Eligible Read online

  The small screen showed an item on a celebrity gossip website that Liz thought of as holding greater appeal for Kitty and Lydia than Mary, with a headline that read, “Flunky Hunky: Did Eligible Bachelor Almost Fail Out of Harvard Medical School?” Below was a photo of Chip Bingley in a tuxedo, clinking champagne flutes with one of the comely female finalists from his season. Liz skimmed the entry, which was only a paragraph (“Former classmates say Bingley was known more for hitting the bike trails than the books…”), then gave back the phone. “So?” she said. “He passed his boards, obviously.”

  “If you cut off your finger, would you want him to be the one to stitch it on?”

  “The fact that he wasn’t first in his class doesn’t mean he’s incompetent.”

  Mary raised her eyebrows dubiously. “I knew there was something fishy about a graduate of Harvard Medical School ending up in an ER in Cincinnati. It was probably the only job he could get.”

  This seemed a rather presumptuous judgment from someone who herself had never been employed. “Don’t show that to anyone,” Liz said. “Even if it’s true, it’s irrelevant.”

  AT FIVE-THIRTY IN the morning, Liz awoke to the rustling of Jane slipping into the twin bed across from hers.

  “Yikes,” Liz mumbled. “I guess it was a successful date.”

  “Oh, Lizzy,” Jane said. “Chip’s amazing.”

  AFTER DINNER AT Orchids, Jane and Chip had moved on to Bakersfield for drinks. (Liz didn’t learn any of this until the afternoon, because Jane not only slept through their morning run but also skipped the eleven A.M. service at Knox Presbyterian Church that Mary and Mrs. Bennet attended every Sunday, Liz and Jane attended when in town, and all other Bennets eschewed except at Christmas.) Following drinks (“Did you actually drink or were you fostering a hospitable uterus again?” Liz asked, and Jane said she’d had one glass of wine at dinner and another at the bar), Jane and Chip had returned to his apartment in Oakley, where they’d taken the opportunity to discover that they were a couple truly compatible in all ways. “Do you think I’m slutty?” Jane asked.

  “You’re thirty-nine years old,” Liz said. “You should do what you want. Was it weird with his sister there?”

  Jane shook her head. “The room she’s staying in is at the opposite end of the apartment.” Jane was still lying in bed as she relayed these facts, and Liz sat on the other twin bed. “It wasn’t awkward with Chip at all, and neither of us was drunk,” Jane added. “I really like him. I just—I felt a way I hadn’t for so long. And it barely had to do with how good-looking he is. He is good-looking, but I was just so comfortable with him. He’s genuinely nice and not self-centered. I really don’t think he’s an aspiring actor. He told me the Eligible producers got in touch recently asking him to be on a reunion show, and he said no.”

  “Then I stand corrected.”

  “He also was mortified you’d overheard him and Darcy talking at the Lucases’. He wanted me to tell you how sorry he is, and how he doesn’t share Darcy’s view of Cincinnati at all.”

  Liz smiled. “At least when it comes to the women here, I’d say that’s obvious.”

  “Really, though.” Jane’s expression was serious. “Chip says Darcy can be kind of brusque, but he’s a really good person and a world-class surgeon.”

  “With a world-class ego, apparently. Just to warn you, Mom’s downstairs practically salivating. She knows you were out late.”

  “You didn’t tell her how late, did you?”

  “No, but I can’t promise she wasn’t looking out the window when Chip dropped you off.”

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Jane said. “Because think how much trouble I’d have gotten in back in high school for coming home from a date at five in the morning. But I just had to wait twenty years, and now Mom’s probably thrilled.”

  “I’VE GOT A question that you need not repeat to any of your sisters,” Mr. Bennet said. He and Liz sat in an exam room at the orthopedist’s office, waiting for the removal of the cast on his arm, a duty Jane had told Liz she didn’t think she could sit through. “I’m afraid I’ll throw up,” Jane had said, and Liz had said, “Because of the saw?” Jane had shook her head and said, “Because of the smell.”

  “This business about Mary being homosexual,” Mr. Bennet continued. “Do you think there’s anything to it?”

  Surprised, Liz said, “Why?”

  “Your mother wouldn’t like it, of course. But what’s the old saying about people going about their business as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses?”

  “Wow, Dad,” Liz said. “Have you become a Democrat?”

  Her father shuddered. “Scarcely. But where does Mary go on Tuesday nights?”

  “You could ask her. Where she goes, I mean, not if she’s gay. Well, you could ask her that, too, although I don’t know if I would.” Liz had concluded some years earlier that Mary wasn’t interesting enough to be gay. All the gay people Liz knew in New York, both men and women, were a little more something than average—a little more thoughtful or stylish or funny—though perhaps, Liz reflected, it was New York itself rather than gayness that accounted for their extra appeal.

  “If Mary has a friend she doesn’t think she can bring to dinner, that’d be rather a shame,” Mr. Bennet said. “Her significant other deserves to suffer as much as the rest of us.” He was looking at Liz directly, and she tried not to squirm. Was he talking about Mary, or was he actually alluding to her and Jasper?

  “She must have her reasons,” Liz said. “You did just say yourself that Mom would be horrified.”

  “Your mother is horrified many times a day.”

  “At least now Mom has Chip Bingley to pin her hopes on. Did you know he and Jane went out for the second time last night? They went to a movie.”

  Before Mr. Bennet could answer, the door opened, and there appeared a male nurse in aqua-colored scrubs, carrying the plastic saw with its round blade at one end; the entire contraption wasn’t much larger than an electric toothbrush. “Fred!” the nurse said, though they had never met. “How are we today?”

  Reading the nurse’s name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, “Bernard! We’re mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?”

  “REMEMBER ALLEN BAUSCH?” Mrs. Bennet said as Liz sat by herself at the kitchen table eating lunch.

  Liz looked at her mother with curiosity. “Mary’s prom date?”

  “You should find him on the computer and send him a message from Mary. That’s something that happens a lot now. Couples find each other on their computer after losing touch, and then they get married.”

  “He’s probably married to someone else.”

  “He isn’t. His aunt is in the Women’s League.”

  “Either way, why would I reach out to him? Shouldn’t Mary do it?”

  “She can be so stubborn.”

  “Were Mary and Allen even a couple? They might have just gone to prom as friends.”

  “He’s a lawyer in Atlanta, and he’s very active in his church,” Mrs. Bennet said. “If that’s not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don’t know what is.”

  CHARLOTTE LUCAS CALLED Liz midweek. “I’m organizing a game night for Friday,” she said. “Can you come, and can you tell your sisters?”

  “Do you remember that Lydia cheats?”

  “Is it possible to cheat at Charades?”

  “Oh, she’ll find a way,” Liz said. “I think Jane’s going out with Chip again Friday—for the third time, if you can believe it. But I’m definitely in, and I’ll try to round up Mary or Kitty.”

  “Jane should bring Chip. Or should I invite him myself?”

  Liz hesitated. On the one hand, the chance to observe her sister and Chip together was tempting. On the other hand, if Chip attended game night—and Liz nerdily, unabashedly adored game nights—he might bring his sister or, worse, Fitzwilliam Darcy. But who was she to exclude others? “Sure,�
� she said to Charlotte. “Call Chip.”

  SO DEPRESSING AND uncomfortable had Liz found the update about Mervetta that in searching for new housecleaners, she sought agencies that would send rotating crews of three rather than an individual, with whom Mrs. Bennet might have a falling-out.

  With estimates in hand for both cleaning and yard services, Liz knocked on the door of her father’s study. When he called, “There’s no one home,” she pushed the door open.

  Mr. Bennet’s desk, which he sat behind, faced into the room, so that Liz saw the back rather than the front of his computer. Aside from this computer, her father’s study looked as it had when his parents had sold the house to him in 1982 for the sum of one dollar, the same year they sold their summer home in Petoskey, Michigan, to his sister, Margo, for the same price. Indeed, it was quite possible that Mr. Bennet’s study, with its sleigh bed, brown velvet curtains, leather-topped writing desk (the leather was burnt red and had a border of gold-leaf embossing), and porcelain desk lamp with fringed shade, was unchanged since Liz’s grandparents had first moved into the Tudor in 1927.

  In her youth, Liz had understood her father to be an important businessman, an investor—he had driven each morning to a two-room office on Hyde Park Square, where he’d employed a secretary named Mrs. Lupshaw—and it was only with the passage of time that Liz realized that the investments he oversaw were solely those belonging to his immediate family and that, further, their oversight accounted for the entirety of his job. This realization had been so gradual that it was not until her junior year of college, when a friend of Liz’s said of the wealthy older guy the friend was dating, “He pretends to work, but I think he’s one of those men who push around piles of his family’s money,” that Liz felt an unwelcome sense of recognition. A decade earlier, when her father had “retired,” Liz had wished she did not have the cruel thought From what?

  Liz entered the study. “I’ve found people to clean up the house and the yard,” she said. She glanced at the reporter’s notebook in her hand. “I’m thinking I’ll have them both come every two weeks, though obviously you’ll need the yard people less after the summer. When Mrs. Bildeier dropped off banana bread, she gave me the name of the cleaning service she uses, and she said they’re great.”

  Her father’s eyes were focused on the computer screen as he said, “Your mother cleans the house, and I mow the lawn.”

  “In theory, maybe. But you still don’t have full mobility, and Mom is so focused on her Women’s League luncheon.” Following the removal of his cast the day before, Mr. Bennet’s right arm was pale, shrunken, scabby, and, even after a shower, not entirely free of the rotten odor Jane had predicted; when Liz had asked Dr. Facciano how long it would be before her father could drive, the doctor had said four to six weeks.

  “Nor is Nancy Bildeier’s house an advertisement for anything,” Mr. Bennet said. “If she owns a piece of furniture not covered by dog hair, I’ve never noticed it.”

  Liz hadn’t expected resistance. Uncertainly, she said, “What if I pay for the first visits?” At present, she had $13,000 in her savings account, an amount that reassured her in comparison to the nonexistent nest eggs of her sisters but that also appeared inexplicably low given that her annual income was $105,000, she had no dependents, and, apart from living in New York, she wasn’t profligate.

  “That’s not a good use of your money,” Mr. Bennet said. “Nor of mine. The answer is no.”

  “But don’t you think the house is kind of a mess? And the yard, too?”

  Mr. Bennet sounded untroubled as he said, “Everything tends toward entropy, my dear. It’s the second law of thermodynamics.”

  TO LIZ’S SURPRISE, both Lydia and Kitty exclaimed with delight on hearing at dinner of Charlotte’s Charades invitation. “I hope you know I’ll kick your asses,” Lydia said, and Mary said, “By cheating, you mean?”

  “What if we’re on the same team?” Liz asked. “Is your ass kicking restricted to your opponents or is it indiscriminate?”

  “Do you ever pass up a chance to use a big word?” Lydia replied. “Or do you find that circumlocution always magnifies life’s conviviality?”

  “That wasn’t bad,” Liz said. “Especially for someone who scored as low as you did on the verbal part of the SATs.”

  “Stop quarreling, girls,” Mrs. Bennet said. “It’s unbecoming.”

  “They’d never speak to one another otherwise,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “Chip and I are going out Friday,” Jane said. “But if we weren’t, I’d love to come.”

  “Charlotte’s inviting him, too,” Liz said, and Mrs. Bennet said, “I’m sure Chip would rather spend time alone with Jane. A new couple needs space.”

  Lydia turned to her eldest sister, her voice merry. “Jane, do you think Chip will be the one you lose your virginity to?”

  Mr. Bennet stood, dropping his napkin on the table. “As interesting as I find this conversation, an urgent matter has come up. I need a hamburger.”

  Simultaneously, Liz said, “Dad, you can’t drive,” and Jane said, “Dad, you can’t eat red meat.”

  Mr. Bennet gestured toward his plate, atop which sat moderate portions of lentil stew prepared by Jane and salad prepared by Liz. “This is unacceptable,” he said. “I’m not a small woodland creature. Lizzy, we’re going to Zip’s.”

  “Dad, Dr. Morelock is the one who recommended a plant-based diet,” Jane said. “It wasn’t us.”

  “The iron in a hamburger will help Dad,” Kitty said. “Just don’t eat the bun.”

  “That’d be like watching a burlesque show with one’s eyes closed,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “Yuck,” Mary said.

  Mr. Bennet pointed toward the back door. “Hop to, Lizzy.”

  Liz glanced at Jane, who sighed audibly. This Liz took as tacit permission, and she, too, stood; the truth, unfortunately, was that the lentils were almost flavorless. “Does anyone else want anything?” she asked.

  Everyone did except for Jane—they requested hamburgers and cheeseburgers and french fries—though at the last minute, just before Mr. Bennet and Liz walked out the back door, Jane called after them, “Fine. I’ll take an order of onion rings.”

  “ARE YOU STILL planning to stay in Cincy until September?” Jasper said to Liz over the phone. “Because I don’t know if I can wait that long for you to get back.”

  “I was thinking we should meet somewhere for a weekend in August,” Liz said. “Maybe Cape Cod?”

  “Here’s my question,” Jasper said. “I realize your mom’s shindig is the biggest thing ever to happen in her life. But when she claims to be spending her days on nonstop planning, what’s she literally doing? Isn’t the event at a hotel that’s making the food and taking care of the setup?”

  While Liz had wondered the same thing, she wasn’t sure Jasper knew Mrs. Bennet well enough—they’d met only once, years before—to have earned the right to ask. “She and the other women are trying to get donations for the silent auction,” Liz said. “And the proceeds from the auction go to a shelter for homeless teenagers. It’s not total society-lady fluffiness.”

  “Okay, now you’re making me feel like a bad person. But doesn’t your mother know I need my Nin?”

  Liz smiled. “You know I’m here for my dad, not my mom. Besides, you kept me waiting fourteen years. Surely you can wait two more months.”

  “What kind of jackass would keep Liz Bennet waiting for fourteen years?” Jasper said. “If I ever met that guy, I’d punch his lights out.”

  WHEN CAROLINE BINGLEY and Fitzwilliam Darcy walked through the door of Charlotte’s downtown apartment, the sight of Darcy rattled Liz more than she wished to admit.

  “Sorry,” Jane murmured to Liz—Chip and Jane had indeed decided to start their evening at Charlotte’s—as the newest arrivals headed into the kitchen to obtain drinks. “Are you okay?”

  Liz squared her shoulders. “Of course.”

  But Darcy’s comment at the Lucases’ barb
ecue about Liz’s ostensibly single status—I suppose it would be unchivalrous to say I’m not surprised—had echoed unpleasantly in Liz’s head during the last week. Could it have been his spontaneous attempt at wit? Or in their brief encounter, had he taken note of some off-putting feature of her presentation—disgustingly bad breath, say—that no one, even Jane, had ever felt comfortable mentioning? In New York, Liz rarely dwelled on the contours of her romantic life, but in Cincinnati, the irregularity of her arrangement with Jasper had come into sharper focus. Depending on how long Susan’s grandmother took to die, it could be several more years before Jasper and Susan officially divorced and, Liz imagined, she and Jasper moved in together. Eventually, in some low-key ceremony, they would marry. It seemed plausible she’d be the last of her sisters to wed, but Liz didn’t share her mother’s view of matrimony as a race. After all, she already had a companion to reliably talk things over with and another body in the bed to reliably curl against, and weren’t those marriage’s truest perquisites?

  And yet, with regard to Jasper, Liz wasn’t impervious to self-doubt. At a co-worker’s wedding, when filling out a form that required her to declare her marital status or identify an emergency contact (she always wrote Jane’s name), or if otherwise confronted with evidence of choices she’d made without necessarily having recognized them as such in the moment—these circumstances all gave her pause. In recent weeks, as she’d repeatedly bumped into former classmates or old family friends, the proof was ample that other people’s choices had been different. A few days before, she had met Charlotte for a drink at Don Pablo’s, which had once been their favorite restaurant, and as Liz took a sip of her pomegranate margarita, she realized that at the adjacent table, standing up to leave, was their Seven Hills classmate Vanessa Krager, as well as a bald man who appeared to be Vanessa’s husband and four children between the ages of five and twelve who appeared to be their offspring. How was this mathematically possible? And wasn’t there, in Vanessa’s avid reproduction, something unseemly, some announcement of narcissism or aggression? It was generally less shocking to Liz that twenty years after high school she was still her essential self, the self she’d grown up as, unencumbered by spouse or child, than that nearly everyone else had changed, moved on, and multiplied. After moderately warm greetings, introductions, and updates (Vanessa was working part-time doing billing for a chiropractor, the family was soon due at the ten-year-old’s piano recital), Vanessa said, “Liz, I read your interview with Jillian Northcutt. Do you think Hudson Blaise cheated on her?”