Eligible

“I hate that I’m causing you grief,” Jasper replied.

“I’m an idiot,” Liz said. “Anyone looking at me would think I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Jasper said. “You’re my best friend.”

If only she had let him smooth back her hair!

At intervals, Liz swore off Jasper—she’d say, “Our friendship is unhealthy,” and she’d briefly embrace yoga, which, loyalty to Jane aside, she hated—but Liz’s and Jasper’s social circles overlapped enough that within a week or a month, they’d run into each other at a party or a Frisbee game and then they’d talk and talk about all the things they’d both been saving up to share with the other.

When they were thirty-one, Jasper announced his engagement to a pert and friendly associate at a white-shoe law firm, a woman named Susan about whom he seemed to Liz no less equivocal than he had toward earlier girlfriends. After a run together, he asked Liz if she’d be a groomsman; seeing her expression, he added, “Or a groomswoman, whatever.” When Liz began to sob, he said, “What? What?” and she sprinted away and didn’t speak to him for five years; though she still laid eyes on him at media events, she did not attend Jasper’s wedding, let alone participate in the ceremony.

One Saturday in the spring of 2011, Liz and an oboist she’d met for a blind date ran into Jasper and Susan on the High Line, Jasper pushing a stroller in which a toddler slept. Susan greeted Liz warmly—like Elise, Susan had always seemed improbably unsuspicious of Liz, causing Liz to wonder exactly how Jasper explained their friendship—and the five of them ended up sharing brunch, during which the toddler, a boy named Aidan, awoke and shrieked so relentlessly that Liz forgave Jasper just a little. That Monday morning, Jasper emailed Liz: It was great to see you. Really miss our friendship.

After an exchange of messages, they met for a weekday lunch at which they discussed recent articles they’d either loved or been outraged by, and then Jasper confided the financial pressure he felt now that Susan had decided she wanted to quit law and remain at home with Aidan. The last few years had, apparently, been rough: as a newborn, Aidan had had colic; Susan had initially struggled with breast-feeding though now was unwilling to give it up; and she was spending enormous quantities of time online trying to determine which potentially toxic chemicals were contained in the cleaning agent used on the carpeting in the halls of their building. Meanwhile, Jasper was spinning his wheels at work. He knew he was capable of running a magazine—he was still a senior editor rather than an executive editor, which was the usual jumping-off point for being an editor in chief—and welcomed Liz’s thoughts about what publication might be most suitable for his continued ascent up the professional ladder. Jasper’s great respect for Liz’s ideas and opinions, his wish for feedback from her on every subject, even the subject of whether it was weird that his wife was still breast-feeding a nineteen-month-old, was simultaneously the most flattering and the most insulting dynamic she had ever experienced. She thought that if the option were available, he would run a cord between her brain and his, or perhaps simply download the contents of her cerebral cortex.

The next time she and Jasper met after the five-year hiatus, it was for drinks, and after the third round, Jasper said that he and Susan had together reached the painful conclusion that their marriage had run its course and that while both of them had had the best of intentions, they agreed they’d made a mistake choosing each other. The catch was that if Susan or any of her siblings divorced, Susan’s deeply Catholic grandmother, a rich, spiteful, and surprisingly hale ninety-eight-year-old living on the Upper East Side, would cut them out of her will, and Aidan wouldn’t get to attend private school. Thus, although Jasper and Susan had each other’s blessings to pursue extramarital relationships, they would continue to live together until Susan’s grandmother died. After conveying this information, Jasper swallowed, and there were tears in his brown eyes as he said, “It was always you, Nin. I messed up so badly, but it was always you.”

At points during their five-year silence, Liz had indulged in the fantasy that Jasper would show up at her office or apartment—possibly, as in a movie, having run through the rain—to urgently declare his love. He might even, in such scenarios, have said, It was always you. But he would not have still been legally wed to Susan; certainly, he would not be the father of a nineteen-month-old. And yet, through the shimmery softness of the three gins she’d consumed, Liz thought that these compromising circumstances gave the situation a certain credibility: It wasn’t too good to be true. She didn’t need to feel unsettled by getting everything she’d always hoped for.

Back at her apartment, the consummation of their whatever-it-was also was not a dream come true—certainly fourteen years of buildup and more than a half dozen cocktails between them didn’t help matters—but it was adequate, and afterward, when Jasper fell asleep holding her, she wished that her twenty-two-year-old self could know that it would, in the end, happen for them. Her twenty-two-year-old self might have been less charmed when Jasper woke up forty minutes later, took a hasty shower, and hurried home to his wife and child; despite Jasper and Susan’s conjugal agreement, it was Jasper’s turn the next morning to get up with Aidan at five A.M.

Within a week, Jasper had made three more visits to Liz’s apartment and in two cases slept over; patterns had been established. The drawbacks to this version of a relationship were so glaringly obvious—because members of Susan’s extended family loyal to her grandmother lived in Manhattan, discretion was necessary, and Liz and Jasper therefore didn’t dine together in restaurants, nor were they each other’s dates for work-related functions—that they hardly seemed worth dwelling on. On the other hand, she was able to enjoy genuine closeness, as well as physical intimacy, with someone she knew well and cared for deeply, while still having time to work and run and read and see friends—perhaps, in fact, more time than when she’d been scouring dating websites or spending three hours at a stretch analyzing her singleness with Jane or other women. A few friends knew about Jasper, as did her older sister, and their skeptical reactions were for Liz sufficient deterrent to discuss the unusual arrangement further; it was too easy for it to sound like Jasper was doing nothing more than cheating.

One Friday evening in late May, two years into Liz’s reconciliation with Jasper, Liz was at Jane’s apartment; Jane chopped kale for a salad while Liz opened the bottle of red wine she’d brought. “Are you really making me drink alone again?” Liz said.

“I’m fostering a hospitable uterine environment,” Jane replied.

“Meaning, yes, I’m on my own.”

“Sorry.” Jane frowned.

“Don’t apologize.” Liz pulled a glass from Jane’s shelf. “And any fetus would be lucky to inhabit your womb. I bet you have the Ritz of uteruses. Uteri?” Liz held her filled glass aloft. “To Latinate nouns and to reproduction.” Jane tapped her water glass against Liz’s as Liz added, “Remember Sandra at my office who took three years to get pregnant? She said she went to this acupuncturist who—” In her pocket, Liz’s phone buzzed, and she wondered if it was Jasper; apparently, Jane wondered the same thing because she said, with not entirely concealed disapproval, “Is that him?”

But it wasn’t; it was their sister Kitty. Liz held up the phone so Jane could see the screen before saying, “Hey, Kitty. I’m here with Jane.”

“It’s Dad,” Kitty said, and she was clearly crying. “He’s in the hospital.”

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