Eligible (17 page)

Jasper laughed. “Incest is best, huh? You can be like the Egyptian pharaohs.”

“I’m not joking. He stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

“Did you like it?”

Liz hadn’t been planning to blurt out what she said next; somehow, it simply emerged. She said, “You didn’t get expelled from Stanford, did you?”

There was a long silence, an immediately sour silence, and finally, Jasper said, “What the fuck? Where’s
this
coming from?”

“I’m sorry.” Until now, Liz really hadn’t believed it; she’d imagined Darcy was confusing Jasper with someone else. “I shouldn’t have—there’s this guy here named Fitzwilliam Darcy, and I guess you guys—”

Before she could finish, Jasper said, “
Darcy
lives in Cincinnati? What the hell is he doing there?”

“There’s a big stroke center where he’s a surgeon.”

Jasper laughed bitterly. “Of course he is. The dude has had a god complex since he was twenty years old. What a wanker.” Rarely was Jasper this undilutedly aggrieved; though he was a frequent complainer, his complaints tended to contain some degree of levity, even charm. He said, “I’ll bet I never told you that a lot of what went down at Stanford was Darcy’s fault.”

This was correct, in part because she and Jasper had never spoken of what had gone down at Stanford, period; Liz was sure of it. Indeed, she had always been under the impression that the school and his time there were a kind of emotional lodestar. In addition to his gold Stanford ring, he sometimes, on fall weekends, wore a much-faded red Stanford sweatshirt; he kept in his living room a framed photograph of him with several fraternity brothers, a row of handsome, athletic-looking men-children in ties and blue blazers, though it struck Liz for the first time that she had never actually met any of the other people in the photo. New York was crawling with her Barnard classmates, but it had seemed unsurprising that his college friends lived on the West Coast.

“I’ll tell you the whole saga in Cincinnati,” Jasper was saying. “It puts me in a bad fucking mood just thinking about it.”

“You should stay at 21c,” Liz said. “I’ve never been, but it’s supposed to be very hip.”

“I hope you’re not friends with Darcy,” Jasper said. “I wouldn’t let that dude lick my shoe.”

It was a relief to be united with rather than divided from Jasper. “Don’t worry,” Liz said. “I feel the same way.”

THE ONE SOLACE
to the unpleasant direction Liz’s conversation with Jasper had taken was that it had distracted her from her encounter with Willie. After she’d ended the call, however, that encounter combined with the confirmation of Jasper’s Stanford expulsion created in her an even higher level of turmoil. Without asking permission and with no particular destination in mind, she left the house in her mother’s car; a few minutes later, she was pulling into the parking lot of Rookwood Pavilion with the idea of getting a manicure and pedicure, and she emerged from the salon after more than an hour also missing four inches of hair, with the remainder layered in a way she was almost certain her colleagues at
Mascara
would be unimpressed by.

Lydia and Kitty sat at the kitchen table wearing workout clothes and eating cashews and organic beef jerky. When Liz entered the house through the back door, Lydia said, “Did you enter the Witness Protection Program to escape from the lust of Cousin Willie?”

“I like your haircut,” Kitty said. “You couldn’t have pulled that off a few years ago, but your cheekbones are showing more as you get older.”

Liz looked at Lydia. “Who told you about Willie?”

“Mom is flipping her shit,” Lydia said. “FYI.”

As Lydia spoke, Mrs. Bennet’s voice became audible from the other side of the closed swinging door between the kitchen and dining room. “Is that Lizzy? Is Lizzy back?”

The door swung into the kitchen, and Mrs. Bennet appeared, flushed and bustling. “Lizzy, what on earth were you thinking? Why, you probably hurt his feelings terribly.”

“Mom, please don’t tell me you think I should date Cousin Willie.”

“He’s smart, he’s successful, and it’s late in the game for you to be picky.”

“He’s my—”

“He’s your step-cousin, Elizabeth. Don’t try to tell me you’re related, because you aren’t.”

“It’s not legal in Ohio to marry your first cousin,” Liz said. During her pedicure, she had checked this information on her phone, hoping to bolster her dismay with facts; she didn’t mention that such a marriage actually was legal in California. “So let’s say we fell madly in love, which would never happen. If we wanted to make it official, we’d need to hire a lawyer.”

“That’d be awesome if you went to prison for marrying Willie,” Lydia said. “I’d laugh so hard.”

“Is someone else pursuing you?” Mrs. Bennet asked, and her accusatory tone made Liz immediately think of the red teddy. “Because if there is, I’d like to know who.”

“OKAY, DON’T KILL
me,” Charlotte said to Liz at Zula, “but I was thinking about it, and I can see Willie being a good boyfriend.”

“Have you ever had a conversation with him?”

“I talked to him for a while at Chip’s dinner party. He was nice.”

“Putting aside the cousin stuff, which there’s no way I can do, he’s incredibly pompous. And even though he’s smart, he isn’t very interesting, because he’s not interested in other people. In retrospect, I realize that the only questions he asked were when he was evaluating me as girlfriend material.”

Charlotte looked carefully at Liz. “Are you sure there’s no ST between you and Darcy?”

“I’m totally sure.” ST, an abbreviation the two friends had been using since their high school days, stood for sexual tension. Liz leaned forward. “Although it turns out Jasper and Darcy went to college together and don’t like each other.” She thought of mentioning Jasper’s expulsion from Stanford, but without yet knowing the circumstances, she was hesitant. Instead, she said, “Jasper’s coming to Cincinnati to write an article about squash. Want to meet him when he’s here?”

“Of course I do. Wait, did you just say he’s coming to write an article?” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Please.”

Liz laughed. “And because I’m irresistible and he can’t stay away from me,” she said. “Also because of that.”

“Is he really writing an article, or is that just the excuse he’s giving people?”

Liz took a sip of wine. “It’s both.”

RETURNING TO THE
Tudor at ten o’clock, Liz saw in the driveway an unfamiliar navy blue SUV and therefore, knowing she wasn’t the last one awake, left the kitchen light on. She’d passed through the dining room and reached the front hall when she heard from the den hushed but unmistakably flirtatious voices that halted just before Lydia appeared in the den’s doorway. “Are you suffering from PTSD after Willie kissed you?” Lydia asked.

“Probably,” Liz said.

“Come in here.” Lydia’s tone was uncharacteristically warm. “I’ll introduce you to Ham.”

He was, as Liz had discerned from his website, fit and handsome in a rather conventional way, though when he stood as she entered the room, she saw that he was significantly shorter than she’d have imagined. Ham extended his arm. “Hamilton Ryan. Or Ham, if you prefer, just like the lunch meat.”

“Liz Bennet.”

“One of the New York sisters, if I’m not mistaken,” he said.

“Not bad,” Liz said. “There are a lot of us to keep track of.” She gestured to the television screen, which was frozen on the opening credits of a popular cable series about FBI agents, and asked, “Which season?”

“First season, first episode,” Ham said, and Liz said, “Then you guys have a lot to look forward to. Or at least until season three, when it comes unraveled. Ham, you own a gym?”

“I do.”

“Liz thinks CrossFit is ‘culty.’ ” Lydia made air quotes.

Good-naturedly, Ham said, “It is.”

“I never said that,” Liz protested. “It just wasn’t for me.”

“Because she tried it once six years ago, for an article she was writing.”

“I did it more than once,” Liz said.

“That’s right,” Ham said. “You work for a magazine. That sounds like a cool job.”

“Depending on the day,” Liz said.

“Liz, Ham is old like you,” Lydia said. “He was born in the seventies.”

Liz and Ham made eye contact and laughed. “I thought you seemed kind of geriatric,” Liz said. “What year?”

“Seventy-nine.”

“Oh, you’re a spring chicken. I was born in seventy-five. You’re from Seattle, aren’t you?” Ham nodded, and Liz realized that she had just mentioned information she’d learned from her online investigation rather than from Lydia. “So how’d you end up in Cincinnati?” Liz asked.

“The short version is, I followed an ex here.”

“That’s enough interviewing,” Lydia said to Liz. “You can leave now.” Both she and Ham were sitting on the couch by this point, their bodies nestled together.

“Wow, Lydia,” Ham said. “No mincing words for you, huh?” But he set his arm around her as he spoke, and Liz had the bewildering thought that perhaps Lydia had met a nice, normal, down-to-earth guy. What she’d have in common with such a person was difficult to fathom.

“Lydia is known in the family for her subtlety,” Liz said, and in reply, Lydia raised her middle finger. “Nice to meet you, Ham,” Liz said.

IT WAS AGAIN
Liz’s turn to drive her father to physical therapy, and no sooner had they pulled out of the driveway of the Tudor than Mr. Bennet said, “The reason your mother wants you to give Cousin Willie a chance is that she thinks his money will save us. Don’t listen to her.”

“Save you how?”

“It turns out my time in the hospital was frightfully expensive.”

“How much?”

“It’s hardly your concern, but since you asked, let’s see. The surgery was a hundred and twenty-two thousand, not counting the anesthesia. It was three thousand a day to stay at that elegant five-star hotel known as Christ Hospital. Then there’s a little something called a doctor fee, and that was another seven thousand. Shall I go on?”

“Isn’t most of it covered by health insurance?”

“Your mother and I don’t have health insurance. Neither of us has had a serious ailment before now.”

“Oh my God, you don’t have health insurance?” Liz was truly astonished, and it occurred to her to pull over, but then what? Nothing would change,
and
they’d be late for physical therapy.