The Jane Austen Society(66)

“It was great,” Mimi cut in, ignoring him. “I’m starting to think we might really pull this off. You know, there are few places left in England where you could still try and do this—the houses are usually long since demolished and gone, or otherwise unavailable. And that we could be bringing the home of Jane Austen, of all people, back to life—”

“So, Monte and I were talking.”

She heard him clear his throat on the other end of the line. If she didn’t know him better, she would have thought he was nervous.

“So, okay, it’s looking like the budget for Sense is going to approach one mil—but the good news is that we’ve got half of that now from your old studio.”

“As you just told me.” She found her throat becoming dry, and cradling the handset under her left ear, she went and poured a glass of cool water from the pitcher left out for her on the bedside table.

“Yeah, well, look—this was never going to be easy to tell you. But the studio has some requests.”

“Of course. Fifty per cent worth of them, I should think.”

“Look, Mimi, this is still our baby, but the studio wants to go in another direction with Elinor.”

“You mean younger.”

“Not necessarily.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s just . . . the energy, you know? We need a good complement to Angela Cummings as Marianne, and they feel the chem is a bit off with the age difference.”

“Goddammit, Jack, Greer Garson was a year older than me when she played Lizzie with Olivier—Jesus, she was even older than Larry—”

“But Garson had the muscle of MGM behind her and they wanted her in that role.”

“Oh my God, Jack—you’re the one who told me to go free agent and screw the studio!”

“Honey, honey, calm down, would ya? You’re gonna scare Frances Knight out of her frigid bed.”

Mimi took a deep breath. “I can’t believe you’re caving in to Monte on all of this—you don’t even technically need his cash from what I can tell.”

He was silent for once.

“Jack . . .”

“Look, I bought into a company in Scotland—nothing risky—but I used up some of my cash flow, and I need to cut corners a bit right now.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Listen, Mimi, it’s all leverage, you know that. And the more risk I minimize on this, the more risks I can take elsewhere. I won’t allow myself to put too much on the line. You should know that about me by now.”

Something in his tone worried her more than his giving away the role of Elinor at Monte’s request. She felt as if this was the Jack Leonard she should have been getting to know the past year. She had only herself to blame because clearly he had been there all that time. Sometimes it was better to know the defects of one’s partner after all.

“I can’t do this right now,” she said into the handset, as she placed the base of the phone back onto the vanity. “I have to go.”

She hung up and hit the wall with her slender right hand balled into a little fist. She half expected Yardley, sleeping next door, to smack the wall back at her, but there was no responding sound. Everyone else in the house was surely fast asleep by now. It had been a long day.

She went over to the row of windows that looked out onto the expansive front drive and the adjoining woodland and fields of pasture beyond. The outside world, so dark and mysterious, shimmered in a moonlit haze. She was furious at the other world, the one back home, the much more sadly predictable one where Monte could assault her and then end up in bed with Jack all the same, and no one would ever say a word, would ever say anything that might lose them money and—most important of all—power. Because power was everything—you could get nothing done without it. The longer she stayed away from Hollywood, and the less negotiating power she had, the more she wondered if she might not be better off simply torching it all rather than enduring a slow but inevitable decline.

Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austen saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austen knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius—a genius that no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own—she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast solely by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.

Mimi realized that this was not altogether true—that perhaps Austen’s life might have turned out differently, the canon might have been even more expansive, if some of the men in her family and in the world of publishing had made different decisions on her behalf. But all Mimi knew, standing there in the moonlight, a pawn between two moneymen without an original thought between them, was how much more satisfying and safe it was to be a creator of something that doesn’t end with age, but only gets better. She accepted that this was her own Faustian bargain, going to Hollywood and forsaking the stage, where the crow’s-feet and grey hairs weren’t visible past the first few rows of the house. She had gotten rich and famous at an unheard-of clip, spurred on by her beauty and the fantasizing that it generated. And, she suspected, she would lose it all just as fast.