Eligible

  “You look very pretty tonight,” Willie said to Liz at one point, and she was just tipsy enough—the sangria was indeed strong—to find the comment endearing rather than weird.

  “Thank you, Cousin Willie,” she said. “You look very handsome.”

  At the conclusion of the main course, Jane, Liz, and Charlotte cleared the plates, and when Charlotte and Liz were standing by the kitchen sink, Charlotte said, “Were you and Darcy flirting on the balcony?”

  “Oh, God, no,” Liz said. “The opposite. And I’m pretty sure he’s dating Caroline.”

  “Really?” Charlotte said. “I didn’t know that.”

  At the table, Caroline was on Darcy’s other side and had spent most of the meal curled toward him in conversation like a poisonous weed. As a dessert of brownies and Graeter’s ice cream appeared, Jane murmured to Liz, “Chip bought me a mountain bike.” She didn’t seem pleased.

  Liz looked at Jane. “That was nice of him.” While at the Tudor for dinner, Chip had mentioned that he’d already explored several area trails.

  Jane shook her head. “I think it was expensive.”

  “Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t have bought it if he couldn’t afford it. Sorry, Jane, but he’s into you.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Jane said. “Maybe his expectations are too high.”

  Liz laughed. “You think if he gives you a fancy bike, you’re obligated to put out? Because if I’m not mistaken, you’ve been doing that for weeks.”

  “It just seems soon for such an extravagant present.”

  “Will you relax and enjoy being courted?” Liz said. “It’s not a diamond ring.”

  “Well, I definitely wouldn’t accept that,” Jane said. After a pause—on the other side of the table, Keith, his fiancée, and Chip were discussing a “hot” appendix Keith had seen the previous day—Jane added, “You think I should keep the bike?”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “Go riding with him. Have fun.”

  Willie, who had been in the bathroom, rejoined them then and gestured toward a pint of ice cream on the table. “The famous black raspberry chip, I take it?”

  Liz passed the pint to him. “When in Cincinnati,” she said.

  In spite of her plan not to initiate conversation with Darcy again—certainly not on this evening, and possibly not ever—Chip and all eight of his guests ended up back out on the balcony, and Liz found herself standing just inches from the person she’d sought to avoid. For better or worse, she was someone who filled silences and smiled at strangers. Thus she said to Darcy, “How was your pizza?”

  “That cicada sound you like so much,” Darcy said. “It’s the males contracting their abdominal muscles.”

  The sound was audible at that moment, beneath the simultaneous balcony conversations. She said, “Did you learn that in medical school?”

  He dispensed one of his infrequent smiles. “I just looked it up on Wikipedia. It’s a mating call.”

  “How romantic,” Liz said.

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t wish Jasper Wick ill,” Darcy said. “Everyone should have the right to move on from their past.”

  Liz looked at him sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I assume you know he was kicked out of Stanford.”

  What? Liz thought. She said nothing, and Darcy, who appeared genuinely surprised, added, “Did you not know that?”

  “It actually isn’t something we’ve discussed.”

  In the shadowy summer night, they watched each other. “Didn’t you say he’s your best friend?” Darcy said.

  “Why did he get kicked out?”

  “I shouldn’t speak for him,” Darcy said. “But it’s not as if it was a secret. It caused a campus-wide stir.”

  “Was it drugs?” Liz asked. “Or cheating on a test?”

  Darcy’s expression had grown impatient; if an unspoken détente had occurred between them, it was no longer in effect. “Those are questions for you to ask Jasper,” he said.

  “LIZZY, I CAME to say goodbye,” Cousin Willie said. “It’s been great to reconnect with you.”

  Liz was at her desk, writing an email to Kathy de Bourgh’s publicist, who had ignored Liz’s entreaties since her failure to call during Kathy de Bourgh’s ten-minute window of availability several days before. “You, too,” Liz said to her cousin. Miraculously, Mary had agreed to drive Aunt Margo and Willie to the airport, and their imminent departure made Liz generous toward her cousin.

  Willie stopped just a few feet from Liz’s chair; his countenance was serious, and he seemed agitated.

  “Is something wrong?” Liz asked.

  Instead of speaking, he swiftly bent down and pressed his lips to hers. The surprise of the kiss was exacerbated when it became evident that he did not mean for it to be brief; he proceeded to open his mouth, and with the intrusion of his tongue, Liz pulled back her head in horror.

  “Oh, Willie—” She was shocked but not entirely; she was appalled but also amused; she felt, already, cruel and distant, as if this were a moment she was comically describing to Jane or Jasper rather than currently experiencing. Still, she needed to focus in order to extricate herself with dignity or grace.

  “I realize I’m not a prince in a fairy tale,” Willie said. “But we get along. We’re known quantities to each other. And you’re almost forty.”

  “Jane is almost forty. I’m thirty-eight. But, Willie, my God, we’re cousins.”

  “Not by blood. It isn’t like our kids would face a stigma.” These hypothetical children that she didn’t want with any man, least of all Willie—she resented him for conjuring them up. “Look,” Willie said. “You and I are practical people. I’ve never been able to see the point of roses and chocolates, and I’m guessing you haven’t, either. But I’ll be faithful to you. I’ll respect your work, and I know you’ll respect mine—I don’t want a woman who gives me a hard time about my long hours. I think we owe it to ourselves to give a relationship a try.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” Liz said, “did you come to Cincinnati with the idea of hitting on me?”

  “You and I have always been compatible. Margo and your mom both think we make a great couple.” Willie set his hand on her shoulder; immediately, she lifted it away, stood, and folded her arms.

  “We’re not a couple,” she said. “And if you’re under the impression that I want us to be one, you’re mistaken.” Softening her tone, she added, “When you meet some awesome woman in a year or two, you’ll be so glad you didn’t end up with me.”

  “How can you be certain I’ll meet someone when you haven’t?”

  Ignoring the question’s sting, Liz said, “There’s a lot you don’t know about my life.”

  Willie sighed; he seemed irritated rather than wounded. “Does the cousin thing bother you that much? Growing up, we hardly spent time together.”

  “Yes, it does bother me.”

  “I’m open to giving you a few days to think it over,” Willie said. “I’ll call you later this week, after I’m back in California.”

  “No, Willie. And I can tell you now that it’s a waste of time to try this with any of my sisters.”

  Willie set his hands on his hips. “Do you know how much I’m worth?”

  “You need to go.” She would not give him a farewell hug; his obstinacy had become offensive.

  He looked at her curiously. Perhaps, Liz thought, he was for the first time realizing that she had an identity, an agency, other than those he’d invented for her. At last, he said, “It’s funny you think there’s such a big difference between being thirty-eight and being forty.”

  JANE, WHO WAS the first person with whom Liz wished to discuss what had just transpired, was at a yoga class. Jasper was the second person, except that Liz remained unsettled by the information she’d learned the previous night about his alleged expulsion from Stanford. And so, having barricaded herself in the third-floor bathroom because Cousin Willie was, at least for a few more minutes, still o
n the Tudor’s premises, it was to Charlotte Lucas that Liz sent a text while sitting on the tile floor: Cousin Willie just kissed me eek!!!!!!

  Less than a minute later, Charlotte’s return text pinged: Wait like KISSED kissed??

  Yes what’s wrong w him? Or me?

  That’s VERY weird. Willie’s cute in a nerd way but um, cousins?!? An additional text from Charlotte arrived a few seconds later: Headed into meeting have a drink tonight?

  Yes!! Liz wrote back. Zula? Somewhere else? U name time.

  Then she called Jasper.

  “Should I stay at the Cincinnatian or 21c?” he asked. “Fiona’s booking my ticket to Cincinnati right now.”

  “You know how my cousin Willie the Silicon Valley whiz kid is visiting?” Liz said. “He just came on to me!”

  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 s
ignificantly 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.