“You need to go.” She would not give him a farewell hug; his obstinacy had become offensive.
He looked at her curiously. Perhaps, Liz thought, he was for the first time realizing that she had an identity, an agency, other than those he’d invented for her. At last, he said, “It’s funny you think there’s such a big difference between being thirty-eight and being forty.”
JANE, WHO WAS the first person with whom Liz wished to discuss what had just transpired, was at a yoga class. Jasper was the second person, except that Liz remained unsettled by the information she’d learned the previous night about his alleged expulsion from Stanford. And so, having barricaded herself in the third-floor bathroom because Cousin Willie was, at least for a few more minutes, still on the Tudor’s premises, it was to Charlotte Lucas that Liz sent a text while sitting on the tile floor: Cousin Willie just kissed me eek!!!!!!
Less than a minute later, Charlotte’s return text pinged: Wait like KISSED kissed??
Yes what’s wrong w him? Or me?
That’s VERY weird. Willie’s cute in a nerd way but um, cousins?!? An additional text from Charlotte arrived a few seconds later: Headed into meeting have a drink tonight?
Yes!! Liz wrote back. Zula? Somewhere else? U name time.
Then she called Jasper.
“Should I stay at the Cincinnatian or 21c?” he asked. “Fiona’s booking my ticket to Cincinnati right now.”
“You know how my cousin Willie the Silicon Valley whiz kid is visiting?” Liz said. “He just came on to me!”
Jasper laughed. “Incest is best, huh? You can be like the Egyptian pharaohs.”
“I’m not joking. He stuck his tongue in my mouth.”
“Did you like it?”
Liz hadn’t been planning to blurt out what she said next; somehow, it simply emerged. She said, “You didn’t get expelled from Stanford, did you?”
There was a long silence, an immediately sour silence, and finally, Jasper said, “What the fuck? Where’s this coming from?”
“I’m sorry.” Until now, Liz really hadn’t believed it; she’d imagined Darcy was confusing Jasper with someone else. “I shouldn’t have—there’s this guy here named Fitzwilliam Darcy, and I guess you guys—”
Before she could finish, Jasper said, “Darcy lives in Cincinnati? What the hell is he doing there?”
“There’s a big stroke center where he’s a surgeon.”
Jasper laughed bitterly. “Of course he is. The dude has had a god complex since he was twenty years old. What a wanker.” Rarely was Jasper this undilutedly aggrieved; though he was a frequent complainer, his complaints tended to contain some degree of levity, even charm. He said, “I’ll bet I never told you that a lot of what went down at Stanford was Darcy’s fault.”
This was correct, in part because she and Jasper had never spoken of what had gone down at Stanford, period; Liz was sure of it. Indeed, she had always been under the impression that the school and his time there were a kind of emotional lodestar. In addition to his gold Stanford ring, he sometimes, on fall weekends, wore a much-faded red Stanford sweatshirt; he kept in his living room a framed photograph of him with several fraternity brothers, a row of handsome, athletic-looking men-children in ties and blue blazers, though it struck Liz for the first time that she had never actually met any of the other people in the photo. New York was crawling with her Barnard classmates, but it had seemed unsurprising that his college friends lived on the West Coast.
“I’ll tell you the whole saga in Cincinnati,” Jasper was saying. “It puts me in a bad fucking mood just thinking about it.”
“You should stay at 21c,” Liz said. “I’ve never been, but it’s supposed to be very hip.”
“I hope you’re not friends with Darcy,” Jasper said. “I wouldn’t let that dude lick my shoe.”
It was a relief to be united with rather than divided from Jasper. “Don’t worry,” Liz said. “I feel the same way.”
THE ONE SOLACE to the unpleasant direction Liz’s conversation with Jasper had taken was that it had distracted her from her encounter with Willie. After she’d ended the call, however, that encounter combined with the confirmation of Jasper’s Stanford expulsion created in her an even higher level of turmoil. Without asking permission and with no particular destination in mind, she left the house in her mother’s car; a few minutes later, she was pulling into the parking lot of Rookwood Pavilion with the idea of getting a manicure and pedicure, and she emerged from the salon after more than an hour also missing four inches of hair, with the remainder layered in a way she was almost certain her colleagues at Mascara would be unimpressed by.
Lydia and Kitty sat at the kitchen table wearing workout clothes and eating cashews and organic beef jerky. When Liz entered the house through the back door, Lydia said, “Did you enter the Witness Protection Program to escape from the lust of Cousin Willie?”
“I like your haircut,” Kitty said. “You couldn’t have pulled that off a few years ago, but your cheekbones are showing more as you get older.”