Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

“Ouch!” she cried. “What the hell?” But by the time she asked, she knew. While she didn’t really have the impulse to throw a snowball back, Jasper was smiling with anticipation. When her snowball glanced off the shoulder of his waterproof jacket, he said, “Oh, Nin, I have so much to teach you.”

How long, on that day, did Liz imagine it would take for them to become romantically involved? Six or eight weeks perhaps — long enough for him to process his breakup with Serena, process being a word Jasper himself, unlike either of her college boyfriends, actually used in reference to his own emotions. But apparently little processing was necessary. Liz felt no compulsion to keep a close eye on Jasper at the party, which made it all the more soul crushing when he left with the host’s sister Natalie, who was a junior at NYU.

A rebound, Liz told herself. Natural enough, and perhaps even best to get it out of his system. Surely what was obvious to Liz — and to others, too, there’d even been an older female editor at the magazine who’d murmured to her, “You and Jasper Wick would be so cute together”—would soon become visible to Jasper as well.

Alas, Jasper and Natalie were a couple for two years, and it took only a few weeks of their courtship for Liz to revert to her Serena-era patterns with Jasper: She was his lunch companion, intermittently his jogging partner, his professional sounding board — she would copyedit and proofread the pitches he was crafting in the hope of getting a front-of-the-book piece in the magazine — and she was also his confidante, helping to parse his concerns about Natalie’s immaturity or his irritation at his roommate, who would, while stoned, consume Jasper’s tortillas and peanut butter. Once when Natalie was at her parents’ house in Phoenix, Liz and Jasper drank many beers together on a Wednesday night at a dive bar near Times Square, and, unable to bear it any longer, Liz blurted out, “But what about us ? I thought you pictured us as a couple!”

Jasper seemed startled. “That’s what you want?” he said.

“Of course it’s what I want!” Liz said.

“Part of me wants it, too.” Jasper’s tone was pained rather than flirtatious. “But we’d be the real thing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. You’re such an important friend that I don’t want to risk losing you.”

When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revisited. It was a windy March night, and the wisps of Liz’s brown hair that had slipped from her ponytail blew around her forehead and cheeks.

Abruptly, Jasper said, “Your hair is all crazy tonight.” He stepped toward her, his hand out. But at the same time, Liz raised her own arm and pushed away her hair, and as she did so, Jasper withdrew his hand and took a step back. There were countless hours — or maybe more than hours, maybe weeks and days — that Liz devoted to replaying this nonaction, this absence of contact. Because her hair hadn’t been that crazy, it was frequently slipping from a rubber band, so obviously he had been about to touch her, about to kiss her even and perhaps to become her boyfriend and the love of her life. Had she intercepted him out of habit, because it was her hair and her head? Because she didn’t believe in kissing the boyfriends of other girls? Or because she was, in some instinctive way, intent on wrecking her own destiny?

On the night he didn’t touch her, Liz and Jasper both were twenty-four years old. For the next six years, they never kissed; they even slept in the same bed twice, at a friend’s aunt’s house in Sag Harbor and another time on a road trip to visit Jasper’s sister at the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, Jasper cycled through additional girlfriends — after Natalie there was Gretchen, and after Gretchen there was Elise, and after Elise there was Katherine — and Liz halfheartedly went out with other guys but never for longer than a few months. Jasper would ask about such men in great detail, and once, when Liz was first giving online dating a whirl, they arranged that he and Elise would have drinks at the same bar where Liz was meeting her online prospect so that Jasper and Liz could debrief in mid-date; this seemed a terribly amusing idea in advance that was plainly fucked up in its execution. Jasper, of course, hadn’t told Elise and, thus, pretended that seeing Liz was a coincidence, and Liz wasn’t sure if it made matters better or worse that Elise appeared to believe the farce.

By this point, neither Jasper nor Liz was employed by the magazine where they’d met, but Liz still worked in the same building, and Jasper would return for lunch in the cafeteria, which had been designed by a famous architect and was reminiscent, with its blue-tinted glass partitions, of a series of aquariums. For all these years, Liz’s attraction to Jasper, and Jasper’s apparently lesser but not nonexistent attraction to Liz, was something they’d allude to jokingly — for instance, after visiting the Guggenheim together, she held up the ticket stub and said, with what she hoped was unmistakable sarcasm, “Maybe if I sleep with this under my pillow tonight, you’ll fall in love with me,” and he grinned and said, “Maybe so.” They’d less often but still regularly have emotional, alcohol-fueled confrontations, always initiated by Liz. “It’s ridiculous we’re not together,” she said once. “In most ways, I basically am your girlfriend.”

“I hate that I’m causing you grief,” Jasper replied.

“I’m an idiot,” Liz said. “Anyone looking at me would think I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Jasper said. “You’re my best friend.”

If only she had let him smooth back her hair!

At intervals, Liz swore off Jasper — she’d say, “Our friendship is unhealthy,” and she’d briefly embrace yoga, which, loyalty to Jane aside, she hated — but Liz’s and Jasper’s social circles overlapped enough that within a week or a month, they’d run into each other at a party or a Frisbee game and then they’d talk and talk about all the things they’d both been saving up to share with the other.

When they were thirty-one, Jasper announced his engagement to a pert and friendly associate at a white-shoe law firm, a woman named Susan about whom he seemed to Liz no less equivocal than he had toward earlier girlfriends. After a run together, he asked Liz if she’d be a groomsman; seeing her expression, he added, “Or a groomswoman, whatever.” When Liz began to sob, he said, “What? What?” and she sprinted away and didn’t speak to him for five years; though she still laid eyes on him at media events, she did not attend Jasper’s wedding, let alone participate in the ceremony.

One Saturday in the spring of 2011, Liz and an oboist she’d met for a blind date ran into Jasper and Susan on the High Line, Jasper pushing a stroller in which a toddler slept. Susan greeted Liz warmly — like Elise, Susan had always seemed improbably unsuspicious of Liz, causing Liz to wonder exactly how Jasper explained their friendship — and the five of them ended up sharing brunch, during which the toddler, a boy named Aidan, awoke and shrieked so relentlessly that Liz forgave Jasper just a little. That Monday morning, Jasper emailed Liz: It was great to see you. Really miss our friendship.

After an exchange of messages, they met for a weekday lunch at which they discussed recent articles they’d either loved or been outraged by, and then Jasper confided the financial pressure he felt now that Susan had decided she wanted to quit law and remain at home with Aidan. The last few years had, apparently, been rough: as a newborn, Aidan had had colic; Susan had initially struggled with breast-feeding though now was unwilling to give it up; and she was spending enormous quantities of time online trying to determine which potentially toxic chemicals were contained in the cleaning agent used on the carpeting in the halls of their building. Meanwhile, Jasper was spinning his wheels at work. He knew he was capable of running a magazine — he was still a senior editor rather than an executive editor, which was the usual jumping-off point for being an editor in chief — and welcomed Liz’s thoughts about what publication might be most suitable for his continued ascent up the professional ladder. Jasper’s great respect for Liz’s ideas and opinions, his wish for feedback from her on every subject, even the subject of whether it was weird that his wife was still breast-feeding a nineteen-month-old, was simultaneously the most flattering and the most insulting dynamic she had ever experienced. She thought that if the option were available, he would run a cord between her brain and his, or perhaps simply download the contents of her cerebral cortex.