Mr. Darcy--1985

Della should have seen it coming. She went back over everything in her mind, and by that, she meant everything. Every little thing. Even the smallest, minutest of details.

   For example, she was standing at the corner of the small hallway that led to the restroom in his fraternity house. Her boyfriend, Jim, had gone inside to use it. She always found it curious that this place had no doors that locked. Was that by design?

   As it was, she felt near petrified to death to ever take a much needed restroom break here. Afraid someone would walk right in on her sitting down to pee. Jim seemed ambivalent when she tried to describe this scenario to him. Perhaps that was still yet another clue. "Don't worry. No one's going to walk in on you," is what he said.

  As it happened at this party, when she rounded the corner to wait for Jim to reappear, she ran smack into one of the pledges of the incoming class. A meaty boy, or as her mother would have said 'big boned.' She had noticed him earlier, staring across the room at her. There was something in his demeanor that set her radar off.

  He reached out his hand and introduced himself, as it seemed they all did here. Never before in her life had she been around so many junior business school associates, or at least that is what they all seemed to be. Perhaps it was all the sports coats and ties.

  She found herself chatting him up for some reason. When in the past, she may have felt intimidated by someone like him and would not have thought of anything to say, she heard herself ask him what his major was. She could not recall what he said, but it led him to go into some detail about himself.

  What she could recall was that he was in Honors College and was pledging Jim's fraternity. And by Jim's fraternity, she meant exactly that. Jim had recently informed her that he was now the president of it. The pledge was ending with something he had started saying, "...And I'm a member of the National Muff Diver's Association."

   "What's that?" she asked.

   "What's what?"

   "The National Muff Diver's Association?"

   "You mean you don't know?" Just then it dawned on her what he was getting at. Muff Diver. Indeed. Is that what he called it? It never occurred to her to name it. Really to think much about it. It didn't seem to her to get the heart of the matter of sex, if she were to analyze it. It was just something that people could do. More like an afterthought of the act itself. She felt herself blush.

    Her eyes must have betrayed her because the pledge was stating, matter-of-factly, "Well, yes, I see you do know what I mean." Just at that moment, Jim came from around the corner. "What are you two talking about?" he asked.

    "Well," she stated, "he just told me that he is a member of the National Muff Diver's Association." She felt Jim's hand on her shoulder.

    "Shshshsh. Not so loud," he said.

    "Yes, Jim," said the pledge smoothly. "Why doesn't your girl here know what the National Muff Diver's Association is?"

     "I know what the National Muff Diver's Association is!" she replied. Even to her it sounded a bit too loud.

     "Shshshsh," said Jim again. Now both of his hands were on each of her shoulders, as if he were literally clamping her down. "What are you getting at?" asked Jim directly to the pledge.

     "She said she didn't know," said the pledge. He met Jim's gaze steadily. "Why wouldn't she know?" Jim had had enough of this. 

      "Well, I guess she'll just have to find out then, won't she?" he said. "Don't worry about it." Jim then took her hand and led her to the dance floor. She knew this was odd because she also knew Jim never really liked to dance.

   Later, she came to view this encounter as a tell-tale sign. One she should have recognized. What did these boys tell each other when the girls were not around anyway? She still trusted Jim though, after all of these years. She didn't think he would have told anything about her because there was nothing to tell. And they both knew that to be true. 

   She began to recognize the startling news about Jim after they had dated on and off for three years. By on and off, she meant that he did what the kids today would call ghosting her. His affection for her ran hot and cold.

   She didn't want to be available when he needed her to be, however. The sad state of her affairs back then was that she pretty much had nothing else going on. Her girlfriends from late adolescence had scattered by the wayside. Each one was either living with a man, engaged, or pregnant and not necessarily in that order. 

   She was by then, spending a crazy amount of time in the college library working on research. None of the other English majors who were male had any appeal to her at all. She had tried to date one or two of them.

   There was the magician. She went on one date with him. When he would not reveal even the smallest of magic tricks to her, she just could not go on another one. And she kept thinking about Jim the entire time anyway.

   The army vet was a huge mistake. It wasn't even a date really. He just met her in the commons one day and bought her a cup of coffee. After chatting for some time, he sketched a picture for her. When he handed it to her, he said it was a sketch of both of them.

     She looked at the sketch of a guy behind a large desk. "Where am I?" she asked.

    "Right, here. See?" He pointed at the desk. "You're on your knees behind the desk. That's why I'm smiling so much." She took the sketch, mumbled something about needing to be somewhere, and left. When she got home, she threw the drawing in the fireplace and watched it burn. She would later report this guy for further harassment, but not until after Jim.

    In many ways, her life up to that point was divided into before and after Jim. Before Jim, she only watched as girls and guys paired up and seemed to know what to do. They understood how the game was played.

     After Jim, her life would open up in ways so vast it would have taken her breath away if she could only have seen it then. It was during Jim that made her stomach turn up in knots and made her heart long for what she could not name.

     During Jim was when she took a class on the Regency Period. Among the assigned readings, Pride and Prejudice. At the end of the term, she wrote one of her best papers on it. She felt that Mr. Darcy was in fact gay, and since men during that time period didn’t come out or act on their desires at all as far as the books would say, she thought Mr. Darcy’s long absences, and seemingly disdain for Lizzie at first meeting could be traced to the fact that he was gay.

      In the end, he proclaimed his love for Lizzie and they married. But what happened after that? What would marriage be like for them? Surely they would develop a fondness for each other, over time. But what would happen before that fondness took hold?  

     When she received the paper back with a “A” marked on the top of it, the professor asked if he could keep it. She felt herself fill up with pride in front of the rest of the class. None of the other know-it-all English majors had been asked if he could keep their papers. Much later in her life, she would wonder exactly why the professor had wanted her paper. “Is that how the things are done then?” she wondered.

         She had turned her paper over to the professor, as she was only an undergrad. As she gave it to him, she felt that a piece of her life was also given away in the text of that paper. The piece of her life that the paper revealed was the truth she had discovered about Jim when writing it. 

     Jim was her Mr. Darcy. Except he was her gay Mr. Darcy. It had taken her three years to realize it. And after the semester ended, when she faced her long summer of discontentment, she would spend hours in her room ruminating over her relationship with Jim and all of its details, or lack of them, to be frank.

    One thing she did still have and one thing she would always remember was how Jim had declared his feelings for her, if inadvertently and without much artistry. She had confounded him at last, it seemed. It was, for her, like the rain scene in Pride and Prejudice, where Darcy proclaims his love for Lizzie, but where she refuses his marriage proposal.  

    In the book, Lizzie refused him because of her pride. And while Jim did not propose marriage, it had made Della certain, at least for a time, of Jim’s feelings. And that summer in all of her ruminations, that one scene did not add up to what everything else about their relationship seemed to calculate out to.

    And so she became obsessed with reliving and reviewing every small detail of what she knew to be true about Jim. By the start of the next semester she vowed she would have it out with him.

    His big reveal had come at a time when she thought they were breaking up. And that is why she felt he was her Mr. Darcy. Just when she thought all was lost, and they were never meant to be anymore, he had spoken the words she had longed to hear, stopping just short of the “L” word. And to add to her confusion, he had added at the end, “We met in our French class, after all. What better place to have met.”

    All summer, she had thought about it. If he meant to give her a brush off speech, something akin to “Let’s just be friends,” then why that addendum at the end? If he did not mean his words romantically, why mention where they had met?

    After that conversation, she had written the paper. The idea for the paper had just come to her, as major truths in life sometimes do. She was initially shocked at her own revelation. Her Jim was gay. That is why he had been an in and out, hot and then cold, sometimes on and sometimes off boyfriend.

     Many many years later, when she had become a wife and a mother to three beautiful girls, she would have a new appreciation for Jim’s affection. She would come to realize that he was just the right man at the right time in her life back then. However, at the time she also knew instinctively that her life with him was going nowhere.

   She had not seen Jim at all the summer before senior year. He said he had worked and traveled in his free time with friends. She didn’t even know how much of this to believe. Perhaps he had found someone else, after all. Perhaps her revelation was incorrect.

    And she may have kept hanging on to the idea that Jim would run hot for her again. It seemed he always had come around in the past. But that was the beginning of the new semester. And new classes meant new classmates.

     Jim had been her Mr. Right for a season. However, her revelations about him threw her into a tizzy to get some kind of sense of it. How they finally came about it was a fateful call one rainy night.

    She called him on some pretense of a party invitation. When he told her he was busy the night of her event, she let loose like a cannon full of powder. Her parting shot had been telling him to find some help, but she let the word ‘help’ hang in the air for a minute. It could have meant anything.  

     He claimed he didn’t know what she meant, or what she was talking about. She hung up on him. He called back. He wanted to meet the next day. Talk things out. She would have none of it. After all the time that had gone by, she just didn’t think further talking would be useful, and it bordered on humiliation from her point of view. They parted with the words, “You go to your event. I’ll go to mine. And then we’ll just see.” And that is how they left it. He never called her again.

     She was in her senior year at the university as an English major. She had signed up for creative writing, a class that was so creative it included grad students as well. So entered from stage left of her life, her next and final Mr. Right

    She started dating her new Mr. Right at the end of that semester. She wished she had said the words to Jim she knew to be true during that last phone call. “Jim, do you think you might be...you know...do you think you might be attracted to guys?”

    She never spoke the words then because she knew he needed to continue living the lie about himself. And she didn’t have the nerve to say what he clearly was not willing to hear. It was a lie of omission--one of the worst kinds of lies for a person to atone for. Eons later, when her own girls were grown and her Mr. Right was still the same one she had found in the aftermath of Jim, she looked Jim up on social media.  

     When they had dated, there was no internet, not really. Not in its current state. She had no way to locate Jim, if she had wanted to, after moving, leaving college getting married, moving again. She had lost his phone number long ago. And in the early days of rearing children, working, and maintaining her marriage, she never wanted to investigate him further.  

      However, when one of her girls had announced that she was a lesbian at the Thanksgiving family dinner, it led Della to another revelation the following year. For a full year, she felt distanced from her daughter. She acted accepting, but her heart did match what her words often said. 

The transition she was going through reminded her of something, but she could not remember what. Then one day, it hit her. It was the same kind of mourning and loss she had felt the summer after her discovery of Jim’s secret. 

      She needed to connect the dots. So she looked Jim up on social media. When she found him, a dagger shot through her heart. She found herself thinking, “If only…” and a new and old sadness filled her up. Jim did not have a huge presence on social media, but what she could find confirmed her suspicions about him. She clicked off her computer and turned to gaze at her final Mr. Right.