Earlier This Afternoon

Earlier This Afternoon

“I like sad endings,” I said, and I meant it.

                “But why?” my mother asked.  I could see the pain in her face.  “Isn’t the real world sad enough as it is?  Do you really want your escape to be full of it too?”  I considered this for a moment.

                “I guess a sad ending to a movie is happy… because it isn’t real,” I said.  The end of the sentence came out a little uncertain, the tiniest bit of a question mixed in somewhere, but she didn’t seem to notice.

                “Well, alright,” she said, bewildered, “if you say so.  I myself prefer a nice, complete, happy ending.  The kind that makes you feel fuzzy and warm.”  I didn’t point out that what I had just said- about sad endings not being real- applied to happy endings as well.  She seemed so cozy in her blindness.

                “Hey, I gotta go,” I said, looking at the clock on the microwave.  “I’ve got class and then a bunch of us are getting together to watch a movie.

                “Okay, have a good time.  I love you.”

                “Love you too mom.”

******

A Few Hours Ago

“What should we watch?”  Anna, my best friend from birth, cocked her head to the side and surveyed the stack of movies on the shelf.

                “Ooh, have you seen “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days?” another one of the girls asked and I groaned, inwardly and outwardly.

                “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, surveying my small group of friends with a disgusted look.  “Talk about the two most unlikeable characters ever written.  Please let’s not.”  I saw a few of the girls shoot each other annoyed looks.  I was always the first to veto a standard chick flick.  Predictable is predictable, but predictable and slutty is something I just cannot abide.

                “Fine,” Anna said quickly, trying to forestall the predictable (but not slutty) argument, “how about ‘Batman: The Dark Knight?’”  Dear, sweet, darling Anna and her noble little heart.  “Batman: The Dark Knight,” unsurprisingly, happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time.  A communal groan went up around me.

                “Are you kidding me? “

                “We always watch stuff like that.”

                “I swear we’ve watched that movie fifty billion times.”

                It is so hard to have such superior taste.  To have a secret knowledge of everyone else’s shallowness.  I felt a pitying affection for these girls.

                “Okay, okay,” Anna almost had to shout, “not that one then.”  She scanned the movies again intently.  Poor Anna, always the referee between me and the world.  Her eyes stopped moving as they contemplated some specific title and she glanced up at me speculatively.

                “Pride and Prejudice,” she announced in a reverential tone.  I didn’t even open my mouth to justify my instantaneous acquiescence.  I only nodded.  She didn’t even need to glance back at the rest of the girls.

                Here is the one place the rest of the female world and I meet, briefly, and with similar reason for once, at the shrine of Jane Austen.  To sigh and flutter; to yearn at the feet of Mr. Darcy.  To be, in effect, utterly predictable.  It was my one weakness.  Anna popped open the case and gently laid the shining disc in the open DVD tray.  A hush fell over the room.  I sank into an available beanbag chair.  As the FBI warning glared for an eternity on the screen I could already feel all remnants of fight leak out of me, through my nostrils and fingertips, onto the floor.  By the opening titles I was an infant again, ready to be spoon fed.

******

The Present

(Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett walk slowly, but surely, towards each other in the breathtaking golden dawn.  Darcy’s white shirt is open halfway down his chest and Elizabeth is wearing nothing more than a thin coat over her nightgown.)

Elizabeth: “I couldn't sleep.”

Darcy: “Nor I. My aunt...”  (Keira Knightly’s perfectly tousled hair gently moves in an unseen breeze.)                  

Elizabeth: “Yes, she was here.”                  

Darcy: (Looking soulfully vacant) “How can I ever make amends for such behaviour?”                  

Elizabeth: “After what you've done for Lydia and, I suspect, for Jane, it is I who should be making amends.”  (The sun gleams and the colors seem impossibly right.)

Darcy: “You must know.  Surely you must know…”  (I wait, breathlessly, for the final hurdle to be crossed).  “It was all for… fun.  I’ve been so bored lately.”  (Elizabeth looks crushed and I feel hazily like I’ve missed something.)

                I’ve missed something.  I swear I thought he just said “it was all for fun,” instead of “it was all for you,” like he’s supposed to.  But that can’t be possible.  I shake my head and look groggily around at all the girls in the room.  They are grinning and one of them mouths audibly to those closest around her “this is my favorite part!”

Elizabeth: (looking pathetically hopeful) “Was there any other reason, Mr. Darcy, that you went to all the trouble to help my family out such a degrading and hopeless debacle?  It was such an imposition on you…”  (She slants a hopeful glance up at him through her lashes.)

Darcy: (still looking soulfully vacant) “No really, I have been chomping at the bit these past few months for something to do to alleviate my constant boredom.  Your little lightskirt sister offered me the perfect opportunity to get back at an old enemy.”  (When Elizabeth looks even more crestfallen he continues.)

Darcy: “Oh, by the way, would you mind relaying a message to your father for me?  Tell him I’ll call on him later to set up a monthly payment he can make to me over the course of the rest of his life to pay back the capitol I had to lay down to get old Wickham to settle.  Really” he chuckles to himself” it’s not much of a compliment to your sister how much he demanded.”  (He looks at her in bored inquiry and she finally nods and bows her head.  He turns and leaves and the girls around me erupt in roars of laughter.)

                I am stunned, probably even more so than Elizabeth, throughout all of this.  My mouth is hanging open, my eyes wide in horror, and my hands are gripping the folds of the beanbag chair around me.  I turn around a glare accusingly at my friends.

                “How the heck did you do that?” I nearly scream and the girls stop laughing and turn to look at me in shock.  They all appear clueless as to what I mean.

                “No!” I scream as I whirl back around and see Elizabeth on the screen start to walk desultorily home to tell her father.    Before I realize it I am on my feet lunging for the remote control on the ground next to Anna.  I frantically rewind to the point where Darcy and Elizabeth first meet in the glorious rural dawn and watch the past five minutes again.  It is the same.  Darcy still walks away, leaves Elizabeth forlorn and unloved.  I rewind it and watch it again.  And again.  And again, growing more frantic with every viewing.  The girls around me are shouting, trying to wrestle the remote from out of my gripping, claw-shaped hands, but I hardly even notice it.  Anna is trying to calm everyone down, most especially me, and finally succeeds in herding everyone else out the door.  I am still rewinding and playing.  Anna tries to talk to me, reason with me, but I can’t hear anything except Mr. Darcy’s cruel words, repeating loudly in my head, shouting in my brain.  Finally I crumple to the floor in defeat and Anna grabs the remote from my hand to turn the movie off.  She is looking at me with profound, if nervous, concern but I can’t seem to register the features on her face.  I am crying.

                I guess my mom was right, I think dejectedly as I sob into the carpet, happy endings are better.