Eligible (29 page)

Darcy was facing straight ahead as he said, “Why would I be?”

“Aren’t you and Caroline a couple?”

“What’s led you to believe that?”

“Besides my powers of observation?”

“Your faith in those powers is misplaced. Caroline and I dated briefly, when Chip and I were in medical school, but that was years ago.”

“Not that I care, but it’s obvious she still has a thing for you.”

“I wonder if the man she’s seeing in L.A. knows that.”

“Is that what she tells you to make you jealous? And it looks like you’re falling for it, too.”

Darcy seemed amused. “Yet you accuse
me
of presuming to understand more than I really do.”

As they turned onto Observatory Avenue, Liz said, “Then who’s your love interest? There must be someone.”

“You might not be aware of this, but surgeons work extremely long hours.”

“And enjoy boasting about it, too, I hear. Okay, here’s my guess: a waify, aristocratic investment banker–slash–social worker–slash–ballerina who lives in—I’ll say Boston. Or maybe London. Just not Cincinnati, of course, because we all know about the subpar quality of Cincinnati women.”

“What I said at the Lucases’—and I hope you know that you’re an exceptionally brazen eavesdropper—is that I don’t want to be set up on blind dates at the whims of my supervisors’ wives. That’s hardly putting a moratorium on all Cincinnati women.” As they passed Menlo Avenue, Darcy added, “I rarely date waifs, by the way. Or ballerinas, though the category of waifs would seem to subsume the category of ballerinas. Aristocrats, investment bankers, and social workers I’m all fine with.”

“When you and Caroline dated, why’d you break up?”

“Why does any couple break up? We weren’t compatible.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“No. Have you?”

“No, but here’s the thing,” Liz said. “You’re—pardon the word choice—very eligible. You don’t have to feign modesty, because I’m sure you know it. I personally would never go out with you, but you’re tall, you went to fancy schools, and you’re a doctor. To the general public, which has no idea what a condescending elitist you are, you’re a catch. You could be married if you wanted, or at least have a girlfriend. And don’t give excuses about your schedule, because people make time for what they want to make time for.”

“Are
you
single right now?”

It was a strange question; just a few days before, she’d have said no. “I am,” she said, “but it’s recent. Anyway, everyone knows it’s completely different for a woman. You could stand on a street corner, announce you want a wife, and be engaged fifteen minutes later. I have to convince people to overlook my rapidly approaching expiration date.” But Liz did not feel, in this moment, like a dusty can of soup on the grocery store shelf; she felt practically gleeful. She was strong and healthy and not pregnant, sweating happily in her tank top and shorts, fleet in her turquoise-and-orange shoes; the gray clouds had dissipated without rain, and beside her was a man who, obnoxious though he might have been, didn’t bore her in the slightest. She said, “When we get to Edwards, want to race up the hill?”

“You know those little dogs who get up in the faces of German shepherds and bark at them?” he said. “That’s what you remind me of.”

“Are you scared you’ll lose?”

“Apparently, growing up with Title IX gave you quite a sense of self-esteem.”

“All right, then,” Liz said. “It’s on.” Though they still were fifty yards from Edwards Road, she began sprinting; she was flying up the sidewalk, past the houses and trees, the cars on Observatory Road a peripheral blur. No more than a few seconds had passed when he caught up to her, but they both were running too fast to speak; she simultaneously felt wild and breathless and like she was about to laugh. For a few more seconds, they were neck and neck, until he pulled ahead. She was pushing herself as hard as she could, and, turning onto Edwards, he was only a few feet in front of her, then more than a few, and before long they were separated by half a block. Still, she propelled herself forward; if she was to lose to Darcy, it wouldn’t be by a centimeter more than necessary.

He was waiting for her at the top of the hill, and she was gratified to see that he was still panting; she slowed down, staggering a little, incapable of speech. She rested both hands atop her head, then removed them and bent at the waist. After a minute, she heard him say, “That was respectable.”

She raised her torso, shaking her head. “Don’t patronize me.” Her limbs burned, her heart pounded; she was exhausted, possibly nauseated, but also giddy. As they faced each other, there was between them such a profusion of vitality that it was hard to know what to do with it; they kept making eye contact, looking away, and making eye contact again. At last—surely he was thinking something similar and she was simply the one giving voice to the sentiment—she said, “Want to go to your place and have hate sex?”

Darcy squinted. “Is that a thing?”

The bravado filling Liz—it wasn’t infinite, it could dissipate quickly. But while it still existed, she said grandly, “Of course it’s a thing.”

“Is it like fuck buddies?”

“This isn’t a sociology class. A simple yes or no will do.” She added, “It’s similar, but without the buddy part.”

“I take it you mean right now.” He didn’t seem flustered or even all that surprised.

“Yes,” Liz said. “I mean now.” This was his last chance to accept the offer, though she didn’t plan to tell him so. But perhaps he sensed the door closing, because he said, “Okay. Sure.”

CINCINNATI WAS THE
city where Liz and sex had made each other’s acquaintance—in a rather festive cliché, she had lost her virginity to her prom date, whose name was Phillip Haley, and she’d subsequently brought home her two college boyfriends for visits, during which surreptitious intra-Tudor romps occurred—but all of that had been quite some time before. And Jasper’s visit had, of course, been unexpectedly fruitless.

As she followed Darcy through the main entrance of a bland three-story brick building and up to the second floor, she experienced a sense of mischief reminiscent of her youthful encounters. Outside his door, Darcy used the front of one running shoe to pry off the heel of the other, then repeated the gesture in reverse with his socked toes, and Liz did the same. Inside the apartment, nothing hung on the walls, and no rugs covered the hardwood floors. The living room held only a long couch, a flat-screen TV, and a low table with a closed laptop computer on it. He led her to the kitchen, which was small and windowless but looked recently renovated; between the counters and the cabinets, the walls were lined with a pattern of black, white, and green tiles. He filled two glasses with tap water and passed her one. They drank in silence, then he said, “I suppose either we both take showers or neither of us does.”

Feeling a minor appreciation for his willingness to assume the role of host, she shook her head. “I need to be back at my parents’ house before dinner. I will pee, though. Do you have a condom?”

He nodded.

In the modern, clean bathroom, after urinating, Liz washed her hands and splashed water on her face, though more to cool off than establish hygiene. In the bedroom, which contained a king-sized bed covered with a gray cotton spread, a nightstand, and a lamp, Darcy was seated on the floor, still in his shirt and shorts, with one leg stretched out and his torso extended over it. Liz walked to him and held out a hand, and he took it and stood. Uncertainty then presented itself, and no doubt if she had been eighteen, or probably even if she’d been twenty-eight, she’d have looked to him to banish this confusion; but she was thirty-eight, she had orchestrated the encounter, and so she said, “I’m thinking it’s more efficient if we both take off our own clothes. Do you care about getting sweat on your sheets?”

He seemed to find the question funny. “They’re washable.”

Thus, standing a few feet apart, they stripped. She avoided looking at him, except that she snuck a few glances. He was hairier than she’d have guessed, though not in a bad way, and while she’d known he was fit, he was practically sculpted; if she’d previously realized just how perfectly muscled he was, she might have been too intimidated to make this overture.

Then his body was pressed up against hers, they were kissing—never having participated in hate sex, she was glad to learn kissing was part of it—and the naked standing-up kissing went on for a while, accompanied by roaming hands, and at some point, an air conditioner kicked on with a forceful whirring, and after another interval, a cacophony of car horns was audible through the apartment’s closed windows, out in the sunny evening populated by people who weren’t, for the most part, kissing each other while standing up naked. Then either he nudged her toward the bed or she pulled him, and soon after that he removed the condom from the drawer of his nightstand. All in all, the experience was highly satisfying, certainly for her, and judging by external clues, it seemed reasonable to conclude for him as well; without question, it was far more enjoyable than prom night with Phillip Haley or most other couplings she’d partaken of in the twenty years following. Indeed, one sign of just how agreeable she found the interaction was that she was only vaguely aware of the identity of the person with whom she was sharing it. At the beginning, the preposterousness of this proximity to Darcy—Fitzwilliam Darcy!—had distracted her and then again at the end, as she emerged from the delirious haze in which they’d mutually collapsed. It was as she returned to herself that it occurred to her to wonder whether what they were doing counted as cuddling; surely, even if hate sex permitted kissing, cuddling was a violation. She rolled away and sat up, reaching to find her clothes on the floor.

She could feel his gaze but waited to look at him until she was fully dressed in her damp and reeking shirt and shorts. Finally making eye contact, she said, “I’ll let myself out.”

As it happened, they had never made it under the bedspread but instead conducted their entire transaction atop it. In that moment, both his hands were set behind his head, and his long, hairy, muscular body was exposed. There was on his face an expression difficult to read, and she felt determined not to blush. “See you around,” she said.

Was he amused? Perturbed? Bewildered? It was impossible to know. “Indeed,” he replied.

LIZ WAS WRITING
a check from her bank account to the contractor when she received the text from Jasper. The contractor had scraped away the bubbling, flaking paint from the water stain in the living room, then covered the wall with primer and a coat of mustard-colored paint from the can Liz had, to her surprise and delight, unearthed during her basement excavations. The source of the water stain, the contractor informed her with such reticence that it occurred to Liz he feared offending her by drawing attention to her stupidity, was that the roof gutters were all overflowing with leaves, which created flooding during rainstorms. “Keeping your gutters clean is a good thing to do,” he said gently.

In its entirety, Jasper’s text said
Awesome!
and provided a link to an article about a man in Nebraska who had unsuccessfully tried to shoplift a snake from a pet store. Jasper was taking her temperature, Liz knew. He wanted to see where things stood between them. She didn’t respond.