Eligible Read online

  From behind the closed door of her bedroom, Mary called, “Lizzy, did someone just ring our doorbell?”

  FOR THE REST of the day—while helping her parents settle in at the country club, while dropping off unexpired canned goods from the Tudor at a food pantry, and while discussing final fumigation preparations with Ken Weinrich (yes, Liz had watered the soil the previous day)—through all of it, Liz thought continuously of Darcy. Eating a late lunch on the porch of the country club with Mary and her parents, Liz could hardly follow what anyone was saying, even when the subject changed from Mrs. Bennet’s speculation about why things hadn’t worked for Jane and Chip to what Kathy de Bourgh would be like. Frowning, Mrs. Bennet said, “I’ve always found her very strident.”

  It was Mr. Bennet who was driving Liz to the airport for her flight to Houston, though they stopped first at her sisters’ apartment to get her bags. Just outside the door of their unit, set on the floor and leaning against the wall, was a plain business envelope with Liz’s first name written on it.

  “Who’s that from?” Mary asked, and Liz folded it in half, stuffed it into her pants pocket, and said, “Nobody.”

  Mary made a scoffing sound. “Yeah, apparently.”

  The envelope practically thrummed as Liz rode to the airport in the passenger seat of her father’s car.

  “Do you remember when you and Mom are allowed back in the house?” Liz asked as her father merged onto 71 South. “It’s one o’clock on Friday. You’ll need to dump out the ice that’s in the ice maker. Don’t make a gin and tonic with it.”

  “It’s remarkable, isn’t it,” Mr. Bennet said, “that for decades at a time, I’ve stayed alive without your daily instructions?”

  “The fumigation guys will have opened all your drawers and cabinets for air circulation,” Liz said. “And the doors and windows, too. But Mary will come over and help close everything. And then, please, will you and Mom both really, really try to keep the house looking presentable for when agents want to show it?”

  Without checking his rearview mirror, Mr. Bennet moved over a lane, and a car just behind them honked. “Relax, my dear,” he said. “We’ll all be just fine.”

  “Do you realize you almost had an accident right now?”

  Mr. Bennet reached out his arm and patted Liz’s knee. In an uncharacteristically serious tone, he said, “Lizzy, you’ve been a voice of reason amid a cacophony of foolishness. It was very good of you to come home this summer.”

  AS SOON AS she had checked her suitcase, made it through airport security, and found the gate from which her plane would depart, Liz opened the envelope. The letter filled four pages of notebook paper, and Darcy’s handwriting, which she had never seen, was of medium size and no particular beauty; inscribed in black ballpoint ink, it seemed to be that of a person making an effort at legibility:

  Dear Liz,

  First off, don’t worry that I’ll try to persuade you here of what I suggested earlier today. The sooner we can both forget my misguided idea, which you obviously found so repulsive, the better for both of us. That said, I’m compelled to clarify a few points regarding Jane and Jasper Wick. I realize that some of what I say might offend you further, and that’s not my intent, but if it’s a by-product of stating the truth, so be it.

  I was, of course, aware that Chip had fallen for your sister. In fact, his feelings for her seemed deeper than for any woman I’d observed him with before. However, although Jane is always a polite person, I wasn’t convinced that she reciprocated his interest. The night of Chip’s dinner party, I heard Jane tell you that she didn’t think she should keep the bike Chip had bought her because of her doubts about their relationship. Granted, I already didn’t think your family was the ideal one for Chip to marry into—I know you won’t want to hear this, but, beyond your mother’s pushiness and preoccupation with social climbing, I find Lydia and Kitty’s indifference to basic manners mind-boggling. And remember that I have a sister close in age to them. I didn’t think such shallow, pampered egotists existed except on reality television…which brings me to my next point. Regardless of my reservations about Jane (reservations Caroline shared, by the way), I couldn’t have convinced Chip to leave Cincinnati and join the Eligible reunion. Frankly, I assume he used Jane’s pregnancy as an excuse to do what he already wanted to, which was take a break from medicine.

  You know your sister better than I do, and I’m willing to concede that I may have been wrong about her feelings for Chip. But if she is or was smitten with him, I didn’t see the evidence. Nevertheless, I genuinely like Jane, and if I’ve caused her to suffer, I’m sorry.

  As for your accusation that I mistreated Jasper Wick, it’s more difficult to refute because I’m not sure precisely what you think I’ve done. However, I’ll tell you the facts, and if you want corroboration, multiple articles ran at the time in the Stanford newspaper.

  I knew Jasper only by name for most of our time on campus and didn’t have an opinion about him. When we were seniors, he took a creative writing class (again, this is all part of the public record) and he turned in a story written from the perspective of a guy in Sigma Alpha Epsilon. I’m sorry to say that because of the charges eventually brought against him, and because I was part of the judicial affairs board, I had the unpleasant experience of reading this story, and I’m confident it was the worst possible version (if there’s any version that’s not bad) of frat-boy lit. Jasper’s crimes against the English language weren’t the reason he got into trouble, though. I wasn’t in the class (I suspect you’ll be neither surprised nor impressed when you hear that the only English course I took in college was to fulfill a requirement), but apparently the discussion of the story was very acrimonious, and the instructor, who was a woman named Tricia Randolph, sided with students who said they found the story offensive.

  Ms. Randolph, who had come to Stanford for a two-year writing fellowship, lived in a ground-floor studio in an on-campus graduate student complex. That night, she returned to her apartment to find that a window screen had been removed and there were puddles of urine all over the papers on her desk and the keyboard of her laptop computer. People had seen Jasper loitering outside the building, obviously drunk, and during questioning with campus police, he confessed to being the culprit. It was clearly a case of intentional property damage, and there was question as to whether, because Ms. Randolph was black, it was also a hate crime, though that charge was ultimately dismissed. I always had the impression that Jasper saw urinating on Ms. Randolph’s desk as a silly prank and viewed himself as a victim of rising political correctness, but to me his transgression absolutely had a racial component; whether or not he himself was aware of it, I doubt he’d have been so blatantly disrespectful to a white instructor. Again, though, when the judicial panel voted unanimously to expel him, it was for the property damage charge. Presumably, the sting of expulsion was exacerbated by the fact that it happened a couple weeks before our graduation, thus denying him a college degree, but my take is, if you want to graduate from Stanford, don’t piss on people’s desks. Clearly, you and I have different impressions of Jasper, and I hope this will shed light on why I’m not a fan. It would be nice to think a person can evolve, but I’m not sure I believe it. In any case, to reiterate what I told you yesterday: Whatever the parameters of your relationship with Jasper, you’re much too good for him. And please don’t think that in making such a declaration, I’m suggesting myself as the alternative. Your opinion of me is abundantly clear.

  I was tempted to tell you all of this today, but due to the unsettling nature of our conversation, I didn’t trust myself to relate the information in a coherent way. While I’m not even sure you’ll read this letter, I find the misapprehensions you’re under troubling enough that I’m nevertheless moved to try setting them straight.

  I wish you luck back in New York.

  Best,

  Fitzwilliam Darcy

  CONTRARY TO DARCY’S speculation, Liz didn’t merely read the letter; she
reread it many times and with each round experienced fresh incertitude and distress. His comments about Jane were not particularly convincing. That he believed his own version of events was plausible, but she suspected that his antipathy to her family had contributed more to the part he’d played in disrupting Jane and Chip’s courtship than his doubts about Jane’s enthusiasm for his friend. She was unsurprised to learn that Caroline Bingley also had disapproved of the union.

  It was Darcy’s description of Jasper Wick that gave Liz pause. Simultaneously so disturbing and so credible, it matched Jasper’s own account in many ways. And yet, was Liz really such a poor judge of character? Was Jasper not merely flawed but racist and truly reprobate? Just as their relationship had too closely and obviously resembled a cliché for her to believe it was one, Jasper had alluded too frequently to being a jerk for Liz to interpret his allusions as anything except jokes; wouldn’t a true jerk show less self-awareness?

  As she’d read the letter for the first time, Liz’s stomach had tightened, and when she took her seat on the plane, she realized that the uncomfortable sensation was one of shame. The proof was plain that both her rudeness to Darcy on nearly every occasion and her faith in Jasper had been wrongly directed. Accompanying her shame was, on Jane’s behalf, a great regret, because it now seemed that misunderstanding rather than lack of affection from either party had been responsible for the collapse of Jane and Chip’s relationship. And yet, with Chip filming in Los Angeles and Jane ever more pregnant in upstate New York, a clarification that could have occurred over coffee in Cincinnati appeared logistically impossible.

  That Liz herself had dismissed Darcy’s declaration of love was the one decision she didn’t regret, for she could no sooner have accepted his entreaty than she could have accepted Cousin Willie’s. She and Darcy scarcely knew each other; the entirety of their interactions had been spent either quarreling or having sex and, in one case, on the evening when they’d each wanted the other person to be on top, both. (He had acquiesced.) She wouldn’t deny that she’d had fun with Darcy, of a confined, antagonistic, and peculiar sort, but surely fun could not be the basis of a relationship. Could it?

  The plane began to accelerate on the runway, and presently, they had lifted off. From her window seat, Liz watched the buildings and rolling hills shrink beneath her, the Ohio River go motionless, the cars on the highways slow to a crawl before vanishing from view. Cincinnati resembled in this moment a miniature model of the sort an architectural firm might create; it didn’t seem large enough to contain all the events of the past months. She had wondered, she now realized, if she’d make it out or end up staying forever, trapped by obligation and inertia; yet it was the very act of leaving that cast doubt on the desirability of escape. Or maybe it was nothing as symbolic as doubt, she thought as the pilot curved south; maybe all that was being cast was the shadow of her own plane over the dappled green midwestern afternoon.

  Time seemed, as it always does in adulthood after a particular stretch has concluded, no matter how ponderous or unpleasant the stretch was to endure, to have passed quickly indeed.

  RIDING IN A taxi from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport to her downtown hotel, Liz called Jane’s cellphone. When her sister answered, Liz blurted out, “Jane, I had sex with Darcy four times, and this morning he came to Kitty and Mary’s apartment and said he’s in love with me.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I was in my pajamas and didn’t even have a bra on.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What do you think I told him? He’s crazy.”

  Jane was quiet before saying, “Maybe he’s not as bad as we thought, if he recognizes how special you are.”

  “Actually, he told me I’m not beautiful, I’m not funny, I’m gossipy, and he can’t stand Mom—this is during his declaration of love. But I still don’t think he could imagine any woman, including me, turning down the chance to be his girlfriend.”

  “Poor guy.”

  “We’re talking about the person who came between you and Chip.”

  “But think how infatuated with you he must be to swallow his pride, which we all know he has lots of.”

  “Do you remember that conversation you and I had at Chip’s dinner party about how he’d bought a mountain bike for you and you didn’t know if you should accept it? Apparently, Darcy overheard us and took your hesitation about the bike as hesitation about Chip in general.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Aren’t you mad? Darcy’s given me grief for eavesdropping, but at least I do it competently.”

  “Lizzy, I did have reservations about Chip. I expressed them to you more than once. I liked him a lot, but—” Jane paused. “The whole time I was with Chip, I wasn’t sure that I was pregnant, but I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.”

  “I have something weird to tell you about Jasper, too,” Liz said.

  “Have you guys been in touch?”

  “Not really.” He had sent two more texts, neither of which Liz had answered. The first had been another link—this one to a list of unintentionally funny newspaper headlines—and the second had said, R u ignoring me? “I didn’t know it until recently,” Liz said, “but Jasper got expelled from Stanford a few weeks before he was supposed to graduate. Jasper and Darcy were in the same class, and even though Jasper had never mentioned his expulsion, he did admit that it had happened. But the story he told me and the story Darcy told me only sort of match up. Basically, according to Darcy, Jasper was kicked out for—” Liz hesitated out of concern for the taxi driver, who, if listening, had already learned an unseemly amount about her in a few minutes. But really, there were few ways of accurately describing the act. “For peeing on the desk of his creative writing professor,” she continued. “And the professor was a black woman.”

  “He peed?” Jane said. “As in going to the bathroom?”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “That kind of pee.”

  “On her desk?”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “On the desk in her apartment.”

  “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard,” Jane said.

  “It’s gross, right? Even if he was twenty-two at the time, and drunk—there’s no way it’s not gross. Darcy also said Jasper never got a degree. Does that mean he’s lied to every employer he’s ever had? It makes it even weirder that he wears that Stanford ring.”

  “Does he?” Jane said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “It’s gold. I’ve always thought it looks like what a bond trader from New Jersey would have worn in the 1980s.”

  “Did Darcy make up the story about Jasper because he’s jealous?”

  “No, I trust Darcy.” The statement felt odd. “But if Jasper peed on his professor’s desk, was he standing? Or did he go in a jar, then pour it out?”

  “Oh, Lizzy.”

  “And was it spontaneous, like he has to take a leak and thinks, I’ll do it on her desk? Or did he decide ahead of time?”

  “Jasper has always seemed like a complicated person.”

  “That’s generous.” Out the window of Liz’s taxi, the other lanes of the highway were packed with cars; to her right, the sun was setting and the sky was tinged pink. “Anyway,” she said, “how are you?”

  “I’m good,” Jane said. “I met with the doctor today, and she was really nice. Was it sad leaving Cincinnati?”

  Liz thought of her final view of the Tudor, when the tenting had been almost complete. The tarps Ken Weinrich’s crew used had yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings. Then she thought of Darcy standing just outside her sisters’ apartment in his scrubs. “It wasn’t sad exactly,” Liz said, “but it was different from what I’d expected.”

  THOUGH LIZ SOMETIMES went along with the pretense that interviewing celebrities was glamorous, the truth was that she rarely enjoyed it. Arranging the interviews through the celebrity’s publicist and the publicist�
�s assistant was always onerous, with frequent cancellations or time changes; during the interviews, celebrities often responded to questions using answers they had given before, which meant Liz’s editor wouldn’t want them included; publicists tended to sit in, chaperone-like, on the interviews, thereby dissuading the celebrity from saying anything ostensibly off-topic; and a general air of urgency attended the encounters, as if the celebrities were heads of state managing a nuclear threat rather than, as was usually the case, good-looking people who appeared onscreen in fictitious stories. Additionally, Liz always worried that her digital recorders—with celebrities, she used two—would fail her. These interviews were stressful then, without necessarily being interesting.

  At the same time—and Liz had found this assertion to be displeasing to some people who were not famous, such as her own younger sisters—most celebrities were charismatic, intelligent, and warm. Lydia, Kitty, Mary, and indeed much of the general population clearly wished to hear that celebrities were, in person, rude or moronic or not that attractive, but this had rarely been Liz’s experience. Publicists were frequently rude, and celebrities almost never were. Also, the celebrities usually were more beautiful in the flesh, emitting a certain glow that made their fame seem inevitable.

  That Kathy de Bourgh, while eighty years old and not a Hollywood starlet, possessed this glow was evident to Liz even from halfway back in the vast hotel ballroom where the National Society of Women in Finance keynote speech occurred. The speech began at one-fifteen in the afternoon, before an audience of two thousand; no more than a dozen of them, by Liz’s calculation, were men. Two large screens on either side of the stage projected Kathy de Bourgh’s image to all corners of the room, and in the first few seconds after Kathy de Bourgh was introduced, Liz noted that she had had Botox, as well as dermal fillers, though after that it was Kathy de Bourgh’s poise and the substance of her speech that Liz focused on. Because Liz had read Revolutions and Rebellions as well as Kathy de Bourgh’s subsequent book of essays and her memoir, much of the advice she dispensed and some of the personal anecdotes she shared were familiar, but her crisp and energetic delivery made everything fresh. Whether citing statistics about the dearth of women in professional leadership roles or recommending the steps individual women could take to command authority, she showed confidence and good humor. Being an icon, it seemed, agreed with her.