Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

“Oh, Willie—” She was shocked but not entirely; she was appalled but also amused; she felt, already, cruel and distant, as if this were a moment she was comically describing to Jane or Jasper rather than currently experiencing. Still, she needed to focus in order to extricate herself with dignity or grace.

“I realize I’m not a prince in a fairy tale,” Willie said. “But we get along. We’re known quantities to each other. And you’re almost forty.”

“ Jane is almost forty. I’m thirty-eight. But, Willie, my God, we’re cousins.”

“Not by blood. It isn’t like our kids would face a stigma.” These hypothetical children that she didn’t want with any man, least of all Willie — she resented him for conjuring them up. “Look,” Willie said. “You and I are practical people. I’ve never been able to see the point of roses and chocolates, and I’m guessing you haven’t, either. But I’ll be faithful to you. I’ll respect your work, and I know you’ll respect mine — I don’t want a woman who gives me a hard time about my long hours. I think we owe it to ourselves to give a relationship a try.”

“Just out of curiosity,” Liz said, “did you come to Cincinnati with the idea of hitting on me?”

“You and I have always been compatible. Margo and your mom both think we make a great couple.” Willie set his hand on her shoulder; immediately, she lifted it away, stood, and folded her arms.

“We’re not a couple,” she said. “And if you’re under the impression that I want us to be one, you’re mistaken.” Softening her tone, she added, “When you meet some awesome woman in a year or two, you’ll be so glad you didn’t end up with me.”

“How can you be certain I’ll meet someone when you haven’t?”

Ignoring the question’s sting, Liz said, “There’s a lot you don’t know about my life.”

Willie sighed; he seemed irritated rather than wounded. “Does the cousin thing bother you that much? Growing up, we hardly spent time together.”

“Yes, it does bother me.”

“I’m open to giving you a few days to think it over,” Willie said. “I’ll call you later this week, after I’m back in California.”

“No, Willie. And I can tell you now that it’s a waste of time to try this with any of my sisters.”

Willie set his hands on his hips. “Do you know how much I’m worth?”

“You need to go.” She would not give him a farewell hug; his obstinacy had become offensive.

He looked at her curiously. Perhaps, Liz thought, he was for the first time realizing that she had an identity, an agency, other than those he’d invented for her. At last, he said, “It’s funny you think there’s such a big difference between being thirty-eight and being forty.”

JANE, WHO WAS the first person with whom Liz wished to discuss what had just transpired, was at a yoga class. Jasper was the second person, except that Liz remained unsettled by the information she’d learned the previous night about his alleged expulsion from Stanford. And so, having barricaded herself in the third-floor bathroom because Cousin Willie was, at least for a few more minutes, still on the Tudor’s premises, it was to Charlotte Lucas that Liz sent a text while sitting on the tile floor: Cousin Willie just kissed me eek!!!!!!

Less than a minute later, Charlotte’s return text pinged: Wait like KISSED kissed??

Yes what’s wrong w him? Or me?

That’s VERY weird. Willie’s cute in a nerd way but um, cousins?!? An additional text from Charlotte arrived a few seconds later: Headed into meeting have a drink tonight?

Yes!! Liz wrote back. Zula? Somewhere else? U name time.

Then she called Jasper.

“Should I stay at the Cincinnatian or 21c?” he asked. “Fiona’s booking my ticket to Cincinnati right now.”

“You know how my cousin Willie the Silicon Valley whiz kid is visiting?” Liz said. “He just came on to me!”

Jasper laughed. “Incest is best, huh? You can be like the Egyptian pharaohs.”

“I’m not joking. He stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

“Did you like it?”

Liz hadn’t been planning to blurt out what she said next; somehow, it simply emerged. She said, “You didn’t get expelled from Stanford, did you?”

There was a long silence, an immediately sour silence, and finally, Jasper said, “What the fuck? Where’s this coming from?”

“I’m sorry.” Until now, Liz really hadn’t believed it; she’d imagined Darcy was confusing Jasper with someone else. “I shouldn’t have — there’s this guy here named Fitzwilliam Darcy, and I guess you guys—”

Before she could finish, Jasper said, “ Darcy lives in Cincinnati? What the hell is he doing there?”

“There’s a big stroke center where he’s a surgeon.”

Jasper laughed bitterly. “Of course he is. The dude has had a god complex since he was twenty years old. What a wanker.” Rarely was Jasper this undilutedly aggrieved; though he was a frequent complainer, his complaints tended to contain some degree of levity, even charm. He said, “I’ll bet I never told you that a lot of what went down at Stanford was Darcy’s fault.”

This was correct, in part because she and Jasper had never spoken of what had gone down at Stanford, period; Liz was sure of it. Indeed, she had always been under the impression that the school and his time there were a kind of emotional lodestar. In addition to his gold Stanford ring, he sometimes, on fall weekends, wore a much-faded red Stanford sweatshirt; he kept in his living room a framed photograph of him with several fraternity brothers, a row of handsome, athletic-looking men-children in ties and blue blazers, though it struck Liz for the first time that she had never actually met any of the other people in the photo. New York was crawling with her Barnard classmates, but it had seemed unsurprising that his college friends lived on the West Coast.

“I’ll tell you the whole saga in Cincinnati,” Jasper was saying. “It puts me in a bad fucking mood just thinking about it.”

“You should stay at 21c,” Liz said. “I’ve never been, but it’s supposed to be very hip.”

“I hope you’re not friends with Darcy,” Jasper said. “I wouldn’t let that dude lick my shoe.”

It was a relief to be united with rather than divided from Jasper. “Don’t worry,” Liz said. “I feel the same way.”

THE ONE SOLACE to the unpleasant direction Liz’s conversation with Jasper had taken was that it had distracted her from her encounter with Willie. After she’d ended the call, however, that encounter combined with the confirmation of Jasper’s Stanford expulsion created in her an even higher level of turmoil. Without asking permission and with no particular destination in mind, she left the house in her mother’s car; a few minutes later, she was pulling into the parking lot of Rookwood Pavilion with the idea of getting a manicure and pedicure, and she emerged from the salon after more than an hour also missing four inches of hair, with the remainder layered in a way she was almost certain her colleagues at Mascara would be unimpressed by.

Lydia and Kitty sat at the kitchen table wearing workout clothes and eating cashews and organic beef jerky. When Liz entered the house through the back door, Lydia said, “Did you enter the Witness Protection Program to escape from the lust of Cousin Willie?”

“I like your haircut,” Kitty said. “You couldn’t have pulled that off a few years ago, but your cheekbones are showing more as you get older.”

Liz looked at Lydia. “Who told you about Willie?”