Eligible

“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.

Chapter 13 (#ulink_94259232-313a-519f-b00f-9123804f7620)

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.”

Chapter 14 (#ulink_87e0cd4a-e155-5e68-8713-9d154cec4331)

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?”

Liz shook her head.

“Fuck,” Lydia said. “I need to text Ham to see what time we’re meeting, but my phone is the only place I have his number.”

“Who’s Ham?”

“Ham Ryan.”

“Am I supposed to know who that is?” Liz asked.

“He owns the box we go to.”

Box, to Liz’s annoyance, was the preferred CrossFit term for its gyms. She said, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Lydia’s expression was disdainful. Sarcastically, she said, “Are we going steady? Do you think he’ll give me his varsity jacket?”

“Excuse me for daring to make conversation with you after you came into my room.”

“There’s a spider on your wall.”

At first, Liz wondered if this was some coded insult used by millennials, but when she turned, she saw a real spider, brown and quarter-sized. She stood to grab a sandal, and when she whacked the shoe against the wall, a chip of paint flaked off.

“Gross,” Lydia said. “Tell me if you find my phone.” She hadn’t yet left the room when Liz opened a new window on her Web browser and typed in Ham Ryan CrossFit Cincinnati.

He washandsome, of course: short light brown hair coaxed by product into a sort of glistening spikiness, as well as blue eyes and a tidy goatee. His real name was Hamilton, apparently, and he was from Seattle.

Liz cared little about either CrossFit or Lydia’s paramours (their turnover was too frequent to justify investing much attention) while finding Kathy de Bourgh’s commencement address genuinely interesting; yet somehow, she spent the next forty minutes exploring the nooks and crannies of the website for Ham Ryan’s “box,” and even came away half-tempted to try a recipe for Paleo crab cakes, if only doing so wouldn’t please her sisters.

Chapter 15 (#ulink_c69b2d6c-e87d-577c-be5d-1eedf5efaf91)

Close to midnight, as Liz was shutting down her computer, she heard someone ascending the staircase to the third floor; to her surprise, it was Mary rather than Jane. On Mary’s face was an unconcealed smirk. “Look.” She passed her phone to Liz.

The small screen showed an item on a celebrity gossip website that Liz thought of as holding greater appeal for Kitty and Lydia than Mary, with a headline that read, “Flunky Hunky: Did Eligible Bachelor Almost Fail Out of Harvard Medical School?” Below was a photo of Chip Bingley in a tuxedo, clinking champagne flutes with one of the comely female finalists from his season. Liz skimmed the entry, which was only a paragraph (“Former classmates say Bingley was known more for hitting the bike trails than the books …”), then gave back the phone. “So?” she said. “He passed his boards, obviously.”

“If you cut off your finger, would you want him to be the one to stitch it on?”

“The fact that he wasn’t first in his class doesn’t mean he’s incompetent.”

Mary raised her eyebrows dubiously. “I knew there was something fishy about a graduate of Harvard Medical School ending up in an ER in Cincinnati. It was probably the only job he could get.”