“Speaking of which,” Caroline said, “has Jane reached the swollen-ankles-and-stretch-marks stage yet?”
Liz smiled as warmly as she could manage. “You know how some pregnant women just give off a glow the whole time? Jane’s been blessed.” Before Caroline could respond, Liz added, “I hear Chip’s still shooting the Eligible reunion. Is Holly the alligator wrestler part of it? Or it’s Gabrielle who has the Celtic cross tattoo on her tongue, right? It always seemed like she and Chip had a lot of chemistry.” Liz beamed at Caroline. “Either one would be so fun for you to have as a sister-in-law.”
UPON THEIR ARRIVAL, Charlotte and Liz had been welcomed by Darcy in a gracious but not especially fraught way (Liz was almost disappointed by how not fraught) and introduced to the other guests, all of whose names Liz promptly forgot: an anesthesiologist and his lawyer wife, a seemingly single male radiologist, a nephrologist (male) married to an architect (also male), plus two Stanford history PhDs, both slender young men whom Liz suspected, based on their posture and inflections around Darcy’s sister, to be in love with Georgie.
Though Liz’s initial interactions with Darcy were subdued and matter-of-fact, as the afternoon progressed and the croquet began—they were playing two separate games simultaneously, both of them the so-called cutthroat version, in which it was everyone for him-or herself, rather than teams—Liz felt there to be an ever-increasing charge between herself and her host. She was at all times acutely conscious of how far he stood from her, of his absence if he stepped away—to bring out additional bottles of wine from the guesthouse, say, or to greet the final arrival, a dermatologist, at the front gate—and whom he was talking with. Periodically, it was she who was speaking to him, always in an undramatic fashion. They weren’t playing in the same game, but the two courts had been set up on adjacent stretches of grass, and they were sometimes near each other; they’d comment on a shot someone had taken or on the pleasantness of the weather, and while such topics felt faintly ridiculous, so, presumably, would anything else.
When Liz knocked her ball out of bounds, Darcy materialized as she was placing it the prescribed distance from the boundary. “I always have this fantasy of discovering some new skill,” she said. “But apparently it’s not croquet.”
Darcy squinted. “Are you wearing makeup?”
Instinctively, Liz brought a hand to one cheek. “Does it look weird?”
“I guess I’m not used to you in it,” Darcy said, and, more defensively than she meant to, Liz said, “It is something women often put on their faces.”
Without speaking, Darcy patted her right shoulder, as if comforting her; instead, the contact was unsettling, but in a good way.
Eventually, Alberta drove up in a golf cart to clear away the used plates and utensils. Liz had by that point consumed two and a half glasses of wine, three bites of a turkey sandwich, and half a cookie; she was too nervous to eat more. It was Darcy who’d won the first game, and Charlotte the second. Caroline said to Liz, “I take it you’re not much of an athlete.”
Though Liz had mocked her own croquet skills with Darcy, she couldn’t permit such a slight from Caroline. “Well, I run twenty-five miles a week,” she said. “And for my job I’ve tried pretty much every fitness trend out there. But I suppose I’m not athletic besides that.”
The two women looked at each other with barely disguised antipathy, and Caroline said, “You leave town tomorrow, right?”
“Is my presence thwarting plans that you had?”
Caroline took a step closer to Liz and lowered her voice. “Just so you know, I see right through you. Your whole laid-back vibe—I can tell it’s bullshit.”
“Coming from you, I think that might be a compliment.”
As Liz finished her third glass of wine, impatience, regret, and tipsiness collected within her. Oh, to get a do-over for that braless, unprepared morning at her sisters’ apartment! To be granted just one more run up Madison Road with Darcy, only the two of them and no one else, and then to decamp for his apartment, this time with the awareness that he didn’t see the encounter as purely transactional—to know that he liked her! But did he still like her, here, today? How long did the sex hormones to which he’d attributed his love linger in the bloodstream?
A short while later, Liz heard herself telling Georgie, as one of Georgie’s suitors listened in, “Your brother mentioned that you guys might sell or donate this property at some point. And I hope this isn’t too forward, but I want to tell you about something my older sister did. My parents are selling the house they’ve lived in for a long time, so my sister, who’s a yoga instructor, held, like, a ritual farewell where she talked about some of the things we’d done at the house and what she’d miss. And even though I was skeptical, I think it’s helped me. Oh, and it only took five minutes.”