A/N: This story is a sequel to Off Balance, a modern P&P retelling in which Lizzy and Will were both serious overachievers who struggled over gender roles, work, money, and how to deal with family dysfunction. OB1 ended with their marriage, and with promises that one day they would start a family, even though it would be a challenge given their demanding careers. That challenge is the focus of this story.
Thanks so very much to my betas, Jan, Barbara, and Alison, for their wonderful feedback and for keeping me honest.
Blurb: Lizzy Bennet and Will Darcy are a New York power couple, married for five years. They work hard and have a great life together. Then they have a baby, and they need to re-negotiate just about everything.
Rating: Rated M for bad language and gauzy sexual metaphors, although it's probably actually safe for 15+. Low angst in the sense that there are absolutely no freak carriage accidents, etc., but you can decide for yourself if juggling work, children, and a relationship counts as a different kind of angst.
For Barbara
Prologue
The New York Times
Weddings/Celebrations
July 6, 2008
Elizabeth Gardiner Bennet and William Prentiss Darcy IV were married Saturday at the Central Park Boathouse. United States Supreme Court Justice Esther Simkin Goldberg officiated. The bride, 30, and the bridegroom, 34, met through a mutual friend, Charles Bingley, who is married to Ms. Bennet's elder sister, Dr. Jane Bingley. Mr. Bingley and Dr. Bingley served as best man and matron of honor, respectively.
"I thought he was a big jerk when we first met," said Ms. Bennet when asked about the couple's two-year courtship, "but eventually I realized he was the best of men." Mr. Darcy smiled but had no comment.
The bride will keep her name. She is senior staff attorney in the immigrant and refugee rights litigation group at Human Rights International. She graduated summa cum laude from Columbia and received a law degree from Yale, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. She later clerked for Justice Goldberg.
The bride is a daughter of Thomas and Lillian Bennet of Artemis, N.Y. The bride's father is a professor of English Literature at Artemis College. Her mother is a freelance documentary filmmaker.
The bridegroom is CEO of WPD Capital. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and also received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
He is the son of the late William Prentiss Darcy III and Anne Fitzwilliam Darcy of Manhattan. The bridegroom's father was founder of WPD Capital. His mother was on the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was the founder of the Fitzwilliam-Darcy Trust.
The couple will reside in Manhattan.
Chapter 1
June 2011
Lizzy came home from work around 7 o'clock on a Friday night. The plan was that she and Will would eat in and then head to a 9 o'clock movie.
Dumping her briefcase and computer on the chair next to the coat closet, she called, "Sweetie, I'm home." She knew Will was home, too, because all the lights were on, as usual. She shoved her coat, shoes, and umbrella into the closet and padded down the long, old Persian carpet gracing the glittering marble hallway.
The hallway looked less like a VIP photo gallery now than it had when they'd first met. Lizzy's family photos were up there with all of Will's Fitzwilliam cousin glamor shots and family portraits. Interspersed were some poster-sized shots Lizzy had taken on their brief but intense vacations, one for each year of their marriage: the Serengeti and Mt. Kilimanjaro, Prague and Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo, Crater Lake and Mt. Rainier. Will always wanted to take cushy First World trips while Lizzy preferred more adventurous ones, so they mixed things up as much as they could. Lizzy hoped they would get to Machu Picchu before too long, but Will was holding out for St. Petersburg. Maybe they would do rock, paper, scissors to decide where they would go next. Or, possibly, they could be more mature about it and agree to take turns or find a compromise like they usually did with big decisions.
"In the kitchen," she heard Will shout as she made her way in that direction.
Will was in his shirtsleeves, grabbing plates and forks out of the kitchen cupboards to set on the table in the breakfast nook. Lizzy could see from the bag he had left on the table that he had stopped at their favorite falafel place on his way home and picked up dinner.
"Hi, babe." She put her arms around him and gave him a kiss, his hands full of utensils and dishes limiting his ability to hug her back. "How was your day?"
He kissed her one more time before turning and heading for the table.
"All right. You?"
She grabbed a couple of glasses and filled them with water from the dispenser on the front of the giant, mostly empty fridge.
"Yeah, good. Just behind-the-scenes stuff today, politicking. Had a meeting with someone from State. Oh, they offered me a job again, can you believe it? How many times do I have to tell them I'm not interested in moving to Washington?"
She had turned down the State Department on several occasions already, even though the idea of having Hillary Clinton as her boss was thrilling. She needed to stay in New York, where Will's unmoveable job was. This kind of persistent recruitment was what happened, though, when you were making a name for yourself the way Lizzy was at HRI. She had nudged the litigation group away from dealing exclusively with immigrant and refugee rights, and gotten the group noticed by carefully choosing a few cases involving the rights of asylum seekers and stateless people. These were big, constitutional issues with a huge impact on a lot of people. The highest-profile case they'd chosen to take on involved some Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who were facing no chargeable crimes, but couldn't be released because they didn't want to return to their home country for fear of their own safety. And, their home country wouldn't take them back anyway. It was a violation of their rights to keep them imprisoned when they hadn't even been charged with any crimes, let alone found guilty of anything. Lizzy's group had sued the US government on their behalf and succeeded in getting them asylum in a third country. That was one reason why State took notice.
Now, she told him a little more about the meeting with the official from State. "Anyway. Did you have that thing with, uh—?" She slid into her seat next to him.
"Human Resources."
Ugh. Lizzy made a face, even though, as HR departments went, WPD's wasn't too bad. When it came to women-friendly policies, at least, they had a reputation in the city for being progressive.
Will continued, "Yeah, the workshop for managers. I don't know why I agree to go to these things. Team building or something. Honestly, I would just fire the entire HR department if I could." He picked up his giant falafel sandwich and took a healthy bite.
"Well, why don't you? You're the boss. HR sucks. Bunch of interfering, self-important weasels." Mouth watering, she served herself some pickled beet salad and reached for the hot sauce.
"I wish. You can't do it, you know that. Gotta have rules. We'd get sued. Anyway, the board insisted on this new program." He grabbed his water.
She sighed and took a bite of falafel. With her mouth full she said, "Yeah, I know. Well, what kind of BS did they throw at you this time?"
"Something about a new work evaluation system. TQM and 360 degree evaluations are apparently so, like, 2008 or something. I don't know. It's a whole new vocabulary. The usual load of incomprehensible crap."
Lizzy leaned forward, giving him a sly smile. "Oooh, HR jargon. Lay it on me, baby." She waggled her eyebrows at him.
Will laughed and put down his falafel. "Well, first we had to identify the WPD management competencies."
"Oh, yeah. Mmm. Competencies." She smiled at him suggestively and went for the green salad.
"Right. Then there was something about how we had to 'surface priorities.'"
"I love it when you verb nouns. It does things to me. What else?"
He thought about it for a minute before continuing, "Um, let's see, one of the managerial competencies is to 'drive results.' We're supposed to drive results. Really hard, I guess." He leered rakishly back at her.
"Seriously?" she laughed. "What is wrong with these people? Do they not hear what they're saying?"
"I don't think they do. Oh, also apparently everything is very robust this year. We're going to have a robust work evaluation system. With robust evaluation criteria, and a robust feedback mechanism."
"Robust! I like it. I could work with that," she nodded approvingly. "Can't have a soft, floppy, flaccid feedback mechanism, no sir."
He snickered and changed the subject. "Do you want to head up to Netherfield early tomorrow, or go in the afternoon? It's probably the last time we'll get up there before the baby is born." Jane and Charlie were expecting their second child in a month or so. Jane was big as a house and had said she didn't want to go on any more long car rides after this trip because car travel was getting really uncomfortable for her.
"Oh, well...why don't we get a relatively early start, and maybe we can get in a long bike ride in the afternoon?" They both really enjoyed exploring the Lake George area on their road bikes. The area was cool and hilly with a sprinkling of lakes and ponds, and there was lots of fresh air, but not too much nature for their urban sensibilities.
He agreed and moved on to their plans for the evening. Pulling out his iPhone, he said, "What do you want to see?" He read off, "X-Men: First Class...uh, Bridesmaids...? Yuck." By this time they had both finished eating, and Lizzy started to cram the remains of their meal back into the bag it had come from.
She shrugged as she squashed a styrofoam container. "Well, we could always stay in and have our own team-building exercise instead. Go, team!" She struck a cheerleading pose, one fist on her hip and an imaginary pom pom held high in the air, before returning to her task.
"Excellent plan. I have some great workshop ideas, myself. Maybe a little role play, for example," Will commented, a tiny smile quirking at the corner of his mouth. He put their dishes and silverware into the dishwasher.
Lizzy dropped the bag she had packed up into the trash and put her arm around Will's waist and nudged him with her hip. "Really! So, you picked up a few pointers today, did you?"
"Yup, yup. Step right into the conference room and I'll show you my flipcharts."
"Flipcharts! Oh, baby!" Grinning, she grabbed his hand and pulled him down the hallway to their bedroom.
Once they had quite thoroughly surfaced their respective priorities, Will suggested that they work together on more fully developing the team competency in driving results. After the results had been most delightfully driven for some time, Lizzy's feedback mechanism proved to be very robust indeed as she gave the project an extremely enthusiastic evaluation. She was, as always, very glad that the walls in the condo were so thick. Robust, even.
Afterwards, they lay curled together, entangled, peaceful, listening to each other's heartbeats and breaths.
"God, I love you," Lizzy said, from deep down in that calm, still place that only seemed reachable following the intense, exhausting connection of making love, when all the cares of the outside world were finally gone and her overactive brain had finally, finally quieted.
Will was right there with her. "I love you, too. So much." He stroked her face and looked into her eyes, really seeing her, accepting her. She gazed back, almost overcome by the raw feelings she saw in his eloquent eyes. It didn't get any better than this, she knew. Her heart ached with the joy of it. She closed her eyes and tenderly, softly kissed him. He turned to take her more fully in his arms and slowly, slowly they slid even further into oneness.
The next week, Lizzy turned 34. She and Will went out for a nice dinner at the Thai restaurant where they'd had their first date years ago. They both enjoyed remembering how it had felt when they were first falling in love.
A couple of days later, she had another little celebration with some of her female friends and colleagues. They met after work for a drink. The women were all lawyers, at non-governmental organizations like Lizzy's or at big corporate law firms, and they met sometimes as an informal support group. The six of them barely fit around the high table in the dim tapas bar. The seventh member of the gang had had to beg off, again, because she had to pick up her new baby from daycare. As the women sipped their drinks, talk at the table turned to how she could never come to anything after 5 pm.
"It's obvious it's really limiting her career prospects," commented Paula, who was a senior partner in her early 60s. "This is why my husband and I agreed early on that we wouldn't have children. I just don't think you can be serious about your career and have children."
"Don't you feel you missed out by not having kids, though?" asked Vanessa, a junior associate Lizzy knew from a Yale alumni network. Unbeknownst to the others, Vanessa was three months pregnant. She fiddled with her cranberry juice.
"No, not at all!" said Paula emphatically. "I never wanted to have children anyway."
"Really?" Vanessa looked at her as if she didn't quite believe her..
"No. If you'd ever met my mother, you'd understand why not. Anyway, Greg and I have a great life. We get to travel—"
Audrey, who was 32, happily single, and on track to make partner in record time, interrupted, "God, Vanessa. I don't want to have any kids, either. Why should I have to justify my damn choices all the time?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way..." Vanessa rushed to apologize.
Janice, who had been quietly observing, now turned to Lizzy and said, "What do you think, Lizzy? You and Will have been together for a long time now. Do you want to have kids?"
"I don't know what we're going to do. When we got married, we agreed that we both wanted to to, but honestly I don't know how practical it is at this point." As she said it, Lizzy could almost hear her mother's voice telling her she wasn't getting any younger. "What about you, Janice?"
Janice looked down at her hands holding her drink on the table. "Well, I wasn't going to say anything about it, but I guess it doesn't matter now. Steve and I found out a while ago that we can't conceive. We decided to try to adopt a baby from China, and we got part way through the adoption process when it turned out that Steve's childhood leukemia disqualifies us from adopting."
"What?" Lizzy was aghast. "But isn't he fine now? That's so unfair!"
"Yes, he is. But that's the Chinese government's rule, no cancer survivors."
"Oh, I'm so sorry..." commiserated Vanessa. "Will you try somewhere else?"
"No, probably not. I just don't think we could go through all of that again," Janice said, shaking her head. Lizzy, sitting next to her, pressed her hand sympathetically.
"Well, we'll expect great things from you at work, then!" chirped Paula.
Lizzy frowned at her and turned to look at Laura, the one member of the party who hadn't been contributing to the conversation. She was in her late 30s, and she never gave too much away about herself. Lizzy realized that after all this time, she didn't know if Laura was gay or straight, single, partnered or married, a mom or not.
Laura looked back at her and pointed at her own chest as if to say, who, me? She smiled enigmatically. "Just haven't met the right person yet, I guess." And that was all anyone could get out of her that evening or any other day.
That night after a late dinner they'd had delivered from a nearby Japanese restaurant, Lizzy said to Will, "Sweetie, I had this surreal conversation with my women lawyer friends today, and...anyway, long story short, it got me thinking about the whole kid question again."
"As in, when are we going to have kids?" he asked, stretching his long arm out behind her on the back of the sofa in the living room. They had turned off the lights and were watching the lights in the park across the street. The big windows were the best thing in the room, Lizzy thought, because otherwise it looked like a big, white mausoleum, so cold and formal. Not that she had any opinions about interior design.
"Right. What do you think? Do you still want to?"
"Yeah, I do. I guess we'll have to get our act together soon, though, if we want to. I'm already 39, and pretty soon my swimmers are going to dry up."
Lizzy laughed and punched him lightly on the arm. "Oh, shut up. You know it's my ovaries that are going to shrivel up and blow away first."
"Seriously, is this something you want to do? It changes things, I hear." He looked thoughtful.
"Well, I'm not sure. One of the things we talked about over drinks was the whole 'mommy track' thing. Would people still take me seriously if I had a baby? Could I do my job?"
"Does it matter? You're already at the top of your field."
"Of course it matters! I love everything about my job! Well, just about everything. Maybe I could do with a some new challenges and a little less Andrew," she said, naming the blowhard in the office next door to hers. "I've been at HRI for five years now. I don't know, maybe it's time to move on to something bigger. But anyway, the point is that I love it, I love helping people, I'm good at it, and I just don't know if I can walk away from it, even only partway."
"Yep, you're a real killer, all right," he smiled at her. "Just one of the many things I love about you." He gave her a big sloppy kiss.
"Oh, get out of here," she laughed.
"Come on. You know it's true."
Actually, Lizzy did know it was true. "But could I be a mom and a killer at the same time?"
"Hmm. Wasn't there some politician that the media kept calling a pit bull wearing lipstick? Or a grizzly mom or something? Oh, I remember—" He named a very conservative woman politician who had been in the news lately. "She's totally vicious, and she has a bunch of kids."
"Don't you dare say that woman's name in my house! Not even as a joke." She thought about it for a while. "No, really, is there anyone out there? Any role model at all for that kind of woman?"
Will wiggled his feet on the coffee table as he pondered that question. "How about Justice Goldberg? She's been your role model in lots of ways. She's pretty sharp, and she has a kid."
"Oh, please, she's fabulous, but she's a hundred and sixteen years old. Totally different thing. Different times."
They sat there slumped back against the sofa for a while in silence, holding hands, staring at the ceiling.
Finally, she asked, "What about you? Would it change things for you?"
"Hmm...well, probably not as much as for you."
"It's that easy? Really? Why?"
"Because you're the girl."
She sat up straight and glared at him. "OK, now I'm really mad at you. Don't say crap like that. You know it pisses me off."
"I know, I know. I'm kidding. Mostly. But it's true, probably, as long as I'm at WPD. If I'm running the company, I have to keep working this much. Plus, you would take maternity leave, and I couldn't take paternity leave or whatever that would be called."
"Huh." They sat and thought some more. "Well, let's keep thinking about it."
"OK."
Lizzy jumped up off the sofa. "All right, then, enough of this messing around. I have to go do some work."
Grinning at her, he said, "We don't even have time to have this conversation. How would we have time to have a kid? You do see the irony in this situation, right?"
"Maybe. Now be a good boy and go do your work, too." She came back and kissed his cheek before heading down the hall to her office.
After that, Lizzy started noticing women and babies all around her, when she was walking to the subway, or swinging by the neighborhood store for cereal, or running in the Park. She began to observe them more and more closely. It wasn't that she fell in love with babies, or even with the idea of having a baby, exactly. It was that she began to see something going on between mothers and babies, and sometimes between fathers and babies, that she thought was interesting and possibly worth having. She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. She wondered whether maybe this connection she was seeing was something important, a part of the human experience that she wanted to sample. The problem was that she knew she couldn't just sample it—it was all or nothing. She didn't talk about it with anyone, not Will, or her best friend Charlotte, or Jane, because it wasn't something she was ready to articulate yet.
A few weeks later, Jane had her baby, a boy named Tyler. Lizzy and Will drove to Westchester to meet him in the hospital the day he was born. He was so ugly that he was cute: red, strangely hairy, flaky, wrinkled, and covered in waxy white junk. When they walked into the hospital room, Jane was lying exhausted and strung out in the slanted bed after an unexpectedly intense and 100% natural labor and delivery. Tyler started crying, so Charlie handed him over to Jane, who, just like that, shoved open her hospital gown and whipped out her boob and started nursing him. Lizzy looked at them, all Madonna and Child with Charlie gazing on, enraptured, enfolding them. Somewhere inside her she felt something change—puzzle pieces fitting together, or an elegant solution to a math problem magically presenting itself, or maybe a mysterious and heretofore inactive gland suddenly squirting hormones into her system, and she thought: I want that. Damn the consequences. She looked at Will and she could see that he was thinking the same thing.
In the car on the way back to the city, she took Will's hand and said, "I want us to be a family like that. I mean, you really already are my family. But I want us to be like that. What do you think? Is it time?"
He squeezed her hand back and replied, "Yeah, I think so."
And that was that. They agreed not to talk with their friends and family about it, just in case things didn't work out.
At first, they tried the carpet-bombing technique: they had unprotected sex a lot, whenever the mood struck them. That was a lot of fun. But the pregnancy test came back negative every month for three months. Lizzy finally decided to ask Jane for her advice, because she had had some trouble conceiving her first child.
"Too soon for a fertility specialist," Jane said over the phone, once she had stopped exclaiming and sighing and squealing about Lizzy's news. Lizzy could hear baby Tyler cooing and toddler Aiden singing "head, shoulders, knees and toes" in the background.
"The best thing to try next is charting your temperature so you know when you're ovulating." She suggested a book Lizzy could look at about controlling her fertility naturally.
So Lizzy started charting, and she and Will entered the living hell of obligatory conception sex, which was no fun at all. It had nothing whatsoever to do with sexual desire and everything to do with the timing of eggs popping forth from her ovaries.
Finally, on January 15, 2012, after sixth months of trying, good news arrived at last. Lizzy and Will sat together on the edge of the bathtub, each with one eye glued to the second hand of Will's watch spinning around and the other on the pregnancy test stick (1).
"Look! Look!" Lizzy pointed to the blue line in the little window, slowly getting darker and more pronounced.
"Yeah!" Will shouted. He never shouted.
The second hand made its way back around to the twelve one last time, and the line was clearly dark blue. She was pregnant. They sat holding each other, perched on the side of the tub for a long time. Lizzy's eyes stung a little with happy tears.
Things were going to change. But how?
Footnotes:
(1) In the US, you can take an early home pregnancy test about a week after ovulation/conception, and that's what Lizzy and Will have done. Often an OB/Gyn won't even bother to do a pregnancy test in the office if the home test comes back positive.
Please do drop me a comment, if you feel so inclined, about whether this is a well-considered decision. I always love to hear what you think and appreciate your taking the time to leave a review.