WHILE IT WAS technically accurate that both Liz and Jane were single, this fact did not for either woman convey the full story. After Jane’s fruitless early engagement, she had met a man named Jean-Pierre Babineaux, a courtly French financier, and they had become a couple for the better part of a decade. Though Jane had assumed she and Jean-Pierre would marry, their conversations on the subject were always marked by a bittersweetness she recognized in retrospect as a kind of warning. It was not that either of them lacked affection for the other but, rather, that the circumstances of their lives were incompatible: He was fifteen years older than she, divorced, and the father of twins who were, when Jane met him, twelve. He traveled back to Paris frequently, and while Jane could hardly complain about her visits there, staying at the apartment he maintained in the Sixth Arrondissement, she did not wish to live so far from her family and certainly not permanently; yet Jean-Pierre’s ultimate plan was to return to his birthplace. Further, while Jane unequivocally wished to bear children, Jean-Pierre had had a vasectomy when the twins were two.
Jane and Jean-Pierre’s eventual breakup was no less devastating for being both protracted and decorous. At thirty-seven, she was single once more and remained so for the next two years. Shortly after her thirty-ninth birthday, following the painstaking consideration of a multitude of anonymous candidates, Jane lay on her back in a hospital gown at a clinic on East Fifty-seventh Street, awaiting the insertion of donor semen into her cervix via needleless syringe. Though Jane followed all the recommendations for creating conditions favorable to pregnancy—she stopped drinking alcohol, slept eight hours a night, and meditated daily—fertilization didn’t occur during that cycle or in any of the next several rounds. While not statistically anomalous—few women attempting to become pregnant via donor insemination were immediately successful—this lack of progress was discouraging as well as expensive, and Jane’s insurance covered none of the monthly $1,000 charge. Anticipating her parents’ disapproval, she hadn’t disclosed her pursuit to them and thus was receiving no extra money beyond the rent, which Mr. Bennet paid directly on her behalf. Thus, for the first time in her adult life, Jane found herself bypassing restaurants, forgoing haircuts, and shunning the street on which her favorite clothing boutique, with its elegantly tailored $400 pencil skirts and luxurious $300 sweaters, was located. Such sacrifices would not, she recognized, count by most people’s standards as hardships, but she was privately conscious of a new austerity.
With no one other than Liz did Jane discuss her efforts to become a mother. Her gynecologist had suggested that she tell her parents even before the first insemination, but Jane thought that if she wasn’t able to become pregnant, then she’d have courted the double punishment of what she assumed would be her mother’s histrionics and no baby. And Jane still hoped to marry eventually, though marriage was no longer her immediate goal.
Unlike Jane, Liz wished to avoid motherhood. That she was dating a married man made such avoidance logical, though whether these circumstances had occurred by chance or subconscious design even Liz herself couldn’t say. In the late nineties, Liz and Jasper Wick had immediately hit it off as new hires in the fact-checking department of the same prestigious magazine: They bit back smiles when the books editor, who was from Delaware, pronounced the word “memoir” mem-wah; they got lunch together several times a week at a cheap Thai restaurant; and they routinely divided the work between them when checking facts on onerous articles. (They had started their jobs using computers with spotty Internet connections, back when fact-checking meant visiting the public library or waiting anxiously for the return of phone calls.)