in which we read Northanger Abbey and gather at Grigg’s
Prudie missed our next meeting. Jocelyn brought a card for everyone to sign. She said it was a sympathy card, which we had to take her word for, as it was all in French. The front was sober enough—a seascape, dunes, gulls, and drift. Time and tide or some such cold comfort. “I was so sad to hear that she had to cancel her trip to France,” Sylvia said, and then looked away, embarrassed, because that was hardly the saddest part.
Jocelyn spoke up quickly. “You know she’s never been.”
We had, most of us, also lost our mothers. We spent a moment missing them. The sun was blooming rosily in the west. The trees were in full leaf. The air was bright and soft and laced with the smells of grass, of coffee, of melted Brie. How our mothers would have loved it!
Allegra leaned over and picked up Sylvia’s hand, traced around the fingers, let it go. Sylvia was looking uncommonly elegant tonight. She had cut her hair as short as Allegra’s and was dressed in a long skirt with a Chinese-red fitted top. Applied a plummy lipstick and had her eyebrows shaped. We were pleased to see that she’d reached that drop-dead stage of the divorce proceedings. She was on her feet and dressed to kill.
Allegra was, as always, vivid. Jocelyn was classic. Grigg was casual—corduroys and a green rugby shirt. Bernadette had already spilled hummus on her yoga pants.
The pants were spotted with olive and blue flowers, and now there was a hummus-colored spot as well on the ledge of her stomach. You could go a long time without noticing the stain, however. You could go a long time without looking at her pants. This was because she’d broken her glasses sometime after our last meeting and patched them together with a startling great lump of paper clips and masking tape.
It was possible they weren’t even broken. It was possible she’d merely lost the little screw.
The meeting was held at Grigg’s. Some of us had wondered whether Grigg would ever be hosting us, and some of us had thought he wouldn’t be and were already cross about the special arrangements men always expected: how they never made the big meals, the holiday meals, how their wives wrote their thank yous for them and sent out the birthday cards. We were working ourselves into something of a state about it when Grigg said we should have the Northanger Abbey meeting at his house, because he was probably the only one in the group who liked Northanger Abbey best of all the books so far.
This was not a position we could imagine anyone taking. We hoped Grigg wasn’t saying this just because it was provocative. Austen was no occasion for displays of ego.
We’d been curious about Grigg’s housekeeping. Most of us hadn’t seen a bachelor pad since the seventies. We were picturing mirror balls and Andy Warhol.
We got chili-string lights and Beatrix Potter. Grigg had rented a cozy brick cottage in a pricey part of town. It had a tin roof and a porch overhung with grapevines. Inside was a sleeping loft and the smallest wood-burning stove we’d ever seen. During February, Grigg said, he’d heated the whole place with it, but by the time he’d chopped the logs into the tiny splinters that would fit inside, he didn’t need a fire anymore; he’d be sweating like a pig.
There was a rug by the couch that many of us recognized from the Sundance catalogue as something we ourselves had wanted, the one with poppies on the edges. The sun glanced off a row of copper pots in the kitchen window.
Each pot held an African violet, some white, some purple, and you have to admire a man who keeps his houseplants alive, especially when they’ve been transferred into pots with no holes for drainage. It made us begrudge him the rug less. Of course, the violets could all have been new, bought just to impress us. But then again, who were we that we needed impressing?
The wall along the stairs was lined with built-in bookcases, and these were stuffed with books, not just upright, but teepeed across the tops of other books as well. They were mostly paperbacks, and well read. Allegra went to check them out. “Lots of rocketships in this collection,” she said.
“You like science fiction?” Sylvia asked Grigg. From her tone of voice you might have thought she was interested in science fiction and the people who read it.
Grigg wasn’t fooled. “Always have,” was all he said. He continued to arrange cheese wedges on a plate. They made a sort of picture of a face when he was done, a cheese-wedge smile, two pepper-cracker eyes. We may have just been imagining that, though. He may have been laying out the cheese with no artistic intent.
Grigg had grown up in Orange County, the only boy in a family with four children, and the youngest. His oldest sister, Amelia, was eight when he was born, Bianca was seven, and Caty, who was called Catydid when she was little and Cat when she was older, was five.
He was always way too easy to tease. Sometimes they told him not to be such a boy and sometimes not to be such a baby. It didn’t seem to leave a whole lot of things for him to be.
If Grigg had been a girl, his name would have been Delia. Instead he was named after his father’s father, who’d died just about the time Grigg was born and already no one seemed to remember him very well. “A man’s man,” Grigg’s father said, “a quiet man,” which was a movie Grigg had seen on television and so he always pictured his grandfather as John Wayne.
Even so, it was hard to forgive the name. Every year at school, the first time his new teacher would take attendance, she would call for Harris Grigg instead of Grigg Harris. All year Grigg anticipated the next year’s humiliation. And then he found out that his grandfather’s real name was Gregory and that his parents had known this all along. Grigg was just a nickname and not a family name, not until Grigg’s own parents had made it one. He repeatedly asked them why, but never got an answer he felt settled the question. He told them that from then on he, too, would go by “Gregory,” but no one ever remembered, even though they could remember to call Caty “Cat” easily enough.
Grandpa Harris had worked for the electric company as a lineman. It was a dangerous job, Grigg’s father told him. Grigg had every hope of having a dangerous job himself someday, though more secret agent than crack utility worker. His own father was a meter reader and had been in the hospital four times with dog bites. He had two shiny scars on the calf of one leg and another scar somewhere no one saw. The Harrises had never owned a dog, and as long as his father was alive they never would. Grigg was five the first time this was explained to him, and he still remembered his reaction, how he thought to himself that his father couldn’t live forever.
Grigg was the only one of the children with his own bedroom. This was a continual source of resentment. The room was so tiny the bed barely fit and his chest of drawers had to be put in the hall. Still, it was all his. The ceiling slanted; there was a single window, and wallpaper with yellow rosebuds, which Amelia had picked because the room had been hers until Grigg came along. If he’d been a girl she would have gotten to keep the room.
When the wind blew, a branch tapped against the glass like fingers, but that surely wouldn’t have scared Amelia. Grigg would lie in the dark, all by himself, and the tree creaked and tapped. He would hear his sisters laughing down the hall. He knew when it was Amelia laughing and when it was Bianca and when it was Cat, even if he couldn’t hear the words. He guessed they were talking about boys, a subject on which they had nothing pleasant to say.
“You girls go to sleep now,” his mother would shout from downstairs. She often played the piano after the children were in bed, and if she could still hear them over her beloved Scott Joplin, then they were too loud. The girls might respond with a temporary silence, or they might not bother. Individually they were governable. As a unit, not so much so.
Grigg’s father couldn’t stand up to them at all. They hated the smell of his pipe, so he smoked only in his toolshed. They hated sports, so he went out to his car to listen to games on the radio. When they wanted money, they flirted for it, straightening his tie and kissing his cheek until, helpless as a kitten, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Once Grigg did the very same thing, blinked his heavy lashes and pouted his lips. Cat laughed so hard she choked on a peanut, which could have killed her. Amelia had heard of that happening to someone, and how would Grigg have felt then?
Grigg was always being laughed at. He’d been the only boy in his first-grade class who could go all the way around the world in jacks, but that, too, turned out to be a social misstep.
One day when he was in the fifth grade, Grigg’s father stopped him after breakfast. “Come out back with me,” he said, in a low voice. “And don’t tell the girls.”
“Out back” meant the little room his father had made for himself in the old toolshed. Out back was strictly invitation-only. There was a lock on the door, and a plaid La-Z-Boy Grigg’s mother hated and wouldn’t have in the house. There was an old Tupperware dish with an endless supply of Red Hots. Grigg didn’t like Red Hots much, but he ate them when they were offered; they were still candy, after all. Grigg was happy to hear that the girls were not invited, were not even to be told. It was not an easy thing, keeping a secret from three older sisters while still making sure everyone knew there was a secret being kept, but Grigg had studied with the masters, who were the girls themselves.
Grigg went to the toolshed. His father was waiting, smoking a cigarette. There was no window in the shed, so it was always dark, even with the lamp on, and the smoke was thick; because no one knew about secondhand smoke then, no one thought anything about it. The lamp had a bendable neck and a glaring bulb, as if someone was about to be interrogated. His father was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with a stack of magazines in his lap.
“This is strictly boy stuff,” his father said. “Top-secret. Got it?”
Grigg took a seat on an upended apple crate, and his father handed him a magazine. On the cover was the picture of a woman in her underwear. Her black hair flew about her face in long, loose curls. Her eyes were wide. She had enormous breasts, barely contained by a golden bra.
But best of all, unbelievably best, was the thing unhooking the bra. It had eight tentacled arms and a torso shaped like a Coke can. It was blue. The look on its face—what an artist to convey so much emotion on a creature with so few features!—was hungry.
This was the afternoon that made a reader out of Grigg.
Soon he had learned:
From Arthur C. Clarke, that “art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.”
From Theodore Sturgeon, that “sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.”
From Philip K. Dick, that “at least half the famous people in history never existed,” and that “anything can be faked.”
What Grigg liked best about science fiction was that it seemed to be a place where he was neither alone nor surrounded by girls. He wouldn’t have continued to like it as he grew, if it really had been as girl-free a world as he initially thought. His first favorite author was Andrew North. Later he learned that Andrew North was a pen name for Andre Norton. Later still he learned that Andre Norton was a girl.
Grigg didn’t tell us any of this, because he thought we wouldn’t be interested. “Those books with rocketships on the spine were the first books I fell in love with,” is what Grigg said. “You never do get over your first love, do you?”
“No,” said Sylvia. “You never do.”
“Except for sometimes,” said Bernadette.
“I was at a science fiction convention when I first met Jocelyn,” Grigg told us.
We all turned to look at Jocelyn. Perhaps one or two of us had our mouths open. We would never have guessed she read science fiction. She had certainly never said so. She hadn’t gone to any of the new Star Wars movies, and she’d never stood in line for any of the old ones.
“Oh, please.” Jocelyn made an impatient brushing motion with her hand. “As if. I was at the Hound Roundup. Same hotel.”
The evening had hardly begun and already there was a second story we weren’t being told.
Almost a year earlier, Jocelyn had gone to Stockton for the annual meeting of the Inland Empire Hound Club. In celebration of a whole weekend free from dog hair (not that Ridgebacks were great shedders: they kept their hair to themselves more than most dogs, this was one of their many attractive features), Jocelyn packed a great many black clothes. She wore a black beaded vest under a black cardigan. Black slacks and black socks. She attended panels entitled “Sight Hounds: What Makes Them Special?” and “Soothing the Savage Beast: New Modification Techniques for Aggressive Behaviors.” (Which was sad, as the proper quote was about savage breasts. Now that would be a panel!)
On the same weekend and in the same hotel was a science fiction convention known as Westernessecon. In the lower-level conference rooms, science fiction fans were gathering to talk about books and mourn dead or dying TV shows. There were panels on “Why We Once Loved Buffy,” “The Final Frontier: Manifest Destiny Goes Intergalactic,” and “Santa Claus: God or Fiend?”
Jocelyn was taking the elevator from the lobby to her room on the seventeenth floor when a man got on. He wasn’t young, but he was considerably younger than Jocelyn; that was a rapidly growing category. There was nothing to draw Jocelyn’s attention to him, and she paid him no further notice.
A trio of young women came on behind him. All three had chains in their noses, spikes on their wrists. They wore cuffs on their ears as if Fish and Wildlife had tagged and then released them. Their faces were powdered the color of chalk and their arms were crossed over their breasts, wrist spikes on top. The man hit the button for the twelfth floor and one of the women for the eighth.
The elevator stopped again and more people entered. Just as the door was shutting, someone outside clapped it open and more people pushed in. Jocelyn found herself crushed against the back of the elevator. The spikes on one young woman’s bracelet caught on Jocelyn’s sweater and left a snag. Someone stepped on her foot and didn’t seem to realize it; Jocelyn had to wiggle out from under and still there was no apology. The elevator stopped again. “No room!” someone at the front said loudly, and the door closed.
The chalk-faced woman to Jocelyn’s right was wearing the same red dog collar that Sahara sported on dressy occasions. “I have a collar just like that,” Jocelyn told her. She intended it as a friendly gesture, a hand across the waters. She was trying not to mind being trapped at the back of the elevator. Jocelyn didn’t normally suffer from claustrophobia, but she was seldom this squeezed and her breath came fast and shallow.
The woman made no response. Jocelyn waited for one, and then a brief, inconsequential humiliation came over her. What had her crime been? Her age? Her clothes? Her “Dog is my copilot” name tag? Everyone except Jocelyn and the not-young-but-younger-than-Jocelyn man got off at the eighth floor. Jocelyn moved forward, picking at the snag in her sweater, trying to pull it inside, where it wouldn’t show. The elevator resumed its ascent.
“She was invisible,” the man said.
Jocelyn turned. “Excuse me?”
He appeared to be a normal, agreeable man. Lovely, heavy eyelashes, but otherwise quite ordinary. “It’s a game. They’re vampires, and when you see one of them holding her arms crossed like that”—the man demonstrated—“then you should pretend you don’t see her. She’s invisible. That’s why she didn’t answer you. Nothing personal.”
This made it sound as if it were all Jocelyn’s fault. “Being a vampire is no excuse for being rude,” Jocelyn told him. “Ms. Manners says.” Of course Ms. Manners had said no such thing, but wouldn’t she probably, if asked?
They’d arrived at the twelfth floor. The elevator hummed and clanged. The man debarked, turned to face her. “My name is Grigg.”
As if anyone would know whether Grigg was a first or a last name without being told. The door slid shut before Jocelyn could answer. Just as well. “What a bunch of freaks,” she said. She said it aloud in case there was someone still in the elevator with her. The feelings of invisible people were of no moment to Jocelyn, though Ms. Manners probably wouldn’t like that, either; Ms. Manners was a hard woman.
Jocelyn left an unimaginative demonstration by a pet psychic—“He wants you to know that he’s very grateful for the good care you take of him”; “She says she loves you very much”—and went to her room. She showered, just to use the hotel soap and lotion, shook her hair dry, slipped into her black linen dress, left her name tag on her cardigan on the bed, and took the elevator to the top floor. She stood at the doorway of the hotel bar, looking about for someone she knew. “I was in Holland and Italy and Australia last year,” an attractive woman at a table near the door was saying, “and every time I turned on a television, some version of Star Trek was on. I’m telling you, it’s ubiquitous.”
There was an empty stool at the bar. Jocelyn occupied it and ordered a dirty martini. She couldn’t find a familiar face. Usually she didn’t mind being out alone; she’d been single too long to care. But here she felt uncomfortable. She felt that her dress was wrong, too tasteful, too expensive. She felt old. Her martini arrived. She drank from it, in a gulp. Another gulp. And another. She’d finish as quickly as possible and leave, look for dog people in the lobby or the restaurant. The bar was headachingly noisy. There were a dozen conversations, high-pitched laughter, a hockey game on the television set, hoses spitting and ice machines crushing.
“All I’m saying is, it would take a thousand years to bring an animal species to full consciousness,” a man near Jocelyn said. “You suggest otherwise and you lose me.” He was speaking so loudly Jocelyn thought there was no need to pretend she hadn’t heard.
She leaned in. “Actually I would have enjoyed something a bit more lizard-brain,” she said. “The perfect grammar, the British accent, for God’s sake. The boringly endless list of thank yous. As if they aren’t all just waiting for the chance to hump your leg.”
Now, that was an inelegant thing to say. Perhaps she was already just a tiny bit drunk. The room did a leisurely spin. Drink in haste, repent at leisure, her mother had always told her. An ad for a poetic sort of running shoe came on the television.
The man had turned toward her. He was a large man with a full beard and a small scotch. He looked like a bear, but good-humored, which real bears never, ever look. Jocelyn was guessing he was a basset breeder; there wasn’t a more agreeable group in the world than the basset contingent. She herself had only recently learned to love the bassets, and it was a point of secret shame that it had taken so long. Everyone else seemed to fall in love with them so effortlessly.
“Mostly I was offended by the invertebrates,” the bear man said. “We are not crustaceans. The same rules do not apply.”
Now Jocelyn was sorry she’d left the demonstration early. How much gratitude could a crustacean express? And if one did, well, she’d certainly want to be there to see it. “He did a crustacean?” she asked. Wistfully.
“Which of his books have you read?”
“I haven’t read his books.”
“Oh my God! You should read his books,” the man told her. “I complain, sure, but I’m a huge fan. You really should read his books.”
“Well, you’re huge. You got that part right.” The voice was tiny, a gnat in Jocelyn’s ear. She turned and found Roberta Reinicker’s face hovering above her, her brother Tad just behind. The Reinickers had a kennel in Fresno and a coquettish Ridgeback named Beauty in whom Jocelyn was periodically interested. Beauty had good papers and a good confirmation. A sweet if unsteady disposition. She gave her heart to whoever was closest. In a dog, this was a pretty nice trait.
“Scoot over,” Roberta said, taking half of Jocelyn’s stool by pressing her hard into the counter. Roberta was a frosted blond in her late thirties. Tad was older and not so pretty. He leaned past Jocelyn to order. “I have a new car,” he told her. He raised his eyebrows significantly and tried to wait for the punch line. He failed. “A Lexus. Great mileage. Beautiful seats. The engine—like butter churning.”
“How nice,” Jocelyn said. He was still hovering. If Jocelyn looked straight up she’d see the soft white froglike skin on the bottom of his chin. This wasn’t a view one often got, and a very good thing, too.
“ ‘Nice’!” Tad shook his head; his chin went right and left and right and left. “I hope you can do better than ‘nice.’ It’s a Lexus.”
“Very nice,” Jocelyn offered. A Lexus was, by all accounts, a very nice car. Jocelyn had never heard otherwise.
“Used, of course. I got a great deal. I could take you for a spin later. You’ve never had such a smooth ride.”
While he was talking, Roberta’s gnat voice came into Jocelyn’s ear again. “What a bunch of freaks,” Roberta said.
Jocelyn did not approve of calling people freaks. Nor did she think the people in the bar looked particularly freakish. There’d been a Klingon, an elf or two down in the lobby, but apparently the aliens weren’t drinking. Too bad. A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, right,” Roberta said. Conspiratorially.
“So which authors do you like?” the bear man asked Roberta.
“Oh!” Roberta said. “No! I don’t read science fiction. Not ever.” And then, into Jocelyn’s ear, “My God! He thinks I’m one of them.”
My God. The bear man was a science fiction fan, not a basset breeder. So what, Jocelyn wondered, had she and he been talking about? How had crustaceans made their way into the conversation?
And surely he couldn’t hear Roberta over the other noise in the bar, but he could see the whispering. Jocelyn was mortified by her own mistake and Roberta’s bad manners.
“Really?” she asked Roberta, loud enough for the bear man to hear. “Never? That seems a bit small-minded. I love a good science fiction novel, myself.”
“Whom do you read?” the bear man asked.
Jocelyn took another gulp, set her glass down, crossed her arms. This accomplished nothing. Roberta, Tad, and the bear man watched her intently. She closed her eyes, which did make them disappear, but not usefully so.
Think, she told herself. Surely she knew the name of one science fiction writer. Who was that dinosaur guy? Michael something.
“Ursula Le Guin. Connie Willis? Nancy Kress?” Grigg had come up while she had her eyes closed, was standing just behind Roberta. “Am I right?” he asked. “You look like a woman of impeccable taste.”
“I think you must be psychic,” she said.
Tad told them all what a really good book was (nonfiction and with boats—The Perfect Storm), and also what wasn’t a good book (anything with talking fucking trees like The Lord of the Rings). It turned out Tad had never actually read either one. He’d seen the movies. This made the bear man so mad he spilled his scotch into his beard.
Jocelyn went to use the bathroom, and when she came back both Grigg and the bear man were gone. Roberta had saved the bear man’s chair for her, and Tad had gotten her a second dirty martini, which was nice of him, though she didn’t want it and he might have asked first. And of course, the stool Roberta was on was actually Jocelyn’s, not that Jocelyn preferred one to the other. Just that she wouldn’t have needed anybody to save her a seat if her own seat hadn’t been taken in the first place.
“I managed to get rid of them,” Tad said. He was shouting so as to be heard. “I told them we were going for a spin in my new Lexus.”
“But not me,” Roberta said. “I’m exhausted. Honestly, I’m so tired I’m not even sure I can make it to bed.” She illustrated the point by drooping prettily over the bar.
“What made you think I wanted to get rid of them?” Jocelyn asked Tad. Really, what an annoying man! She hated his Lexus. She was beginning to hate Beauty. The prettiest dog you could ever imagine, but did Jocelyn want that “Chase me, chase me” gene in the Serengeti pool?
“I can tell when you’re just being polite,” Tad said, proving, if he only knew it, how much he couldn’t. He winked.
Jocelyn told him politely that she had an early panel to get to the next morning and was going to have to call it a night. (“Me too,” Roberta said.) Jocelyn thanked Tad for her untouched drink, insisted on paying for it, and left.
She looked for Grigg and the bear man for a while. She was afraid it might have looked collusive—she disappears to the bathroom; Tad gets rid of the unwelcome guests. However Tad had handled their dismissal, it couldn’t have been delicately done. She wanted to say she’d been unaware of it. She wanted to say she’d been enjoying their company. This would be awkward, no doubt, and unpersuasive, but was true; she had that on her side.
She saw a notice in the elevator for a book-launch party on the sixth floor, so she went down and walked by, pretending she had a room on that floor and was about her innocent business there. The party suite was so packed that people had spilled out into the hall. The vampire girls were seated among them. Two of them were visible, drinking red wine and flicking Cheetos at each other. The other had her arms crossed behind the neck of a young man and her tongue in his mouth. He had his hands on her butt, so he was visible, but Jocelyn wasn’t sure about the girl. She would have to ask Grigg when she found him: Are you invisible if your arms are crossed but there is a skinny, caped guy inside them, sucking your face?
Jocelyn picked her way through the hall, past the door of the suite. Lights strobed inside; there was music and dancing. The party pulsed. She was surprised to see Roberta, shaking her hair and her ass, moving in the intermittent light from attitude to attitude. Now her hands were on her hips. Now she snaked to one side. Now she did a hip-hop dip. Jocelyn couldn’t see her partner, the room was too crowded.
Jocelyn gave up. She went back to her room, called Sylvia and related the whole annoying evening.
“Which one is Tad?” Sylvia asked. “Is he the one who’s always saying ‘Good girl,’ to everyone?” But he wasn’t, Sylvia was thinking of Burtie Chambers. Sylvia liked the idea that you could disappear by crossing your arms, though. “God, wouldn’t that be great!” she said. “Daniel will love it. He’s always wishing he could disappear.”
Jocelyn didn’t see Grigg again until the evening of the next day. “I was afraid you’d left,” she said, “and I wanted to apologize for last night.”
He was kind enough to cut her off. “I got you something in the dealer’s room,” he told her. He fished through his convention bag and pulled out two paperbacks—The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven. “Give these a try.”
Jocelyn took the books. She was touched by the gift, though he was also, she thought, making fun of her, because there was Le Guin, the same author she’d claimed, with his guidance, to read and love. Plus, Grigg was a little too eager, obviously excited to have found a reader so utterly ignorant. “These are classics in the field,” he said. “And amazing books.”
She thanked him, though she really hadn’t planned to begin reading science fiction and still didn’t. Perhaps some of this came through. “I really think you’ll love them,” Grigg said. And then, “I’m perfectly willing to be directed, too. You tell me what I should be reading, and I promise to read it.”
Jocelyn liked nothing so much as telling people what to do. “I’ll make you a list,” she said.
In fact she forgot all about Grigg until he e-mailed her in late January. “Remember me?” the e-mail asked. “We met at the convention in Stockton. I’m out of work now and I’m relocating to your neck of the woods. Since you’re the only person I know up there, I’m hoping for an insider’s view. Where to get my hair cut. Which dentist to see. Could we have a cup of coffee and you make me one of your famous lists?”
If he hadn’t had such an odd name Jocelyn probably would have had trouble bringing Grigg to mind. She remembered now how agreeable she’d found him. Hadn’t he given her a book or two? She really should dig those out and read them.
She kept his e-mail on the top of her queue for a few days. But a charming, unattached (she assumed) man was too valuable to throw away just because you had no immediate use for him. She e-mailed him back and agreed to coffee.
When she began putting the book club together, she e-mailed him again. “I remember you as a great reader,” she wrote. “We’ll be doing the completed works of Jane Austen. Are you interested?”
“Count me in,” Grigg answered. “I’ve been meaning to read Austen for a long time now.”
“You’ll probably be the only boy,” Jocelyn warned him. “With some fierce older women. I can’t promise they won’t give you a hard time now and then.”
“Better and better,” Grigg said. “In fact, I wouldn’t be comfortable any other way.”
Jocelyn didn’t tell us any of this, because it was none of our business and anyway we were there to discuss Jane Austen. All she did was turn to Sylvia. “You remember. Stockton. I saw the Reinickers there and they annoyed me so much? I’d agreed to breed Thembe with Beauty and then I backed out?”
“Is Mr. Reinicker the one who’s always saying ‘Good girl,’ to everyone?” Sylvia asked.
Grigg had put the dining room chairs out on the back porch, it being such a perfect evening. There was one papasan chair, with pin-striped cushions, which Jocelyn made Bernadette take. The rest of us sat in a circle around her, the queen and her court.
We could hear the hum of traffic on University Avenue. A large black cat with a small head, very sphinxlike, wound around our legs and then made for Jocelyn’s lap. All cats do this, as she is allergic.
“Max,” Grigg told us. “Short for Maximum Cat.” He hoisted Max with two hands and set him inside, where he paced the windowsill, weaving through the African violets, watching us with his golden eyes, clearly wishing us ill. Of all the cats that come through the pounds, all-black males are the hardest to place, and Jocelyn heartily approved of anyone who had one. Had Jocelyn known about the cat? It might explain Grigg’s invitation into the group, something we had ceased to mind, since Grigg was very nice, but we had never settled.
Grigg told us how he’d lost a tech-support job in San Jose when the dot-coms crashed. He’d gotten a severance package and come to the Valley, where housing cost less and his money would last longer. He was working in a temp job at the university, part of the secretarial pool. He was based in the linguistics department.
He’d recently been told that the job was his for as long as he liked. His computer skills had everyone pretty excited. He spent his days recovering lost data, chasing down viruses, creating PowerPoint presentations of this and that. He seldom got to his real work, but no one complained; everyone was relieved to avoid the campus tech support. Apparently the campus group was some sort of elite paramilitary operation in which all information was treated as top-secret, to be doled out grudgingly and only after repeated requests. People came back from the computer lab looking as if they’d made a visit to the Godfather. Grigg’s pay was less than it had been, but people were always bringing him cookies.
Plus, he was thinking of writing a roman à clef. The linguists were a pretty weird bunch.
We paused for a moment, all of us wishing that Prudie was there to hear Grigg say “roman à clef.”
Grigg had laid out a green salad made with dried cranberries and candied walnuts. There were the cheeses and pepper crackers. Several dips, including artichoke. A lovely white wine from the Bonny Doon vineyard. It was a respectable spread, although the cheese plate had a snow scene and was obviously meant to be used only at Christmas and probably for cookies. And the wine-glasses didn’t match.
“Why did you say you like Northanger Abbey best of all Austen’s books?” Jocelyn asked Grigg. She had the tone of someone calling us to order. And also of someone keeping an open mind. Only Jocelyn could have managed to convey both.
“I just love how it’s all about reading novels. Who’s a heroine, what’s an adventure? Austen poses these questions very directly. There’s something very pomo going on there.”
The rest of us weren’t intimate enough with postmodernism to give it a nickname. We’d heard the word used in sentences, but its definition seemed to change with its context. We weren’t troubled by this. Over at the university, people were paid to worry about such things; they’d soon have it well in hand.
“It makes sense that Austen would be asking these questions,” Jocelyn said, “since Northanger Abbey is her first.”
“I thought Northanger Abbey was one of her last,” Grigg said. He was rocking on the back legs of his chair, but it was his chair, after all, and none of our business. “I thought Sense and Sensibility was first.”
“First published. But Northanger Abbey was the first sold to a publisher.”
Our opinion of the Gramercy edition of the novels sank even further. Was it possible it didn’t make this clear? Or had Grigg simply neglected to read the foreword? Surely there was a foreword.
“Austen doesn’t always seem to admire reading,” Sylvia said. “In Northanger Abbey she accuses other novelists of denigrating novels in their novels, but isn’t she doing the same thing?”
“No, she defends novels. But she’s definitely having a go at readers,” Allegra said. “She makes Catherine quite ridiculous, going on and on about The Mysteries of Udolpho. Thinking life is really like that. Not that that’s the best part of the book. Actually that part’s kind of lame.”
Allegra was always pointing out what wasn’t the best part of the book. We were a bit tired of it, truth to tell.
Grigg rocked forward, the front legs of his chair hitting the porch with a smack. “But she doesn’t much care for people who haven’t read it, either. Or at least those who pretend not to have read it. And while she makes fun of Catherine for being so influenced by Udolpho, you have to say that Northanger Abbey is completely under that same influence. Austen’s imitated the structure, made all her choices in opposition to that original text. Assumes everyone has read it.”
“You’ve read The Mysteries of Udolpho?” Allegra asked.
“Black veils and Laurentina’s skeleton? You bet. Didn’t you think it sounded good?”
We had not. We’d thought it sounded overheated, overdone, old-fashionedly lurid. We’d thought it sounded ridiculous.
Actually it hadn’t occurred to any of us to read it. Some of us hadn’t even realized it was a real book.
The sun had finally set and all the brightness fallen from the air. There was a tiny moon like a fingernail paring. Gauzy clouds floated over it. A jay landed on the sill outside the kitchen and Maximum Cat wept to be let back out. During the bedlam Grigg went and got our dessert.
He’d made a cheesecake. He took it to Bernadette, who cut it and passed the slices around. The crust was obviously store-bought. Good, though. We had all used store-bought crusts ourselves in times of need. Nothing wrong with store-bought.
Bernadette began to give us her opinion on whether Jane Austen admired people who read books or whether she didn’t. Eventually we understood that Bernadette didn’t have an opinion on this. She felt there was a great deal of conflicting data.
We sat for a bit, pretending to mull over what she’d said. It didn’t seem polite to move right on when she’d taken so long to say it. She’d laid her glasses with their great lump of paper clips and masking tape by her plate, and she had that stripped, eye-bagged look people who usually wear glasses get when they take their glasses off.
We talked briefly about moving inside for coffee. The uncushioned chairs weren’t comfortable, but Grigg didn’t seem to have other chairs; we’d just be taking them with us. It wasn’t cold. The city mosquito abatement program had done its work and nothing was eating us. We stayed where we were. A motorcycle coughed and spit its way down University Avenue.
“I think Catherine is a charming character,” said Bernadette. “Where’s the harm in a good heart and an active imagination? And Tilney is a genuine wit. He has more sparkle than Edward in Sense and Sensibility or Edmund in Mansfield Park. Catherine’s not my very favorite of the Austen heroines, but Tilney’s my favorite hero.” She directed this at Allegra, who hadn’t yet spoken on the subject, but Bernadette was guessing what she thought. And bull’s-eye, too.
“She’s very, very silly. Implausibly gullible,” Allegra said. “And Tilney’s a bit insufferable.”
“I like them both,” said Sylvia.
“So do I,” said Jocelyn.
“Here’s the thing.” The fingernail moon sliced open the clouds. Allegra’s eyes were large and dark. Her face had its silent-screen-star expressiveness and a lunar polish, too. She was so very beautiful. “Austen suggests that Udolpho is a dangerous book, because it makes people think life is an adventure,” she said. “Catherine has fallen completely under its spell. But that’s not the kind of book that’s really dangerous to people. You might as well argue that Grigg here thinks we’re all extraterrestrials, just because he reads science fiction.”
Bernadette made a surprised coughing sound. We all turned to look at her, and she managed an unconvincing smile. She had that great gob of tape and paper clips on her glasses. Her legs were twisted up in her lap in some impossible yoga posture. All our suspicions were suddenly roused. She was fooling no one. She was far too bendable to be human.
But why care? There was no one more benign than Bernadette.
“All the while it’s Austen writing the really dangerous books,” Allegra continued. “Books that people really do believe, even hundreds of years later. How virtue will be recognized and rewarded. How love will prevail. How life is a romance.”
We thought how it was time for Allegra to be getting over Corinne. We thought how hard Sylvia was working to get over Daniel. We thought Allegra could learn something from that. Birdshit landed with a plop on the edge of the porch.
“What should we read next?” Bernadette asked. “Pride and Prejudice is my favorite.”
“So let’s do that,” Sylvia said.
“Are you sure, dear?” Jocelyn asked.
“I am. It’s time. Anyway, Persuasion has the dead mother. I don’t want to subject Prudie to that now. The mother in Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand . . .”
“Don’t give anything away,” Grigg said. “I haven’t read it yet.”
Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice.
Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice.
Grigg had read The Mysteries of Udolpho and God knows how much science fiction—there were books all over the cottage—but he’d never found the time or the inclination to read Pride and Prejudice. We really didn’t know what to say.
The phone rang and Grigg went to get it. “Bianca,” we heard. There was genuine pleasure in his voice, but not that kind of pleasure. Just a friend, we thought. “Can I call you back? My Jane Austen book club is here.”
But we told him to take the call. We were done with our discussion and could let ourselves out. We carried our plates and our glasses to the kitchen, said good-bye to the cat and tiptoed away. Grigg was talking about his mother as we left; apparently she had a birthday coming up. Not a friend, then, we thought, but a sister.
After we’d gone, Grigg talked to Bianca about us. “I think they like me. They do give me a hard time. They just found out tonight that I read science fiction. That didn’t go over well.”
“I could come up,” Bianca offered. “I’m not scared of Jane Austen–reading women. And nobody picks on my little brother.”
“Except you. And Amelia. And Cat.”
“Were we so awful?” Bianca asked.
“No,” Grigg said. “You weren’t.”
While he was cleaning up, Grigg remembered something. He remembered a day when he’d been playing secret agent and overheard a conversation his parents were having that was all about him. He was behind a curtain in the dining room and his parents were in the kitchen. He heard his father pull the tab on a can of beer. “He’s more of a girl than any of the girls,” Grigg’s father said.
“He’s perfectly fine. He’s still a baby.”
“He’s almost in junior high. Do you have any idea what the life of a girly boy is like in junior high?”
The curtain breathed once, in and out. Grigg’s heart was filled with a sudden fear of junior high.
“So teach him to be a man,” his mother said. “God knows you’re the only one here who can.”
The next day at breakfast Grigg was told that he and his dad were going on a camping trip together, no girls allowed. They would hike and they would fish. They would sit around the campfire and tell each other stories, and there would be more stars in the sky than Grigg had ever seen.
Grigg’s main image of camping was the little sandwiches you made with graham crackers, Hershey bars, and marshmallows roasted on sticks that you’d peeled with sharp and dangerous hunting knives. Naturally he was excited. Bianca and Cat said how glad they were not to be going. Even though they were hard-core outdoorswomen who had no trouble putting hooks right through worms so that their guts spilled out, and Bianca had once shot a Coke can off a fence with a BB gun. Even though Grigg would probably have nightmares like a baby and have to come home. Amelia had started a program to become an X-ray technician and was too grown-up to care who got to go camping and who didn’t.
This was the seventies. Grigg’s father had developed an obsession with the Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land. He took it out of the library and then told the librarian he’d lost it. For a couple of months now, it had been the only thing he read. When he wasn’t reading it, he was hiding it somewhere. Grigg would have liked to take a look, but he couldn’t find it. The library wouldn’t allow him to check it out, even when they had a copy, which now they didn’t.
The Harris men loaded the car with sleeping bags and groceries and headed north along 99 for Yosemite. Three hours later they picked up two girls at a gas station. “How far are you going?” Grigg’s father asked them, and they said they were on their way to Bel Air, which was, of course, the wrong way and farther the wrong way than simply going back home would have been. So Grigg was astonished to hear his father agree to take them. What about no girls allowed?
Grigg’s father was very chatty, and his language changed, so that suddenly he was using words like “far out” and “heavy.” “Your old man’s pretty cool,” one of the girls told Grigg. She had a bandanna tied over her hair and a sunburnt nose. The other girl’s hair was clipped close to her head—you could see the shape of her skull, and you could also see the shape of her breasts through the thin cotton of her blouse. She was black-skinned, but light, and with freckles. They were headed for a very mellow scene, they said, one that Grigg and his dad would probably dig.
“We’re going camping,” Grigg told them.
His father frowned and dropped his voice so that only Grigg would hear. It wouldn’t be cool to leave two pretty girls hitching, he said. Someone not right might pick them up next. Grigg wouldn’t want to read that in the papers the next day! Suppose it was Bianca and Cat? Wouldn’t Grigg want someone to take care of them? A real man looked out for women. Besides, if they got to Yosemite a day late, what was the big deal with that?
By the time his father had finished, Grigg felt small and selfish. At the next stop his father bought dinner for everybody. Afterward Grigg found himself in the backseat with the girl with the bandanna. Her name was Hillary. The girl with the breasts was in the front. Her name was Roxanne.
There were some cosmic forces coming together, Hillary told them. The car windows were open; she had to talk very loud.
Grigg watched the landscape pass. He saw straight rows of almond trees that seemed to curve as they went by, roadside stands selling lemons and avocadoes. It had been a long time since the last rain. Little clouds of dust spun above the fields. “He Is Coming,” one billboard announced. “Are You Ready?”
Grigg pretended he was running alongside the car, leaping the drainage ditches and overpasses. He was as fast as the car, and as tireless. He swung arm over arm down the telephone wires.
If you knew anything about ancient texts, Hillary said, Nostradama and the like, then you knew some major karma was coming due. It was going to be intense, but it was going to be beautiful.
Grigg’s dad said he’d suspected as much.
Roxanne changed the radio station from the one they’d been listening to.
They stopped often at gas stations so the girls could pee. Grigg’s sisters never asked to stop the car to pee.
By the time they made it to the Grapevine, the sky was dark. The freeway was crowded. A river of red lights flowed in one direction, one of white in the other. Cat had once made up a game called Ghosts and Demons, based on car lights, but you couldn’t play it when there were so many of them. Anyway, Cat was the only one who could make it fun; without her it was a pretty boring game.
It was around nine o’clock when they drove through the gates to Bel Air. Hillary directed them to a massive house with a wrought-iron fence of metal leaves and vines on which actual leaves and vines had been trained. Grigg’s father said he needed a rest from the driving, so they all went inside.
The house was enormous. The entryway was mirrored and marbled, and opened into a dining room whose glass-topped table had chairs for ten. Hillary showed them how there was a button on the floor beneath the table so the hostess could summon the help without leaving her seat. This seemed unnecessary to Grigg, as the room where the bell would ring, the kitchen, was only a few steps away. The house belonged to some friends of hers, Hillary said, but they were out of town.
The dining room ran into the kitchen, and across the back of both rooms was an atrium with a palm tree and three shelves of orchids. Past the glass of the atrium, Grigg could see the neon-blue water of a swimming pool, lit up and filled with people. Later, when he tried to remember this, Grigg asked himself how old these people had been. About Amelia’s age. Maybe Bianca’s. Certainly not his dad’s.
In the kitchen, three kids were seated at the counter. Hillary got Grigg’s dad a beer from the refrigerator. There was the smell of pot in the air. Grigg could recognize the smell of pot. He’d seen 2001: A Space Odyssey six times, and two of those screenings had been on a university campus.
His dad began talking to a young man with long hair and a messianic face. His dad asked the young man whether he’d ever read Heinlein (he hadn’t) and the young man asked whether Grigg’s dad had ever read Hesse (he hadn’t). Things were changing, they assured each other. The world was in spin. “It’s a great time to be young,” Grigg’s dad said, which he clearly wasn’t, Grigg hoped he knew.
Something about his dad’s part of the conversation embarrassed Grigg. He excused himself to the bathroom (as if he would ever really need to go again!—all those stops on the road) and went to explore the house. He thought he might be running a slight fever. He had that magical, made-of-glass feeling and he moved through room after room, bedrooms and studies and libraries and TV rooms, as if in a dream. The house had rooms with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a billiard table, and a wet bar. There was a girl’s bedroom with a canopy bed and a Princess phone. Cat would die for a phone like that. Grigg made a collect call home.
Amelia answered. “How’s the camping?” she said. “I didn’t know there were phones in the high country.”
“We’re not camping. We’re in Bel Air.”
“This is costing a fortune. Give me your number and we’ll call you right back,” Amelia said.
Grigg read the number off the dial. He lay on the bed under the canopy, pretending it was the jungle, mosquito nets, tribal drums, until the phone rang. “Hey there.” It was his mother. “How’s the camping?”
“We’re in a house in Bel Air,” Grigg said. “We’re not going camping until tomorrow.”
“Okay,” his mother said. “Are you having a good time? Are you enjoying being with your dad?”
“I guess.”
“Thanks for calling,” his mom said. And then she hung up. She was going with the girls to a movie. Nothing he would like, she had assured him. Something girly.
Grigg went to open the girl’s closet. He wasn’t allowed in the girls’ closets at home. There were scrapbooks in there, and shoe boxes full of secret shit. Once he’d opened Cat’s secret-shit shoe box, and she screamed at him for half an hour even though all he’d seen was some inexplicable buckeye nuts in a little plastic candy dish she’d lined with red velvet.
The only shoe boxes in this girl’s closet had shoes in them. She also had a shoe tree. She had, in fact, more shoes than his three sisters put together.
Another place for secrets was under the folded clothes in the bureau. Grigg looked but again came up empty. There was a vanity table with a locked drawer, which he worked on for a while, but he needed fingernails or a credit card. Or a key. He found some keys on a chain slung over the bedpost. None of them fit.
A boy and a girl came into the bedroom. They were halfway out of their clothes before they even saw Grigg. The boy’s penis bloomed through the slit in his shorts like a mushroom after a rain. Grigg put the keys on the vanity. The girl screamed when he moved, then laughed. “Do you mind, man?” the boy asked. “We’ll only be a minute.” The girl laughed again and hit him in the arm.
Grigg went back to the kitchen. His dad was still talking to the messiah. Grigg hovered in the doorway at just that spot where the sounds from the pool were as loud as his father’s voice. “You go the same places, see the same people. Have the same conversations. It takes like half your brain. Less,” Grigg’s dad said.
“Jeez,” the boy said.
“Half a life.”
“Jeez.”
“It’s like a cage and you don’t even know when the door closed.”
The boy became more animated. “Feel around you.” He demonstrated. “No bars, man. No cage. You’re just as free as you think you are. Nobody makes you do it, man. Nobody makes you set the alarm, get up in the morning. Nobody but you.”
Grigg went outside to the pool. Someone threw a towel at him. It was Hillary, and she was wearing nothing but the rubber bands in her braids. She laughed when she saw that he was looking at her. “You’re not such a little boy, after all,” she said. “But no clothes allowed out here. You want to look, you got to be looked at. Them’s the rules. Otherwise”—she leaned in and her breasts swung toward him—“we’ll think you’re a little pervert.”
Grigg went back inside. His face was burning, and the most familiar part of the strange stew of things he was feeling was humiliation. He focused his attention on that part simply because he recognized it. In the study he found another phone and called home again. He didn’t expect anyone to answer—he thought they’d all be at the movies—but Amelia picked up. She told the operator she wouldn’t accept the charges, and then, less than a minute after he had hung up, the phone rang and it was Grigg’s mom again.
“We’re on the way out the door,” she said. She sounded cross. “What is it?”
“I want to come home,” Grigg said.
“You always want to come home early. Cub Scout camp? Every sleepover since you were three? I always have to make you stay, and you always end up having a fabulous time. You have got to toughen up.” Her voice was louder. “I’m coming,” she called. And then, to Grigg again, “Be fair to your dad. He’s been really looking forward to this time with you.”
Grigg put the receiver down and went to the kitchen. “I’m so unhappy,” his father was saying. He passed a hand over his eyes as if he might have been crying.
Grigg would rather have taken all his clothes off and stayed at the pool to be laughed at than hear his father say this. He tried to figure out ways to make his father happy. He tried to figure out the ways he was making his father unhappy.
He made up his mind to leave. If his father wouldn’t take him, he’d go alone. He’d walk. The days would pass; he’d eat oranges off the trees. Maybe find a dog to walk with him, keep him company. Nobody would force him to get rid of a dog that had brought him all the way home. Maybe he’d hitch and maybe someone not right would pick him up and that would be the end of that. He heard the sound of breaking glass and laughter from the pool. Doors slamming. The phone ringing, deep in the house. I’m so unhappy, he thought. He went to the room with the canopy bed and fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of rain. It took him a moment to remember where he was. Los Angeles. Not rain, then—he was hearing the sound of sprinklers on the lawn. The white curtains swelled and dropped at the open window. He’d drooled on the bedspread. He tried to dry it with his hand.
He went looking for his father again to ask when they were going camping. The kitchen was empty. The door to the pool stood open and Grigg went to close it. He was careful not to look out. He smelled chlorine and beer and maybe vomit.
Grigg sat on his father’s stool at the kitchen counter with his back to the door. He put his hands tight over his ears and listened to his heart beating. He pressed on his eyelids until colors appeared like fireworks.
The doorbell rang. It rang again and again and again, as if someone were leaning on it with an elbow, and then stopped. There were noises in the hall, someone was making a commotion. Someone tapped him on his shoulder. Amelia was standing behind him; Bianca was behind her, and behind Bianca was Cat. Each of them wore an expression Grigg knew well, as though someone had tried to mess with them and no one was going to make that mistake again.
“We’re here to take you home,” Amelia said.
Grigg burst into racking, snot-producing sobs, and she put her arms around him. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll just get Dad. Where is he?”
Grigg pointed toward the pool.
Amelia went out. Bianca moved into her place beside him.
“Mom said I had to stay,” Grigg told her. There was no harm in saying so. Obviously Mom had been overruled.
Bianca shook her head. “Amelia called back here and asked for Grigg, and no one knew who that was or would even try to find out, they thought Grigg was such a funny name. But they gave her the address and she told Mom we were coming whether Mom liked it or not. She said you sounded weird on the phone.”
Amelia came back inside. Her face was grim. “Dad’s not ready to leave yet.” She put her arm around Grigg, and her hair fell on his neck. His sisters used White Rain shampoo, because it was cheap, but Grigg thought it had a romantic name. He could take the cap off the bottle in the shower and smell Amelia’s hair, and also Bianca’s, and also Cat’s. For a while he drew a comic with a superwoman in it named White Rain. She controlled weather systems, which was something he’d made up all by himself, but he later learned that someone else had had the idea first.
As Grigg stood in the kitchen of that Bel Air mansion with his sisters around him, he knew that his whole life, whenever he needed rescuing, he could call them and they would come. Junior high school held no more terrors. In fact, Grigg felt sorry for all the boys and girls who were going to tease him once he got there.
“Let’s go, then,” said Amelia.
“As if you don’t always sound weird,” said Cat.
The saddest thing of all was that when Grigg finally read Stranger in a Strange Land, he thought it was kind of silly. He was in his late twenties at the time, because he’d promised his mother never to read it and he kept the promise as long as he could. There was a lot of sex in the book, for sure. But a leering sort of sex that was painful to associate with his father. Grigg read The Fountainhead next, which he’d promised Amelia never to read, and that turned out to be kind of a silly book, too.
This was the third story we didn’t hear. Grigg didn’t tell it to us because we’d already gone home by the time he remembered it, and anyway none of us had read Stranger in a Strange Land and we were way too snotty about science fiction for him to criticize Heinlein in our chilly company. Nor did he want to describe the sex to us.
But this was a story we would have liked, especially the rescue at the end. We would have been sad for Grigg’s father, but we would have liked the White Rain girls. From the sound of it, no one who’d known Grigg since infancy could have doubted he was born to be a heroine.
From The Mysteries of Udolpho,
by Ann Radcliffe
“Bring the light forward,” said Emily, “we may possibly find our way through these rooms.”
Annette stood at the door, in an attitude of hesitation, with the light held up to show the chamber, but the feeble rays spread through not half of it. “Why do you hesitate?” said Emily, “let me see whither this room leads.”
Annette advanced reluctantly. It opened into a suit of spacious and ancient apartments, some of which were hung with tapestry, and others wainscoted with cedar and black larch-wood. What furniture there was, seemed to be almost as old as the rooms, and retained an appearance of grandeur, though covered with dust, and dropping to pieces with the damps, and with age.
“How cold these rooms are, Ma’amselle!” said Annette: “nobody has lived in them for many, many years, they say. Do let us go.”
“They may open upon the great staircase, perhaps,” said Emily, passing on till she came to a chamber, hung with pictures, and took the light to examine that of a soldier on horseback in a field of battle.—He was darting his spear upon a man, who lay under the feet of the horse, and who held up one hand in a supplicating attitude. The soldier, whose beaver was up, regarded him with a look of vengeance; and the countenance, with that expression, struck Emily as resembling Montoni. She shuddered, and turned from it. Passing the light hastily over several other pictures, she came to one concealed by a veil of black silk. The singularity of the circumstance struck her, and she stopped before it, wishing to remove the veil, and examine what could thus carefully be concealed, but somewhat wanting courage. “Holy Virgin! what can this mean?” exclaimed Annette. “This is surely the picture they told me of at Venice.”
“What picture?” said Emily. “Why a picture,” replied Annette, hesitatingly—“but I never could make out exactly what it was about, either.”
“Remove the veil, Annette.”
“What! I, Ma’amselle!—I! not for the world!” Emily, turning round, saw Annette’s countenance grow pale. “And pray what have you heard of this picture, to terrify you so, my good girl?” said she. “Nothing, Ma’amselle: I have heard nothing, only let us find our way out.”
“Certainly: but I wish first to examine the picture; take the light, Annette, while I lift the veil.” Annette took the light, and immediately walked away with it, disregarding Emily’s calls to stay, who, not choosing to be left alone in the dark chamber, at length followed her. “What is the reason of this, Annette?” said Emily, when she overtook her; “what have you heard concerning that picture, which makes you so unwilling to stay when I bid you?”
“I don’t know what is the reason, Ma’amselle,” replied Annette, “nor any thing about the picture, only I have heard there is something very dreadful belonging to it—and that it has been covered up in black ever since—and that nobody has looked at it for a great many years—and it somehow has to do with the owner of this castle before Signor Montoni came to the possession of it—and—”
“Well, Annette,” said Emily, smiling, “I perceive it is as you say—that you know nothing about the picture.”
“No, nothing, indeed, Ma’amselle, for they made me promise never to tell:—but—”
“Well,” rejoined Emily, who observed that she was struggling between her inclination to reveal a secret, and her apprehension for the consequence, “I will inquire no further—”
“No, pray, Ma’am, do not.”
“Lest you should tell all,” interrupted Emily.