Eligible. Curtis Sittenfeld
and I might never see each other again after Saturday.” Jane’s cheeks were flushed. “So please, can everyone not make a big deal out of this? Mom, I’ll have plenty of time to spend with Cousin Willie.”
“It was obvious that Chip found you absolutely charming, Jane,” Mrs. Bennet said. “And so he should have. But you’ll have to ask why he didn’t go into private practice. Working in an emergency room, he must see very unattractive people.”
Liz, who felt some responsibility for displeasing her sister, said, “I wonder if Willie is interested in visiting the Freedom Center.”
“Just so you all know, I have a paper due at the end of next week,” Mary said. “I won’t have much time for Willie or Aunt Margo.”
“That’s so heartbreaking,” Lydia said. “I wonder if they’ll ever recover from the devastation.”
“Well, I look forward to seeing both of them,” Jane said.
From the head of the table, Mr. Bennet said, “That makes one of us.”
After dinner, Liz followed the scent of nail polish to its source, which turned out, as was often the case, to be Kitty; she sat on the counter in the bathroom she and Lydia shared, the door open, painting a rather impressive pattern on her toenails of cream-colored polish with sparkly gold dots.
Liz turned on the overhead fan. “You know how Dad sleeps in his study?” she said. “Is it because of the Jewish thing?”
Without looking up, Kitty said, “Maybe.”
“Do you think it is?”
At last, Kitty met Liz’s eyes. “Ask them.”
Liz had no intention of doing so. Mr. Bennet’s two great and overlapping interests were genealogy and history—when capable of driving himself, he whiled away many afternoons in the stacks of the Mercantile Library downtown—and at some point about a decade prior, he’d announced with amusement his discovery that Mrs. Bennet’s maternal grandmother had been Jewish; indeed, prior to her marriage, Ida Conner had been Ida Rosenbluth. While not an overt anti-Semite, Mrs. Bennet was prone to making declarations about almost all religious and ethnic minorities that were often uncomfortable for her listeners. “Jews are very fond of dried fruit,” she’d told Liz on more than one occasion, and when Liz had been in fifth grade, Mrs. Bennet had refused to purchase a party dress for her that had a black sequined bodice and a black velvet skirt, on the grounds that it was “Jewish-looking.”
Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Bennet wasn’t receptive to Mr. Bennet’s pronouncement about her religious ancestry. Adding insult to injury, Lydia and Kitty took to referring to their mother, in and out of her presence, as the Jewess; in fact, Lydia once reduced Mrs. Bennet to tears by recommending that she have a late-in-life bat mitzvah. This teasing had faded over time, possibly replaced with Lydia’s badgering of Mary about her sexual orientation. But perhaps, Liz thought, the consequences of the genealogical discovery lingered still.
In the bathroom, Liz said to Kitty, “You don’t think Mom and Dad would ever get divorced, do you?” The more pointed question, which Liz didn’t ask, was Do you think they should?
Kitty made a scoffing sound. “They’re too lazy,” she said.
On Saturday evening, just before being picked up by Chip Bingley, Jane stood in front of the mirror that hung over Liz’s bureau, applying blush. As she glanced at Liz’s reflection, Jane said, “Should I have watched his season of Eligible? Are there things everyone else knows about him that I don’t?”
Liz sat at her desk, where she planned to spend the next few hours working—her parents were having dinner at the country club with neighbors, Lydia and Kitty were headed out, Mary was in her own room with the door closed—although already, both quite accidentally and quite horribly, Liz had found herself on a webpage featuring cannibal lemurs. Given that she was researching an upcoming Mascara feature on how to ask for a raise, it was difficult to say exactly how this had happened.
Liz pushed her chair back and set her feet on the edge of her desk in a way her mother had been objecting to for three decades. “Did you tell him at the Lucases’ you’ve never seen the show?” she asked.
Jane nodded.
“Then that might be part of your charm,” Liz said. “He came off like a good guy, I promise. He did his share of on-air smooching, but he wasn’t sleazy.”
“He told me that patients sometimes ask for his autograph.” Jane appeared troubled rather than gratified. “Can you imagine?”
“Here’s my one hesitation about him,” Liz said. “And it’s not huge, but for what it’s worth—there’s this idea that he didn’t want to be on Eligible and his sister talked him into it. I call bullshit on that. People only do reality TV because they want to. I read somewhere that everyone on those shows is trying to make it in Hollywood.”
Jane set down her blush container and turned to face Liz. “You think?”
Liz shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first.”
“Aren’t you the one who encouraged me to go out with him tonight?”
“It could be that he saw Eligible as a lark and thought, Why not? I didn’t get an egomaniacal vibe when I talked to him. I just don’t totally buy his backstory.”
“I’m almost afraid to tell you this now,” Jane said, “but you know how his sister Caroline is here for a few weeks from LA?”
“I saw her at the Lucases’, but we hardly talked.”
“She’s his manager,” Jane said.
Liz squinted. “Meaning what?”
“I guess ever since Eligible, he gets approached about product endorsements or doing charity events. She handles all of that for him.”
Liz struggled not to form an expression of distaste; Caroline Bingley had on the Fourth of July revealed herself to Liz to be almost as unappealing as Fitzwilliam Darcy. As Caroline, her brother, and Darcy had been about to depart together, Caroline had first told Liz that she kept forgetting whether she was in Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Columbus, then she’d lamented the local dearth of decent sushi or yoga. Liz had considered recommending Modo Yoga, which was the studio Jane frequented, but decided instead to withhold the kindness.
Liz had by that point in the party shared Darcy’s remarks with other attendees, animated as she did so by a giddy and outraged fervor. Charlotte Lucas had laughed, Mrs. Bennet had been deeply insulted, and Jane had speculated that Darcy had known she was eavesdropping and had been joking, which Liz thought gave Darcy far too much credit.
In her bedroom, Liz said to Jane, “Maybe you and Chip can get paid to show up together at nightclubs. That would be funny.”
“You’re sending very mixed messages right now, Lizzy.”
Liz grinned. “I contain multitudes.” She added, “Sorry. Just enjoy yourself tonight, and forget I said anything.”
Liz was still at her desk, though actually doing work—she was reading a commencement speech delivered by Kathy de Bourgh, a famous feminist whom she hoped to interview for her pay-raise article—when Lydia entered the room and said, “Have you seen my phone?”