Pride and Prejudice
A few notes: It probably helps to have read Jane Austen's classic. Standard Disclaimer applies: I don't own NCIS: Los Angeles, and (checking my pulse) I don't own Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, either.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Eric stared, for the longest time, as Jane Austen's words upbraided him from the written page. His previous times reading the book had shown him that the next two chapters would illustrate the irony with which the words were written, but with another uneventful Valentine's Day in the books, he could not escape Jane Austen's urgency.
He set down his tattered, highlighted, annotated book and went to the kitchen for some tea. Hetty had introduced him to tea, and he'd developed a taste for it, but instead of her bone-china tea ceremony he simply zapped a mug of water and unwrapped a teabag—decaf Earl Grey from Trader Joe's. As he returned the tin to the cupboard door his eye fell on a sticky note, carefully framed, leaning against the side of the cupboard.
The case had been a tough one, and closed just at two that Thursday afternoon. Afterward, as he and Nell had worked up the paperwork and neatened the computer files, he had asked what her plans were. When she'd said she was reading Virginia Woolf, he silently decided to seek comfort in the familiar words of Pride and Prejudice. Sure, it was a cultural disconnect, like Beethoven beside Stravinsky, but the words were comfortable and there was no contest going on, so in the privacy of his own place, he'd read what he danged well chose.
Eric pulled up the "viola" playlist on his iPhone and routed it to his home stereo, then returned to his book. As the familiar arpeggios of Bach's First Suite started, Eric paused, ran his thumb over the book's cover, and remembered his disaster with Paula Murcheson at the music ensemble festival. After years of viola practice, he'd been assigned Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, for Violin (Paula), Viola (Eric), and orchestra, (replaced by a piano accompanist.) Since it's basically a double concerto, some wags say Mozart's best violin concerto includes a violist. Less irreverent speculation suggests Mozart wrote it to perform with his father, an act of reconciliation in their stormy relationship.
In the cafeteria/ready-room at Pemberly High School, amidst the cacophony of instruments tuning, runs and scales, (there was even some Paganini in the distance) Eric, in his nervousness and enthusiasm, had thrown an arm around her, "If this goes well, let me take you out to Le Cid!" he'd said, thinking of the neighboring town's fancy restaurant. Paula had quickly pulled back and stared at him. Once they reached the stage, her smile, normally natural and radiant, had been replaced with a glare, his with a strangled grimace. The performance itself had been a disaster, the judges' comments made clear. "You were stepping on each other's entrances. This piece is all about chemistry: make it a love-song! Violin: you need to flirt with him and charm him, not upstage him. Viola: not so plaintive!"
Eric knew he'd messed up, trying to turn their work into a relationship, and now he could see, with vicious clarity, how any simple step he might take with Nell could get him started down a path that led, inevitably, inexorably, to the same train-wreck he'd endured with Paula.
Eric's mind drifted back, again, to high school, back to Dorothy Vinton. Dorothy, with wavy brown hair draping down to her shoulders, ever the sharpie, the girl all the boys stole glances at, had somehow become his debate partner, even though he was a year younger than she was. As they prepared their plans and counter-plans, as they found ever-more obscure quotation cards on the topic, they chatted, and Eric became a sounding-board for her problems with guys. "You seem out of sorts, today, Dorothy," would prompt yet another tirade on all the privileges Rob, the quarterback, or Scott, the point guard, would expect, simply for the honor of dating him.
Later, as he waited for a ride home he would overhear the guys from the sports teams with their bawdy complaints about her. "There goes Dorothy Vinton, the Ice Queen." "Frigid," they said. This wasn't the Dorothy that Eric knew: organized, witty and sarcastic. So it came as no surprise to him that she wouldn't put up with their gropings. It's not like Eric tried anything, either. Not only was she out of his league, she was his teammate, his partner. Still, he felt for her, and vowed never to become "that guy," the one who expected so much, as if it were some entailed birthright.
Eric longed for the simpler days of Regency England, where the rules and norms were strictly enforced. If you simply lay an indecorous hand on a woman, you had to run off to London, hide in the rougher neighborhoods, and marry her as soon as you were found out. But then he read of the fear with which Mrs. Bennett struggled to marry off her daughters, for unless they married well before her husband died, she would be doomed to the poorhouse.
After another mug of tea, Eric read of the ball, the one that puts the "pride" in Pride and Prejudice. He read of how Lydia had danced and flirted with any bachelor who was even halfway eligible, and he thought back to the sock hops the Student Council would put on. Boys in taut, nervous clusters eyed girls in defensive circles. Flirt as they might, the girls became deer ready to protect their own if the wrong boy had the nerve to ask even for a single dance.
For Mrs. Bennett, even the decision of whether to take a carriage or to walk when visiting a friend was fraught with strategic significance. In her day, a woman could send a message simply with the way she held her fan, or a man could with the flowers he gave. So careful, so strategic, so regimented her times were. In high school, he'd availed himself of the Student Council's carnation sale anonymously to send a flower to Elizabeth, and he'd gotten one as well! But after he'd thanked Lizzie for it, he'd learned that Charlotte, not Elizabeth, had been his secret admirer. Sluggish, dim-witted: all those high school romantic intrigues left him bitter about the whole thing, and he'd resolved never to play the subtle, flirtatious games.
But Nell had gotten under his skin, and when he'd seen her dating profile on "Romancing The One dot com," he'd fallen back into the expected pattern: he bought two copies of a football DVD, and spent the night ruthlessly studying one before giving her the other. He cringed and laughed, and cringed again before getting back to Jane Austen's story.
As he read of Mr. Bingley's sudden departure, and the heartbreak with which Jane took it—or more strictly the heartbreak with which Elizabeth and her mother took it on Jane's behalf—he thought of Rosalind, his college girlfriend, and how she'd suddenly transferred. He learned later of the advances her English prof was making on her, and how she felt she had no choice, but it hurt nonetheless. Eric had poured out his soul for Rosalind, and they had explored so much together, and yet she had simply disappeared.
After Rosalind had come Missy Wharton. He'd been so distraught by Rosie's departure that he'd fallen straight into Missy's arms—and bed. She had been so besotted with Eric that he never stopped to think how incompatible they were. Only too late did he freeze up, then muster the courage to say what he had to say: that he could never be happy in the relationship. They'd been foolish college students, both legally adults, but still he regretted what he had done.
Eric read, with something approaching veneration, the four-page missive Mr. Darcy wrote for Elizabeth. He admired the clarity and precision with which Darcy defended himself from Elizabeth's suppositions. It was past midnight when he finished the book:
If any young men are here for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure.
As he picked up before going to bed, he had to put the tea away, and saw again the sticky-note he'd extracted from Nell, and then framed and saved all these many months.
The next morning as he was getting in his car, he was approached by his neighbor, Mrs. DeBerg. "This is what Hetty would become, if she had been born into old money," he thought. As soon as he'd moved in, she had tried to set him up with her daughter, Anne.
Eric knew that she still nurtured that plan, so he hurried to close the car door and peel away, but she got to the curb just in time to rap firmly on the doorframe with her cane. Eric relented and got back out of his car. "You really should leave that little redhead alone. She is simply, simply not right for you. My bridge group and I have put your picture side by side with my Anne's,"
"You've got my picture?"
"Oh, yes! Just the second time you left to go surfing, I took some pictures to show to Anne. You've gotten even more—what's the word these days—ripped since then. But what I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted—she's a bad influence on you, that redhead." Eric had to smile: if Mrs. DeBerg knew how he and Nell ran their tag-team briefings, she'd understand what great chemistry can mean for great communication. "What I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted, is that my bridge group and I have put your picture side by side with my Anne's, and we all agree what a wonderful couple you'll make, and how perfect my grandbabies will be. I want you to promise right now that you'll break up with that little redhead."
Her irony finally spurred Eric into speech. "Mrs. DeBerg, I'll promise no such thing. First, my friend and I are not dating. We are not now, and never have been. Second, and more importantly, our love-lives are none of your concern."
"Why, I never…"
"The romantic choices that your Anne makes, that I make, and that Ms. Jones makes are ours, and ours alone, to make. If, and only if, two of those coincide will great things start to happen. But when that happens, nothing you say, nothing your bridge group says, nothing the whole world could say, will stop what we decide." He returned to his seat and violently he turned the key, and when his car had roared to life, it bolted out toward the mission.
By the time he was halfway to work, he'd settled down enough to realize what he had to do. He took a few more deep breaths, and then pulled into a nearby strip mall, where the florist was just opening up. He stepped inside, bought a dozen cut roses and a small box of chocolate-covered Oreos. He carefully chose a small card and wrote on it.
"Nell: Can I take you out to dinner? Eric."
AN:Portions (549 words, 29%) are revised from my previous story, "Another Neric Christmas,"
In this story, I tried to juggle three time-frames: Eric reading, Eric's backstory, and Pride and Prejudice. I'm nervous about whether I succeeded. Did I even get the verb tenses right? Did I skip too much after Darcy's letter? Are the names for the minor characters appropriate, confusing, or cheap? If you've got an opinion, leave a note in the reviews.
p.s. Sorry, violists, that Eric's viola playlist started with a transcription, but you've got to admit that if Eric is into classical music, he'll be a Bach kind of guy.
Newbie.