Eligible (51 page)

“Then I also have an announcement,” Lydia said, and her voice sounded more tentative than usual. “Mary, I still don’t like you, but I shouldn’t have tried to force you out of the closet. Your gayness is your business.”

Snippily, Mary said, “I’m not gay.”

“She bowls,” Kitty said. “That’s what she does.”

In a shaky voice, Mrs. Bennet said, “Now what on earth is bowls?”

“As in bowling balls,” Kitty said. “The sport.”

“How do you know?” Mary asked, and Kitty said, “Mary, I’m your roommate now.”

Mr. Bennet cleared his throat. “Anyone else with a confession?” he said. “Lizzy?”

“Not today,” Liz said.

Mrs. Bennet said, “Jane, we’ll need to invite the Lucases and Hickmans and Nesbits to your wedding. Oh, and the Hoffs. They’d all be very hurt otherwise.”

“They’re only letting us invite twenty people,” Jane said.

“Everyone will know it was just immediate family, Mom,” Liz said. “The proof will be on TV.”

“You’ll all need to sign nondisclosure agreements, and the producers are very serious about them,” Jane said. “That means you can’t talk about the wedding before it airs. Especially not on social media, Kitty and Lydia. But something fun is that there’ll be wardrobe and makeup people to help us look great. Isn’t that neat?”

“Tell them my look is contemporary but classic,” Mrs. Bennet said. “And I don’t care for navy blue.”

“I’m not wearing makeup,” Mary said. “The texture of foundation disgusts me.”

“Dad, what do you think?” Jane asked. “You’ve been quiet.”

Before Mr. Bennet could reply, Mrs. Bennet said, “Why don’t they come here and film at Knox Church? Knox does an elegant service.”

“I think it’s easier for them to shoot in California,” Jane said. “Dad?”

“You’re forty years old, Jane. If you want to make a spectacle of yourself, I can hardly stop you.”

“Fred, Chip is a Harvard-educated doctor whose family started Bingley Manufacturing,” Mrs. Bennet said. “He’s very distinguished.”

“Is that really what you think, Dad?” Jane sounded distraught.

“Jane, let them get used to the idea,” Liz said. “You can’t expect them all to be jumping for joy right away.”

“You do realize we can hear you, right?” Mary said.

“Tell them the last thing,” Liz said to Jane, and Mr. Bennet said, “To top what’s come so far, it had better have to do with alien abduction or bestiality.”

“You’ll each get paid about thirty thousand dollars,” Jane said. “Sorry, Ham, not you. But the rest of you.”

“Ha,” Kitty said. “Do you still not like the texture of foundation, Mary?”

“In that case,” Mr. Bennet said, “this sounds like an excellent opportunity for our entire family.”

TWELVE DAYS LATER,
on the plane to Phoenix, where they’d board a second plane for Palm Springs—for both flights Liz was disappointed but unsurprised to find they were flying coach—Jane said, “In all the hubbub, I haven’t even formally asked, but I’ve been assuming you’ll be my maid of honor. Will you?”

“Of course,” Liz said.

“Just so you know, Darcy will be Chip’s best man. You’re okay with that, right? You and Darcy seemed very civil at the restaurant.”

That Darcy would attend the wedding was a likelihood to which Liz had reconciled herself; after all, as Chip’s friend and Caroline’s beau, he was doubly connected to the Bingleys. She had considered the possibility that what she presumed was his disdain for reality television, combined with his inflexible schedule, would result in his absence, but she’d recognized that such a conclusion was probably wishful thinking. However, that he would be the best man was not an eventuality she’d entertained.

“Chip feels indebted to Darcy,” Jane continued. “We wouldn’t be getting married if not for him making that dinner happen.”

“Or maybe if not for him you wouldn’t have broken up in the first place,” Liz said.

“But I still would have been pregnant.” A look of worry crossed Jane’s pretty features. “Lizzy, the media stuff will blow over quickly, don’t you think? When people appear in tabloids all the time, aren’t they in cahoots with the reporters?”

“Kind of,” Liz said. “But with the baby born by the time your wedding airs, I’m sure there’ll be a bounty for pictures of the
Eligible
offspring.”

Jane shuddered.

“Does Chip expect that Caroline will be your manager now, too?” Liz asked. “Do they want you to shill for, like, a diaper company?”

Jane shook her head. “He told me the night he proposed that I’m the only person he’s met since he appeared on TV who loves him for him and isn’t trying to ride his coattails. He knows I have no desire for fame. He wouldn’t say it, but, Lizzy, I think he even wonders if Caroline is using him a little.”

“A little?” Liz repeated. “He wonders?”

“The house we’ll live in after the wedding is in a gated community in Burbank,” Jane said. “I hope it’s not weird being so isolated. I’m actually excited about L.A., but I’ll be happy when everything with
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is finished.”

“I know you will,” Liz said, though what she thought was
Everything with
Eligible
hasn’t even started.

LIZ, JANE, AND
Chip had arrived in Palm Springs a day earlier than their families in order for Jane and Chip to attend to various obligations, including fittings for their wedding clothes, on-camera interviews, and filming of B-roll footage (Jane walked pensively and alone on the resort’s golf course, and then they both sat by the pool gazing at the sunset, his hands placed protectively on her belly). A team of six from the national jewelry chain that was indeed a sponsor of the show held a consultation in which the couple chose from an array of rings; this meeting was also, of course, caught on camera.

Liz had expected the Hermoso Desert Lodge to be mostly empty upon their arrival, but after being met at the airport luggage carousel by Anne Lee—who proved to be a poised, unpretentious woman with stylishly cut black hair and a quick laugh—as well as a driver who hefted their suitcases into his white van, Liz discovered that the resort was already abuzz with a production crew of perhaps eighty. Indeed, the entire grounds—the main lodge, with its pink stucco exterior and Spanish-tiled roof; the elegant courtyard featuring a slate hot tub and a heated infinity pool; the lush eighteen-hole golf course dotted with palm trees, beyond which stood the scrubby beige mountains—resembled a small but busy village. Men and women, though mostly men, wore dark T-shirts and cargo pants, moved about briskly, and spoke into walkie-talkies; trucks and vans came and went from the parking lot, around the perimeter of which trailers and tents had been set up; collapsed ladders, large black plastic buckets, coils of thick orange extension cords, and mysterious equipment inside stacked black suitcases were transported on large dollies; long tables of craft services food appeared at intervals in the parking lot, crew members flocked to them, and then just as quickly both the people and the food disappeared again. Eventually, Liz deduced that some sort of control room was being set up in a first-floor guest suite that opened onto the courtyard; black twill fabric was unrolled to cover the windows from the inside, and people seemed to enter and exit with particular urgency.

The room Liz and Jane were sharing included two double beds, a balcony (Liz’s point of observation for outdoor activity), and a fireplace. On the desk, a gift basket contained a fat white scented candle, two pairs of pearl earrings, hair-removal cream, razors, mini-bottles of rum and vodka, and three string bikinis with padded breast cups. The attached card read,
Liz and Jane, welcome to Palm Springs from all your
Eligible
friends!

Liz held up the bikini top. “Is this meant for me?”

Jane smiled. “It’s not for me, obviously.”

In her other hand, Liz held up the package of pink razors. “Very subtle.”

Much wasn’t quite as Liz had expected: Her cellphone would not be confiscated, nor had the television been removed from their hotel room. “That’s just for the longer shoots,” Anne Lee had explained when she’d escorted them upstairs, before pointing out what she referred to as a Pelco camera—it looked to Liz like a security camera—hanging in one corner of the room near the ceiling. “Just to catch any fun, casual conversations you guys might have,” Anne said in a lighthearted tone, and for Jane’s sake, Liz refrained from jokes about Communist surveillance.

The hair and makeup artists Jane had mentioned would be working with guests besides Jane and Chip only for the wedding itself—Jane seemed surprised to learn this, and apologetic—so otherwise, Liz was responsible for her own appearance. And though, as the sister whose wedding wasn’t imminent, Liz had anticipated having time to enjoy the lodge’s amenities—perhaps by booking a massage or, before she realized how public it was, soaking in the hot tub—she, too, was kept busy.

Her own sit-down interview occurred the first evening, while Jane and Chip enjoyed an “intimate” dinner in the hotel restaurant that Jane subsequently told Liz had been filmed by two camera crews of three men each. (Upon discovering that prior to the wedding, she and Jane rather than Jane and Chip were sharing a room, Liz had assumed Jane would sneak out during the night to see her fiancé. But if she did, Liz realized, the Pelco camera would alert the producers, and a camera crew would likely materialize.)

It was Anne Lee who conducted Liz’s interview, in the living room of a first-floor suite. A man stood behind a camera set on a tripod. Two panel lights were mounted on separate tripods, and there was much adjusting of the lights, the furniture, and even of Liz’s posture. She sat in a brocade-covered chair, and Anne sat off-camera in an identical chair facing her. “We’re so excited for this amazing love story between your sister and Chip,” Anne said warmly. “And America will be so excited, too.”

Since the initial conference call, Anne had been Jane’s primary contact; when Jane spoke positively about the
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people she’d met, she mostly meant Anne, and indeed, it was Anne and a crew of four who had flown to Cincinnati the week prior to interview assorted Bennets. An impulse to travel there herself for purposes of supervision and possible intervention had arisen in Liz, but she’d been scheduled to conduct two
Mascara
interviews of her own on back-to-back days in New York; plus, wasn’t all this
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stuff not in her jurisdiction? Still, she had been unsettled rather than reassured by her family members’ universal praise of Anne Lee (or, as Mrs. Bennet referred to her, “that nice Chinese girl,” though Liz suspected Anne was of Korean descent). The more favorable everyone else’s opinion, the more suspicious of Anne Liz had become, and meeting in person hadn’t allayed Liz’s concerns. It was that Anne was so upbeat, so easy to talk to, so reassuring about what a nutty situation this was, and above all so totally not fake-seeming that Liz distrusted her primarily on the basis of her very trustworthiness; it was no wonder that, at this woman’s behest, hundreds of Americans had gotten inebriated, fought, stripped, canoodled, and divulged secrets, all with cameras rolling.

“What I need you to do,” Anne was saying, “is talk in complete sentences, which should be no problem since you’re obviously super-smart. But if I say, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ I need you to say, ‘My favorite color is blue,’ as opposed to just ‘Blue.’ Is that cool?”

“You might already know that I’m a journalist,” Liz said. “I’m the writer-at-large for
Mascara.
So I’m definitely familiar with how interviews work, although I’m accustomed to being on the other side.”

“Fantastic.” Anne beamed. “Now, TV is a different medium, and I won’t be saying ‘uh-huh’ or laughing, even if you say the most hilarious thing ever, because I don’t want to make noise while you’re talking. If you lose your train of thought, no worries. Just pause and start over. And you don’t need to censor yourself—talk how you normally talk, and if you drop an F-bomb, we’ll bleep it out. This isn’t live.”

“Just please don’t Frankenbite me,” Liz said, and Anne looked at her blankly. “Isn’t that what it’s called?” Liz said. “When you take one word I said here and one word there and put them together into a sentence that you use as a voiceover?”