A Jane Austen Education(52)

My commitment to this frightening new idea was put to the test the summer after I had finally finished my Austen chapter. My best pal from college had gone off to graduate school in another city, and as the years went by I started to feel as if I knew him less and less. Not because we lost touch, but because he never seemed to say anything real about himself when we were in touch. Not coincidentally, it became more and more clear to me, the few times I did see him, that he was becoming a pretty serious alcoholic.

One weekend he was back in the city, and we arranged a night to catch up. His wife was on his case about the drinking by this point, but she let him out on my recognizance for a harmless beer at the local bar—or so at least we all imagined as the two of us set out.

Well, before we could make it through the initial pleasantries, he had managed to get three drinks down his throat. By about the middle of the second, he had completely checked out of the conversation, at least as far as anything personal was concerned. Before long, I was trying to get the evening over with as quickly as possible and wanted nothing better than to call a cab. But he insisted on driving me home, if only to maintain the pretense that everything was perfectly fine, and I was so afraid of a confrontation that I let him do it.

Then, on the way, he made a wrong turn and ended up—what do you know?—in our old stomping grounds of the East Village. We just had to go to the Blue & Gold for old times’ sake, didn’t we? So he had another bourbon while I sipped my beer and watched him and wondered what the f*ck had happened to the friend I used to know, and then another quick one, and then, what the hell, one more for the road.

We both managed to make it home in one piece, but once my anger wore off, I realized that I had failed him too—not just because I’d let him drive, but because I hadn’t had the guts to tell him the truth about himself. Yet we were really still just college buddies, and we simply had no vocabulary with which to talk about anything that grave. I tried to write the next week, starting off all breezy as usual, pretending once again like nothing had happened, but I quickly ground to a halt. There was an elephant in the room that we weren’t talking about, and I finally understood that we weren’t going to be able to talk about anything else anymore until we did.

It took me another month to screw up the courage to try again. I didn’t even tell him that he needed to deal with his drinking. I just told him that I didn’t feel like we had a relationship anymore, and that that was really too bad. I knew that he would understand the rest.

Months went by without my hearing from him. I thought our friendship was over. But when he did finally get in touch, it was to tell me he had gotten sober—joined AA and everything—and that my letter had been one of the reasons why. Few things had ever felt better or made me prouder. But as I knew perfectly well, that letter had a coauthor, and it was Austen.





However glad I was that I could be a true friend to someone else, I was even gladder to realize that I had always had one myself. She was that last remaining friend from youth movement, the person who knew me better than I knew myself. The one thing that had always bothered me about her was her tendency to call me on the stupid things I did. Like the time she cut me off—“Billy, she’s already heard them all”—before I could make those idiotic puns about her friend Honour’s name. She always tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible, but it invariably stung, would make me feel a little small and foolish. Only once I had learned Austen’s lessons about humiliation, on the one hand, and friendship, on the other, did I realize how much reason I had to thank my friend for having been on my case for all those years. She had been trying to make me into a presentable person—maybe the person she thought I could be—and she was willing to have faith that it might someday happen.

Predictably, people used to ask me why the two of us didn’t get together. The question made me mad. Couldn’t men and women be friends without having sex? Apparently not, according to what everyone seemed to believe. I finally did see When Harry Met Sally . . . , only to discover that the whole point of the movie was that men and women can’t, in fact, be friends, “because the sex thing gets in the way.” It was the same wherever I looked. People of the opposite sex might claim to be “just friends,” the message was, but count on it, there was always something going on underneath.

The most annoying thing about this apparently universal belief was that it implied that sex was all that men and women could really be interested in each other for. Conversation or collaboration or any other kind of common activity seemed to be out of the question. As if we weren’t just different genders, but different species.

Well, that was another idea that Austen refused to believe. In fact, as I learned, she was one of the first to challenge it, and she never challenged it more directly than she did in Persuasion. Once the people at Lyme got properly introduced to one another, on that visit—Anne and Mary and so forth on the one hand, the Harvilles and Captain Benwick on the other—the heroine always seemed to find herself with Benwick. The two had a lot in common. Both were grieving for lost loves—Anne for Wentworth, Benwick for his fiancée, Captain Harville’s late sister. Both were shy, gentle, thoughtful souls. And both, it turned out, were great readers of poetry. Not once or twice, but three times in the space of an evening and a morning—“Anne found Captain Benwick getting near her. . . . Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her”—the two young people, both single and unattached, fell into deep, heartfelt conversation about the leading poets of the day, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.