“I hope you’re not bored being here,” she said as they turned left on Grandin Road. “I’m afraid Cincinnati is better to live in than visit.”
“I can see that,” Willie said, and since he was simply agreeing with her, Liz tried not to again feel offended. “I need to do some work tomorrow, and I wonder if there’s a café you recommend. Your parents’ bandwidth is a joke.”
“There’s a place called Awakenings on Hyde Park Square.” The heat of the day had dissipated, and it was actually pleasant to be outside; around them, invisibly, cicadas buzzed. She said, “The summer I graduated from college, I was back here for a few months before I moved in with Jane in New York. Mary and I played Twenty Questions one time when we were waiting for takeout at a Chinese restaurant. This was before any of us had cellphones. Anyway, I was guessing, and it was a person who lived in Cincinnati. I got to the twentieth question and still didn’t know who it was. And I’m good at Twenty Questions.” Liz laughed a little at her own impulse to brag about something unimpressive, and Willie didn’t. “Mary told me it was me,” Liz continued. “I was the person she was thinking of, but I hadn’t guessed myself. And I was all outraged, like, ‘I don’t live in Cincinnati! I live in New York.’ She said, ‘You could have fooled me.’?” Liz and Willie were passing a miniature chateau—even in its modified version, it was seven or eight thousand square feet—and Liz said, “I guess I’m a Cincinnati opportunist. In New York, I play the wholesome-midwesterner card, but when I’m back here, I consider myself to be a chic outsider.” Even before Willie replied, Liz felt the loneliness of having confided something true in a person who didn’t care. Still, when he spoke, it was more disappointing than she’d expected.
He said, “That chili we had—I liked it okay, but I keep burping up the taste of it.”
“That happens to everyone,” Liz said. “It’s called repeating on you.”
NEITHER LIZ NOR Jane carried their phones on their morning run, so Liz didn’t receive the texts from Jasper until after she’d eaten breakfast and gone upstairs to shower. I had a great idea call me, read the first, followed by a second: Don’t u want to know why I’m a genius? She walked into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, still in her perspiration-ridden tank top and shorts.
Jasper answered on the second ring. “Cincinnati is like the world headquarters of squash, right?” he said without prior greeting. “The sport, not the food.”
“Yep, I was with you.”
“They send an insane number of kids to play in Ivy League schools every year. But why Cincinnati?”
“Good question,” Liz said.
“Don’t you think it’s crying out for an article?”
In under two seconds, Liz thought, But I need to write the next “Women Who Dare” as soon as I finish my asking-for-a-raise piece, then thought, But it would be fun and random to report an article in Cincinnati, then thought, And since I’ve barely written about sports, that could be a cool challenge. Growing up, she hadn’t played squash herself but had known kids at Seven Hills who did.
Jasper said, “Mainly, though, it’ll give me an excuse to come out there and bang you in a hotel room that I get to expense. Win-win-win, right?”
“Oh,” Liz said. “Right.” Already it seemed a bit embarrassing that she’d imagined he wanted to assign the piece to her rather than himself.
“Plus I can drop by for one of the famous Bennet family dinners,” Jasper said. “And see your ancestral home.”
Years earlier, Jasper had met Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and an adolescent Kitty and Lydia on a trip they’d made to New York for the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. To Liz’s alarm, fourteen-year-old Kitty had seemed more interested in finding out from her older sisters how one procured a prescription for the Pill than in seeing the Rockettes; Lydia, who was still comparatively innocent, was focused on acquiring underwear from Bloomingdale’s that said BLOOMIE’S across the back. As had happened often with Jasper over the years, the experience of introducing him to her family at brunch had felt to Liz like an enticing yet unsatisfactory facsimile: Here’s the guy who’s almost my boyfriend. That hadn’t been what she’d said, of course, and to her mother’s prying questions, she’d insisted that Jasper was simply a friend.
On the phone, she said, “Well, you could have dropped in for a family dinner before sending me skanky lingerie.”
“You gotta get over that, Nin,” Jasper said. “Have you ever heard of a kid named Cheng Zhou?”
“No.”
“He’s a prodigy. This eleven-year-old kid of Chinese immigrants who’s racking up insane squash titles.”
“Interesting—I mainly associate the sport with rich white people.”
“See?” Jasper said. “I already know more about your hometown than you do.”
LIZ ENTERED HER father’s study. “Do you think Mom has a shopping addiction?”
“Without question.” From behind his desk, her father’s tone was equanimous.
“I’m not kidding,” Liz said.
“Nor am I.”
“Do you think anything should be done about it?”