Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

As she followed Darcy through the main entrance of a bland three-story brick building and up to the second floor, she experienced a sense of mischief reminiscent of her youthful encounters. Outside his door, Darcy used the front of one running shoe to pry off the heel of the other, then repeated the gesture in reverse with his socked toes, and Liz did the same. Inside the apartment, nothing hung on the walls, and no rugs covered the hardwood floors. The living room held only a long couch, a flat-screen TV, and a low table with a closed laptop computer on it. He led her to the kitchen, which was small and windowless but looked recently renovated; between the counters and the cabinets, the walls were lined with a pattern of black, white, and green tiles. He filled two glasses with tap water and passed her one. They drank in silence, then he said, “I suppose either we both take showers or neither of us does.”

Feeling a minor appreciation for his willingness to assume the role of host, she shook her head. “I need to be back at my parents’ house before dinner. I will pee, though. Do you have a condom?”

He nodded.

In the modern, clean bathroom, after urinating, Liz washed her hands and splashed water on her face, though more to cool off than establish hygiene. In the bedroom, which contained a king-sized bed covered with a gray cotton spread, a nightstand, and a lamp, Darcy was seated on the floor, still in his shirt and shorts, with one leg stretched out and his torso extended over it. Liz walked to him and held out a hand, and he took it and stood. Uncertainty then presented itself, and no doubt if she had been eighteen, or probably even if she’d been twenty-eight, she’d have looked to him to banish this confusion; but she was thirty-eight, she had orchestrated the encounter, and so she said, “I’m thinking it’s more efficient if we both take off our own clothes. Do you care about getting sweat on your sheets?”

He seemed to find the question funny. “They’re washable.”

Thus, standing a few feet apart, they stripped. She avoided looking at him, except that she snuck a few glances. He was hairier than she’d have guessed, though not in a bad way, and while she’d known he was fit, he was practically sculpted; if she’d previously realized just how perfectly muscled he was, she might have been too intimidated to make this overture.

Then his body was pressed up against hers, they were kissing — never having participated in hate sex, she was glad to learn kissing was part of it — and the naked standing-up kissing went on for a while, accompanied by roaming hands, and at some point, an air conditioner kicked on with a forceful whirring, and after another interval, a cacophony of car horns was audible through the apartment’s closed windows, out in the sunny evening populated by people who weren’t, for the most part, kissing each other while standing up naked. Then either he nudged her toward the bed or she pulled him, and soon after that he removed the condom from the drawer of his nightstand. All in all, the experience was highly satisfying, certainly for her, and judging by external clues, it seemed reasonable to conclude for him as well; without question, it was far more enjoyable than prom night with Phillip Haley or most other couplings she’d partaken of in the twenty years following. Indeed, one sign of just how agreeable she found the interaction was that she was only vaguely aware of the identity of the person with whom she was sharing it. At the beginning, the preposterousness of this proximity to Darcy — Fitzwilliam Darcy! — had distracted her and then again at the end, as she emerged from the delirious haze in which they’d mutually collapsed. It was as she returned to herself that it occurred to her to wonder whether what they were doing counted as cuddling; surely, even if hate sex permitted kissing, cuddling was a violation. She rolled away and sat up, reaching to find her clothes on the floor.

She could feel his gaze but waited to look at him until she was fully dressed in her damp and reeking shirt and shorts. Finally making eye contact, she said, “I’ll let myself out.”

As it happened, they had never made it under the bedspread but instead conducted their entire transaction atop it. In that moment, both his hands were set behind his head, and his long, hairy, muscular body was exposed. There was on his face an expression difficult to read, and she felt determined not to blush. “See you around,” she said.

Was he amused? Perturbed? Bewildered? It was impossible to know. “Indeed,” he replied.

LIZ WAS WRITING a check from her bank account to the contractor when she received the text from Jasper. The contractor had scraped away the bubbling, flaking paint from the water stain in the living room, then covered the wall with primer and a coat of mustard-colored paint from the can Liz had, to her surprise and delight, unearthed during her basement excavations. The source of the water stain, the contractor informed her with such reticence that it occurred to Liz he feared offending her by drawing attention to her stupidity, was that the roof gutters were all overflowing with leaves, which created flooding during rainstorms. “Keeping your gutters clean is a good thing to do,” he said gently.

In its entirety, Jasper’s text said Awesome! and provided a link to an article about a man in Nebraska who had unsuccessfully tried to shoplift a snake from a pet store. Jasper was taking her temperature, Liz knew. He wanted to see where things stood between them. She didn’t respond.

SHANE’S COLLEAGUE’S CLIENTS were scheduled to visit the Tudor between two and three on Monday afternoon, which meant the house’s inhabitants needed to be elsewhere. After arranging for Mary to take their father to the Mercantile Library (“I already did that last week,” Mary said, and Liz said, “Exactly. It’s called pulling your weight”), Liz had requested that Lydia, Kitty, and Mrs. Bennet accompany her to the Kenwood mall to help her select an outfit in which to interview Kathy de Bourgh. This seemed to Liz such a transparently obvious excuse that she was surprised by how readily they agreed to it.

She was inside a dressing room, wearing a blue wraparound dress, when, at two twenty-five, which was far earlier than she’d expected, she received a call from Shane. “They love it,” he said. “They’re making an offer tonight, which obviously will be contingent on the inspection.”

Looking at herself in the mirror — her dark hair, the expensive dress that didn’t belong to her, her bare legs and feet — Liz actually smiled. “Thank you, Shane,” she said. “This is such great news.”

IT WASN’T THAT Liz had changed her mind about Darcy’s essentially disagreeable nature; rather, she had concluded that a romp or two in his bed would neither diminish nor exacerbate his disagreeability, especially if she discussed it with no one, even Jane.

Twenty-four hours after their initial coital encounter, she went for another run fully prepared to see him; so prepared, in fact, that she was surprised not to see his imposing figure at Easthill Avenue, then surprised at Observatory Avenue, at Menlo Avenue, at Stettinius Avenue, and by Edwards, she had to admit to herself that the chances of crossing paths with him had grown slim. Really, she had little idea of either his work schedule or his exercise routine.

The question then was how deliberate to be — whether to dispense altogether with pretenses of coincidence, track down his email or phone number, and arrange another meeting using the same specificity she’d employ to make a dentist appointment. The antipathy she and Darcy felt for each other meant the sacrifice of pride such a plan would entail was simultaneously more and less consequential than if they shared mutual fondness and respect.