going somewhere!”) so they can fast-forward to the part where they get to sleep with you, then dump you immediately afterward (Thanks a lot, Mike); others, those rare taxi-in-the-rain express-train-on-time unicorns, are actually intent on having a relationship, and they don’t let conventions like “we’ve only known each other a week” get in the way.
Things picked up momentum because Alex was a serial monogamist. He really liked having someone to be into and I was delighted to have someone who was actually interested in me after two rough forays in a row. Plus it was great to spend time with someone who didn’t hate musicals, who knew he wanted kids (and in fact had two), and who wasn’t already cynical about things a lifelong New Yorker takes for granted, the way Eric was. Poor Alex. He was a good guy; he deserved better.
Our fifth date in a week was a late-night walk on the Highline (an abandoned elevated train track in Chelsea, rehabilitated as a plant-filled walkway and park) under the full moon. It was Bastille Day, so there were fireworks. I was dressed up from ushering a play. He brought me a Gerbera daisy. Even a less romantic woman than I would have been disarmed by that setup. It was catnip presented to a domestic shorthair on a silver platter. So I did what I hadn’t done since high school: I gave a convincing performance of enthusiasm for someone I was barely attracted to. He put his arms around me and we kissed in the moonlight, and suddenly I understood how all those people on dating reality shows wind up in the hot tub so fast. Things get away from you when the set is dressed just right. But then Alex went home and wrote a poem full of tender imagery and wonder and earnestness, which he emailed to me and posted on his blog. And linked to on Twitter and quoted on Facebook. We’d rushed into social networking the way we’d rushed into everything else, so there was no escaping his heartfelt posts and veiled references to his Very Romantic Experience. I saw them everywhere, and so did the mutual Internet friends we had. Even if I had been sincerely interested in him, I think I would have found the poem mortifying.
Eric was a private, offline sort of guy, which I had never appreciated as much as I did that day. I felt guilty, and my guilt made me uncomfortable, and my discomfort made me distant and abrupt. If he hadn’t gotten so ahead of himself (if I hadn’t let him), things with Alex might have progressed past that hasty honeymoon, maybe even blossomed into a misspent autumn in New York, before I was forced to confront my indifference (my inner Rosalie Murray). But now that free verse was involved, I had to shut it down.
It took some digging to place Alex in the Brontë pantheon. He’s not St. John, because he at least thought he had genuine feelings for me. I suppose he could be cast from the Edgar Linton mold, but that would make me Cathy Earnshaw and that I could not bear. However, even better than a fictional incarnation, there were several corresponding gentlemen in Charlotte’s actual love life who might fit the bill. She rejected four proposals of marriage (including Arthur Bell Nicholls’s first one) before finally accepting Nicholls in 1854. First, the Reverend Henry Nussey, a brother of Charlotte’s friend Ellen: Charlotte turned Henry down because she knew how much work being a clergyman’s wife was, and wasn’t willing to undertake it for less than genuine affection.
Then, in 1839, an Irish curate named David Pryce visited the Parsonage for a day and afterward sent Charlotte a letter declaring his attachment and asking for her hand in marriage. She laughingly wrote to Ellen, “Well thought I—I’ve heard of love at first sight but this beats all,” and politely declined.5 Charlotte’s third proposal was from a Smith, Elder & Co. employee, James Taylor, who wanted Charlotte to accompany him to India, which is ironic when you consider how poorly St. John’s whole plan went over. Surely any admirer who’d actually read Jane Eyre would have known its author was not likely to accompany a man she didn’t ardently love on his quest to an inhospitable climate away from her friends.
Alex was most like David Pryce—our relationship was as unlikely to succeed and based on almost as little acquaintance. Mourn the lost art of letter writing anew, because it meant there had to be an excruciating break-up dinner. For those of you looking to set free the unwanted suitors in your lives, let me recommend you do it over coffee and not sushi, unless you’re skilled at feigning genuine interest despite recently acquired revulsion for the person across from you. Or you know how to pick a fight and storm out dramatically. I am not so skilled; I’m terrible at covering up disdain. Before the miso soup even arrived he was asking why I didn’t want to hold his hand (which there is no non-hurtful way to explain without having some kind of skin condition) and why I appeared to be searching for a trapdoor to crawl through. I clearly didn’t want to be there. I had to explain that my feelings had changed, assure him there was nothing he could do to alter them, and, most painful of all, tell him I didn’t want to stay friends either. And then we had to sit and wait for our bento boxes while he looked hurt and I looked anywhere else. You could ask me how many keys were in the collage on the locksmith’s shop across the street and I bet I would know within fifty. As soon as I could extricate myself I fled down Hudson Street; I called Eric, needing to vent my wretchedness, and as I wandered the streets of Soho, we had our first phone conversation.
The next day I could tell Eric was relieved that I was no longer dating Alex. But instead of being gratified, I was angry. I had worked hard to give up on Eric. Really, I had. Why was he still over there harboring some kind of emotional response? After one last awkward talk where I asked point-blank if he was planning on being single in the near future (he hedged, tellingly), I finally reached the knot at the end of my tolerance-rope. In being an undemanding shoulder to lean on and a maintainer of secret inside jokes, I was settling for nothing because of how badly I wanted everything. I was an emotional airbag. It had to stop. Eric would neither make room for me nor let me go. Anyway, did I really want to be a person who broke up a long-term relationship? I wouldn’t mind if they broke up, of course, but I didn’t want to be the reason.
A friend of mine had been suggesting with increasing degrees of firmness that I should go to a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the Berkshires—not just because of my obsession with Eric, but also to learn some techniques for calming a noisy mind and managing anxiety. I couldn’t let myself give in to the impulse to write desperate, confessional letters, like Charlotte had to M. Heger. At least she got to be miles away by the time he read them—I’d still be seeing Eric at the office for another month. Finally I decided to take her up on it. I was slightly afraid of discovering an internal void of unlovable toxicity, but I packed ten days’ worth of flowy pants and loose t-shirts and turned off my phone for an Eric detox. There was going to be a lot of crying.
AFTER William S. Williams, the editor who stayed up all night reading the Jane Eyre manuscript after it arrived, George Smith was Charlotte’s best literary friend—he appreciated her writing, fixed her spelling, and kept her supplied with novels, newspapers, and magazines despite her protestations that she didn’t deserve the attention. Since Emily had made Charlotte promise not to disclose their identities as authors, Charlotte had only ever corresponded as Currer Bell or C. Brontë on the Bells’ behalf. She had exchanged letters with Smith for about a year before finally deciding, in July of 1847, that she and Anne should go to London in person to put to rest some particularly pernicious gossip about the Bells and their novels.
Emily and Anne’s publisher, T. C. Newby, had unscrupulously sold excerpts from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to an American publisher, misrepresenting it as the latest work by Currer Bell. Newspapers had speculated for some time that either all three Bells were one person—Newby’s announcement was an apparent confirmation that left Smith, Elder & Co. understandably rankled. Smith wrote to Charlotte to say that as her publishers, they were miffed that she’d evaded their right of first refusal; the only way to clear up the misunderstanding, Charlotte felt, was in person.
The account of Charlotte and Anne’s first meeting with Smith and Williams is priceless. Charlotte wrote to her friend Mary Taylor, who was by then running a shop in New Zealand with her brother:
Somebody came up and said dubiously
“Did you wish to see me, Ma’am?” “Is it Mr. Smith?” I said, looking up through my spectacles at a young, tall, gentlemanly man. “It is.”
I then put his own letter into his hand directed to “Currer Bell.” He looked at it—then at me—again—yet again—I laughed at his queer perplexity—a recognition took place—I gave my real name—“Miss Brontë”—We were both hurried from the shop into a little back room, ceiled with a great skylight and only large enough to hold 3 chairs and a desk—and there explanations were rapidly gone into—Mr. Newby being anathematized, I fear with undue vehemence. Smith hurried out and returned quickly with one whom he introduced as Mr Williams—a pale, mild, stooping man of fifty.… Another recognition—a long, nervous shaking of hands—then followed talk—talk—talk—Mr Williams being silent—Mr Smith loquacious—
“Allow me to introduce you to my mother & sisters—How long do you stay in Town? You must make the most of the time—tonight you must go to the Italian opera—you must see the Exhibition—Mr. Thackeray would be pleased to see you—if Mr Lewes* knew ‘Currer Bell’ was in town—he would have to be shut up—I will ask them both to dinner at my house &c”6
Once the shock and excitement had calmed, Smith took the Misses Brontë to the opera, introducing them to as few people as possible as “the Misses Brown,” to services at St. Stephens, to dinners that both impressed and exhausted the “quaintly dressed little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking.” They returned home with friends for life. Shortly after, Charlotte received what surely was one of the last letters before she became so famous it would be absurd for someone to get her name wrong; Smith inadvertently addressed a bank letter to her as “Caroline.” After she revealed her true identity, Charlotte’s exchanges with Smith grew ever friendlier, though she is consistently overly self-deprecating—she insists he shouldn’t trouble himself with the likes of her, he must have better things to do, she wouldn’t want to intrude, etc. She and Williams corresponded like father and daughter, but George and Charlotte were, in an understated, heavy on the literary criticism sense, totally flirting.
In one of her letters, following a brief lapse in communication after another visit in London, Charlotte said, “Of course I was not at all pleased when the small problem was solved by the letter being brought—I never care for hearing from you the least in the world.”7 That sort of teasing banter doesn’t occur in her correspondence with anyone else! “My dear sir I return the ‘Times’ and the ‘Literary Gazette’ with—Oh no! I forgot—not with thanks.”8 That “not with thanks” implies he told her to knock it off with the groveling.
The two of them went to a phrenologist together in London, under the names Mr. And Miss Fraser. According to Smith, Dr. Browne, the phrenologist, was so struck by the “imaginative power” of a lady he’d examined that he was talking about her days later to anyone who would listen. Since we don’t have any of Smith’s letters to Charlotte, we can’t close-read them to assuage our curiosity about his feelings. We can tell, though, that Charlotte occasionally doubted her highhanded manner with him, but consistently received reassurance: “Mr Fraser kindly understood me—for which I beg to tell him—I am grateful—it is pleasant to be understood.”9 And this bit of sweetness: “Forgive all the nonsense of this letter—there is such a pleasure and relief either in writing or talking a little nonsense sometimes to anybody who is sensible enough to understand—and good natured enough to pardon it.”10 That’s what I’d always liked about Eric—I didn’t want to be dominated or overruled, but I did want to be met halfway. To be challenged. To have my volley returned. To have a little nonsense now and then.
I don’t think George Smith was Constantin Heger 2.0; Charlotte didn’t look up to him as a teacher-god. They were intellectual equals, even if their age and social standing was uneven. Charlotte might write relationships that reflected traditional gender roles, even as she queered them with tomboys and Captain Shirley Keeldar, but in real life she was attracted to men she could hold her own with. As much as she liked his flippant correspondence, she carefully consigns her most overt appreciation to the pen of Currer Bell, keeping Charlotte Brontë at bay:
But though Currer Bell cannot do this [write a serial for Smith, Elder & Co.]—you are still to think him your friend—and you are still to be his friend. You are to keep a fraction of yourself—if it be only the end of your little finger—for him, and that fraction he will neither let gentleman or lady—author or artist… take possession of—or so much as meddle with. He reduces his claim to a minute point—and that point he monopolizes.11
That is surely the sound of a woman in love who believes, rightly or wrongly, that she can make no larger claim on the object of her affection. But that pinkie finger is hers.
As much as George Smith appreciated Charlotte’s friendship, admired her writing, and bantered with her through the mails, after her death he denied ever being in love with her. He even said he’d found her appearance insufficiently charming. This earns him a side-eye for shallowness. I also think his opinion of her was somewhat compromised by the well-meaning efforts of literary gossips like Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, who were prone to spreading reports of Charlotte’s frailness and ill health even when Charlotte herself wasn’t particularly sickly. She was irked enough—and perhaps aware that it was affecting his perception of her—to write to him about it:
May I be so egotistical as to say a word or two about my health. Two ladies—neither of them unknown to Fame—whom I reverence for their talents and love for their amiability, but of whom I would beg the small favour of being allowed to remain in tolerable health—seem determined between them that I shall be a sort of invalid;… If I do not answer the letters of these ladies by return of post… flying rumours presently reach me derogatory to my physical condition.…
Why may not I be well like other people? I think I am reasonably well; not strong or capable of much continuous exertion (which I do not remember that I ever was) and apt no doubt to look haggard if over-fatigued—but otherwise I have no ailment and I maintain that I am well, and hope (D.V.) to continue so a while.12
This is the passage often pointed to by Brontë enthusiasts and researchers to suggest that Charlotte was in love with Smith, and that she feared his feelings for her might be compromised by the rumors of her sickliness. And it’s very possible that they were, and he was dissuaded from developing stronger feelings for her as a result. The woman Smith eventually chose to marry he claimed to have fallen in love with at first sight; she was young, and rosy-cheeked, and for Charlotte’s sake I hope you will join me in despising her.
Even if they were never romantically attached, Charlotte was sufficiently invested in their relationship that receiving news of his engagement in 1853 led to a very brief and frosty acknowledgment, and then a chillier silence, until she wrote back to him with news of her own engagement the following year.
I returned from my silent retreat calm and collected. I had eaten a significant quantity of yogurt, peanut butter, and tofu. I had learned to sit still. I felt like I’d had a breakthrough. The torch I carried wasn’t out, but it had dimmed enough that I could see beyond it. I had to live my life as though Eric were going to be permanently unavailable, and I had to really mean it, not just attempt to work reverse-psychology on the universe. Eric could stay locked in his unhappy relationship, since apparently it suited him, and I would eventually find a partner willing and eager to be with me. Then I would condescend to invite Eric to our wedding and make him die a little inside at how happy and radiant I was. This was Plan A, a significant improvement over Plan B, which was dying abandoned and alone in a forest.
My first day back at work, Eric asked me to lunch, and confessed he actually had broken up with his girlfriend while I was away. My newfound serenity wobbled but didn’t falter—if we were going to be together, I didn’t want him on the rebound. I wanted him for keeps. We existed in sort of a limbo for a few weeks—socializing occasionally outside of work, texting daily, but not constantly. It was exasperating. If he wasn’t ready to address this lingering tension by my last day in the office, I planned to acknowledge myself defeated and move on.
On the Monday of my last week at LightBulb he came out to Brooklyn with me after work. We sat on my couch, fidgeted with the red corduroy cushions, and watched the sunlight slant through the windows. I remember putting my toes into the beam that was heating up the hardwood floor where Gracie was sleeping. I was ready to surrender.
“Even when you really want something to happen,” I said, “if it’s not the best thing for the person you care about, you don’t get to just demand it, right? Sometimes you just have to let go. I guess I’m ready.” It was weird to be having this conversation face to face. We rarely talked about anything serious out loud, least of all our relationship. I was used to having time to revise or think better of what I was about to say. There was a certain temptation to take out my phone and just text him. My sentiments had sounded so much more poignant in my head. We sat through a long pause while I wiped away a noble tear or two, expecting him to nod and admit he just wasn’t ready, although he liked me a lot, it was too soon, and he’d given it a lot of thought but just couldn’t in good conscience—
“Wait, are you talking about us?” Eric said. I closed my eyes and exhaled in a very un-Zen huff. Every conversation we’d had for months, no matter how innocuous, was secretly about the Long Term Potential Of Us. How did he not get it? When I nodded, he gave me a hug and suggested we go get some dinner. We walked to Bogota, my favorite restaurant in Park Slope, and continued our circular conversation around “what this is exactly.” I have no patience for circular conversation. It makes me want to cut to the heart of things, but as the great Diana Ross and a few dozen others have vainly tried to warn me, you can’t hurry love. No, you just have to wait. Finally I put down my fork and said, “Listen, we’re already here. This is dating. We just haven’t kissed yet. The question is, do you want to be here or not? Because I’d understand if you didn’t, but I can’t keep going on as if you might if the truth is you don’t.” I speared a plantain and avoided eye contact while Eric worked out what I had said. He smiled (finally, one thing that’s better in person), and said, “I do. I want to be here.”
I believe that I blushed. After dinner we got gelato and walked back to my apartment. I invited him up to the roof to “see the view of Manhattan.” I assumed anyone who’d ever dated anyone with a roof, or stairs, or a collection of etchings knew that a visit to see them was a flagrant transparency, but later Eric would profess he had no idea why I wanted to go upstairs. It was to make out, obviously. Maybe the reason Charlotte could never get things going with George Smith was the Smith & Elder offices didn’t have a rooftop with a view.
I led him to the waist-high wall at the front of the building and perched up on it with a dexterity that my teenage self would have applauded. Behind me was Lower Manhattan’s skyline and the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower clock, with its red neon hands. They seldom both worked at the same time, but that night they were glowing in tandem. He got nervous I’d fall, so I slid down to face him. Eric is almost exactly my height, so I was looking straight into his eyes. I don’t think we’d ever stood this close together unless the elevator was particularly crowded. His eyes were so blue. I could see individual curls in his dark hair, lit by the streetlights on Fourth Avenue. His hands were surprisingly smooth and soft as he slid them into mine. I had a split second to regret the whole idea because we were about to ruin everything when finally he kissed me. We kissed for a while, until I broke away giggling. I couldn’t stop, silly and suddenly shy, despite all my brazenness.
The next day at work we sheepishly said hello over the cube wall and sat down. I felt like my cheeks were in some shade of red all day; my coworkers had to be aware of the magnetic waves ebbing through the office. That afternoon, an earthquake shook Manhattan. So maybe the magnetic waves had nothing to do with us. Our offices were on the top floor of a sturdy Rector Street building, and yet the whole floor swayed. The entire staff either chanced it in the elevators or bolted down all twenty-six flights of interior stairs to reconvene in Battery Park. I may have allowed a moment of smugness—Jane Eyre only got a lightning-struck tree after her first kiss, I got a whole earthquake—but then I remembered that it wasn’t a good omen.* It was, however, another one I chose to ignore. Work abandoned, Eric and I walked all the way up Broadway, soaking in that peculiar feeling of camaraderie New York City gets whenever something drastic happens to us all at once. We parted ways at Union Square with a squeeze of the hand and a kiss on the cheek.
The lesson I should have learned from that shaky beginning was that Eric would take action when it felt like now or never, regardless of whether he was actually ready, and it would lead to unpleasant aftershocks every time. As you might have expected, there were some complications in leaping into a serious relationship with a man just out of an existing (and, I would find out later, still largely unresolved) domestic situation who wasn’t aware that I already saw our relationship as serious. He didn’t want to hurt me, but being with him meant compromises. It meant being patient when he took forever to make plans, and being gracious when plans had to be canceled at the last minute, and being accepting when he refused to make plans at all. I was required to access reservoirs of chill I’d never known before. Whatever grace and acceptance I had learned at the silent retreat had totally evaporated two weeks into our long-awaited relationship. It hurt that we were exchanging our easy everyday banter for tense, testy exchanges when my impatience met his reluctance. I was ready to be in love, and instead we were perpetually in transition.
Eric was candid with me, but just like I’d predicted when I was a teenager, when Mr. Rochester offered a vision of paradise set sometime in the future in exchange for my dignity and self-respect in the moment, I took it and ran. Believing I’d done my due diligence (when I’d only taken the bare minimum dosage of Jane Eyre), I swallowed my expectations and eagerly signed up for what Eric had to offer—his hesitancy, his conflicted loyalties, his history of not communicating honestly when it was painful to do so. I imagined I would shape it into what I really wanted later.
Come to think of it, Eric didn’t attempt to lure me to a villa on the Mediterranean. I wasn’t even invited to his actual apartment, because it was still the contested home of his shared-custody dog. But it wasn’t all bad. Our first real date post-kiss, post-quake was a visit to the Museum of the City of New York and a walk down Central Park West. Our third date was The Elegance of the Hedgehog and a stroll around Midtown East. We fell into a rhythm—he would come to my apartment after work, we’d make out for a while, have dinner, and he’d go home. If I tried to make plans on the weekend, he was noncommittal and evasive. A smarter woman than I would have backed off immediately, busied herself with schoolwork, and attempted to date other people.
Or, if I’d really wanted to do it up right, I could have thrown myself on the mercy of my aunt and uncle in White Plains, set off in the dark of night on the New Jersey Turnpike. This hypothetical smarter woman would have let Eric take his time with no hard feelings. Or the hard feelings would have won out, so she could stop wondering when he would call and what he would say and when he would want to see her. But I was no smarter than I’d ever been. Dumber, in fact, because for the first time I was outright rejecting the counsel of Jane Eyre, who is always full of wisdom and self-respect. When her romantic idol fell drastically short of her standards, Jane walked away. When my love interest showed the same frailty, I shortened my measuring stick. I asked for less, denied I had standards at all. Jane was also still speaking directly to me, by the way, or at least trying to:
Meantime, let me ask myself one question—Which is better?—To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort—no struggle;—but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa: to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester’s mistress; delirious with his love half my time—for he would—oh, yes, he would have loved me well for a while. He did love me—no one will ever love me so again.… He was fond and proud of me—it is what no man besides will ever be.—But where am I wandering, and what am I saying, and above all, feeling? Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles—fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next—or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?13
The answer is obvious, right? Unqualified surrender, silken snare all the way. A fool’s paradise is still paradise when you don’t know the difference. Freedom and honesty is all very well, but being loved wins in a landslide, every time. I was too thrilled to have Eric in my life, to have him squeeze my hand back when I squeezed his. I was too afraid. I couldn’t step back and protect either of us from the effects of surging ahead too quickly.
Over the next six months we had the equivalent of three good ones together. Some weekends he would make the long train ride from Inwood to not-quite-Park-Slope and we’d go for long walks, sharing a sense of discovery and a love of Brooklyn architecture. We’d force each other to watch movies we knew the other would hate just to get distracted into fooling around halfway through. He got us tickets to Labapalooza, a series of experimental puppet vignettes at St. Ann’s Warehouse, and we lit up at the unexpected, the tiny and adorable, the strange.
He took me to a screening of a Ben Katchor cartoon with live musical accompaniment, an ode to the New York Public Library. He convinced me to try sushi for the first time. Sushi is a lot like love, I thought, insufferably. You look for ingredients you recognize and try not to be scared by the ones you haven’t seen before. (And when in doubt, cover it in a slice of ginger?) I started eating sushi so often I actually worried about mercury poisoning.
I wanted to tell Eric I loved him after about two weeks, but I managed to hold off for a whole month—and then I told him in every language I knew except English. When I finally told him in a language he understood, he smiled and whispered back that he loved me too. But a few hours later he sat up on my bed abruptly. “I feel like I’m cheating on both of you,” he said, and gathered his things to leave. There would be stretches where he’d be fighting with his ex, or caught up in his obligations to their demanding dog (who was diabetic as well as emotionally unstable), or just distracted, and I’d struggle to feel connected. It was like a switch went on and off—sometimes he was warm, and open, and generous. He got us theater tickets to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, for my birthday and didn’t blame me when it turned out to be terrible. We hid notes to each other in coat pockets, surprised one another with little gifts. Other times I had to pry any proof he cared out of the locked box of his closed hand; he met me with silence when I tried to talk about the future, whether it was “ours” or “two weeks from now.” I was still convinced that if we could just get through this part, what came next would be everything I’d ever wanted.
Right after Christmas, which I spent in Arkansas with relatives and he spent in New Jersey with his older brother’s family, we broke up. I’d urged him to get some therapy, and the therapist had naturally pinpointed the turmoil he felt about our relationship. This prompted him to text me, “My therapist says it sounds like I need more time before jumping into a relationship—what do you think?”—essentially, trying to get me to do the work of breaking up with myself. Communicating over text message again while I was traveling had allowed him to finally voice his need for space, however obliquely. I was in shock. I had bent over backward to accommodate him and assured him I had no emotional needs whatsoever! How did that not work?! Seldom has a terrible decision backfired so predictably. When I got back to New York, he came over for the ritual torture of getting his things back. I gave him the little trinkets I’d picked up as Christmas presents. He brought nothing for me. We sat side by side on the same couch; he couldn’t even look at me. I curled into myself and didn’t get up when he left.
After a month of misery, not eating, not sleeping, and not writing, I gave in to that selfish feeling Jane Eyre had so stalwartly resisted, and called him to suggest we get back together. Not because anything had actually improved, but because I was just determined to stick it out this time. That’s not what I told him, naturally—the story I fed him was that I was finally ready to let things be relaxed and casual, like he needed. So casual. My roommate and my coworkers all observed that it sounded like he wasn’t ready, my mother asked what I was thinking, and even my ordinarily supportive brother asked why on earth this was a good idea. But I knew how Jane Eyre ended already—with a sweet, happy reunion. Why spend a year banished to a metaphorical village school with only a frosty St. John Rivers to talk to if I didn’t have to? Eric and I went to dinner together at the Mermaid Inn on the Lower East Side. Things almost felt normal despite the lingering pit in my stomach and Eric’s noticeably monosyllabic conversation. After dinner, the little plastic fortune-telling fish they bring with the check curled right up in my hand (“Ready for love!”), but Eric’s just laid there in his palm, flat and dormant (“Cold fish!”). Nevertheless, as we walked uptown on Second Avenue, I cheerily put my arm through his.
“I’m so glad we’re back—aren’t you glad we’re back?” I chirped. Eric looked down and away from me.
“Well…” he trailed off.
Despite that palpable flag on the play, I barreled ahead. Even though he still wouldn’t make plans more than a day or two in advance, I still wasn’t invited to his apartment, and he wasn’t comfortable staying over at mine. He showed no sign of letting me peek around the edges of his impressive emotional barriers. I knew what Jane Eyre would tell me to do (she would point out this guy bore no resemblance to her Rochester, first of all—and Edward Fairfax had real estate—and then she would talk about one’s moral fiber). I didn’t want to hear it, so in exasperation I picked up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Better the devil that nobody you know has ever read before than the one you have memorized.
Is that not how that goes?