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Chapter 17

Manic Pixie Dream Earl

J ulianna had not expected Effie to decline her proposal. She was set back on her heels. Perhaps she had misunderstood him. Had he said “I can’t go” or “I won’t go”? There were nuances there that led to disparate interpretations.

“I exist for more than your gratification,” Effie said quietly.

Her mind began to spin. He had said won’t .

How? Why? What had changed? Could he lose his regard for her so quickly?

She took a breath. “I beg your pardon? Where is this coming from?”

He rested his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “I am not a character you invented.”

“Of course you aren’t. If I was any good at inventing characters, I’d be a novelist, not an editor.”

“You are being glib, and I’m trying to say something important. Something that’s important to me, in any case.”

He might as well have thrown cold water on her, so shocked was she. She, seated across from him, physically recoiled, leaning back in her chair as far as was possible. Once there, the cold turned hot as shame flooded in.

“By all means, speak.”

“Ofttimes, it feels as if I am but a character for you to take out and play with when the urge strikes. Or perhaps the better metaphor is a doll. I am pretty and amusing and good for a laugh—until you tire of me. Then you may put me back on the shelf until next time.”

She tried to object, but he spoke over her, which was unheard of from the usually solicitous Effie.

“I have twisted myself trying to be that doll. Trying to be what I thought you would like. Initially, it was my pleasure to do it. It would have remained so had I felt we were building something. An alliance, a partnership. I would never have forced you into marriage, but something . It wouldn’t have been twisting, in that case. It would have been something more like . . . bending.

“You once remarked on how biddable I was, how I always seemed to know exactly what you wanted to do, or to hear. I should have listened better when you said that. I thought I was being gentlemanly. I thought making you happy would make me happy—and it did.

“But that only works if you want me as much as I wanted you.”

Wanted . Past tense. Julianna blinked rapidly so that she would not cry. She had cried enough tears in recent weeks that she could no longer credibly claim she was not a crier, but she still found herself resisting.

“You have this idea about who I am,” Effie said. “An aristocrat.”

“You are an aristocrat,” she could not resist pointing out.

“Yes, and I used to wish I could change that.” He smiled. “Ironically, perhaps I can, in a way.”

She had no idea what that meant, but she didn’t have an opening to ask, because he kept going, the pace of his speech pickingup.

“I understand I can’t make you want me—truly want me, for something enduring, for something more than once or twice a year—and so I’ve got to stop trying. It’s a small revelation, in the scheme of things, but it’s a rather large one for me personally.”

“Effie,” Julianna said, unable to disguise the anguish in her voice. “I am so very sorry. I never meant to make you feel unappreciated. I never wanted you to twist yourself to please me. And I never thought of you as a doll.”

“I know,” he said quietly, sadly. “But does it matter what you meant, what you thought? Or does it matter what you did ?”

Oh, dear heavens. Julianna had never experienced such misery, not even the day Father died. Her body felt heavy with it.

She wanted to ask why this was all coming out now. Why hadn’t he told her any of this before, back when she could have modified her behavior?

“I had the dream again,” he said, “and this time it worked differently.”

“You were able to control it?” she asked, struggling to adjust to the change in topic but understanding, somehow, that he was answering her unarticulated question about what had prompted him to make that devastating speech.

“In a manner of speaking. It wasn’t as you said—as Aristotle says. I had no awareness that I was dreaming while I was dreaming. But there was a voice in the dream. A voice that had never been there before. It guided me up and out of the wardrobe.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said, and meant it. “Whose voice was it, do you think?”

“I did consider that perhaps it was yours, because after I got out of the wardrobe, I went for a swim, and you were the one who suggested that.”

Something inside Julianna lurched toward him. She wanted the voice to have been hers. She wanted to be the one helping Effie in his time of need, the one who appeared in his dreams.

“But as I was floating in the waves—which was curious because it was December in the dream, yet the water was warm—I realized the voice was mine .

“You think I’m a specific kind of man. The kind who will try to control you, or your magazine, which I sometimes think you care about more than yourself.

“I can’t make you see that I’m different.” He unsteepled his fingers and sat back again. “Or perhaps I’m not different; perhaps to think so is only self-flattery. It matters not. The point is, I cannot go to the seaside with you and give you everything and then come back and withdraw everything because you only want me in certain circumstances.”

He stood. She, having been struck dumb—again—by his speech, stood, too. It was all she could think to do.

“I will write the February Mrs. Landers letters, but after that you should find someone else to do it.”

The sob was beating at the door of her chest. She swallowed it. “Will you still send me poems for consideration?” She couldn’t bear it if Effie stopped sending her poems.

He smiled—a little sadly, she thought. “No. I will send myself poems.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but she was too desperate to query him further, for she understood that he was saying goodbye—he was carrying himself toward the door. “You can’t even be my friend. My correspondent?” She heard the desperation in her tone but could not do anything about it.

He must have heard it too, for he turned with his hand on the door, his expression exquisitely gentle. How the tables had turned. “No. I am sorry. I know I contradict myself. I know I was the one who suggested we keep up our correspondence even as we set aside our affair. I came here today in that spirit, to pay a friendly visit. But I didn’t understand.”

“You didn’t understand what?”

“I didn’t understand that for me, being your friend is nearly as painful as being physically intimate with you but not being able to truly belong to you.”

Julianna inhaled sharply. He might as well have slapped her. Never in a hundred lifetimes would she have imagined Effie forsaking her. But what could she do? She couldn’t make him stay. If she had indeed been bending him to her will as he’d suggested, she could no longer allow herself to do so. “So this is goodbye.”

“This is goodbye.” He nodded as if punctuating what he’d just said. He stared at her for a long time.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I truly am.”

“I know you are. Goodbye, Jules.”

* * *

It was early, and dark. Julianna didn’t expect anyone to be in the office this early on a Sunday.

He looked up from where he’d been bent over his desk—his desk that was in the center of the room, flush with hers, the way it used to be.

“Father!” she cried. What was he doing here? How was he here?

His fond smile pierced her chest. Oh, how she missed him. Oh, how she missed the magazine they used to make together, without the meddling of any Glanvils.

She was hit with a wave of exhaustion so fierce, her limbs grew weak. She had been working so hard. Sometimes, producing the magazine in the Glanvil era made her feel as if she were pushing a boulder up a hill—alone. Father having returned threw into sharp relief how terribly lonely she was.

But she didn’t have to be anymore. He was here. She didn’t understand how , but he was. She made to go to him, but something stopped her. There was a barrier between them, nothing she could see or feel, but it was there all the same. She tried again, approaching from the other side of his desk. She could not get close to him.

He was trying to speak. He seemed to know what this invisible barrier was. She stopped trying to surmount the barrier so she could listen. So he could explain.

“Would you repeat that, Father?”

His lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. Julianna began to grow agitated.

“I can’t hear you! Speak up!”

Father kept “talking,” but no sound came out. The longer it went on, the more her distress intensified.

Tears gathered. Julianna tried so hard not to cry. She wasn’t certain where this extreme aversion to crying had come from, except that she feared that once she started crying, she would never stop.

Usually, she had some amount of control. When Mr. Glanvil’s actions threatened to summon tears, she thought of the larger picture. The magazine above all.

Here, now, though, she feared she could not hold back the tears. As with the time she had read the letter from Effie that closed with his formal name, they were too strong, too powerful. She was at the bottom of a massive waterfall with an insufficient parasol.

She brushed them away angrily. She was angry with herself, for crying. She was angry with Father, for not being able to make himself heard. She was angry with Effie, for . . . for what? Why was she angry with Effie, who had given her everything she could ever want? A brilliant trove of Mrs. Landers letters each month. The sea.

His heart.

As she was swiping tears off her cheeks, her fingers grazed against something unfamiliar near her ear.

What was that?

She checked the other ear. It was there, too, something soft but foreign.

She pulled.

She had scraps of muslin balled up inside her ears! No, not scraps, a long, thin piece in each ear. She kept pulling and pulling. As she neared the end of each length, she began hearing her father.

“You don’t have to be alone,” he said.

Except, it wasn’t his voice coming out of his mouth; it was her own.

“I beg your pardon?” she said, shaking her head and giving one last rub to each now-empty ear.

“You don’t have to be alone.”

Again, it was Julianna’s voice coming out of Father’s lips.

Extraordinary.

She awakened with a start.

Frantically, she checked her ears. They were empty.

After fumbling to light a candle, she got out of bed and hurried from her windowless room. She went outside and stood in front of her sister’s house and looked up at the starless city sky.

Amy had been right. It hadn’t been a message from Father she’d been struggling to hear; it had been a message from herself. From herself, to herself.

And it hadn’t been that Father had been unable to speak; it had been that she had been unable to hear.

She had heard now. The question was, what was she going to do about it?

No, the question was: Was she too late?