The Complicated Fanny

by Ernest Gamble

The Lifestyle Now & Forever! section of the Los Angeles Times rang with the headline:

Lost Jane Austen Thriller Disinterred in Istanbul

The Complicated Fanny Rumored to Contain

Shards of Semi-Autobiography

*

Letting fall her monocle, Dame Emma Thompson, or "Em" as the brainy, bankable Euro-patootie "it" girl was known affectionately in country houses and the gutter press, emerged naked and snickering from the peculiarly shaped, faintly spooky indoor swimming pool of her neo-Gothic fixer-upper overlooking an off ramp of the San Bernardino freeway.

Adorning but not concealing her glossy mass of chestnut hair beneath a Mexican sombrero, Em, choking back a hiccup, draped herself in worldly disorder across a squashy, tassled settee as if waiting for the spice ship from Ceylon and listened thoughtfully as Boy Oops-Spielberg, her druidic, flintily self-critical publicist and osteopath, read aloud, in an annoying nasal stammer, a fax from Her Majesty the Queen, stopping at intervals to carefully wipe his mouth like the Prioress in Chaucer, "Verify ASAP authenticity of Austen manuscript and work up screenplay for BBC before Warner Bros. or MGM parachute in pre-production team. Necessary to secure 'amicable relations' with Court of Sublime Selim, Sultan of Turkey. Military transport standing by. Expect wide press publicity. E-mail to follow. HRH."

Impulsively placing her breasts at a fashionable angle, Em cooed in a reedy treble, "How very ... something."

"An opportunity perhaps to capture with camcorder the unspoilt Byzantine mosaics," Boy ventured, between little dry spasms of mechanical laughter.

Like a Titian brought up for authentication, Em lingered with unusual indolence over the Tootsie Pop she had removed from her mouth to see how it was getting on and breathed, "Nothing like foreign climes to restore one's tone."

*

Shivering into a slimming decollete faux-leopard "Baby Doll" day dress, Em, devoid of eye liner, clapped on a pith helmet with elastic under the chin and, slightly out of sorts from negotiating the tarmac in disturbing black stiletto heels, scrambled aboard the idling Eisenhower-era DC-9, her arms moving inexplicably in small, bird-like swoops.

"Butter-Rum Life Saver?" she inquired of Boy with a polite snort, snapping open her satinwood traveling box which concealed spring-loaded compartments housing a collection of hard-earned Academy Award statuettes as well as pricey manicure and tea-making utensils.

Pouring from a porcelain teapot fashioned to look like a duck, Boy adjusted Em's fluffy feather boa and preserved a discreet silence as she scrutinized with monocled interest the most recent coded cable from Her Majesty the Queen: "Sultan Abdul the Damned sacked by cabal in outburst of pique. Fleet dispatched to Mediterranean. Shipping camel from London Zoo for your personal use. HRH."

Em's flawless, strawberry and cream complexion went somewhat to pallor.

"Because God still believes in the relative dulcety of the English countryside, it is surely His will that we interfere in the internal affairs of a non-belligerent NATO country," Boy guffawed with the sort of Who-me? tongue-in-cheek buoyancy that can only come of a profoundly ripening id.

*

Accompanying herself with monotonous ease on a laptop pianoforte, Em, belting out a hearty rendition of "This Old Man," had just got to the bit about knick-knacking up in heaven when the DC-9's chatty, delusional co-pilot, whose taste ran to polka dots, established a "first" by inadvertently crash landing into a fish stall set between view-obstructing minarets that dotted the capital of what Churchill called Europe's soft underbelly, prudently fortified with hastily dug Tomahawk cruise missile silos in anticipation of a British expeditionary force bent on fomenting holy war and reclaiming a colonial foothold in the Near East (if one is to believe the idiosyncratic, sometimes contradictory gossip surfacing on the Web). Crawling out from beneath the wreckage, Em completed a methodical inspection of Boy for signs of concussion (he appeared to be lucid enough to hold up two fingers on command) then presented her diplomatic credentials to a bewhiskered officer of the Turkish Revolutionary Guard standing at attention before abruptly erected sawhorses holding back the curious.

"Jane Austen's parsonage was perhaps more drafty than contemporary biographers have allowed," he sputtered clumsily in serviceable English beneath a burdensome beaded head-dress that added several inches to his height.

As Em's witty and sometimes scatological bon mots were widely circulated throughout the Pan-Islamic world, the freckle-laden Turkish officer, perspiring freely, was understandably disappointed when she made no reply except to venture, "Indeed."

*

Tossing back her mane with a listless hand, its little finger archly splayed, Em, in a sequined tube top and constricting biscuit colored jodhpurs, made her way past topiary chickens lined up like a corps de ballet encircling the tackily neon, faux-marble Beler Bey Hilton where a complimentary lunch and toffee pull was being held in honor of her arrival by the Byzantine chapter of the International Jane Austen and Rational Cheese Society.

Making occasional pretense of puzzling over a Mr. Spock refrigerator magnet floating in her soup, Em listened politely as a lumpy dowager in soiled pinstripes harrumped with a portentious Boswellian tone, The Complicated Fanny's existence was hinted at in several of Jane's letters to her sardonic Cockney herbalist, a fact scholars continue to ignore at their peril."

Running a lead comb through her eyebrows, Em wondered aloud what motive governed the manuscript's transportation from Bath to the municipal smokeworks of Istanbul as the whole of Jane's life had been spent locally among the families of clergymen and minor gentry. A brisk exchange ensued, several tiresome, pasty-faced Jane-ites going so far as to maintain, through clenched teeth, that they did not exist, citing the philosophy of Berkeley which questioned the reality of material objects.

After a hoarsely whispered conference with herself, the soiled dowager, gesticulating furiously while ammonia was held to her nose, confirmed the disingenuous suspicion that Jane Austen may, in middle age, have consorted with circus people.

"Capeesh?" she brayed, superintending a maracoon.

*

Appearing, scarved and unbidden, at precisely the opportune moment, Boy, taking Em firmly by the elbows, hustled her with comparative ease through the hotel's nausea-inducing kitchen onto a side street off Istikal Caddesi, a sweltering pedestrian promenade beyond which no doubt pressing business awaited her. Responding with an indolent shrug born of privilege, Em, inserting her monocle, followed the direction of Boy's finger past the somewhat repetitive Ottoman architecture pockmarked by centuries of dubious restoration where a luxuriously canopied sampan manned by twelve shirtless oarsmen, two abreast, of more than ordinary beauty, was bobbing leisurely in the Bosporus.

"Am I to go aboard?" Em inquired, gazing like a hungry leopard at the magisterially bronzed oarsmen.

"So it would seem," Boy replied, placing a picnic hamper of seed cakes and tinned tongue on the creaky, swaying deck. "You are to meet a nun carrying a ventriloquist's dummy in whose possession the manuscript appears to have fallen."

Suppressing a momentary impulse to tweak the nearest oarsman's nipples, Em seated herself presumptively and retired behind a periodical as the sampan glided through a press of tourist boats with the grim determination of a maniacal ballet master.

"And do be careful. Your impromptu appearance on `Good Morning Istanbul' may have landed you in fresh difficulties with the revolutionary clique's secret police," Boy, knocking out his pipe, yelped in what Em regarded as more of an Oxford rather than his typical Cambridge slant.

*

Looking radiant in a fetching Islamic head scarf complemented by pink Capri pants and a chiffon and crepe de chine blouse of such fineness of texture as to permit seeing through, Em stood at the entrance of a twisty, wine-dark underground reservoir built by Constantine on a deserted island far up the Bosporus.

"Hello. Anyone there with a ventriloquist's dummy?" she chirped pleasantly, displaying a refreshing decisiveness of character. The Dada-esque, sinewy demimonde reminded Em of dailies from the high concept splatter flick she had just completed for Disney, Ada Byron vs. The Smog Pirates, at the climax of which her character, a begrimed, flamethrower-wielding endocrinologist, swallows a fatal dose of bromide after falling into those very mistakes in etiquette against which she had been schooled from birth.

"Lozenge?" asked a rumpled, hunky dweeb carrying a Cartoon Network tote bag, abruptly materializing as if by alchemy from behind an overturned, faintly repulsive statue of the multi-breasted Diana of Ephesus.

Em delicately wiggled her nose like Samantha Stephens in Bewitched. "Didn't we share a conga line at last year's Golden Globes?" she preened thoughtfully, the ridiculously fragrant sprig of honeysuckle in his lapel almost asphyxiating her.

Snapping shut a tin of Altoids, the slightly idealized dweeb, his fez askew, seemed distracted. Behind him, at a respectable distance, a nun with a ventriloquist's dummy kept nervous watch in the semi-darkness.

"You wish to see the manuscript, verify its authenticity?" the dummy pantomimed disarmingly, a troubling, thuggish permanent grin disfiguring its face.

"Why not?" Em shrugged good-naturedly and giving a shaping touch to her cupid's bow, fire engine red lips, tagged along on a wide-eyed descent deep beneath the Great Mosque of Progress and Modern Personal Hygiene, the adenoidal Muslim call to prayer echoing in ebbs and flows through the intense, sensory violating heat.

After what seemed an age, the self-service elevator came to a jumpy halt and an automatic door popped open revealing a soundproof, steel-reinforced concrete, asbestos lined vault squatting like a Buddha beneath fluorescent lighting, its massive door ajar. From its recesses crawled a bruised, geriatric emigre rasping in an apoplectic, garbled monotone, "The Complicated Fanny ... it is stolen ... gone!"

"Impossible!" snapped the dummy, its head spinning like a pinball as the hunky dweeb, emitting brief choking noises, moved dumbfoundedly from drawer to drawer where the brittle manuscript pages had been kept between humidity-controlled glass plates.

His language skills eroding, the usually unflappable vault curator convulsed, "Gun-toting brigands in ski masks ... repeating over and over: 'This will bring intellectual credibility to the Sunday night lineup.' They seemed remarkably focused."

A year later, the NBC miniseries My Little Fanny, "based on an idea by Jane Austen," won for the network the May sweeps and created a lucrative franchise from the sequels Fanny Suitably Rewarded and Fanny Quite Herself as well as a series of thin novelizations based on the moist-eyed, pigtailed gamine's adventures in a Georgian netherworld of rheumatic vicars and leathery spinster aunts rather too highly roughed.

*

Invasion rumors reached a fever pitch and martial law was decreed in Istanbul when the media-genic British Prime Minister, during televised Question Time, suggested that Abdul the Damned, who had regained the throne in a hastily improvised palace coup, occasionally accessorized badly.

*

The sound of Em, naked except for a straw boater and shin guards, pressing her skates into the service of figure-eights scribing the mahogany floor of her glassed-in roller rink (and advertently smashing several irreplaceable Jade figures) hurried Boy into the still evening air of the garden, where, collapsing into a green wicker chaise, he began capturing the Black Death in needlepoint. Em, her face framed in corrugated, Pre-Raphaelite wavelets, made a tardy appearance among the hydrangeas and delphiniums, kicking off her skates with a restless sigh. Boy barked into a copper speaking tube of his own invention and presently a man in livery appeared with sticky cake.

"How very complicated life is," Boy opined over the shrieking of a peacock in the middle distance.

"The only complication in life," Em chanted with the lilt of blank verse, "should be a certain hesitation over which screenplay to peruse next."

The heather under her feet was so springy she had begun to feel somewhat light-headed.