Jane Bites Back_ A Novel - Michael Thomas Ford [24]
Anyway, she liked the cover. And she mostly liked being Jane Fairfax. She would have preferred to be Jane Austen, but that was of course impossible. Besides, she was used to being a Fairfax now.
Opening the minibar, she took out two Scharffen Berger dark chocolate bars and a half bottle of Shiraz. Then she lay down on the bed, sinking into the impossibly soft mattress with a contented sigh. Pulling the wrapper from the first bar, she nibbled the corner as she turned on the television and began flipping through the channels. She watched a minute or two of several different things, but none held her interest. She had consumed half of the chocolate bar before she recognized a familiar face on one of the channels and stopped.
It was Peter Cushing. And the film, she realized shortly thereafter, was Brides of Dracula. It was one of her favorites, and she had not seen it in a long time. Now she settled in to enjoy it, alternately sipping from the bottle of wine and taking bites of the chocolate.
One of the infamous Hammer horror films, Brides of Dracula was enormously fun, particularly, Jane thought, if you were a vampire yourself. Watching the young heroine fall under the spell of the gorgeous and tragic vampire Baron Meinster (the name made her cringe) amused her, as did the generally ridiculous plot and the fact that despite the title and one brief reference in the dialogue, not once did Dracula himself actually appear in the film.
Yet as she watched the story unfold, Jane found herself growing sad. For the first time, she identified with young Marianne Danielle, the innocent schoolteacher tricked into helping Meinster escape from the room in which he was being kept prisoner by his mother the baroness. Rather than seeing her as a stupid girl who overlooks the obvious, Jane saw her as a girl in love, a girl who sees a wounded man needing her comfort.
By the end of the film she had worked her way through the bottle and most of the second chocolate bar, and felt a bit sick. And although she was happy that Marianne had escaped the fate of the other vampire brides, the scenes in which the baron is first disfigured by holy water and then done in by a cross-shaped shadow added to her queasiness.
She couldn’t help thinking back to the time when she’d been as innocent as Marianne. She too had trusted someone who had betrayed her. Unlike Marianne, however, she had not escaped.
“No,” she said to the dark. “You’re not going to think about that. You’ve let it go.”
She felt foolish speaking the thoughts out loud. It was a trick she’d learned during an est seminar in 1972. That was the year she’d decided to become self-actualized. Along with a perm and bell-bottom jeans, it was one of many things she regretted. The technique of getting rid of unhealthy thoughts by speaking them aloud, though, was actually helpful. It had helped her release some of the anger she’d carried inside her for so long.
She turned on her side and focused her eyes on the window. Beyond the curtains the lights of Broadway blinked on and off and the sounds of car horns broke the stillness. “That was the past, this is now,” Jane said. “That was the past, this is now.” Another trick she’d picked up during that long-ago weekend.
She repeated the phrase over and over, until the sound of her own voice drowned out everything else. When she felt her eyes beginning to close, she rolled onto her back. Across from the bed the cover for her novel still hung on the mirror. “I am Jane Fairfax,” she said. “I am Jane Fairfax.”
Repeating this new mantra, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, the room was filled with dirty gray light. A quick glance out the window showed that it was snowing again. Jane was tempted to pull the covers over her head and sleep some more, but the numbers on the clock beside the bed showed that she was due to meet Kelly for breakfast in an hour to go over the rest of his editing suggestions. She was supposed to have looked through them, but the manuscript still sat untouched on the coffee table by