Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

WHILE IT WAS technically accurate that both Liz and Jane were single, this fact did not for either woman convey the full story. After Jane’s fruitless early engagement, she had met a man named Jean-Pierre Babineaux, a courtly French financier, and they had become a couple for the better part of a decade. Though Jane had assumed she and Jean-Pierre would marry, their conversations on the subject were always marked by a bittersweetness she recognized in retrospect as a kind of warning. It was not that either of them lacked affection for the other but, rather, that the circumstances of their lives were incompatible: He was fifteen years older than she, divorced, and the father of twins who were, when Jane met him, twelve. He traveled back to Paris frequently, and while Jane could hardly complain about her visits there, staying at the apartment he maintained in the Sixth Arrondissement, she did not wish to live so far from her family and certainly not permanently; yet Jean-Pierre’s ultimate plan was to return to his birthplace. Further, while Jane unequivocally wished to bear children, Jean-Pierre had had a vasectomy when the twins were two.

Jane and Jean-Pierre’s eventual breakup was no less devastating for being both protracted and decorous. At thirty-seven, she was single once more and remained so for the next two years. Shortly after her thirty-ninth birthday, following the painstaking consideration of a multitude of anonymous candidates, Jane lay on her back in a hospital gown at a clinic on East Fifty-seventh Street, awaiting the insertion of donor semen into her cervix via needleless syringe. Though Jane followed all the recommendations for creating conditions favorable to pregnancy — she stopped drinking alcohol, slept eight hours a night, and meditated daily — fertilization didn’t occur during that cycle or in any of the next several rounds. While not statistically anomalous — few women attempting to become pregnant via donor insemination were immediately successful — this lack of progress was discouraging as well as expensive, and Jane’s insurance covered none of the monthly $1,000 charge. Anticipating her parents’ disapproval, she hadn’t disclosed her pursuit to them and thus was receiving no extra money beyond the rent, which Mr. Bennet paid directly on her behalf. Thus, for the first time in her adult life, Jane found herself bypassing restaurants, forgoing haircuts, and shunning the street on which her favorite clothing boutique, with its elegantly tailored $400 pencil skirts and luxurious $300 sweaters, was located. Such sacrifices would not, she recognized, count by most people’s standards as hardships, but she was privately conscious of a new austerity.

With no one other than Liz did Jane discuss her efforts to become a mother. Her gynecologist had suggested that she tell her parents even before the first insemination, but Jane thought that if she wasn’t able to become pregnant, then she’d have courted the double punishment of what she assumed would be her mother’s histrionics and no baby. And Jane still hoped to marry eventually, though marriage was no longer her immediate goal.

Unlike Jane, Liz wished to avoid motherhood. That she was dating a married man made such avoidance logical, though whether these circumstances had occurred by chance or subconscious design even Liz herself couldn’t say. In the late nineties, Liz and Jasper Wick had immediately hit it off as new hires in the fact-checking department of the same prestigious magazine: They bit back smiles when the books editor, who was from Delaware, pronounced the word “memoir” mem-wah; they got lunch together several times a week at a cheap Thai restaurant; and they routinely divided the work between them when checking facts on onerous articles. (They had started their jobs using computers with spotty Internet connections, back when fact-checking meant visiting the public library or waiting anxiously for the return of phone calls.)

When Liz and Jasper met, he had a girlfriend, which was unsurprising: He had deep brown eyes and tousled blond curls and was at once smart and irreverent, boyish and thoughtful, with, in Liz’s assessment, the perfect quantities of neuroses and prurience to make him interesting to talk to, receptive to gossip, and game for analyzing the behavior and personalities of others without tipping over into seeming unmasculine. Indeed, Jasper’s sole flaw, in Liz’s opinion, apart from his girlfriend, was that he wore a gold ring from Stanford University, his alma mater; Liz did not care for either jewelry on men or academic ostentatiousness. But she actually was glad to have identified the one thing about Jasper she’d change, because it was similar to realizing what you’d forgotten to take on a trip, and if it was only perfume, as opposed to your driver’s license, you were relieved.

Initially, Liz had believed that a union with Jasper was just a matter of time; such was Jasper’s tendency to confide in her about the multitude of challenges he and his girlfriend, Serena, were experiencing that Liz imagined she need not persuade him of anything. While still together with Serena, Jasper had dropped conversational bombshells on Liz that included “I mean, I talk way more openly with you than I do with her” and “Sometimes I think you and I would be a good couple. Do you ever think that?” Liz knew for certain he had said these things because, although she no longer kept a journal, she’d written them down verbatim, along with their date of utterance, on an unlined sheet of computer paper she kept in her nightstand. Also, after she mentioned to Jasper that as a toddler she’d referred to herself as Ninny or Nin, he began calling her by the latter pet name.

Eight months into knowing Jasper, meaning seven months and three weeks into being thoroughly smitten with him, during a blizzard that occurred on a Saturday in February, Liz went running with him in Central Park in five inches of snow, while flakes were still falling. Jasper’s pace combined with the snow on the ground made this outing the most grueling physical exertion Liz had ever experienced, and by the second mile, she could take it no more. She stopped, leaned over, pressed her palms to her knees, and said while panting, “I give up. You win.”

“Really?” Jasper was a few feet in front of her, looking over his shoulder, grinning under a black fleece cap. “What’s my prize?”

Your prize is me, Liz thought. “Bragging rights,” she said. “And a hot drink from any bar that’s open.” Then she knelt and let herself collapse backward into the snow.

Jasper retraced his steps and lay down beside her. They were quiet as the flakes fluttered and spun in the air above, the sky a dirty white, the snow beneath them a chilly cushion. Jasper stuck out his tongue, catching a flake, and Liz did the same. All the usual noises of Manhattan were muted by the storm, and she felt completely happy. Then Jasper looked over at her. “So I broke up with Serena last night,” he said.

The joy that flared in Liz’s heart — it was almost too much. She hoped she sounded calm as she said, “I guess that makes sense.”

“You think so?”

“It just seems like you guys have had a lot of issues.”

“She’s furious, though. She claims I ambushed her.” Though no prettier than Liz, Serena was far more confidently difficult, more expectant of appeasement and conciliation.

Liz said, “Do you still feel like going to Alex’s thing tonight or you think you’ll skip it?” This was an anti-Valentine’s party a co-worker of theirs was throwing, but if Jasper wanted to forgo it, Liz thought, they could order takeout, watch a movie, and have a mellow night.

“I’ll probably go.”

Liz was then assaulted by something wet and lumpy, a substance that broke upon contact with her nose and dispersed into her eyes and nostrils.