Eligible (36 page)

“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?

“Liz?” Approaching from a door near the stage was a young woman in a charcoal pantsuit. “I’m Valerie Wright. Kathy de Bourgh is ready to see you.”

IN THE GREENROOM,
Kathy de Bourgh was eating an arugula salad. She stood to firmly shake Liz’s hand and said, “I apologize for keeping you waiting, but my dog has keratitis and I was touching base with the vet.”

“I’m so sorry,” Liz said. She knew that Kathy de Bourgh was the owner of a Pekingese named Button, though Liz did not mention this knowledge because of the fine line between due diligence and creepiness.

As they sat, Kathy de Bourgh smiled and said, “Now that we’ve both apologized within the first thirty seconds of our conversation about women and power, shall we begin?” While Liz set her two digital recorders on the glass tabletop and turned them on, Kathy de Bourgh added, “You might not know this, but I myself was once a writer for
Mascara.
”

“Oh, it’s one of our claims to fame,” Liz said. She was reassured that Kathy de Bourgh knew what publication she was being interviewed for; regularly, very famous people didn’t.

“That was roughly fifteen thousand years ago,” Kathy de Bourgh said. “During the Pleistocene epoch.”

Liz said, “Knowing you’d worked for the magazine was the main reason I was excited to get a job there.”

Kathy de Bourgh laughed. “Liz, flattery will get you everywhere.”

As Valerie Wright and two other women whose identities never became clear to Liz sat in chairs against the wall and typed on their smartphones, Liz asked Kathy de Bourgh about feminism’s present and past, about whether its current prominence in popular culture struck her as meaningful or fleeting, about reproductive freedom and equal compensation, race and gender, mentoring, ambition, likability, and whether having it all was a realistic possibility or a phrase that ought to be expurgated from the English language. Usually in interviews, every few minutes the subject would say something articulate or insightful enough that Liz knew she could use it in her article, and she’d feel a little lift, or maybe relief; with Kathy de Bourgh, every sentence of every answer was usable. And the responses
weren’t
all ones Liz had heard before.

As they reached the end of the allotted twenty minutes, which Liz had high hopes of exceeding, she said, “You didn’t marry until you were sixty-seven years old. Was that due to the difficulty of finding a spouse who would treat you as an equal partner?”

Kathy de Bourgh smiled again. “Are you married?” she asked.

Et tu, Kathy de Bourgh?
Liz thought and shook her head. She knew that Kathy de Bourgh’s husband, a renowned architect, had died of an aneurysm only three years after their wedding.

“I considered getting married many times,” Kathy de Bourgh said. “I certainly had my share of suitors. But—” She paused. “How can I describe this?” Liz remained quiet—remaining quiet was the most reliable tool in her interviewing kit—and Kathy de Bourgh said, “With all the men I dated before Benjamin, there was some degree of performance involved. Even when those men and I had a lot of chemistry, or maybe especially then, it was like we were performing our chemistry either for an audience or just for each other. I was engaged once to a very good-looking man”—
Indeed,
Liz thought,
to the attorney general of New York
—“but eventually I realized that when I was with him, I was always trying to present the most cheerful, entertaining, attractive version of myself, instead of just
being
myself. It was a lot of effort, especially over time. Whereas with Benjamin, it never felt like people saw us as a golden couple, and it wasn’t how we saw ourselves. We knew each other for ten years before we became involved. During that time, I gradually realized he was easy to be around and easy to talk to. We once traveled together to China as part of a delegation—not just us, but about twenty people—and even when the bus was late or our luggage got lost, he was very unflappable, very considerate of others. That probably doesn’t sound romantic, does it? It was
real,
though—we got a clear view of each other. Whereas when I dated other men, whether it was leading protests or attending parties at the White House, there was a fantasy aspect to our time together that I don’t think prepared us for some of the mundane daily struggles life has in store.”

As Kathy de Bourgh took a sip of water, Liz said, “So the lesson is—?”

Kathy de Bourgh set her glass down. “Benjamin was very nurturing, by which I don’t mean that he talked extensively about his feelings. He didn’t. But he looked out for me in a steady, ongoing way, and I hope I did the same for him.”

“Kathy, you have a three o’clock with George Schiff,” Valerie Wright said, standing. “Liz, we need to wrap it up. So glad we could make this happen.”

Ignoring Valerie, Kathy de Bourgh said, “There’s a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of you—that both are inherently unfeminist. I don’t agree. There’s no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.”

Within thirty seconds, Liz knew, she’d be back on the other side of the greenroom door. She reached for her recorders but didn’t turn them off, in case Kathy de Bourgh was about to share any final pearls of wisdom. Instead, Kathy de Bourgh hugged her, and Liz tried to think who in her life liked her enough that Liz could later make them listen to the barely audible rustle of being embraced by the leader of second-wave feminism. Jane would listen to humor Liz, though she wouldn’t really be interested.

“Be well,” Kathy de Bourgh said.