Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

“Once you see them, you’ll think it should be.”

As Kitty pulled into a parking space and turned off the car, Liz said, “She’s in there now?”

“I followed her here a few weeks ago. I needed to make sure she wasn’t in a satanic cult before we became roommates.”

“Did you tell her you’d followed her?”

Kitty shook her head.

“So what’s your plan? We go inside and yell ‘Surprise!’ at her?”

“Last time, she changed in her car into a red-and-black uniform,” Kitty said. “Don’t you think it’s weird that she’s so secretive about something so dumb?”

“Because she knew this was how you’d act if she told us.”

Kitty had parked near a light pole, and in the sallow illumination it provided, the sisters looked at each other. Petulantly, Kitty said, “You’re no fun.”

“You know what, Kitty? You can decide to be a good person. If you’re lucky, you have a long adulthood ahead of you, and you might actually be happier if you’re nice instead of mean.”

“I am a good person,” Kitty said. But it was with clear resentment that, to Liz’s relief, she started the ignition.

LIZ CALLED JANE from the Ikea couch, and when she told her sister where she was, Jane said, “I’m sorry your last night in Cincinnati isn’t very ceremonious.”

“Whatever,” Liz said. “This way I’ll appreciate the luxury of my Houston hotel room.”

“I’ve been thinking about what the extermination man told you,” Jane said, “and the idea of Mom and Dad eating food that was in the house during the fumigation — it makes me nervous. What if you move stuff to Kitty and Mary’s place beforehand, or just throw it away? Some of Mom’s spices are probably from the eighties anyway.”

The annoyance Liz felt — it was because she knew Jane was right, and she also knew that clearing out the many kitchen cabinets, plus the refrigerators on two floors, would not be an insignificant task. And Ken Weinrich’s team was supposed to arrive at the Tudor at ten the next morning.

Liz glanced at the closed door of Kitty’s bedroom; light shone out from the crack, and she could hear the sound of whatever TV show Kitty was watching on her smartphone. Mary was out, presumably still at the bowling alley. Liz would enlist them both, she thought. To Jane, she said, “Want me to send you a picture of the house when it’s tented?”

“No!” Jane sounded dismayed.

“I won’t if you don’t want me to.” Liz lowered her voice. “There’s something I haven’t told you about Darcy.” Her wish to confess stemmed less from a moral awakening than from confusion over the uneasiness she’d experienced leaving Darcy’s apartment that afternoon; she needed to discuss the oddness of their final encounter.

“Do you know,” Jane said before Liz revealed more, and Jane’s tone was equanimous rather than bitter, “if it weren’t for Darcy, I have a hunch Chip and I would still be together?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The night he broke up with me, one of the things he said was that Darcy didn’t think we made a good couple. Chip also said, as if I didn’t know this, how much he respects Darcy.”

An unpleasant alertness had come over Liz. “Why would Darcy have disapproved of you and Chip?”

“Who knows? Although I’m sure I could torment myself from now until the end of time guessing.” Jane laughed a little, which seemed to Liz a sign of her sister’s progress. Indeed, Jane appeared far calmer about what she was describing than Liz felt. “Anyway, it’s not like Darcy’s low opinion of our family has ever been a secret,” Jane said. “What’s the thing you haven’t told me about him?”

Liz thought miserably of her conclusion — her entirely self-serving conclusion, she realized — that sleeping with Darcy was not wrong. What disloyalty to Jane she’d shown! Surely divulging her trysts to Jane at this juncture, especially when those trysts were now finished, would serve no purpose. Haltingly, Liz said, “That day you fainted, when you were at the hospital — I ran into Darcy outside the ER. He helped me figure out where to go.”

Jane was quiet, seemingly waiting for more.

Lamely, Liz added, “I couldn’t remember if I’d mentioned that to you.”

“I do feel like I can see things more from Chip’s perspective than I could at first,” Jane said. “What if instead of me telling him I was pregnant, he’d told me that another woman was pregnant with his child? Or if — well, the way Amanda and Prisha had Gideon was using sperm from a friend of theirs, a straight friend. If Chip had donated his sperm to a lesbian couple he was close to, no matter how carefully he’d tried to explain it, it would have seemed weird.”

“Not really. This stuff happens now.”

“But if you’re just getting to know the other person?”

“You’re being too easy on him.” Liz was, however, unsure if she really thought this or merely wished to deflect attention from herself and what she’d almost disclosed. Then she said, “Kitty solved the mystery of Mary’s evening outings. Mary doesn’t know we know, but apparently she’s in a bowling league.”

“Really?” Jane sounded tickled. “That’s so cute.”

THE DOORBELL OF the apartment, a sound Liz hadn’t previously heard, woke her just before seven in the morning. In the boxer shorts and T-shirt she’d slept in — the shirt was one she’d excavated from her closet at the Tudor, and it read HARVEST FAIR 1991 across the front — she opened the door. Insofar as she was awake enough to have any such expectations, she assumed it would be the building’s superintendent, or perhaps the landlord; but to Liz’s astonishment, it was Fitzwilliam Darcy. Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her braless chest. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“You told me your sisters’ building was at the intersection of Millsbrae and Atlantic.” Darcy’s countenance was grim: His skin was unusually pale, and there were pronounced bags beneath his eyes. He wore green scrubs, and Liz suspected he’d driven directly from his overnight shift. They looked at each other — was she supposed to invite him in? — and somewhere nearby, an oriole trilled. Darcy said, “I take it you’re still planning to leave town this afternoon?”

“Yeah, after the epic fumigation. Or after it starts — it won’t be finished for three days.”

There was a pause. Then, in a severe voice and without preamble, Darcy said, “I’m in love with you.”

“Ha, ha,” Liz said.

“It’s probably an illusion caused by the release of oxytocin during sex,” Darcy continued, “but I feel as if I’m in love with you. You’re not beautiful, and you aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are. You’re a gossip fiend who tries to pass off your nosiness as anthropological interest in the human condition. And your family, obviously, is a disgrace. Yet in spite of all common sense, I can’t stop thinking about you. The time has come for us to abandon this ridiculous pretense of hate sex and admit that we’re a couple.” Darcy had delivered this monologue stiffly, while mostly avoiding eye contact, but when he was finished, he looked expectantly at Liz.

If she had ever been so bewildered, she could not recall when. And though she understood that his remarks contained some flattering essence, she had never been more insulted. For several seconds, she searched for words and finally said, “So this isn’t — you’re not joking? Or are you?”

“I’m not joking at all.”

“Darcy, how could we possibly be a couple? We don’t even like each other.”

“That was at first.”