Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Curtis Sittenfeld 2016

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover photographs © Nina Masic/Trevillion Image

Curtis Sittenfeld asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007486311

Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007486304

Version: 2017-03-13

Praise for Eligible:

‘These days, if Curtis Sittenfeld writes it, I read it’

JUDY BLUME

‘A masterpiece … I found Eligible so relevant and relatable. Whether or not you’re an Austen fan, you’ll adore this version: This is Pride and Prejudice 2.0 and I must confess, I liked it more than the original. There I said it’

Stylist

‘Bold and brilliant … Sittenfeld’s prose is so witty and sparkling that she keeps you entranced from first page to last’

Glamour

‘Eligible has all the charm, wit and romance of Pride and Prejudice and also takes these characters who are such a stalwart feature of our literary landscape and treats them with such affection and humour, that I defy anyone not to find Eligible an absolute delight’

Red

‘Dazzling’

Woman and Home

‘Fizzy [and] funny’

Psychologies

‘Such a feast of a book’

NIGELLA LAWSON

‘Not since Clueless, which transported Emma to Beverly Hills, has Austen been so delightedly interpreted … three cheers for Curtis Sittenfeld and her astute, sharp and ebullient anthropological interest in the human condition’

New York Times

‘An enjoyably light-hearted romp’

Financial Times

‘Hilarious and endearing family drama’

Kirkus Reviews

‘Effortlessly entertaining and delightfully readable’

National

‘A delightful romp for not only Austen devotees but also lovers of romantic comedies and sly satire, as well … bestselling Sittenfeld plus Jane Austen? What more could mainstream fiction readers ask for?’

Booklist

‘Sittenfeld adeptly updates and channels Austen’s narrative voice – the book is full of smart observations on gender and money … a clever retelling of an old-fashioned favourite’

Publishers Weekly

‘This sexy retake also deals with contemporary issues, such as transgender and racism … an enjoyable romp’

Daily Express

‘The whole confection is riotously entertaining, and can be wolfed down in a handful of sittings’

Daily Mail

‘Curtis Sittenfeld is brilliant. She’s very honest about relationships and the unspoken stuff that goes on between people. She’s a very good student of human nature’

MARIAN KEYES

‘Eligible is a wickedly funny retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with plenty of modern twists’

Good Housekeeping

‘Sittenfeld is triumphant in her modern take on Austen … the story has a great pace and witty, wry, spot-on social observations’

Grazia

‘Eligible is funny, clever and really rather sweet’

Heat

‘[A] clever, witty novel’

Hello!

‘A sharp, satirical book with literary cred’

The Times

‘A magnificent read’

Independent

‘Clever, funny and terrifically entertaining’

Sunday Times

‘Eligible is inventively and mischievously done’

Literary Review

‘Deliciously readable’

Mail on Sunday

‘Sittenfeld pulls off the modernization splendidly … brimming with feminist life lessons’

Porter

‘Sittenfeld proves once again that when it comes to dialogue, she reigns supreme’

Readers Digest

‘It is a testament to her sharp dialogue and astute observations that the novel works both as an updating of a classic and a satisfying story in its own right. Austen would approve’

Sunday Express

‘Familiar, yet surprising – and full of acerbic wit’

Sunday Mirror

‘A sweet, touching and human story’

Sunday Times

‘Sizzling sexual tension makes for the perfect poolside indulgence’

Mail on Sunday

‘Pitch-perfect … a pure joy from the very first page’

ATTICA LOCKE

‘Unwholesomely addictive … compulsively readable’

Spectator

‘With […] deft wit and clear-eyed compassion she tackles new social dilemmas’

The Times

‘If there exists a more perfect pairing than Curtis Sittenfeld and Jane Austen, we dare you to find it … Sittenfeld makes an already irresistible story even more beguiling and charming’

Elle

Dedication

For Samuel Park,

Austen devotee and beloved friend

Epigraph

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.

—MARK TWAIN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Eligible

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

Chapter 111

Part II

Chapter 112

Chapter 113

Chapter 114

Chapter 115

Chapter 116

Chapter 117

Chapter 118

Chapter 119

Chapter 120

Chapter 121

Chapter 122

Chapter 123

Chapter 124

Chapter 125

Chapter 126

Chapter 127

Chapter 128

Chapter 129

Chapter 130

Chapter 131

Chapter 132

Chapter 133

Chapter 134

Chapter 135

Chapter 136

Chapter 137

Chapter 138

Chapter 139

Chapter 140

Chapter 141

Chapter 142

Chapter 143

Chapter 144

Chapter 145

Chapter 146

Part III

Chapter 147

Chapter 148

Chapter 149

Chapter 150

Chapter 151

Chapter 152

Chapter 153

Chapter 154

Chapter 155

Chapter 156

Chapter 157

Chapter 158

Chapter 159

Chapter 160

Chapter 161

Chapter 162

Chapter 163

Chapter 164

Chapter 165

Chapter 166

Chapter 167

Chapter 168

Chapter 169

Chapter 170

Chapter 171

Chapter 172

Chapter 173

Chapter 174

Chapter 175

Chapter 176

Chapter 177

Four Months Later

Chapter 178

Chapter 179

Two Weeks Later

Chapter 180

Chapter 181

Acknowledgments

An essay by Curtis Sittenfeld

About the Author

Also by Curtis Sittenfeld

About the Publisher

PART I

Chapter 1

Well before his arrival in Cincinnati, everyone knew that Chip Bingley was looking for a wife. Two years earlier, Chip—graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School, scion of the Pennsylvania Bingleys, who in the twentieth century had made their fortune in plumbing fixtures—had, ostensibly with some reluctance, appeared on the juggernaut reality television show Eligible. Over the course of eight weeks in the fall of 2011, twenty-five single women had lived together in a mansion in Rancho Cucamonga, California, and vied for Chip’s heart: accompanying him on dates to play blackjack in Las Vegas and taste wine at vineyards in Napa Valley, fighting with and besmirching one another in and out of his presence. At the end of each episode, every woman received either a kiss on the lips from him, which meant she would continue to compete, or a kiss on the cheek, which meant she had to return home immediately. In the final episode, with only two women remaining—Kara, a wide-eyed, blond-ringleted twenty-three-year-old former college cheerleader turned second-grade teacher from Jackson, Mississippi, and Marcy, a duplicitous yet alluring brunette twenty-eight-year-old dental hygienist from Morristown, New Jersey—Chip wept profusely and declined to propose marriage to either. They both were extraordinary, he declared, stunning and intelligent and sophisticated, but toward neither did he feel what he termed “a soul connection.” In compliance with FCC regulations, Marcy’s subsequent tirade consisted primarily of bleeped-out words that nevertheless did little to conceal her rage.

“It’s not because he was on that silly show that I want him to meet our girls,” Mrs. Bennet told her husband over breakfast on a morning in late June. The Bennets lived on Grandin Road, in a sprawling eight-bedroom Tudor in Cincinnati’s Hyde Park neighborhood. “I never even saw it. But he went to Harvard Medical School, you know.”

“So you’ve mentioned,” said Mr. Bennet.

“After all we’ve been through, I wouldn’t mind a doctor in the family,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Call that self-serving if you like, but I’d say it’s smart.”

“Self-serving?” Mr. Bennet repeated. “You?”

Five weeks prior, Mr. Bennet had undergone emergency coronary artery bypass surgery; after a not inconsiderable recuperation, it was just in the last few days that his typically sardonic affect had returned.

“Chip Bingley didn’t even want to be on Eligible, but his sister nominated him,” Mrs. Bennet said.

“A reality show isn’t unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, then,” Mr. Bennet said. “In that they both require nominations.”

“I wonder if Chip’s renting or has bought a place,” Mrs. Bennet said. “That would tell us something about how long he plans to stay in Cincinnati.”

Mr. Bennet set down his slice of toast. “Given that this man is a stranger to us, you seem inordinately interested in the details of his life.”

“I’d scarcely say stranger. He’s in the ER at Christ Hospital, which means Dick Lucas must know him. Chip’s very well-spoken, not like those trashy young people who are usually on TV. And very handsome, too.”

“I thought you’d never seen the show.”

“I only caught a few minutes of it, when the girls were watching.” Mrs. Bennet looked peevishly at her husband. “You shouldn’t quarrel with me. It’s bad for your recovery. Anyway, Chip could have had a whole career on TV but chose to return to medicine. And you can tell that he’s from a nice family. Fred, I really believe his moving here right when Jane and Liz are home is the silver lining to our troubles.” The eldest and second eldest of the five Bennet sisters had lived in New York for the last decade and a half; it was due to their father’s health scare that they had abruptly, if temporarily, returned to Cincinnati.

“My dear,” said Mr. Bennet, “if a sock puppet with a trust fund and a Harvard medical degree moved here, you’d think he was meant to marry one of our girls.”

“Tease me all you like, but the clock is ticking. No, Jane doesn’t look like she’ll be forty in November, but any man who knows her age will think long and hard about what that means. And Liz isn’t far behind her.”

“Plenty of men don’t want children.” Mr. Bennet took a sip of coffee. “I’m still not sure that I do.”

“A woman in her forties can give birth,” Mrs. Bennet said, “but it isn’t as easy as the media would have you believe. Phyllis and Bob’s daughter had all sorts of procedures, and what did she end up with but little Ying from Shanghai.” As she stood, Mrs. Bennet glanced at her gold oval-faced watch. “I’m going to phone Helen Lucas and see if she can arrange an introduction to Chip.”

Chapter 2

Mrs. Bennet was always the one to say grace at family dinners—she was fond of the Anglican meal prayer—and hardly had the word amen passed her lips that evening when, with uncontainable enthusiasm, she announced, “The Lucases have invited us for a Fourth of July barbecue!”

“What time?” asked Lydia, who at twenty-three was the youngest Bennet. “Because Kitty and I have plans.”

Mary, who was thirty, said, “No fireworks start before dark.”

“We’re invited to a pre-party in Mount Adams,” Kitty said. Kitty was twenty-six, the closest in both age and temperament to Lydia, yet contrary to typical sibling patterns, she both tagged after and was led astray by her younger sister.

“But I haven’t told you who’ll be at the barbecue.” From her end of the long oak kitchen table, Mrs. Bennet beamed. “Chip Bingley!”

“The Eligible crybaby?” Lydia said, and Kitty giggled as Lydia added, “I’ve never seen a woman cry as hard as he did in the season finale.”

“What’s an eligible crybaby?” Jane asked.

“Oh, Jane,” Liz said. “So innocent and unspoiled. You’ve heard of the reality show Eligible, right?”

Jane squinted. “I think so.”

“He was on it a couple years ago. He was the guy being lusted after by twenty-five women.”

“I don’t suppose that any of you can appreciate the terror a man might feel being so outnumbered,” Mr. Bennet said. “I often weep, and there are only six of you.”

“Eligible is degrading to women,” Mary said, and Lydia said, “Of course that’s what you think.”

“But every other season is one woman and twenty-five guys,” Kitty said. “That’s equality.”

“The women humiliate themselves in a way the men don’t,” Mary said. “They’re so desperate.”

“Chip Bingley went to Harvard Medical School,” Mrs. Bennet said. “He’s not one of those vulgar Hollywood types.”

“Mom, his Hollywood vulgarity is the only reason anyone in Cincinnati cares about him,” Liz said.

Jane turned to her sister. “You knew he was here?”

“You didn’t?”

“Which of us are you hoping he’ll go for, Mom?” Lydia asked. “He’s old, right? So I assume Jane.”

“Thanks, Lydia,” Jane said.

“He’s thirty-six,” Mrs. Bennet said. “That would make him suitable for Jane or Liz.”

“Why not for Mary?” Kitty asked.

“He doesn’t seem like Mary’s type,” Mrs. Bennet said.

“Because she’s gay,” Lydia said. “And he’s not a woman.”

Mary glared at Lydia. “First of all, I’m not gay. And even if I were, I’d rather be a lesbian than a sociopath.”

Lydia smirked. “You don’t have to choose.”

“Is everyone listening to this?” Mary turned to her mother, at the foot of the table, then her father, at the head. “There’s something seriously wrong with Lydia.”

“There’s nothing wrong with any of you,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Jane, what’s this vegetable called? It has an unusual flavor.”

“It’s spinach,” Jane said. “I braised it.”

“In point of fact,” Mr. Bennet said, “there’s something wrong with all of you. You’re adults, and you ought to be living on your own.”

“Dad, we came home to take care of you,” Jane said.

“I’m well now. Go back to New York. You too, Lizzy. As the only one who refuses to take a dime and, not coincidentally, the only one with a real job, you’re supposed to be setting an example for your sisters. Instead, they’re pulling you down with them.”

“Jane and Lizzy know how important my luncheon is,” Mrs. Bennet said. “That’s why they’re still here.” The event to which Mrs. Bennet was referring was the annual fundraising luncheon for the Cincinnati Women’s League, scheduled this year for the second Thursday in September. A member of the league since her twenties, Mrs. Bennet was for the first time the luncheon’s planning chair, and, as she often reminded her family members, the enormous pressure and responsibility of the role left her, however lamentably, unavailable to tend to her husband’s recovery. “Now, the Lucases’ barbecue is called for four,” Mrs. Bennet continued. “Lydia and Kitty, that’s plenty of time for you to join us and still get to your party before the fireworks. Helen Lucas is inviting some young people from the hospital besides Chip Bingley, so it’d be a shame for you to miss meeting them.”

“Mom, unlike our sisters, Kitty and I are capable of getting boyfriends on our own,” Lydia said.

Mrs. Bennet looked from her end of the table to her husband’s. “If any of our girls marry doctors, it will meet my needs, yes,” she said to him. “But, Fred, if it gets them out of the house, I daresay it will meet yours, too.”

Chapter 3

In the professional realm, Mr. Bennet had done little while supporting his family with a large but dwindling inheritance, and his observations about his daughters’ indolence was more than a little hypocritical. However, he was not wrong. Indeed, an outsider could be forgiven for wondering what it was that the Bennet sisters did with themselves from day to day and year to year. It wasn’t that they were uneducated: On the contrary, from the ages of three to eighteen, each sister had attended the Seven Hills School, a challenging yet warm coeducational institution where in their younger years they’d memorized songs such as “Fifty Nifty United States” and collaborated—collaboration, at Seven Hills, was paramount—with classmates on massive papier-mâché stegosauruses or triceratops. In later years, they read The Odyssey, helped run the annual Harvest Fair, and went on supplemental summer trips to France and China; throughout, they all played soccer and basketball. The cumulative bill for this progressive and wide-ranging education was $800,000. All five girls had then gone on to private colleges before embarking on what could euphemistically be called non-lucrative careers, though in the case of some sisters, non-lucrative non-careers was a more precise descriptor. Kitty and Lydia had never worked longer than a few months at a time, as desultory nannies or salesgirls in the Abercrombie & Fitch or the Banana Republic in Rookwood Pavilion. Similarly, they had lived under roofs other than their parents’ for only short stretches, experiments in quasi-independence that had always resulted in dramatic fights with formerly close friends, broken leases, and the huffy transport of possessions, via laundry basket and trash bag, back to the Tudor. Primarily what occupied the younger Bennet sisters was eating lunch at Green Dog Café or Teller’s, texting and watching videos on their smartphones, and exercising. About a year before, Kitty and Lydia had embraced CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast. Naturally, all Bennets except Kitty and Lydia were among these masses.

Mary, meanwhile, was pursuing her third online master’s degree, this one in psychology; the earlier ones had been in criminal justice and business administration. The plainest in appearance of the sisters, Mary considered her decision to live with her parents to be evidence of her commitment to the life of the mind over material acquisitions, and also to reflect her aversion to waste, since her childhood room would go empty were she not its occupant. By this logic, Mary’s waste avoidance was truly exemplary: since she hardly decamped from her room from one day to the next and instead sequestered herself with her studies, stayed up late, and slept in. The exception was a standing Tuesday-night excursion, but if asked about this mysterious weekly outing, Mary would bark, “It’s none of your business,” or that’s what she would have said back when her family members still inquired. Also, back then, Lydia would have said, “AA meeting? Lesbian book club? Lesbian AA meeting?”

Jane and Liz had always held jobs, but even for them, a certain awareness of the safety net below had allowed the prioritizing of their personal interests over remuneration. Jane was a yoga instructor, a position that might have let her cover her rent in a city such as Cincinnati but did not do so in Manhattan, and certainly not on the Upper West Side, which she had called home for the last fifteen years. While Liz, too, had spent her twenties and thirties in New York, she had for most of them, until a recent move to Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, inhabited dingy walk-ups in the outer boroughs. The exception had been the apartment at Seventy-second and Amsterdam that the sisters had shared shortly after Liz graduated from Barnard College in the late 1990s, just a year after Jane’s graduation from the same school. Though they had gotten along well as roommates, the sisters’ cohabitation had reached its conclusion when Jane became engaged to an affable hedge-fund analyst named Teddy; Mrs. Bennet’s uneasiness with Jane and Teddy living together prior to their marriage was allayed by Teddy’s degree from Cornell and his lucrative job. Alas, Teddy’s dawning awareness of his attraction to other men ultimately precluded a permanent union with Jane, though Jane and her erstwhile fiancé did part on good terms, and once or twice a year, both Liz and Jane would meet Teddy and his toothsome partner, Patrick, for brunch.

Liz had spent her entire professional life working at magazines, having been hired out of college as a fact-checker at a weekly publication known for its incisive coverage of politics and culture. From there, she had jumped to Mascara, a monthly women’s magazine she had subscribed to since the age of fourteen, drawn equally to its feminist stances and its unapologetic embrace of shoes and cosmetics. First she was an assistant editor, then an associate editor, then a features editor; but at the age of thirty-one, realizing that her passion was telling stories rather than editing them, Liz had become Mascara’s writer-at-large, a position she still occupied. Though writing tended to pay less than editing, Liz believed she had a dream job: She traveled regularly and interviewed accomplished and sometimes famous individuals. However, her achievements did not impress her own family. Her father still, after all this time, pretended not to remember Mascara’s name. “How’s everything at Nail Polish?” he’d ask or “Any new developments at Lipstick?” Mary often told Liz that Mascara reinforced oppressive and exclusionary standards of beauty; even Lydia and Kitty, who had no problem with oppressive and exclusionary standards of beauty, were uninterested in the publication, likely because they were fans of neither magazines nor books and confined their reading to the screens of their phones.

And yet, if Liz’s job underwhelmed those close to her, its flexible nature was what had allowed her to remain at home during her father’s convalescence, and the situation was similar for Jane, who had taken a leave of absence from the yoga studio where she was employed. Five weeks earlier, the two sisters had traveled to Cincinnati unsure of the outcome of, and greatly rattled by, Mr. Bennet’s surgery. By the time it was clear that he would make a full recovery, Liz and Jane were deeply involved in both his recuperation and the day-to-day proceedings of the household: They grocery shopped and prepared cardiac-friendly meals for the entire family; they took turns transporting Mr. Bennet to his doctors’ appointments, including to the orthopedist treating the arm Mr. Bennet had broken when he’d lost consciousness during his original heart incident and had fallen at the top of the stairs in the second-floor hall. (Because he still wore a cast on his right arm, Mr. Bennet was unable to drive himself.) Additionally, though they had made little progress so far, Liz and Jane intended to address the cluttered and dusty condition into which the Tudor had deteriorated.

While their sisters could in theory have performed all such tasks, the younger women appeared disinclined. Though also clearly rattled by their father’s heart incident, they weren’t rattled in a way that caused them to alter their daily schedules: Lydia and Kitty carried on with CrossFit and leisurely restaurant lunches, while Mary emerged from her room erratically to attempt to engage family members in discussions of mortality. In the kitchen, observing her father drinking the powdered-psyllium-seed-husk-based liquid meant to offset the constipating effects of his pain medication, Mary had announced that she considered the Native American view of life and death as cyclical to be far more advanced than the Western proclivity for heroic measures, at which point Mr. Bennet had poured the remainder of his beverage down the sink, said, “For Christ’s sake, Mary, put a sock in it,” and left the room.

Mrs. Bennet expressed great concern about her husband’s plight—indeed, she could hardly speak of the evening on which he’d been hospitalized without sobbing at the recollection of the fright it had caused her—but she could not act as his nurse or chauffeur because of her many Women’s League luncheon duties. “What if you ask somebody else on the committee to take over and you’re the chair next year instead?” Liz had inquired one day when Mr. Bennet was still in the hospital. Her mother had looked at her in horror.

“Why, I’d never hear the end of it,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Lizzy, all those items being solicited for the silent auction—I’m the one keeping track of them.”

“Then how about creating an online spreadsheet that everyone can see?” Because Mrs. Bennet wasn’t proficient with a computer, Liz added, “I can help you.”

“It’s out of the question,” Mrs. Bennet said. “I’m also the one who’s been talking to the florist, and I’m the one who had the idea to do napkins with the league’s insignia. You can’t pass off things like that in midstream.”

“Does Mom secretly hate Dad?” Liz asked Jane the next morning when the two sisters were out for a run. “Because she’s acting really unsupportive.”

“I think she just doesn’t want to face how serious things could have been,” Jane said.

After Mr. Bennet’s return home, however, Liz wondered if she’d been wrong not about her mother’s antipathy for her father but only about its being secret. Although her parents resumed their regular lunches together at the Cincinnati Country Club as soon as Mr. Bennet possessed the energy, the couple led largely separate lives within the Tudor. In fact, her father no longer shared the master bedroom, instead sleeping in a narrow sleigh bed in his second-floor study, a setup that predated his hospital stay. When Liz asked Mary how long the arrangement had existed, Mary squinted and said, “Five years? Or, I don’t know, ten?”

Reinforcing Liz’s dismay was the fact that, although Dr. Morelock had explicitly talked about the importance of Mr. Bennet embarking on a diet low in red meat, salt, and alcohol, Mrs. Bennet had welcomed her husband home with a cocktail hour of Scotch and Cheetos followed by a steak dinner. When the subsequent night’s entrée was roast beef, Liz discreetly asked her mother afterward if she might consider making chicken or salmon. “But Kitty and Lydia like beef because it’s caveman food,” Mrs. Bennet protested.

“But Dad had a heart attack,” Liz said.

For all the nights since, she and Jane had taken turns preparing dinner. They had also agreed to stay in Cincinnati until the weekend after the Women’s League luncheon. Liz had little confidence that her mother would step in and provide care for her father at that point; rather, with his cast off by then, his physical therapy well under way if not complete, and his ability to drive likely restored, she hoped he’d be able to care for himself.

Chapter 4

“Honk so your mother knows we’re waiting,” Mr. Bennet said. In the large circular driveway of the Tudor, waiting to depart for the Lucases’ barbecue, Liz sat in the driver’s seat of her mother’s Lexus sedan, with Mr. Bennet in the passenger seat and Jane in back.

“She already knows,” Liz said, and Mr. Bennet leaned over and, using his left arm, which was the one not in a cast, pressed the horn himself.

“Jesus, Dad,” Liz said. “Show a little patience.”

The Bennets would transport themselves to the Lucases’ in no fewer than three cars: Lydia and Kitty would drive out in Kitty’s Mini Cooper, and Mary insisted she’d take her own Honda hybrid. “This way, it won’t be a problem if Dad is tired and needs to leave early,” Mrs. Bennet had said as she, Liz, and Jane conferred in the kitchen about the slightly droopy strawberry-and-blueberry-bedecked sponge cake Jane had made.

In the driveway, Liz turned to her father. “Are you eager to meet the famous Chip Bingley?”

“Unlike your mother, I don’t care whom any of you marries or, frankly, if you marry,” Mr. Bennet said. “The institution hasn’t done much for me, Lord knows.”

“That’s a nice sentiment.” Liz patted her father’s knee. “Thank you for sharing.”

Mrs. Bennet appeared at the back door, looking flustered, and called out, “I just need another minute.” Before they could respond, she vanished again.

Liz glanced at Jane in the rearview mirror. “Jane, are you excited to meet Chip?” Jane was gazing out the window; so placid was she in demeanor that at times it was difficult to discern whether she was upset or simply reflective. In any case, she had never participated with much gusto in the banter her father and sisters enjoyed.

“I suppose,” Jane said as Mrs. Bennet emerged from the house.

“How lovely of you to join us!” Mr. Bennet called out his open window.

Liz started the engine as her mother climbed into the backseat. “The phone rang, and it was Ginger Drossman inviting us for brunch,” Mrs. Bennet said. “That’s what took so long.” As she leaned forward into the front seat, a look of concern pinched Mrs. Bennet’s features. “Lizzy, I’m sure there’s time for you to run in and put on a skirt.”

In her teens or early twenties, such a remark would have irritated Liz, but at thirty-eight, having wardrobe fights with her mother felt preposterous. Cheerfully, she said, “Nope, I’m comfortable.” Even if her mother couldn’t recognize it, the shorts she had on were extremely stylish, as were her sleeveless white blouse and straw sandals.

Jane spoke as they pulled out of the driveway. She said, “I think Lizzy looks pretty.”

Chapter 5

While it was technically accurate that both Liz and Jane were single, this fact did not for either woman convey the full story. After Jane’s fruitless early engagement, she had met a man named Jean-Pierre Babineaux, a courtly French financier, and they had become a couple for the better part of a decade. Though Jane had assumed she and Jean-Pierre would marry, their conversations on the subject were always marked by a bittersweetness she recognized in retrospect as a kind of warning. It was not that either of them lacked affection for the other but, rather, that the circumstances of their lives were incompatible: He was fifteen years older than she, divorced, and the father of twins who were, when Jane met him, twelve. He traveled back to Paris frequently, and while Jane could hardly complain about her visits there, staying at the apartment he maintained in the Sixth Arrondissement, she did not wish to live so far from her family and certainly not permanently; yet Jean-Pierre’s ultimate plan was to return to his birthplace. Further, while Jane unequivocally wished to bear children, Jean-Pierre had had a vasectomy when the twins were two.

Jane and Jean-Pierre’s eventual breakup was no less devastating for being both protracted and decorous. At thirty-seven, she was single once more and remained so for the next two years. Shortly after her thirty-ninth birthday, following the painstaking consideration of a multitude of anonymous candidates, Jane lay on her back in a hospital gown at a clinic on East Fifty-seventh Street, awaiting the insertion of donor semen into her cervix via needleless syringe. Though Jane followed all the recommendations for creating conditions favorable to pregnancy—she stopped drinking alcohol, slept eight hours a night, and meditated daily—fertilization didn’t occur during that cycle or in any of the next several rounds. While not statistically anomalous—few women attempting to become pregnant via donor insemination were immediately successful—this lack of progress was discouraging as well as expensive, and Jane’s insurance covered none of the monthly $1,000 charge. Anticipating her parents’ disapproval, she hadn’t disclosed her pursuit to them and thus was receiving no extra money beyond the rent, which Mr. Bennet paid directly on her behalf. Thus, for the first time in her adult life, Jane found herself bypassing restaurants, forgoing haircuts, and shunning the street on which her favorite clothing boutique, with its elegantly tailored $400 pencil skirts and luxurious $300 sweaters, was located. Such sacrifices would not, she recognized, count by most people’s standards as hardships, but she was privately conscious of a new austerity.

With no one other than Liz did Jane discuss her efforts to become a mother. Her gynecologist had suggested that she tell her parents even before the first insemination, but Jane thought that if she wasn’t able to become pregnant, then she’d have courted the double punishment of what she assumed would be her mother’s histrionics and no baby. And Jane still hoped to marry eventually, though marriage was no longer her immediate goal.

Unlike Jane, Liz wished to avoid motherhood. That she was dating a married man made such avoidance logical, though whether these circumstances had occurred by chance or subconscious design even Liz herself couldn’t say. In the late nineties, Liz and Jasper Wick had immediately hit it off as new hires in the fact-checking department of the same prestigious magazine: they bit back smiles when the books editor, who was from Delaware, pronounced the word “memoir” mem-wah; they got lunch together several times a week at a cheap Thai restaurant; and they routinely divided the work between them when checking facts on onerous articles. (They had started their jobs using computers with spotty Internet connections, back when fact-checking meant visiting the public library or waiting anxiously for the return of phone calls.)

When Liz and Jasper met, he had a girlfriend, which was unsurprising: He had deep brown eyes and tousled blond curls and was at once smart and irreverent, boyish and thoughtful, with, in Liz’s assessment, the perfect quantities of neuroses and prurience to make him interesting to talk to, receptive to gossip, and game for analyzing the behavior and personalities of others without tipping over into seeming unmasculine. Indeed, Jasper’s sole flaw, in Liz’s opinion, apart from his girlfriend, was that he wore a gold ring from Stanford University, his alma mater; Liz did not care for either jewelry on men or academic ostentatiousness. But she actually was glad to have identified the one thing about Jasper she’d change, because it was similar to realizing what you’d forgotten to take on a trip, and if it was only perfume, as opposed to your driver’s license, you were relieved.

Initially, Liz had believed that a union with Jasper was just a matter of time; such was Jasper’s tendency to confide in her about the multitude of challenges he and his girlfriend, Serena, were experiencing that Liz imagined she need not persuade him of anything. While still together with Serena, Jasper had dropped conversational bombshells on Liz that included “I mean, I talk way more openly with you than I do with her” and “Sometimes I think you and I would be a good couple. Do you ever think that?” Liz knew for certain he had said these things because, although she no longer kept a journal, she’d written them down verbatim, along with their date of utterance, on an unlined sheet of computer paper she kept in her nightstand. Also, after she mentioned to Jasper that as a toddler she’d referred to herself as Ninny or Nin, he began calling her by the latter pet name.

Eight months into knowing Jasper, meaning seven months and three weeks into being thoroughly smitten with him, during a blizzard that occurred on a Saturday in February, Liz went running with him in Central Park in five inches of snow, while flakes were still falling. Jasper’s pace combined with the snow on the ground made this outing the most grueling physical exertion Liz had ever experienced, and by the second mile, she could take it no more. She stopped, leaned over, pressed her palms to her knees, and said while panting, “I give up. You win.”

“Really?” Jasper was a few feet in front of her, looking over his shoulder, grinning under a black fleece cap. “What’s my prize?”

Your prize is me, Liz thought. “Bragging rights,” she said. “And a hot drink from any bar that’s open.” Then she knelt and let herself collapse backward into the snow.

Jasper retraced his steps and lay down beside her. They were quiet as the flakes fluttered and spun in the air above, the sky a dirty white, the snow beneath them a chilly cushion. Jasper stuck out his tongue, catching a flake, and Liz did the same. All the usual noises of Manhattan were muted by the storm, and she felt completely happy. Then Jasper looked over at her. “So I broke up with Serena last night,” he said.

The joy that flared in Liz’s heart—it was almost too much. She hoped she sounded calm as she said, “I guess that makes sense.”

“You think so?”

“It just seems like you guys have had a lot of issues.”

“She’s furious, though. She claims I ambushed her.” Though no prettier than Liz, Serena was far more confidently difficult, more expectant of appeasement and conciliation.

Liz said, “Do you still feel like going to Alex’s thing tonight or you think you’ll skip it?” This was an anti-Valentine’s party a co-worker of theirs was throwing, but if Jasper wanted to forgo it, Liz thought, they could order takeout, watch a movie, and have a mellow night.

“I’ll probably go.”

Liz was then assaulted by something wet and lumpy, a substance that broke upon contact with her nose and dispersed into her eyes and nostrils.

“Ouch!” she cried. “What the hell?” But by the time she asked, she knew. While she didn’t really have the impulse to throw a snowball back, Jasper was smiling with anticipation. When her snowball glanced off the shoulder of his waterproof jacket, he said, “Oh, Nin, I have so much to teach you.”

How long, on that day, did Liz imagine it would take for them to become romantically involved? Six or eight weeks perhaps—long enough for him to process his breakup with Serena, process being a word Jasper himself, unlike either of her college boyfriends, actually used in reference to his own emotions. But apparently little processing was necessary. Liz felt no compulsion to keep a close eye on Jasper at the party, which made it all the more soul crushing when he left with the host’s sister Natalie, who was a junior at NYU.

A rebound, Liz told herself. Natural enough, and perhaps even best to get it out of his system. Surely what was obvious to Liz—and to others, too, there’d even been an older female editor at the magazine who’d murmured to her, “You and Jasper Wick would be so cute together”—would soon become visible to Jasper as well.

Alas, Jasper and Natalie were a couple for two years, and it took only a few weeks of their courtship for Liz to revert to her Serena-era patterns with Jasper: she was his lunch companion, intermittently his jogging partner, his professional sounding board—she would copyedit and proofread the pitches he was crafting in the hope of getting a front-of-the-book piece in the magazine—and she was also his confidante, helping to parse his concerns about Natalie’s immaturity or his irritation at his roommate, who would, while stoned, consume Jasper’s tortillas and peanut butter. Once when Natalie was at her parents’ house in Phoenix, Liz and Jasper drank many beers together on a Wednesday night at a dive bar near Times Square, and, unable to bear it any longer, Liz blurted out, “But what about us? I thought you pictured us as a couple!”

Jasper seemed startled. “That’s what you want?” he said.

“Of course it’s what I want!” Liz said.

“Part of me wants it, too.” Jasper’s tone was pained rather than flirtatious. “But we’d be the real thing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. You’re such an important friend that I don’t want to risk losing you.”

When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revisited. It was a windy March night, and the wisps of Liz’s brown hair that had slipped from her ponytail blew around her forehead and cheeks.

Abruptly, Jasper said, “Your hair is all crazy tonight.” He stepped toward her, his hand out. But at the same time, Liz raised her own arm and pushed away her hair, and as she did so, Jasper withdrew his hand and took a step back. There were countless hours—or maybe more than hours, maybe weeks and days—that Liz devoted to replaying this nonaction, this absence of contact. Because her hair hadn’t been that crazy, it was frequently slipping from a rubber band, so obviously he had been about to touch her, about to kiss her even and perhaps to become her boyfriend and the love of her life. Had she intercepted him out of habit, because it was her hair and her head? Because she didn’t believe in kissing the boyfriends of other girls? Or because she was, in some instinctive way, intent on wrecking her own destiny?

On the night he didn’t touch her, Liz and Jasper both were twenty-four years old. For the next six years, they never kissed; they even slept in the same bed twice, at a friend’s aunt’s house in Sag Harbor and another time on a road trip to visit Jasper’s sister at the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, Jasper cycled through additional girlfriends—after Natalie there was Gretchen, and after Gretchen there was Elise, and after Elise there was Katherine—and Liz halfheartedly went out with other guys but never for longer than a few months. Jasper would ask about such men in great detail, and once, when Liz was first giving online dating a whirl, they arranged that he and Elise would have drinks at the same bar where Liz was meeting her online prospect so that Jasper and Liz could debrief in mid-date; this seemed a terribly amusing idea in advance that was plainly fucked up in its execution. Jasper, of course, hadn’t told Elise and, thus, pretended that seeing Liz was a coincidence, and Liz wasn’t sure if it made matters better or worse that Elise appeared to believe the farce.

By this point, neither Jasper nor Liz was employed by the magazine where they’d met, but Liz still worked in the same building, and Jasper would return for lunch in the cafeteria, which had been designed by a famous architect and was reminiscent, with its blue-tinted glass partitions, of a series of aquariums. For all these years, Liz’s attraction to Jasper, and Jasper’s apparently lesser but not nonexistent attraction to Liz, was something they’d allude to jokingly—for instance, after visiting the Guggenheim together, she held up the ticket stub and said, with what she hoped was unmistakable sarcasm, “Maybe if I sleep with this under my pillow tonight, you’ll fall in love with me,” and he grinned and said, “Maybe so.” They’d less often but still regularly have emotional, alcohol-fueled confrontations, always initiated by Liz. “It’s ridiculous we’re not together,” she said once. “In most ways, I basically am your girlfriend.”

“I hate that I’m causing you grief,” Jasper replied.

“I’m an idiot,” Liz said. “Anyone looking at me would think I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Jasper said. “You’re my best friend.”

If only she had let him smooth back her hair!

At intervals, Liz swore off Jasper—she’d say, “Our friendship is unhealthy,” and she’d briefly embrace yoga, which, loyalty to Jane aside, she hated—but Liz’s and Jasper’s social circles overlapped enough that within a week or a month, they’d run into each other at a party or a Frisbee game and then they’d talk and talk about all the things they’d both been saving up to share with the other.

When they were thirty-one, Jasper announced his engagement to a pert and friendly associate at a white-shoe law firm, a woman named Susan about whom he seemed to Liz no less equivocal than he had toward earlier girlfriends. After a run together, he asked Liz if she’d be a groomsman; seeing her expression, he added, “Or a groomswoman, whatever.” When Liz began to sob, he said, “What? What?” and she sprinted away and didn’t speak to him for five years; though she still laid eyes on him at media events, she did not attend Jasper’s wedding, let alone participate in the ceremony.

One Saturday in the spring of 2011, Liz and an oboist she’d met for a blind date ran into Jasper and Susan on the High Line, Jasper pushing a stroller in which a toddler slept. Susan greeted Liz warmly—like Elise, Susan had always seemed improbably unsuspicious of Liz, causing Liz to wonder exactly how Jasper explained their friendship—and the five of them ended up sharing brunch, during which the toddler, a boy named Aidan, awoke and shrieked so relentlessly that Liz forgave Jasper just a little. That Monday morning, Jasper emailed Liz: It was great to see you. Really miss our friendship.

After an exchange of messages, they met for a weekday lunch at which they discussed recent articles they’d either loved or been outraged by, and then Jasper confided the financial pressure he felt now that Susan had decided she wanted to quit law and remain at home with Aidan. The last few years had, apparently, been rough: as a newborn, Aidan had had colic; Susan had initially struggled with breast-feeding though now was unwilling to give it up; and she was spending enormous quantities of time online trying to determine which potentially toxic chemicals were contained in the cleaning agent used on the carpeting in the halls of their building. Meanwhile, Jasper was spinning his wheels at work. He knew he was capable of running a magazine—he was still a senior editor rather than an executive editor, which was the usual jumping-off point for being an editor in chief—and welcomed Liz’s thoughts about what publication might be most suitable for his continued ascent up the professional ladder. Jasper’s great respect for Liz’s ideas and opinions, his wish for feedback from her on every subject, even the subject of whether it was weird that his wife was still breast-feeding a nineteen-month-old, was simultaneously the most flattering and the most insulting dynamic she had ever experienced. She thought that if the option were available, he would run a cord between her brain and his, or perhaps simply download the contents of her cerebral cortex.

The next time she and Jasper met after the five-year hiatus, it was for drinks, and after the third round, Jasper said that he and Susan had together reached the painful conclusion that their marriage had run its course and that while both of them had had the best of intentions, they agreed they’d made a mistake choosing each other. The catch was that if Susan or any of her siblings divorced, Susan’s deeply Catholic grandmother, a rich, spiteful, and surprisingly hale ninety-eight-year-old living on the Upper East Side, would cut them out of her will, and Aidan wouldn’t get to attend private school. Thus, although Jasper and Susan had each other’s blessings to pursue extramarital relationships, they would continue to live together until Susan’s grandmother died. After conveying this information, Jasper swallowed, and there were tears in his brown eyes as he said, “It was always you, Nin. I messed up so badly, but it was always you.”

At points during their five-year silence, Liz had indulged in the fantasy that Jasper would show up at her office or apartment—possibly, as in a movie, having run through the rain—to urgently declare his love. He might even, in such scenarios, have said, It was always you. But he would not have still been legally wed to Susan; certainly, he would not be the father of a nineteen-month-old. And yet, through the shimmery softness of the three gins she’d consumed, Liz thought that these compromising circumstances gave the situation a certain credibility: It wasn’t too good to be true. She didn’t need to feel unsettled by getting everything she’d always hoped for.

Back at her apartment, the consummation of their whatever-it-was also was not a dream come true—certainly fourteen years of buildup and more than a half dozen cocktails between them didn’t help matters—but it was adequate, and afterward, when Jasper fell asleep holding her, she wished that her twenty-two-year-old self could know that it would, in the end, happen for them. Her twenty-two-year-old self might have been less charmed when Jasper woke up forty minutes later, took a hasty shower, and hurried home to his wife and child; despite Jasper and Susan’s conjugal agreement, it was Jasper’s turn the next morning to get up with Aidan at five A.M.

Within a week, Jasper had made three more visits to Liz’s apartment and in two cases slept over; patterns had been established. The drawbacks to this version of a relationship were so glaringly obvious—because members of Susan’s extended family loyal to her grandmother lived in Manhattan, discretion was necessary, and Liz and Jasper therefore didn’t dine together in restaurants, nor were they each other’s dates for work-related functions—that they hardly seemed worth dwelling on. On the other hand, she was able to enjoy genuine closeness, as well as physical intimacy, with someone she knew well and cared for deeply, while still having time to work and run and read and see friends—perhaps, in fact, more time than when she’d been scouring dating websites or spending three hours at a stretch analyzing her singleness with Jane or other women. A few friends knew about Jasper, as did her older sister, and their skeptical reactions were for Liz sufficient deterrent to discuss the unusual arrangement further; it was too easy for it to sound like Jasper was doing nothing more than cheating.

One Friday evening in late May, two years into Liz’s reconciliation with Jasper, Liz was at Jane’s apartment; Jane chopped kale for a salad while Liz opened the bottle of red wine she’d brought. “Are you really making me drink alone again?” Liz said.

“I’m fostering a hospitable uterine environment,” Jane replied.

“Meaning, yes, I’m on my own.”

“Sorry.” Jane frowned.

“Don’t apologize.” Liz pulled a glass from Jane’s shelf. “And any fetus would be lucky to inhabit your womb. I bet you have the Ritz of uteruses. Uteri?” Liz held her filled glass aloft. “To Latinate nouns and to reproduction.” Jane tapped her water glass against Liz’s as Liz added, “Remember Sandra at my office who took three years to get pregnant? She said she went to this acupuncturist who—” In her pocket, Liz’s phone buzzed, and she wondered if it was Jasper; apparently, Jane wondered the same thing because she said, with not entirely concealed disapproval, “Is that him?”

But it wasn’t; it was their sister Kitty. Liz held up the phone so Jane could see the screen before saying, “Hey, Kitty. I’m here with Jane.”

“It’s Dad,” Kitty said, and she was clearly crying. “He’s in the hospital.”

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