Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

“Poor guy.”

“We’re talking about the person who came between you and Chip.”

“But think how infatuated with you he must be to swallow his pride, which we all know he has lots of.”

“Do you remember that conversation you and I had at Chip’s dinner party about how he’d bought a mountain bike for you and you didn’t know if you should accept it? Apparently, Darcy overheard us and took your hesitation about the bike as hesitation about Chip in general.”

“I can understand that.”

“Aren’t you mad? Darcy’s given me grief for eavesdropping, but at least I do it competently.”

“Lizzy, I did have reservations about Chip. I expressed them to you more than once. I liked him a lot, but—” Jane paused. “The whole time I was with Chip, I wasn’t sure that I was pregnant, but I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.”

“I have something weird to tell you about Jasper, too,” Liz said.

“Have you guys been in touch?”

“Not really.” He had sent two more texts, neither of which Liz had answered. The first had been another link — this one to a list of unintentionally funny newspaper headlines — and the second had said, R u ignoring me? “I didn’t know it until recently,” Liz said, “but Jasper got expelled from Stanford a few weeks before he was supposed to graduate. Jasper and Darcy were in the same class, and even though Jasper had never mentioned his expulsion, he did admit that it had happened. But the story he told me and the story Darcy told me only sort of match up. Basically, according to Darcy, Jasper was kicked out for—” Liz hesitated out of concern for the taxi driver, who, if listening, had already learned an unseemly amount about her in a few minutes. But really, there were few ways of accurately describing the act. “For peeing on the desk of his creative writing professor,” she continued. “And the professor was a black woman.”

“He peed ?” Jane said. “As in going to the bathroom?”

“Yes,” Liz said. “That kind of pee.”

“On her desk ?”

“Yes,” Liz said. “On the desk in her apartment.”

“That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard,” Jane said.

“It’s gross, right? Even if he was twenty-two at the time, and drunk — there’s no way it’s not gross. Darcy also said Jasper never got a degree. Does that mean he’s lied to every employer he’s ever had? It makes it even weirder that he wears that Stanford ring.”

“Does he?” Jane said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s gold. I’ve always thought it looks like what a bond trader from New Jersey would have worn in the 1980s.”

“Did Darcy make up the story about Jasper because he’s jealous?”

“No, I trust Darcy.” The statement felt odd. “But if Jasper peed on his professor’s desk, was he standing? Or did he go in a jar, then pour it out?”

“Oh, Lizzy.”

“And was it spontaneous, like he has to take a leak and thinks, I’ll do it on her desk ? Or did he decide ahead of time?”

“Jasper has always seemed like a complicated person.”

“That’s generous.” Out the window of Liz’s taxi, the other lanes of the highway were packed with cars; to her right, the sun was setting and the sky was tinged pink. “Anyway,” she said, “how are you?”

“I’m good,” Jane said. “I met with the doctor today, and she was really nice. Was it sad leaving Cincinnati?”

Liz thought of her final view of the Tudor, when the tenting had been almost complete. The tarps Ken Weinrich’s crew used had yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings. Then she thought of Darcy standing just outside her sisters’ apartment in his scrubs. “It wasn’t sad exactly,” Liz said, “but it was different from what I’d expected.”

THOUGH LIZ SOMETIMES went along with the pretense that interviewing celebrities was glamorous, the truth was that she rarely enjoyed it. Arranging the interviews through the celebrity’s publicist and the publicist’s assistant was always onerous, with frequent cancellations or time changes; during the interviews, celebrities often responded to questions using answers they had given before, which meant Liz’s editor wouldn’t want them included; publicists tended to sit in, chaperone-like, on the interviews, thereby dissuading the celebrity from saying anything ostensibly off-topic; and a general air of urgency attended the encounters, as if the celebrities were heads of state managing a nuclear threat rather than, as was usually the case, good-looking people who appeared onscreen in fictitious stories. Additionally, Liz always worried that her digital recorders — with celebrities, she used two — would fail her. These interviews were stressful then, without necessarily being interesting.

At the same time — and Liz had found this assertion to be displeasing to some people who were not famous, such as her own younger sisters — most celebrities were charismatic, intelligent, and warm. Lydia, Kitty, Mary, and indeed much of the general population clearly wished to hear that celebrities were, in person, rude or moronic or not that attractive, but this had rarely been Liz’s experience. Publicists were frequently rude, and celebrities almost never were. Also, the celebrities usually were more beautiful in the flesh, emitting a certain glow that made their fame seem inevitable.

That Kathy de Bourgh, while eighty years old and not a Hollywood starlet, possessed this glow was evident to Liz even from halfway back in the vast hotel ballroom where the National Society of Women in Finance keynote speech occurred. The speech began at one-fifteen in the afternoon, before an audience of two thousand; no more than a dozen of them, by Liz’s calculation, were men. Two large screens on either side of the stage projected Kathy de Bourgh’s image to all corners of the room, and in the first few seconds after Kathy de Bourgh was introduced, Liz noted that she had had Botox, as well as dermal fillers, though after that it was Kathy de Bourgh’s poise and the substance of her speech that Liz focused on. Because Liz had read Revolutions and Rebellions as well as Kathy de Bourgh’s subsequent book of essays and her memoir, much of the advice she dispensed and some of the personal anecdotes she shared were familiar, but her crisp and energetic delivery made everything fresh. Whether citing statistics about the dearth of women in professional leadership roles or recommending the steps individual women could take to command authority, she showed confidence and good humor. Being an icon, it seemed, agreed with her.

At the speech’s conclusion, Liz waited in her chair in the ballroom, as directed to do via a text that morning from Kathy de Bourgh’s publicist, Valerie. After eight minutes, Valerie texted to say Kathy de Bourgh was on a call but Liz would be escorted to the greenroom imminently.

And then, as they had many times already in the last thirty hours, Darcy’s remarks outside her sisters’ apartment came back to her. I’m in love with you. I can’t stop thinking about you. Yes, his confession had contained multiple slights, but those words had flanked them. To recall such declarations was marvelously bothersome, it was vexing and delectable. I’m in love with you. I can’t stop thinking about you. They made her feel as if her heart were releasing lava.

She had planned to blithely leave Darcy behind, but it seemed now that matters between them were unresolved. What it was that needed to be settled, however — what she might convey to him — continued to elude her. Surely it was related to the indifference to his feelings, the defiance even, that she’d demonstrated during their final conversation. If on certain topics he’d shown insensitivity, she’d concluded that his misbehavior had been of a less egregious variety than her own. She also couldn’t help wondering: Was he still in love with her? Had her hostile response immediately nullified his desire? Really, how could it not have?