Eligible (34 page)

LIZ CALLED JANE
from the Ikea couch, and when she told her sister where she was, Jane said, “I’m sorry your last night in Cincinnati isn’t very ceremonious.”

“Whatever,” Liz said. “This way I’ll appreciate the luxury of my Houston hotel room.”

“I’ve been thinking about what the extermination man told you,” Jane said, “and the idea of Mom and Dad eating food that was in the house during the fumigation—it makes me nervous. What if you move stuff to Kitty and Mary’s place beforehand, or just throw it away? Some of Mom’s spices are probably from the eighties anyway.”

The annoyance Liz felt—it was because she knew Jane was right, and she also knew that clearing out the many kitchen cabinets, plus the refrigerators on two floors, would not be an insignificant task. And Ken Weinrich’s team was supposed to arrive at the Tudor at ten the next morning.

Liz glanced at the closed door of Kitty’s bedroom; light shone out from the crack, and she could hear the sound of whatever TV show Kitty was watching on her smartphone. Mary was out, presumably still at the bowling alley. Liz would enlist them both, she thought. To Jane, she said, “Want me to send you a picture of the house when it’s tented?”

“No!” Jane sounded dismayed.

“I won’t if you don’t want me to.” Liz lowered her voice. “There’s something I haven’t told you about Darcy.” Her wish to confess stemmed less from a moral awakening than from confusion over the uneasiness she’d experienced leaving Darcy’s apartment that afternoon; she needed to discuss the oddness of their final encounter.

“Do you know,” Jane said before Liz revealed more, and Jane’s tone was equanimous rather than bitter, “if it weren’t for Darcy, I have a hunch Chip and I would still be together?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The night he broke up with me, one of the things he said was that Darcy didn’t think we made a good couple. Chip also said, as if I didn’t know this, how much he respects Darcy.”

An unpleasant alertness had come over Liz. “Why would Darcy have disapproved of you and Chip?”

“Who knows? Although I’m sure I could torment myself from now until the end of time guessing.” Jane laughed a little, which seemed to Liz a sign of her sister’s progress. Indeed, Jane appeared far calmer about what she was describing than Liz felt. “Anyway, it’s not like Darcy’s low opinion of our family has ever been a secret,” Jane said. “What’s the thing you haven’t told me about him?”

Liz thought miserably of her conclusion—her entirely self-serving conclusion, she realized—that sleeping with Darcy was not wrong. What disloyalty to Jane she’d shown! Surely divulging her trysts to Jane at this juncture, especially when those trysts were now finished, would serve no purpose. Haltingly, Liz said, “That day you fainted, when you were at the hospital—I ran into Darcy outside the ER. He helped me figure out where to go.”

Jane was quiet, seemingly waiting for more.

Lamely, Liz added, “I couldn’t remember if I’d mentioned that to you.”

“I do feel like I can see things more from Chip’s perspective than I could at first,” Jane said. “What if instead of me telling him I was pregnant, he’d told me that another woman was pregnant with his child? Or if—well, the way Amanda and Prisha had Gideon was using sperm from a friend of theirs, a straight friend. If Chip had donated his sperm to a lesbian couple he was close to, no matter how carefully he’d tried to explain it, it would have seemed weird.”

“Not really. This stuff happens now.”

“But if you’re just getting to know the other person?”

“You’re being too easy on him.” Liz was, however, unsure if she really thought this or merely wished to deflect attention from herself and what she’d almost disclosed. Then she said, “Kitty solved the mystery of Mary’s evening outings. Mary doesn’t know we know, but apparently she’s in a bowling league.”

“Really?” Jane sounded tickled. “That’s so cute.”

THE DOORBELL OF
the apartment, a sound Liz hadn’t previously heard, woke her just before seven in the morning. In the boxer shorts and T-shirt she’d slept in—the shirt was one she’d excavated from her closet at the Tudor, and it read
HARVEST FAIR 1991
across the front—she opened the door. Insofar as she was awake enough to have any such expectations, she assumed it would be the building’s superintendent, or perhaps the landlord; but to Liz’s astonishment, it was Fitzwilliam Darcy. Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her braless chest. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“You told me your sisters’ building was at the intersection of Millsbrae and Atlantic.” Darcy’s countenance was grim: His skin was unusually pale, and there were pronounced bags beneath his eyes. He wore green scrubs, and Liz suspected he’d driven directly from his overnight shift. They looked at each other—was she supposed to invite him in?—and somewhere nearby, an oriole trilled. Darcy said, “I take it you’re still planning to leave town this afternoon?”

“Yeah, after the epic fumigation. Or after it starts—it won’t be finished for three days.”

There was a pause. Then, in a severe voice and without preamble, Darcy said, “I’m in love with you.”

“Ha, ha,” Liz said.

“It’s probably an illusion caused by the release of oxytocin during sex,” Darcy continued, “but I
feel
as if I’m in love with you. You’re not beautiful, and you aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are. You’re a gossip fiend who tries to pass off your nosiness as anthropological interest in the human condition. And your family, obviously, is a disgrace. Yet in spite of all common sense, I can’t stop thinking about you. The time has come for us to abandon this ridiculous pretense of hate sex and admit that we’re a couple.” Darcy had delivered this monologue stiffly, while mostly avoiding eye contact, but when he was finished, he looked expectantly at Liz.

If she had ever been so bewildered, she could not recall when. And though she understood that his remarks contained some flattering essence, she had never been more insulted. For several seconds, she searched for words and finally said, “So this isn’t—you’re not joking? Or are you?”

“I’m not joking at all.”

“Darcy, how could we possibly be a couple? We don’t even like each other.”

“That was at first.”

“For you, maybe,” Liz said. “I mean, sorry, but I still consider you a jackass. Do you imagine you’re doing me some big favor by overlooking how unattractive I am and how much you hate my family and declaring your love anyway?”

Darcy’s surprise was apparent in his widened eyes, a surprise, Liz thought, that served as further evidence of his arrogance. Tightly, he said, “I was under the impression that you appreciated candor. It wasn’t my intent to offend you.”

“How could I possibly want to be with the person who pushed Chip and Jane apart? I know now that you told him to break up with her. And I know you were part of getting Jasper kicked out of Stanford. This idea you have that your judgment is better than everyone else’s, that you alone should decide the fates of other people—the only question is if being a surgeon gave you a god complex or if your god complex is what led to your being a surgeon.”

“I see,” Darcy said. “And you believe that I have not only the will to control people’s behavior but also the power?”

“The facts speak for themselves.”

“Let me assure you that the idea for Chip to leave medicine and go back on
Eligible
didn’t come from me.”

“You may not have bought his plane ticket to L.A., but I’m sure you influenced him.”

“And when you suggest that I got Jasper expelled from Stanford”—Darcy’s expression was haughty—“just so I fully comprehend, was it that he was innocent and I planted evidence on him, or was it that he was guilty but I should have unilaterally decided to let him off the hook?”

“There are worse crimes than writing an idiotic story.”

Darcy scrutinized her face before saying, “Yes, there are.”

“Even if you hadn’t screwed over Jasper and Jane, I’d never want you to be my boyfriend,” Liz said. “And even if you hadn’t just insulted my looks, my personality, and my family, and blamed your interest in me on sex hormones—even if you’d expressed your attraction like a normal human being, I still wouldn’t.”

She was experiencing a pleasing anger, a satisfying outrage rare in her daily encounters, and she expected him to be experiencing it, too. But rather than glaring back at her, he seemed wounded, and a small seed of doubt formed within Liz.

“I apologize for misreading the situation so egregiously,” he said. Then—it was such a strange, old-fashioned gesture—he basically bowed to her. “Forgive me.” He turned, and in a matter of seconds, without further farewell, he was gone. Immediately, Liz began to question whether she’d imagined the whole bizarre exchange.

Still standing on the threshold of the open door, Liz found that she was shaking; her anger was quickly slipping away, replaced with a growing uneasiness. How was it possible that Darcy—
Darcy
—had announced that he was in love with her? If it was at some level gratifying, it was also unthinkable. How thoroughly confused she felt, how rattled and off-kilter.

From behind the closed door of her bedroom, Mary called, “Lizzy, did someone just ring our doorbell?”

FOR THE REST
of the day—while helping her parents settle in at the country club, while dropping off unexpired canned goods from the Tudor at a food pantry, and while discussing final fumigation preparations with Ken Weinrich (yes, Liz had watered the soil the previous day)—through all of it, Liz thought continuously of Darcy. Eating a late lunch on the porch of the country club with Mary and her parents, Liz could hardly follow what anyone was saying, even when the subject changed from Mrs. Bennet’s speculation about why things hadn’t worked for Jane and Chip to what Kathy de Bourgh would be like. Frowning, Mrs. Bennet said, “I’ve always found her very strident.”

It was Mr. Bennet who was driving Liz to the airport for her flight to Houston, though they stopped first at her sisters’ apartment to get her bags. Just outside the door of their unit, set on the floor and leaning against the wall, was a plain business envelope with Liz’s first name written on it.

“Who’s that from?” Mary asked, and Liz folded it in half, stuffed it into her pants pocket, and said, “Nobody.”

Mary made a scoffing sound. “Yeah, apparently.”

The envelope practically thrummed as Liz rode to the airport in the passenger seat of her father’s car.

“Do you remember when you and Mom are allowed back in the house?” Liz asked as her father merged onto 71 South. “It’s one o’clock on Friday. You’ll need to dump out the ice that’s in the ice maker. Don’t make a gin and tonic with it.”

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it,” Mr. Bennet said, “that for decades at a time, I’ve stayed alive without your daily instructions?”

“The fumigation guys will have opened all your drawers and cabinets for air circulation,” Liz said. “And the doors and windows, too. But Mary will come over and help close everything. And then, please, will you and Mom both really, really try to keep the house looking presentable for when agents want to show it?”

Without checking his rearview mirror, Mr. Bennet moved over a lane, and a car just behind them honked. “Relax, my dear,” he said. “We’ll all be just fine.”

“Do you realize you almost had an accident right now?”

Mr. Bennet reached out his arm and patted Liz’s knee. In an uncharacteristically serious tone, he said, “Lizzy, you’ve been a voice of reason amid a cacophony of foolishness. It was very good of you to come home this summer.”