Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

“But isn’t life better when you’re on speaking terms with your mother?”

Lydia smirked. “Hard to say.”

“ Why did Darcy talk to Mom?” Liz yelled.

“Because he thinks he’s the smartest man in the world and he likes when other people listen to him.”

“No!” Liz yelled. “I mean, how did he know there was a need for him to intervene?”

“Exactly!” Lydia yelled back. “There wasn’t!”

LESS THAN AN hour later, Liz lay in her spinning hotel room bed in the dark while poor Jane stood in the courtyard below, still being interviewed in front of blinding lights; although Liz had experienced one of the superlative nights of her life, surely by now Jane had to feel some doubt about the manner in which she’d decided to get married. Abruptly, and somewhat nausea-inducingly, Liz sat up, turned on the nightstand lamp, rose from bed, grabbed the plastic card that was her room key, and hurried down the hall.

After Liz had knocked on the door, Mary opened it with a toothbrush in her mouth, a foamy outline of toothpaste around her lips. “What?” she said.

“That time you ran into Darcy at Skyline,” Liz said, “did you tell him Mom still wasn’t speaking to Lydia?”

Suspiciously, Mary said, “Why?”

“I think he ended up talking to her afterward.”

“Oh,” Mary said in a slightly friendlier tone. “He did.” She turned and walked toward the bathroom, and Liz followed her. Mary spat into the sink and rinsed off the toothbrush’s bristles. “At Skyline, he asked if he should. Because of his job, he thought he could explain the trans stuff in terms of Ham’s brain.”

“So he told her it’s like a birth defect?”

“I wasn’t there for the conversation, but that seems to be Mom’s one and only talking point.”

Meaning Darcy had salvaged her family’s happiness in not one but two ways; in addition to bringing Jane and Chip back together, he had facilitated the reconciliation between Lydia and Mrs. Bennet. But why? For whose benefit? Neither situation affected him directly, and in neither case had he sought credit — indeed, Liz suddenly recalled Darcy deflecting the question when she’d asked at their dinner in New York how he knew Mrs. Bennet and Lydia were no longer estranged — yet his efforts far exceeded basic kindness.

Mary turned off the faucet, and the sisters made eye contact in the mirror. “In case you don’t realize it,” Mary said, “you got superdrunk tonight, and you reek right now.”

HAM LED A CrossFit workout in the courtyard at nine in the morning; he had told Liz the night before that anyone was welcome, including parents, and that he’d modify the exercises to be compatible with the participants’ current fitness regimes or lack thereof. But no workout could have been modified enough to accommodate the dry-mouthed, head-pounding state in which Liz awakened. She didn’t attend the class; she didn’t attend the midday lunch for the two families; and it was only a short while before the rehearsal dinner, which also was to happen in the courtyard, that she forced herself out of bed. The rehearsal dinner was supposed to be casual; even bathing suits, the producers had mentioned a number of times, were acceptable.

Liz applied makeup, drank a cup of black coffee she brewed in the bathroom, and was visited by the same production assistant and a different sound guy from the previous night.

That the rehearsal dinner functioned both as a real rehearsal for the wedding and as an event that was itself being recorded for the entertainment of an audience represented a brain-hurting conundrum, but Liz’s brain hurt for other reasons, and she was mostly preoccupied with which hair-of-the-dog beverage she’d consume as soon as the walk-through of the ceremony concluded. While making chitchat with Mr. Bingley, she acquired from a passing tray a glass of white wine. Having learned of her job, Mr. Bingley was confiding that he’d always yearned to write a novel. With wine in hand, Liz’s prospects for the evening improved greatly.

Though Liz wore a sundress rather than a bathing suit, Lydia, Kitty, Ham, Shane, and Caroline all swam. (Liz attempted not to stare at Ham’s chest, but insofar as she did, she noted that it was impressively, masculinely defined; a trail of hair ran above and below his navel, and the only evidence of his previously female body were two thin red scars beneath male-looking nipples.) The women all wore bikinis that Liz assumed were courtesy of their own welcome baskets; Caroline’s was white, and at one point, she emerged from the water, approached Darcy — he wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved button-down shirt open at the collar — and was clearly trying to convince him to join her in the pool. He shook his head; she shivered sexily; he still shook his head.

Jane, who was standing next to Liz, said, “Are you planning to go in?”

“I’m afraid I’d accidentally become the role model for American women who shouldn’t wear bikinis but do.”

Jane pointed at her belly. “Then heaven help me.”

“Oh, please,” Liz said. “You get a free pass.”

There was a multitude of topics Liz wished to discuss with Jane, and no way of broaching them with any confidence that they wouldn’t later be broadcast. Was Jane having a horrible time or did she find this whole spectacle funny? Did she actually like the Bingleys or was she just pretending? Were their parents behaving, and had their mother yet delivered any on-camera rants? To Liz’s amusement, Mr. Bennet and Mr. Bingley had discovered a shared fondness for cribbage and cigars and apparently had spent most of the day at a table in the courtyard, puffing and playing.

A chicken fight commenced, with Lydia on Ham’s shoulders and Kitty on Shane’s, as Liz said to Jane, “Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

Jane smiled. “I’m ready to start living the rest of my life.”

Because she found it difficult not to, Liz again looked directly at the camera and audio guys standing five feet from them. “You’re welcome,” she said.

SHE WAS CROSSING the lobby with Mary and Mr. Bennet, all of them headed toward the elevators to return to their rooms after the rehearsal dinner’s conclusion, when Liz heard her name being called. As she turned, she was surprised to see Caroline Bingley walking briskly behind her. “Go ahead,” Liz said to her father and sister, and, warily, she waited for Caroline. The other woman had changed from her white bikini into dark jeans and a fitted gray hoodie sweatshirt that looked to be cashmere.

When Caroline was still a few feet away, Liz said, “What do you want?”

“You’re completely wrong for Darcy,” Caroline said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Liz. It’s obvious you’ve had your sights set on him since that awful Fourth of July barbecue. But he wasn’t available then, and he’s not now.”

“Okay.” What on earth, Liz wondered, had inspired this confrontation?

“Your sister is lucky to be marrying Chip,” Caroline said. “Very lucky. Don’t let it give you any ideas. I know your family thinks of itself as, like”—Caroline made air quotes—“ ‘Cincinnati high society.’ But that’s an oxymoron. And Darcy and I go way back. There’s always been an understanding that we’d end up together. We have this intense chemistry, and the moment is finally right for us to be serious.”

Liz smiled in as nasty a way as she could manage. “How wonderful for both of you.”

“If Darcy goes for you, it’ll only be because he’s lost perspective living in Ohio. It’s like when people start sympathizing with their kidnappers.”