A Jane Austen Education(32)

It turned out that I hadn’t made a mistake by wanting to become a professor, after all. It had just taken me a while to discover my potential. I had started to learn how to teach—but more importantly, after more than twenty years in school, I had finally learned how to learn.





CHAPTER 4

mansfield park being good

That first year in Brooklyn, I sensed my life beginning to grow into a new shape. It was the first time I had had a place of my own, and I could almost feel my arms and legs getting longer with all the psychological space I had to move around in. I got a platform for my futon, bought a nice set of chairs at a stoop sale down the street, even picked up some plants and learned how to keep them alive. (When I asked the clerk at the garden store if my potting soil would go bad if I didn’t, you know, use it up right away, he said, “You wanna know if this dirt is going to get stale? I feel like I’m talking to my little brother!”) My English-muffin-pizza days were over. Instead, I picked up The New Basics Cookbook and started having people over for things like minty roasted potatoes and lemon-garlic-rosemary chicken. A few months in, I even acquired a cat—this was some serious responsibility now—a little gray thing who needed a home and who took to curling up beside me on my desk while I was working.

Living so far from Columbia, I began to see less of my graduate school friends. Instead, I gravitated toward a very different world. Another friend had become involved with a woman who’d been raised on the Upper East Side and gone to a fancy Manhattan private school. Her prep-school crowd was back in the city after college, dabbling in this or that and living the high life, and these were the people I started spending time around. It would have been hard not to. This was the upper crust, the world of Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitzgerald updated for the nineties: posh, polished young people who gave off a glow of glamour and sophistication that drew me like a moth. I was dazzled, I was seduced. It was an undreamed-of world of privilege, and I was grateful just to be able to watch.

There was the stunning department-store heiress who ran a chic East Village café and went out with a guy who talked about getting into film. There was the scion of a consumer-products fortune who had married his art-school girlfriend. There was the lovely, blue-eyed daughter of an Ivy League president. And there was one young woman who seemed to be richer than all the others put together—even they grumbled when she took us to a “little place around the corner” where the desserts started at twelve dollars—and who had picked up a tall, Dutch, model-beautiful boyfriend somewhere along the way.

I went to their openings and partied with them afterward in downtown lofts. I partook of artful brunches and elegant candlelit dinners at a town house in Cobble Hill. I was ushered into the large East Side apartment building where my friend’s girlfriend grew up, to discover that there were only two doors facing us when the elevator opened: one for her apartment and one for the other one. I spent weekends at her family’s summerhouse on Long Island, with four or five bedrooms and a swimming pool and a lawn that rolled down about three hundred feet to the sound.

Here it was, I thought, that fabulous, glamorous New York world that I had always sensed around me but had never known how to get to. The city is Oz when you grow up, as I had, in the Jersey suburbs, a shining mirage in the distance, and ten years of living there had never really changed that. I could walk the streets and hit the bars on a thousand college nights; I could eat black bean cakes in Chinatown, blini in Brighton Beach, and bowls of flaczki at Christine’s; I could discover the Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, and P.S. 122; but I could never shake the feeling that I was still just wandering somewhere out there in the cold. The real city, as I imagined it, the magic kingdom where beautiful people in shining clothes said clever things in darkened rooms, still lay there on the other side of the velvet ropes.

But now I felt like I’d been slipped a pass, even if it was strictly limited-access. My friend’s girlfriend befriended me—she turned out to be a tremendously magnetic personality, a great storyteller and reader of character—but the rest of them mostly ignored me. I could hardly blame them. I didn’t know how to dress, where to stand, how to order a drink or cross a room at a party. So I stayed on the edges, gazed at the women, and tried to pay for my keep with witty remarks. Yet still I hoped to find a place within the circle, if only by special dispensation. I would become the house intellectual, I imagined, prized for my ability to spice up a gathering with a dash of literary zest. The guys would respect me; the women would notice me. Eventually, one of them—it almost didn’t matter which—would find me intriguing enough to make me her boyfriend.





It wasn’t always easy, after one of those weekends or one of those nights, to go back to plugging away at my Austen chapter. It was the longest of long slogs, writing a dissertation, and I had still only barely begun, and I often wondered where it would finally get me, whether there would be a job out there at the end of it all. Sometimes I even lost patience with Austen herself—specifically, when I thought about Mansfield Park. I had read it a couple of times by then, and I still could not see anything to like about the book, or comprehend how she had ever written it. The novel seemed to pit itself against everything Austen believed in, everything that was delightful about Emma and Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey—against wit and energy and curiosity. Its mood was dour, even bitter, its view of life crabbed and prudish.