Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

“I’m sure he loves you.”

“It’s weird,” Charlotte said, “because if your dad hadn’t had a heart attack, you and Jane wouldn’t have come back to Cincinnati this summer, and if you hadn’t come back to Cincinnati, Willie wouldn’t have visited with Margo, and I’d never have met him. Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance.”

“I know. I think about that all the time.”

They both were quiet, and the fence of Pemberley came into view. “Are you on the Pill?” Charlotte asked. “Because we can turn around and go buy a condom.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Liz said.

“WHAT A COINCIDENCE that you happen to be in town the same weekend Darcy is here,” Caroline said to Liz by way of greeting. They stood on the lawn near the covered pool, where the croquet equipment had already been set out: the wickets inserted into the grass, the mallets and balls waiting in tidy rows. Along one side of the pool, a buffet lunch still looked vibrant, despite the fact that it was midafternoon: various sandwiches and salads, enormous cookies, lemonade, iced tea, beer, and white wine. Surveying the scene, Liz had the somewhat troubling thought that she was starting to understand Darcy’s unfavorable view of Cincinnati; it would be difficult for any place to compete with these lush gardens, blue skies, and magnificent spreads of food.

“I’m visiting Charlotte,” Liz said to Caroline. “You may have heard that she’s dating my cousin Willie.”

“I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder,” Caroline said.

Liz was fairly sure Charlotte didn’t overhear the insult, because she was being introduced to the half dozen other guests, but the remark seemed too rude to simply let stand. “Is it my cousin or my oldest friend that you’re implying is ugly?” Liz asked.

Caroline shrugged. “Take your pick. When two people like that get together, I never know if I should be happy for them or just pray they don’t reproduce.”

You’re awful, Liz thought. You’re even worse than I remember.

“Speaking of which,” Caroline said, “has Jane reached the swollen-ankles-and-stretch-marks stage yet?”

Liz smiled as warmly as she could manage. “You know how some pregnant women just give off a glow the whole time? Jane’s been blessed.” Before Caroline could respond, Liz added, “I hear Chip’s still shooting the Eligible reunion. Is Holly the alligator wrestler part of it? Or it’s Gabrielle who has the Celtic cross tattoo on her tongue, right? It always seemed like she and Chip had a lot of chemistry.” Liz beamed at Caroline. “Either one would be so fun for you to have as a sister-in-law.”

UPON THEIR ARRIVAL, Charlotte and Liz had been welcomed by Darcy in a gracious but not especially fraught way (Liz was almost disappointed by how not fraught) and introduced to the other guests, all of whose names Liz promptly forgot: an anesthesiologist and his lawyer wife, a seemingly single male radiologist, a nephrologist (male) married to an architect (also male), plus two Stanford history PhDs, both slender young men whom Liz suspected, based on their posture and inflections around Darcy’s sister, to be in love with Georgie.

Though Liz’s initial interactions with Darcy were subdued and matter-of-fact, as the afternoon progressed and the croquet began — they were playing two separate games simultaneously, both of them the so-called cutthroat version, in which it was everyone for him- or herself, rather than teams — Liz felt there to be an ever-increasing charge between herself and her host. She was at all times acutely conscious of how far he stood from her, of his absence if he stepped away — to bring out additional bottles of wine from the guesthouse, say, or to greet the final arrival, a dermatologist, at the front gate — and whom he was talking with. Periodically, it was she who was speaking to him, always in an undramatic fashion. They weren’t playing in the same game, but the two courts had been set up on adjacent stretches of grass, and they were sometimes near each other; they’d comment on a shot someone had taken or on the pleasantness of the weather, and while such topics felt faintly ridiculous, so, presumably, would anything else.

When Liz knocked her ball out of bounds, Darcy materialized as she was placing it the prescribed distance from the boundary. “I always have this fantasy of discovering some new skill,” she said. “But apparently it’s not croquet.”

Darcy squinted. “Are you wearing makeup?”

Instinctively, Liz brought a hand to one cheek. “Does it look weird?”

“I guess I’m not used to you in it,” Darcy said, and, more defensively than she meant to, Liz said, “It is something women often put on their faces.”

Without speaking, Darcy patted her right shoulder, as if comforting her; instead, the contact was unsettling, but in a good way.

Eventually, Alberta drove up in a golf cart to clear away the used plates and utensils. Liz had by that point consumed two and a half glasses of wine, three bites of a turkey sandwich, and half a cookie; she was too nervous to eat more. It was Darcy who’d won the first game, and Charlotte the second. Caroline said to Liz, “I take it you’re not much of an athlete.”

Though Liz had mocked her own croquet skills with Darcy, she couldn’t permit such a slight from Caroline. “Well, I run twenty-five miles a week,” she said. “And for my job I’ve tried pretty much every fitness trend out there. But I suppose I’m not athletic besides that.”

The two women looked at each other with barely disguised antipathy, and Caroline said, “You leave town tomorrow, right?”

“Is my presence thwarting plans that you had?”

Caroline took a step closer to Liz and lowered her voice. “Just so you know, I see right through you. Your whole laid-back vibe — I can tell it’s bullshit.”

“Coming from you, I think that might be a compliment.”

As Liz finished her third glass of wine, impatience, regret, and tipsiness collected within her. Oh, to get a do-over for that braless, unprepared morning at her sisters’ apartment! To be granted just one more run up Madison Road with Darcy, only the two of them and no one else, and then to decamp for his apartment, this time with the awareness that he didn’t see the encounter as purely transactional — to know that he liked her! But did he still like her, here, today? How long did the sex hormones to which he’d attributed his love linger in the bloodstream?

A short while later, Liz heard herself telling Georgie, as one of Georgie’s suitors listened in, “Your brother mentioned that you guys might sell or donate this property at some point. And I hope this isn’t too forward, but I want to tell you about something my older sister did. My parents are selling the house they’ve lived in for a long time, so my sister, who’s a yoga instructor, held, like, a ritual farewell where she talked about some of the things we’d done at the house and what she’d miss. And even though I was skeptical, I think it’s helped me. Oh, and it only took five minutes.”

Georgie looked both interested and confused. She said, “Did someone come and do it for you, or did she do it herself?”

“No, she did it. I can ask if she was following a script or just winging it.”

“If you want to learn about moving superstitions, you should talk to my Chinese grandma,” Georgie’s suitor said. He was still talking when suddenly Darcy was beside Liz; he touched her arm just above the elbow, and again, she felt she might swoon. Instead, in an impossibly normal voice, she said, “Hi.”