Boyfriend #4
Ray Riboldi, AGE SEVENTEEN
Ray was pockmarked and didn’t wash his hair every day, but it didn’t matter, because he was nice. After boyfriends 2 and 3, Jane read Mansfield Park and decided that a kind, quiet guy was the way to go. Ray picked her wildflowers. He gave her the Hostess desserts his mother still packed him for lunch, even the fruit pies, and his constant gaze made her feel luscious.
After a couple of months, two guys Jane had grown up with
decided Ray shouldn’t be dating out of his Appearance Pool and played a prank involving catapulting dog poop (so original!) into the open roof of Ray’s rusty Jeep.
“Stay away from girls too pretty for you!” they shouted, tires squealing out of the school parking lot.
Jane swore she wasn’t involved, but Ray didn’t listen. In the middle of the cafeteria, he ground a premeditated Hostess cupcake into her hair. Hard.
“How do you like it? Huh?”
Turned out, he wasn’t that nice after all.
day 7
THE NEXT DAY WAS YET another late breakfast, reading in the morning room, a visit from Miss Heartwright, and a stroll with the gentlemen. The “stroll with gentlemen” part should’ve made Jane’s hatted, sideburned fancies race, but she was disengaged now. Her eyes searched the garden for signs of that tall glass of water.
That afternoon she sat alone in the library, reading an Ann Radcliffe novel, The Italian, her brain straining to keep up with the archaic storytelling. Part of the Experience was the life of leisure, she knew, but she was an adopted New Yorker, an heiress to the Puritan work ethic, and doing next to nothing all day was taking its toll. She had begun to daydream of the oddest things: washing her clothes in the sink when all her building’s laundry machines were occupied; the hot, human smell of a full subway; eating a banana from a street vendor; buying a disposable umbrella in a downpour.
All the hours she had spent daydreaming of living in Austen’s world, and now here she was pondering the mundane realities of normal life. It seemed too cruel.
So she decided to hunt Martin down during the day. What was stopping her? After all, he wasn’t a vampire.
It was pleasant and sunny, though as she strolled the flat, elegant garden, the glare soon made her want shade. The mazelike lines of low hedges were disrupted in the center by a miniature Parthenon that might have been placed, monolithesque, by meddling aliens. In her present mood, she found it unsettling, an obvious falsehood inside the otherwise natural loveliness of flowers and shrubs, turning the garden into a farce.
Jane spotted a couple gray, squat-hatted heads dispersed through the wilderness areas of the park before discovering a tall gardener pruning growth by a low stone wall. She sat on the wall, opened her book, and paid him no mind. After a few minutes the sounds of clipping stopped, and she felt his gaze on her. She turned a page.
“Jane,” he said with a touch of exasperation.
“Shh, I’m reading,” she said.
“Jane, listen, someone warned me that another fellow heard my telly playing and told Mrs. Wattlesbrook, and I had to toss it out this morning. If they spot me hanging around you . . .”
“You’re not hanging around me, I’m reading.”
“Bugger, Jane . . .”
“Martin, please, I’m sorry about your TV but you can’t cast me away now. I’ll go raving mad if I have to sit in that house again all afternoon. I haven’t sewn a thing since junior high Home Ec when I made a pair of gray shorts that ripped at the butt seam the first time I sat down, and I haven’t played pianoforte since I quit from boredom at age twelve, and I haven’t read a book in the middle of the day since college, so you see what a mess I’m in.”
“So,” Martin said, digging in his spade. “You’ve come to find me again when there is no one else to flirt with.”
Huh! thought Jane.
He snapped a dead branch off the trunk.
Huh! she thought again. She stood and started to walk away.
“Wait.” Martin hopped after her, grabbing her elbow. “I saw you with those actors, parading around the grounds this morning. I hadn’t seen you with them before. In the context. And it bothered me. I mean, you don’t really go in for this stuff, do you?”
Jane shrugged.
“You do?”
“More than I want to, though you’ve been making it seem unnecessary lately.”