The Jane Austen Book Club (13 page)

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.

J
ocelyn 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.

T
ad 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.”