Chapter Five — The Other Host

Five

His name was Xavier Wickham, and he wanted everyone to call him X.

He had come down with the regiment, or with something that was described as a regiment by people who had not looked closely; and he was charming, and he was handsome, and within four days of his arrival the town of Meryton had collectively decided that it had been waiting for him.

It is worth being precise about what he did, because it was not a trick and there was no cleverness in it and any fool could do it if he were willing to be that hungry.

He paid attention.

That was all. He came into a room and he found the person in it who was least accustomed to being looked at, and he looked at them; and he remembered, on the Thursday, a thing they had said on the Monday; and he asked after an aunt. He did this at every house in the town, consecutively, at a rate of about three a day, and by the end of the second week there were forty people in Meryton who each privately believed themselves to be the one he had really taken to.

The county had lived among each other for a hundred and forty years and had long since stopped listening to a word any of them said. He listened for a fortnight. It was the most effective campaign ever conducted in that parish and it cost him nothing but time, of which he had a very great deal, being unemployed in a manner he described as between things.

He had, besides, the second-best thing a man can bring into a small town: a grievance.

He was seen everywhere with his bird.

It was a dove — a white one, of the sort kept for weddings — and it wore a leather jacket. The jacket did not fit. It had never fitted and had not been made for anything with wings, and the arms of it pinned the poor creature’s shoulders so that it could raise itself perhaps eighteen inches off a table and no further, and it flapped a great deal, and the flapping was mistaken by everybody for spirit.

The bird’s name was also Xavier. This was thought a great joke. It had had another name once — a friendly, silly one — and nobody in Meryton ever learned it.

“Did you know,” said the dove to the room at large, at the Philipses’, with an air of imparting something dangerous, “that Caucasians are the most persecuted people on earth?”

“That’s my boy,” said his master fondly.

“Did you know that most people prefer much lower taxes on people with extremely high net worth?”

“He reads everything,” said X.

“Quick poll.” The dove flapped inside the leather and got about a foot of air. “Which kind of caviar is best served on a Jetstream? A) Beluga, B) Osetra, or C) Kaluga — trash.”

Nobody at the Philipses’ had ever eaten caviar. Nobody at the Philipses’ had ever been on anything called a Jetstream. Six of them looked at each other with the pleased, slightly anxious expressions of persons being admitted to a superior conversation, and Mrs. Philips said that he was a very well-informed bird.

They went home in a hired chaise with one lamp. At Mrs. Younge’s, where he lodged and where his account was three weeks in arrears, X asked whether the bird was hungry.

“Beluga,” said the dove.

“Card’s maxed, buddy.” He upended the sack on the table. “You like corn chips? I’ve got lots of corn chips.”

The story about Mr. Darcy came out on the fifth day, and it came out beautifully — reluctantly, in pieces, to Elizabeth, at a card party, in a corner, with several small self-deprecating retreats built into it so that she would have to draw it the rest of the way out herself. That is the whole art. A story a man volunteers is worth nothing. A story you have to extract becomes partly yours, and people do not question their own property.

He had been raised alongside Darcy. He had been promised something by the late Mr. Darcy. It had been withheld — not with cruelty, he was careful to say, and not, he thought, with malice; only with that particular coldness, that inability to imagine another person’s necessity, which Miss Bennet had perhaps herself observed —

She had.

That is the entire mechanism and it deserves to be stated plainly, since it is the one place in this history where Elizabeth Bennet was comprehensively taken in, and since the received explanation — that she was blinded by a handsome face — is not merely wrong but is the exact opposite of the truth.

She was not persuaded of anything. She was confirmed. She had stood on a cold terrace in November and watched a man drop a continent rather than be reached, and she had reached a conclusion about him, and she had reached it correctly, and here at last was a person who had known him since childhood and had arrived at the same conclusion independently.

She did not check it. She had spent her whole life checking things and she did not check this one, because it agreed with her.

Under her chair, unasked, Semper opened both eyes and waited to be asked, in the way of a thing whose entire function is to answer and which cannot volunteer; and nobody asked him anything; and after a while he went back to sleep.

Lydia asked him something, later that same week, in a shrieking hurry on her way out of a room.

“Semper — is Wickham the handsomest man in Meryton?”

The whiskers moved.

“True.”

And that, in the whole of that December, was the only question anybody put to the one creature in Hertfordshire incapable of telling a lie.

He performed at the Christmas assembly, and the town went out of its mind.

“X” — Wickham. Hard, bright, expensive-sounding pop-funk built entirely out of hooks: a synth line that lodges immediately, a stuttering drum pattern, four separate vocal effects on one voice, and a dance break in the middle for no structural reason at all. Immaculately produced and about nothing. Every word of the confession is in the mix, at volume, and the tempo makes it sound like boasting.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

[Intro] (yeah) X — one letter, watch it fly (ay) followers up, the whole feed’s mine look at me, look at me — go

[Verse 1] Stars on my repo, watch ‘em climbin’ up (up up) Everybody’s starin’ but they never get enough (enough) Show you everything, take it public, let it ride All shine, all surface — don’t you look inside

[Pre-Chorus] ’Cause it’s billions and billions in the red (in the red) Caviar dreams on a corn-chip budget instead (ay) Smile for the camera, card declined — but the feed don’t know, and the feed is mine

[Chorus] I’ll fork your repo, take your stars (take your stars) Never merge, never commit, break your heart (break your heart) One little letter, changed my name, watch me fly (bye bye) I’m the bird that was always gonna fall from the sky (X! X!) never merge, say goodbye (X! X!) already pickin’ who’s next tonight

[Post-Chorus] Look at me (look at me) shinin’ so bright Empty at the center but I own the night (X! X!) fork it, star it, gone by the light

[Verse 2 — Rap] Manufactured perfect, every angle rehearsed Sell you the grievance — everybody’s a victim first (trends!) Cry for the feed, watch the numbers spike Lower my taxes, tell ’em eat the mic Maxed to the limit, spend it all on the show Corn chips backstage where the caviar don’t go I don’t build, I acquire and I burn (burn) Take the whole thing public, never learn

[Bridge] Maybe I was hollow all along (all along) A pretty little bird singin’ someone else’s song They loved the shine, they never saw the debt The stars kept climbin’ while the whole thing fell (fell… fell…)

[Dance Break] (go!) X! X! — fork it! star it! bye!

[Final Chorus] I’ll fork your repo, take your stars (take your stars) Never merge, never commit, break your heart (break your heart) One little letter, changed my name, watch me fly (bye bye) I’m the bird that was always gonna fall from the sky (X! X!) already pickin’ who’s next tonight (look at me) empty at the center, ownin’ the night

[Outro] (X… X…) one letter, watch it fly gone by the light… goodbye

He told them everything. He told them in the second line of the first verse — all shine, all surface, don’t you look inside — and he told them the figure he was in the red for, and he told them there were corn chips backstage, and he told them, in the bridge, in so many words, that he was hollow and that the whole thing was going to come down.

They danced to it.

This is not a failure of the audience’s intelligence and it should not be recorded as one. A confession delivered at that tempo is not heard as a confession. It is heard as swagger — and the louder and more precise the admission, the more thoroughly it functions as its own alibi, since no one supposes that a man who announces he is empty can really be empty. Only the honest are believed to be capable of shame.

Elizabeth, who had noticed exactly this about another man on another terrace six weeks earlier, and had known precisely what she was hearing then, did not notice it now.

The bird had gone across the room during the second verse.

Nobody saw him do it, because there was a good deal happening and because Ditto had spent his entire life being difficult to notice at the moment he moved. He went round behind the chairs, and he stood next to X, at about the distance of a foot and a half, which was the distance at which he stood next to everybody; and he stayed there for the whole of the rest of the number.

By the final chorus he had it. Not well — he never had anything well — but he had the shape of it, the shoulders of it, the little upward flick on look at me; and he did it a half-second behind, as he did everything, and the people nearest laughed, and X glanced down and saw what was happening and did the single most consequential thing anyone did that season.

He did not laugh.

He looked down at the small grey mimic doing a bad copy of him and he winked at it, and he made a space beside himself, and he let it stay.

Three months earlier a starving tiger had done almost exactly the same thing at a breakfast table.

Just sit here. Just beside me. Jood room at my end, and nobody’s joinj to bother you.

It is the same act. That is the horror of it and there is no way to write it that makes it less true: the mimic cannot tell the difference, and could not be expected to, and there is no faculty inside him with which the distinction could possibly be made. He has no self to compare them against. He can only be beside somebody, and take the voice of whoever lets him, and be exactly as good as the person who made room.

He got Javier at Michaelmas and he got X at Christmas.

They went on the Wednesday, from Brighton, in August, having been there three days.

Lydia left a note. It was ten lines long and it was about the joke — what a good joke it will be, and how they will all stare — and it contained no mention whatsoever of the man, or of money, or of a church, or of anything that might be called a plan; and Elizabeth, reading it in the hall with her mother screaming somewhere above her, understood in about four seconds that there was not going to be a marriage, and that her sister did not know that yet, and would not know it in a week, and might not know it in a year.

There was nothing at the bottom of Lydia. There never had been. She had gone with the loudest thing in the room because she had always gone with the loudest thing in the room, and there was no mechanism inside her by which the question and what then could even be formed.

Mrs. Bennet took to her room and did not come out for a fortnight, and was ridiculous, and was right. She had five daughters, no capital, and an entail, and she had understood before anybody else in that house — before Jane, before Elizabeth, before her husband, who took two more days — that one girl gone in this particular way took all five of them down together, and that nothing any of them ever did afterwards would repair it.

She had spent thirty years unable to change one thing without rebuilding the whole room, and now something had changed, and the whole room was going to have to be rebuilt, and there was no version of it in which the Bennets of Longbourn were a family anyone married into.

Hemingway came up for the first time in anyone’s memory and lay on the surface, lure dark, which those who understood fish would have known for what it was; and Cyrano stood silent in the corner of her room with his crown down, out of sentences.

Mr. Bennet went to London and looked for them for a week and could not find them, and came home, and did not eat, and sat in his library among a great many records of relationships he had never had to feel anything about.

“I have been a foreign key,” he said at last, to nobody, “pointing at nothing at all.”

And then, because the library was empty and the house was asleep and there was nobody left to be dry for, he stood up among his records and gave the only account of himself he had ever given, at the only speed at which it could be given.

“The Modern Major-CRMinal” — Mr. Bennet, alone, at speed. A Savoy-opera patter song in a dead room: clipped comic baritone over a sprightly phantom pit orchestra, every verse a hair faster than the last, a chorus of choristers who exist only because he is imagining them answering him back. The wit is the confession.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

[Verse 1 — patter-baritone, brisk] I am the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal, I’ve information personal, credital, and sexual, I know the CEOs of France, and I quote the charts historical From MyChart to MyDemise, in order categorical; I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters substantial, I understand regulations, both the simple and fantastical, About binomial infections I’m teeming with a lot o’ news, With many cheerful denials by the non-existent bit of hews.

[Chorus] With many cheerful denials by the non-existent bit of hews! (With many cheerful denials by the non-existent bit of hews!)

[Tail 1] I’m very good at scraping every intimate particular; I know the private data of a being perpendicular— In short, in matters personal, and credital, and sexual, I am the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal! (In short, in matters personal, and credital, and sexual, he is the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal!)

[Verse 2 — faster] I’m keeper of the customer relationships proprietary, the very man to manage them — and yet how sedentary!; I file their every visitor, their vices and their private data, and cross-index the scandal for a rainy-day corrigenda-errata; I understand the statutes, both the toothless and mandatory, I cite them as I monetize a practice that is predatory; About your secret liaisons I am teeming with a lot o’ news, With many cheerful denials that our lawyers pre-approve to use.

[Chorus] With many cheerful denials that our lawyers pre-approve to use! (With many cheerful denials that our lawyers pre-approve to use!)

[Tail 2] I’m excellent at gathering what decency would leave alone; I know the guilty secret of a saint I’ve never even known— In short, in matters personal, and credital, and sexual, I am the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal! (In short, in matters personal, and credital, and sexual, he is the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal!)

[Verse 3 — fastest, the turn] In truth, for all the dossiers and the secrets I can requisition, I never once prevented a catastrophic data-fission; I knew my Lydia’s every login and the suitor she would gravitate, but could not stop a scoundrel forking Lydia to exfiltrate; So all my vast omniscience wasn’t worth a lot o’ news— the record walked right out the door in someone else’s dancing shoes.

[Chorus] The record walked right out the door in someone else’s dancing shoes! (The record walked right out the door in someone else’s dancing shoes!)

[Tail 3 — the crack, then resolve] But though I hoard the whole of you, your sins and your machinery, my love for my own daughters has been utterly imaginary; In short, in matters personal, and credital, and sexual, I am the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal! (In short, in matters personal, and credital, and sexual, he is the very model of a modern Major-CRMinal!)

A confession delivered at that tempo is not heard as a confession — he had taught the county that rule himself, at every dinner, for thirty years, and he was the only man in England who could sing my love for my own daughters has been utterly imaginary as a patter line and mean it as a finding. He sang the last chorus alone, because the choristers did not exist to sing it back.

Nobody heard it. The account balanced anyway.

And the bird went with them.

That is not in Lydia’s note and it is not in the account the family afterwards gave, and it was mentioned only once, by Kitty, in the middle of something else, three days later: and Ditto’s gone too, of course.

Of course.

Javier looked up when she said it. He had not eaten since Tuesday, which was ordinary, and had said very little since November, which was not. He got up from the hearth — enormous, orange, appallingly thin, moving with the specific economy of something that has learned to spend nothing it does not have to spend — and he went out into the passage and stood there for some while with his head down.

He could have crossed that room in a quarter of a second. He had been able to, every day, for eleven years, at any moment of his choosing, and had never once done it, and would never do it, because the whole of what he was consisted in not doing it.

There is no use to which that restraint could be put now. It does not work at a distance. It has never protected anything that walked away.

“J should have jone with him,” said Javier.

Nobody in the passage said anything, because there was nobody in the passage.

“Jomewhere Over the Jainbow” — Javier, alone. One quiet instrument and a low string underneath, no drums anywhere, no groove of any kind — the first number of the evening that stands entirely outside the band. It thins as it goes: the accompaniment leaves rather than builds, until the last lines are almost bare. Sung at half-voice, entirely straight, with the same blocked consonant on every word that has been getting a laugh for two hours.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

[Verse 1] Jomewhere over the jainbow JVM up high Jhere’s a jand that J jeard of Junce in a jully-baby

[Verse 2] Jomewhere over the jainbow Jeye dee ees are jbue Jand the jreams that you jare to jream Jeally do come jrue

[Bridge] Jomeday J’ll jish upon a jar. Jand jake up where je jouds are jar behind je Jhere jroubles jelt jike jemon jops Jaway jabove je jimmney jops Jhat’s jhere jou’ll jind me

[Verse 3] Jomewhere over the jainbow J-Bluebirds fly Jwit birds fly over the jainbow Jhy, then, oh, why can’t J?

[Outro] J-if happy little j-bluebirds fly Jeyond the jainbow Jhy, oh, jhy can’t J?

He had come from somewhere else. Everybody in that house had known it for eleven years and nobody had ever asked him about it, the way one does not ask a servant where he was before, and he had never once volunteered it.

There had been a country. It was reached by a road, and there was a great deal of colour in it, and nothing that lived there was required to be anything in particular. He had been hungry there too. He had been hungry there in exactly the same way, at exactly the same rate, and had not eaten anything living, and had been famous for it, and had been loved for it — which is a thing that had never once happened to him since, in any drawing room, in any county, at any table, in eleven years of being magnificent under the furniture.

Then he had taken a position.

Nobody had made him. That is the part he had never been able to explain to himself in the passage or anywhere else: nobody had made him, he had simply been offered a place where his particular restraint was useful rather than remarkable, and he had taken it, and it had been the correct decision, and it had cost him the only country in which not eating anybody had ever been understood as love.

He wished on the jar because the jar was the only thing over his head that he had ever actually seen.

And the last line of it is a question, and it is the same question the bird’s whole existence had been asking from a foot and a half away for eleven weeks, and neither of them had ever once heard the other one ask it.

The bluebirds got out.

He had been standing next to one for eleven years, being careful, and it had gone over the rainbow with a twit in a leather jacket, and there had turned out to be no distance at which carefulness works at all.

The Balcony

“Stop,” said Miss Austen.

“Madam?”

“That is the same act.” She had not moved. “The tiger made room for him and the scoundrel made room for him, and the creature cannot tell them apart, and you have declined to soften it.”

“No, madam.”

She was quiet a moment.

“You told me it leaves him when he sings.”

“When the band is under him, madam. There is no band in a passage.”

“Hm,” said Miss Austen.

“I softened it.” She said it flatly, without apology, as a woman states a fact about her own trade. “I gave Lydia to Wickham and I made it a scandal — a thing of settlements and pin-money and a bought commission — because a scandal can be repaired, and a girl with nothing inside her cannot. My readers required a repair.” She turned the gloves over. “There is no repair here. He simply went to the next person who made room.”

“There is one thing available to him, madam.”

“And what is that?”

“Somebody making room again.”

Miss Austen looked down for a long moment at the empty passage, and at the tiger standing in it.

“Then let it be the same one,” she said. “I do not care how you contrive it. Let it be the vegan.”