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.)
When Liz and Jasper met, he had a girlfriend, which was unsurprising: He had deep brown eyes and tousled blond curls and was at once smart and irreverent, boyish and thoughtful, with, in Liz’s assessment, the perfect quantities of neuroses and prurience to make him interesting to talk to, receptive to gossip, and game for analyzing the behavior and personalities of others without tipping over into seeming unmasculine. Indeed, Jasper’s sole flaw, in Liz’s opinion, apart from his girlfriend, was that he wore a gold ring from Stanford University, his alma mater; Liz did not care for either jewelry on men or academic ostentatiousness. But she actually was glad to have identified the one thing about Jasper she’d change, because it was similar to realizing what you’d forgotten to take on a trip, and if it was only perfume, as opposed to your driver’s license, you were relieved.
Initially, Liz had believed that a union with Jasper was just a matter of time; such was Jasper’s tendency to confide in her about the multitude of challenges he and his girlfriend, Serena, were experiencing that Liz imagined she need not persuade him of anything. While still together with Serena, Jasper had dropped conversational bombshells on Liz that included “I mean, I talk way more openly with you than I do with her” and “Sometimes I think you and I would be a good couple. Do you ever think that?” Liz knew for certain he had said these things because, although she no longer kept a journal, she’d written them down verbatim, along with their date of utterance, on an unlined sheet of computer paper she kept in her nightstand. Also, after she mentioned to Jasper that as a toddler she’d referred to herself as Ninny or Nin, he began calling her by the latter pet name.
Eight months into knowing Jasper, meaning seven months and three weeks into being thoroughly smitten with him, during a blizzard that occurred on a Saturday in February, Liz went running with him in Central Park in five inches of snow, while flakes were still falling. Jasper’s pace combined with the snow on the ground made this outing the most grueling physical exertion Liz had ever experienced, and by the second mile, she could take it no more. She stopped, leaned over, pressed her palms to her knees, and said while panting, “I give up. You win.”
“Really?” Jasper was a few feet in front of her, looking over his shoulder, grinning under a black fleece cap. “What’s my prize?”
Your prize is me, Liz thought. “Bragging rights,” she said. “And a hot drink from any bar that’s open.” Then she knelt and let herself collapse backward into the snow.
Jasper retraced his steps and lay down beside her. They were quiet as the flakes fluttered and spun in the air above, the sky a dirty white, the snow beneath them a chilly cushion. Jasper stuck out his tongue, catching a flake, and Liz did the same. All the usual noises of Manhattan were muted by the storm, and she felt completely happy. Then Jasper looked over at her. “So I broke up with Serena last night,” he said.
The joy that flared in Liz’s heart—it was almost too much. She hoped she sounded calm as she said, “I guess that makes sense.”
“You think so?”
“It just seems like you guys have had a lot of issues.”
“She’s furious, though. She claims I ambushed her.” Though no prettier than Liz, Serena was far more confidently difficult, more expectant of appeasement and conciliation.
Liz said, “Do you still feel like going to Alex’s thing tonight or you think you’ll skip it?” This was an anti-Valentine’s party a co-worker of theirs was throwing, but if Jasper wanted to forgo it, Liz thought, they could order takeout, watch a movie, and have a mellow night.
“I’ll probably go.”
Liz was then assaulted by something wet and lumpy, a substance that broke upon contact with her nose and dispersed into her eyes and nostrils.
“Ouch!” she cried. “What the hell?” But by the time she asked, she knew. While she didn’t really have the impulse to throw a snowball back, Jasper was smiling with anticipation. When her snowball glanced off the shoulder of his waterproof jacket, he said, “Oh, Nin, I have so much to teach you.”
How long, on that day, did Liz imagine it would take for them to become romantically involved? Six or eight weeks perhaps—long enough for him to process his breakup with Serena, process being a word Jasper himself, unlike either of her college boyfriends, actually used in reference to his own emotions. But apparently little processing was necessary. Liz felt no compulsion to keep a close eye on Jasper at the party, which made it all the more soul crushing when he left with the host’s sister Natalie, who was a junior at NYU.
A rebound, Liz told herself. Natural enough, and perhaps even best to get it out of his system. Surely what was obvious to Liz—and to others, too, there’d even been an older female editor at the magazine who’d murmured to her, “You and Jasper Wick would be so cute together”—would soon become visible to Jasper as well.
Alas, Jasper and Natalie were a couple for two years, and it took only a few weeks of their courtship for Liz to revert to her Serena-era patterns with Jasper: she was his lunch companion, intermittently his jogging partner, his professional sounding board—she would copyedit and proofread the pitches he was crafting in the hope of getting a front-of-the-book piece in the magazine—and she was also his confidante, helping to parse his concerns about Natalie’s immaturity or his irritation at his roommate, who would, while stoned, consume Jasper’s tortillas and peanut butter. Once when Natalie was at her parents’ house in Phoenix, Liz and Jasper drank many beers together on a Wednesday night at a dive bar near Times Square, and, unable to bear it any longer, Liz blurted out, “But what about us? I thought you pictured us as a couple!”
Jasper seemed startled. “That’s what you want?” he said.
“Of course it’s what I want!” Liz said.
“Part of me wants it, too.” Jasper’s tone was pained rather than flirtatious. “But we’d be the real thing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. You’re such an important friend that I don’t want to risk losing you.”
When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revisited. It was a windy March night, and the wisps of Liz’s brown hair that had slipped from her ponytail blew around her forehead and cheeks.
Abruptly, Jasper said, “Your hair is all crazy tonight.” He stepped toward her, his hand out. But at the same time, Liz raised her own arm and pushed away her hair, and as she did so,
