The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler Page A

flipping through his enormous complete-works-of. Why did men always have to have the biggest books? It wasn’t clear he’d even heard.
    W hile Allegra liked to describe herself as a garden-variety lesbian, she knew that the truth was more complicated. Sexuality is rarely as simple as it is natural. Allegra was not entirely indifferent to men, just to men’s bodies. She was often attracted to the men in books; they seemed, as a rule, more passionate than thewomen in books, though actual women seemed more passionate than actual men. As a rule.
    Allegra was aroused most by passion itself. Poems of the confessional sort. Vistas, all kinds, even swampy. Swelling music. Danger. She needed to feel to feel alive.
    Adrenaline was her drug of choice. This was not something she talked much about, and especially not to people who knew her mother. Sylvia believed in being careful, though she also believed that being careful was often not enough. She saw the world as an obstacle course. You picked your way across it while the terrain slipped about and things fell or exploded or both. Disasters arrived in the form of accidents, murders, earthquakes, disease, and divorce. She’d tried to raise sensible, cautious children. During the high school years, when Allegra knew that Sylvia had been congratulating herself on her daughter’s good appetite, good grades, sweet friends, sober habits, Allegra had been cutting herself.
    Allegra and Corinne met in a small plane on Allegra’s twenty-eighth birthday. She’d spent the night with her parents, and her dad had made her waffles in the morning. Then she’d left, telling them she was meeting friends back in the city. Instead she’d gone to a tiny airport in Vacaville for an appointment she’d made months earlier. This was her very first solo jump. She hesitated at the last minute, with the sky roaring past her—she wasn’t insane—and wondered whether she was going to go through with it. She was more afraid than she’d been on her first tandem jump. She’d been warned of this, but it still surprised her. If she could have backed down without anyone’s knowing, she would have. Instead, merely to save face, she threw herself out. She pulled the cord too soon. The instant she did, she wished she were free-falling again. That was the best part, and she saw she would have to do this again, and better next time. The chute opened,jerking her upward, taking her breath, the straps compressing her breasts. She grabbed the cords, pulled herself into a better position. How odd, to be minding the uncomfortable straps at the very moments in which she was plunging to earth from a plane. “That’s one small step for a man, and it’s a bit hot in this spacesuit.”
    The fall became quiet, contemplative. She was surprised at how long it seemed to last, how she experienced each second of it with such clarity. She came down hard, landing on her butt and then tipping so that she crushed the point of her elbow, and her butt hurt immediately, but she didn’t feel her elbow at first. She lay, looking up, with the chute spilled behind her. Clouds floated, birds flew. Her blood was still plummeting deliciously. Corinne and the tandem master drifted over her. Allegra could see the bottoms of Corinne’s boots, which meant Corinne was in the wrong position. Like Mary Poppins.
    Allegra tried to stand, and as she tipped herself upright, a white-hot wire shot through her arm. Her ears were full of sea sounds; her eyes were full of light. There was a smell like tar. She took a step, pitched forward into the void.
    She came to with Corinne speaking. “Are you all right? Can you answer me?” The words passed over like the shadows of birds, and then the darkness spread silently out from those shadows. The next time she awoke, she was in Corinne’s arms.
    It was an irresistible way to meet. By the time they got to the hospital they were