[The following is the first part in a series of excerpts from the diary of Frank Darcy contemporaneous to the events described here by Miss Elizabeth Bennet. The excerpts are published with due permission from the Frank Darcy Estate, Chillingham, Northumberland, England.]

28th August:

As if the rotting stench of this sticky New York summer was not enough, I get one of those "good-natured" text messages from Elaine-

"I genuinely hope you are doing okay.

It has been almost a year now

Yours truly

E."

One would like to believe that the embers of one's terrible marital past have cooled considerably but before you can even handle them or try to dispose of them the unthinking indifferent winds of time blow them right into your face. Clearly, the thread of messages left on read before this fresh one had no impact on the confidence of that insolent woman. Because she is just that good, isn't she? Oh she is good, alright. She was tailor-made by some god to be good. That blonde hair of her functioning as some make-shift halo which frames the goodness of her pacific blue eyes. She trained the airs around her to convey messages of shimmering charm and unattainable emotional extravagance long before she even met me. Her gestures were nothing but loyal pets doing her bidding to the world around her. One microsecond of eye-contact inviting you in, one flick of the seemingly delicate wrist brushing off a bunch of translucent hair while the long neck choreographing the sideways movement of the face. And these are just the ones I remember now in withdrawal; but I don't regret not documenting Elaine Bergmann in any form of pretentious verse. Her photographic and cinematographic presence is good enough for her and grotesquely more than what her stale inner life even deserves.

She remembers that it has been a year. She wants to retain civility with the Darcys, said some handmaiden or eunuch-like companion of her, whose name I cannot quite remember. This is what your mother would have wanted, they said. She wanted me to happy. Well, isn't that just fucking precious? The one question I have now is, why? Why did Catherine Darcy née Cronenberg (plain American Jewish princess) want me happy? In my more agitated adolescent years this thought used to torment me every night apart from the million other dark afflictions a rapidly growing teenage boy experiences. From the moment I was informed of it, I used to wonder if the household staff noticed the great secret of the Darcy family hanging from my back every time I was in the same room as Catherine Darcy. A few years later, in the aftermath of some heated argument I had with 'mum' when I was grimly sent to my bedroom by papa, my brother tried to assuage some of my bitterness towards her by saying, 'maybe she knows what it is like to adopt the Darcy name instead of being born in it.' It didn't made any sense to me. But I wouldn't put it past him, he, unlike me, was the one who belonged to the legitimate Darcys, well within the comfortable, predictable boundaries of the Christian marriage, the beautiful, first baby boy born to the Darcys sometime in the blissful era of Late-70s. It was for all intents and purposes his right to defend her. And then there was me, born as…. Well, let us not go there today.

This humid air does make one enthusiastic about visiting the quaint Appalachian Beardsley, especially in autumn. It has been quite a while. Someone mentioned Mrs. Bennet, and after much rummaging I found a rather faint image of some woman who had a voice sweetened synthetically by airy American mannerisms and had a husband who happened to be a college classmate of papa's. One of her daughter has now become a diplomat or something (Joan, I think?). My memory has been rather deceptive lately as it has been hinting that she had two more daughters (or is it one?), but that is beyond the point. Besides, my greater interest in the Bennets lies with Mr. Bennet, as I remember Aidan mentioning his firm being rather too successful in navigating the cut-throat competition of the east coast rather successfully, thwarting the ambition of this transatlantic conglomerate. If I feel like I might have a look in it, call in some belated, ancestral favor(by way of her friendship with mother) from that Bennet woman, apart from whatever patchy possessions of Catherine Cronenberg are left in this vacuum of a country that I need to shift to the other, better side of the Atlantic.

I wonder if I should sit on Elaine's alimony checks for a couple of months.

4th September

The town of Beardsley in autumn smelled faintly of pines and heavily of something musty. The condo downtown was dutifully put to order by that british caretaker in top form. There was a mellow welcoming party in the corporate office which was attended by all the office dwellers reverently. All of them gathered around me when I entered the hall like I was a Martian who came to earth to take account of the humans, or be evaluated by them with more ferocity and scrutiny. The first half of the afternoon before lunh went by in a haze of crisp handshakes and curt "certainly"s and 'definitley's spewed out of my mouth in a rather assembly like fashion. Obviously peppered in between these vacant formalities were wisps of consolatory remarks about my "lovely" deceased mother. The somberness was not too difficult to imitate, even after a year people were very readily convinced of the conviction of my pain. It was Harry's job to be stoic and brave in the face of emotional turmoil- him being the elder brother. This made a lot more sense aesthetically too (the only aspect of humanity that people seem to actually give a shit about); he was the one who faithfully inherited the ginger hair and kind green eyes in anticipation of his accommodative and pleasant personality. This lies in cruel contrast to me, a raven haired 'figure of doom with dead black eyes and a haunting ghost of olive in my otherwise blank pale skin' as described by Catherine's rather too boisterous hag of a mother. I don't regret skipping that old ashen woman's funeral back when I was in sophomore year despite mother requesting me. Despite treating me with the extreme level of hostility that a woman of her age can brutalize any angsty teen with, she was disproportionately penalizing of me whenever I called mother Catherine.

I tortured my conscious unnecessarily for far too long before realizing that she knew the biological truth of my Darcy lineage, and it was because of this knowledge, not despite of it that she would come strong onto me about familial semantics; you see, that woman had a very bright flash of pleasure flit across her grey eyes whenever I was pained in any way.

The chauffer pointed me towards the Bennet estate on our way from the airport. From that distance, it seemed quite quaint, but the jolly fellow in the driver's seat warned me pleasantly that it is astronomical as one approaches it. One would not blame a seemingly content working class man to buff the local legends, especially if the fellow seems to be one with a rather lessened ambition of even understanding of the world around him and what it is built of, but I didn't take his words at face value. Just agreed mutely.

I shall call on the Bennets soon. Wouldn't want them to eat into my firms on the east coast.

6th September

What sweet honey did this acorn cup of thorny reality can hold at times! I write this with certain holes in one's very being filled to the brim, overflowing from the brim. Hole that I didn't even knew were so shamelessly exposed, not to everyone obviously. Not everyone can spot these vacancies in one's soul, either they were just blind by default or were deliberately avoiding them like an embarrassing disability I had. Of course, not her. It couldn't escape her notice. In fact, she went straight for them, that little nymph. Like a skilled hunter.

My memories of her are deeply colored in some substance resembling deep dark yet somehow translucent blood, with the scent of Arabian rosewater and the coolness of the gust of wind coming down from the Alps. The sharpest image of her that I am capable of recreating right now is that of her sitting at the bar, resting her face on her left arm, orally seducing the straw of her cosmo, deliciously lost in a mythologically populated jungle of fertile imagination that youth so lovingly ventures into as soon as they are let out.

I don't know what it was, the 4th serving of old-fashioned, the bar filled surprisingly crowdedly with a sea of 20-somethings, or the music that was- due to some kind of outlandish coincidence that is only witnessed via cinematic efforts on a two-dimensional screen- playing some of my well-liked 80s hits. I don't know if the reaction was amplified by the presence of not one, but two well-endowed bartenders, both brunettes, the first two training versions of the woman on whom I was focusing most of my crazed lust on. Like a well organized tasting menu, the gods of love operating from their lair at some distant yet well connected planet were plating the small-town delectable delicatessens in a mise-en-place carefully curated to increase the appetites of the patrons tenfold.

And then, just when I was done gulping the last sips of this intoxicating setting that unnerved me more than it calmed me down, she, my shameless love, in her infinite wantonness sensed the eyes of a horridly lonely man feasting on the down of her folded left arm and turned to make eye contact directly with me. She looked in my direction vaguely, trying to make my figure out in the hazy darkness of the bar. I write this almost 3 days after the occurrence of the events I describe here, and I still don't know if she realized that it was me. I wondered if she could see me.

To my buoyant surprise, she did see me.

"Need you tonight" by INXS started thumping through the overworked speakers and was warmly welcomed by a low murmur of recognization and appreciation. She looked at me as if the lyrics of the song bounced off of my eyes that were glued to her vague face. She finally found the centre of my lust and raised her glass closer to her face. A flash of wildfire crossed her mouth and contorted it into a dangerous grin, before she wrapped her lips around the straw.

That thing! I can see that from light years away in a woman. I admit that I have over the past 20-odd years of my libidinal existence secretively curated this felinity of hundreds of woman across two continents. By curated I mean collected in the way one collects the napkins one blows their noses into. The elation lasted a little bit more than that one gets by satisfactorily blowing one's nose.

But with her, her ferocity had claws that tugged onto my confidence. Her tiny face with slim nose dividing her features in a perfect mirror image was a daintier, feminine version of my own. Her tiny mouth was delicate yet her eyes carried the might of some Amazonian female warrior that was seven feet tall and could look down on all of disgusting humanity from colossal heights of immortal existence.

And then, the Oscar-winning director that was the director of the whole scene decided to cue her to stand up and move in my direction with the song 'Maniac'. Her intoxication soon became screamingly obvious as she walked swaying her lower body symmetrically. She was a bit shorter than I was anticipating her to be but that was a spit of relief for my raging beating heart. She passed through me retaining eye contact with the confidence of some seasoned veteran while it slowly dawned on me (as I got a closer, more clearer look of her) that she was also a lot more younger than she seemed from the distance.

My heart was now outperforming the tempo of the song. Anticipating that she was by now at the entrance of the bathrooms, I turned on the other side like a frantic beast and found her turning her head sideways towards me synchronous to my own little motion. Her gesture was so loud that an irrational part of my consciousness grew unusually aware of the entire bar full of people that I assumed was drunkenly looking at this palpitating, positively pornographic non-verbal exchange of promiscuous promises. This misconception of mine was dismissed by the bartender (a male with the buzz cut this time, probably to root me back to reality or something) wiping the wooden counter skillfully around my empty glass that I was still holding on to like it was the smooth trunk of tree at the periphery of a dazzling lake where Venus baths naked every day.

I stood up and staggered a bit for some unknown reason which made the unbalanced barstool stumble like a misshapen spindly pillar. I dragged myself towards the bathrooms, pausing momentarily to check the situation outside and inside the ladies' bathroom. I crossed the tiny portal from the noise and drunken heat of humans into a little pocket of paradise where stood my little doll pretending to tend to her vanity as she looked away from her face and in the reflection of the entrance with me looming in it with a smug grin of satisfaction. For such a crowded bar the bathroom was emptier than an abandoned American gas station in some backwater city of the mid-west.

And then, without even the slightest of warning, she stooped up and clung onto my shoulders, and before I could mentally register the sudden increase in weight she attempted to devour my mouth with what seemed to me tiny cute little sips of kisses. It was in that moment, the way that she kissed me that I finally discerned that she has to be younger than 24. Her kisses were unable to keep up with the hot lava fountain of lust she had inside of her, and her inexperience soon came through with her diminishing confidence with every long awkward second that passed.

"Where do you live?" she slurred as she pulled back to breathe and smiled through a wet chin.

I was in such a desperate hurry for my new lover that I took no notice of the large bedroom windows open. The sharp cold winds stabbed my entire naked back rather indiscriminately, as if foreshadowing a certain doom that I was ensuring by possessing my pale pink darling. But she, my darling nymph was practically sweating. She was possessed less by me and more by the torrid flames of unrequited something, something that neither she nor me knew about. Those hungry flames of her I felt in my mouth as I kissed her in between, it was magnetic, the way her little mouth worked everywhere.

"What's…. your….. name…." I managed to say in between heavy grunts, something that I rarely do for women I pick up in the manner of that fateful night.

"Elizabeth" she said, making eye contact through a thin film of melted eye makeup.

"Elizabeth what?" I asked with a pained voice as I felt the bubble building up slowly in a distance. The anguish of completion carried a certain pain so magnificent that the only thing I feared on those moments was breaking down crying.

"Elizabeth Bennet" she breathed as she saw me approaching that golden gonadal goal of mine with a victorious expression.

"Why do I feel like I have heard that name before?" I breathed shakily into her dark chocolate hair smelling of luscious lavender as the clouds of my orgasm tipped its contents into the slick rubber sheath that finally stopped it's probing of her tangled crimson curtains, the curtains that veiled nothing of any technical significance but were housed in a bungalow surrounded by the most mystic of forests.

I remember going numb for a few very long moments; whether it was because of the cold breeze being successful in deriving all the heat of life from my body or it was this semi-conscious nymph's endless void of death and utter despair, I don't know. All I remember is finding her plump yet tiny arms a maze where I knew I would never come out clean from.