The Standing Chandelier

by Lionel Shriver

  They raised the new addition to Weston Babansky’s already eclectic decor to its upright position, and with the base unpacked it was stable. Jillian assured Lance that she could take it from here, thanked him effusively, and wished him good-night. Yet it was several more minutes before Paige finally emerged from downstairs, carrying a basket of clean laundry. Had Jillian heard visitors muffling overhead, while the scraping of an obscure object penetrated the ceiling of her utility room, curiosity would have gotten the better of her sooner. Some women had a vigilant relationship to a load in the drier.

  “Jillian!” Paige’s face quivered briefly, as if she were about to sneeze. “What on earth? Is this that—chandelier thing?”

  “I was thinking”—Jillian had unwound the big sheet now, and was down to snipping the smaller squares cushioning each individual assemblage—“that during the party on the night of the wedding, it would be nice to have a centerpiece. Which also provides romantic, indirect lighting.”

  “So this is a loaner?” Most people were a little graceless or flustered when on the receiving end of extreme generosity, and she wouldn’t have meant to sound so hopeful.

  “No, no,” Jillian corrected. “That would make for a pretty feeble wedding present. It’s yours, and the welds are solid. As your grandchildren will discover, should you choose to go that direction.”

  Insofar as Jillian had envisioned this presentation, she’d imagined a bit more hubbub, especially since Paige had never seen the “chandelier thing” before. But the betrothed couple was unnervingly muted, so that when Paige offered a cup of tea, Jillian said maybe a glass of wine instead, if a bottle was open. A steadier. The trouble was, the unveiling was too fiddly and protracted, what with unwinding the individual strips of Bubble Wrap first from the miniature toy box and then from the helicopter inside, unpacking the cotton balls from around the curlew skull, checking that the wisdom teeth were still securely glued in place, and peeling off every little scrap of residual tape from the structure. On reflection, the theater would have been flashier had she delivered the gift while Baba was home during the day. Then Paige could have walked in, and voilà! Jillian could have switched on the power. As it was, unpacking was so time-consuming that Paige drifted off to work on dinner, and Baba started reading “Talk of the Town” in last week’s New Yorker. With no outlet in reach, she had to ask for an extension cord, and lacking spares on hand Baba had to resort to a power strip whose disconnection would disable his stereo speakers.

  At last, after Jillian had whisked around the floor filling three enormous black trash bags with Bubble Wrap, she tied her ribbon (alas, crumpled) around the trunk, and the moment was upon them. Baba called Paige away from her cutting board, and she returned to the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Baba had helped Jillian position the lamp at its most becoming angle—though some rearrangement of furniture might be required in order to show off her creation to its best advantage and make it look at home here. She hit the switch.

  “Well,” Paige said. “That’s really something, isn’t it.”

  Baba seemed to take in the chandelier anew. When he said, “It’s wonderful,” he hit a note of wistfulness as well as awe, and the assertion didn’t flush Jillian with quite the same heat as the first time he said that. But then, these infusions of perfect satisfaction don’t necessarily come around more than once.

  “Thank you,” Paige said formally. “I’m sure no one else will give us a wedding present anything like yours. And it’s always going to remind us of you, isn’t it?”

  As Jillian explained the derivation of a few elements, Paige’s expression remained more polite than fascinated, and she cut the museum tour short. No one sat down. She was mildly surprised not to be asked to stay for a bite, though she’d arrived without warning, and maybe they had only two stuffed peppers or something. While that shouldn’t have precluded a refresher of the wine, that glass must have been the end of a bottle. And sure, it wasn’t a long walk back to the cottage; the summer evening was soft. Still, even if she’d have declined, it might have been nice to have at least been offered a ride home.

  You hate it.” They had waited to speak until hearing Frisk crunch safely to the end of the gravel drive.

  “I hate the fact of it,” said Paige. “Though I’ll grant it’s not quite as ugly as I’d pictured.”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with it if you find it a torture.”

  “For now, we’re not going to do anything,” she said, U-turning briskly to the kitchen to resume chopping onions. “One upside of the long-term prospects for that friendship—meaning, it has no long-term prospects—is that after the wedding, we can do whatever we want with it, and she’ll never know. In the meantime, on the off chance she comes back here again—unannounced, with the standard presumption—I guess we haven’t any choice but to let that hulking contraption take up a third of our living room to keep from hurting her feelings.”

  It hit Weston then, the absurdity of protecting Frisk’s feelings for four more weeks, only to summarily crush them. The illogic recalled capital cases in which condemned men fell ill, and the state devoted all manner of expensive medical care to reviving convicts it planned to kill.

  “I know you think she means well,” Paige recommenced at dinner. “But it’s so inappropriate! For a wedding present? For one thing, it’s physically intrusive. It’s huge. And I’d never seen it. She had no idea whether I’d like it.”

  “Most people like it,” Weston mumbled.

  “But anything that occupies that much space is an imposition.”

  “I realize how hard it is for you to take it this way, but that chandelier is important to her, and I’m sure it was hard for her to part with it. That was a lavish gift. Emotionally lavish.”

  “In which case, it’s even more inappropriate. It’s excessive, as usual. She has no business giving you an ‘emotionally lavish’ gift. What’s wrong with a set of coasters?”

  “That chandelier was a labor of love.”

  “A labor of love for herself! Those knickknacks glued every which way are all about her. A wedding present should be about us. Honestly, I no sooner begin to see the horizon beyond which we can stop fighting over that woman than she moves into our house. As a leering, beady-eyed monstrosity, peering at us while we eat. It’s not any different than if Tracey Emin gave us her filthy bed. With used condoms, cigarette butts, and smears of menstrual blood on the sheets.”

  “Now it’s not only Frisk who’s going overboard. You can’t equate a used condom with a toy whistle.”

  “I’m just having fun.” Paige leaned over to kiss him, and the discussion was over—for tonight.

  In retrospect, the expectation had been crazy. For three solid months, Weston would bop around the court with Frisk, interspersing chatty, musing dinners, in the full knowledge that at the knell of August twenty-sixth a curtain would drop on the whole relationship. In this loopy version of events, the friendship would still perk along as if nothing were the matter. Frisk would keep bearing down on that erratic but occasionally devastating crosscourt backhand. Weston would share his recipe for quick-pickling fresh vegetables in miso paste. And then one day—August twenty-fifth, say—it would be, Oh, by the way, we’re never going to meet again, so long, it’s been real.

  In contrast to this fantasy, his treatment of Frisk all summer had been perfectly wretched. Unconsciously or otherwise, he’d been trying to gradually widen a distance between the two—just as you work a baby tooth loose with your tongue until it clings by a thread, making the extraction itself almost painless. Well, so much for the application of dentistry to human relations. He’d been subjecting Frisk to flat-out torture. Were his accelerating remoteness meant to make the imminent severance any less agonizing for himself, even there the technique had backfired. Acting like a prick had made him feel only worse, and for weeks, he’d done nothing but suffer.

  An alternative to the working-the-baby-tooth model glared. What’s less excruc
iating, inching into a cold swimming pool, or diving in? Peeling a Band-Aid slo-mo, or ripping it off? So why not get it over with?

  Because he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to, he didn’t have to yet, so he wouldn’t.

  Weston Babansky was a coward. He hadn’t taken a bold, difficult decision in May; he’d taken half a decision. The easy half. Ever since the announcement to Paige that he would comply with her terms—ever since his sorrowful, downcast concession that he could see why no wife should be asked to tolerate another woman waiting in the wings, another confidante, an ex-lover of all things, and a rather intemperate one at that, who wasn’t always artful about negotiating the spiky geometry of the triangle—day-to-day domestic life had certainly been more tranquil. The late-night scenes over his best friend had subsided. Paige was patient with his continuing to see Frisk on court, albeit with a tinge of triumphalism. He hated to think that she would take enjoyment in another woman’s impending pain, though Weston had a bad habit of holding others to standards he wouldn’t meet himself. Anyone would feel the frisson of victory on summarily trouncing a perceived rival.

  A lifelong procrastinator, he’d been cashing in on the benefits of ditching Frisk while not paying the price. The hard part was the other half of the decision, which, being the hard part, was obviously the whole decision: telling Frisk. Because he had just enough wit to realize that, when you announce a relationship is going to be over, it is over right then.

  The sole argument in his defense was that if he was trying to eat and have cake, it had not so long before been very good cake. Overoptimistic and idiotic, obviously, the aspiration was also tender: he’d hoped to safeguard one last summer with his favorite tennis partner.

  Yet predictably, his fiancée’s having articulated all that was wrong with the woman had made Weston more irritable with Frisk—which is to say, at all irritable—and more inclined to nitpick. That paean to Paige, for example, had been so strained, so conspicuously trying-too-hard, that he’d wanted to hit her. The unremitting corruption of her forehand (why ever would a player with a perfectly serviceable stroke suddenly install a fatal flip of the wrist—for variety?) actually moved him to rage, and expressing the fury as mere frustration required ungodly self-control. However curtailed their courtside debriefs, he found himself listening with a different ear: there she was, talking about herself again. When he told her about revisiting the National Gallery with Paige, her questions were flat, few, and generic. It must have been true, after all, that Frisk didn’t really care for him, that she used him only as an audience.

  It goaded him, too, how insensitive Frisk remained to the fact that Paige disliked her. Was his best friend dense? She’d had enough experience with detractors by now, so how could she still be so poorly attuned to positively semaphoric social cues? What did it take for Frisk to get the message? Did Paige have to march into the room wearing a T-shirt printed I HATE YOU? Physically attack her with a coal shovel?

  In times past he’d have been endeared, yet even the billowy overkill of Bubble Wrap around the chandelier had been vexatious. Showing up at the A-frame out of the blue, staging a trashy striptease on the lawn, taking over the living room for an hour and a half, appealing to Paige for a bowled-over gratitude that would never be forthcoming … The whole production demonstrated Frisk’s weird obliviousness to other people, her blindness to the fact that what they wanted might be contrary to what Frisk wanted. For Christ’s sake, if she’d simply asked him whether he thought the lamp would make a suitable wedding present, he might have figured out a diplomatic way of fending the present off.

  But here was the super weird thing: he was delighted to have it. Though Weston was not about to emphasize as much to Paige, he adored the Standing Chandelier, which melted him, and induced an emotional falling sensation, every time he laid eyes on it. Since the lamp had arrived in their possession, he had routinely basked in its glimmer for the long hours after Paige went to bed. Maybe Frisk did have a problem with alcohol, because something about the light it gave off went irresistibly with whiskey.

  Obviously with a D-day looming, Weston was always going to find it a challenge to have a wonderful time while steeped in dread. Yet if his intention was to conduct a final halcyon season as a monument to all the bucolic seasons that went before it—to which he might later refer as a keepsake, raising his hands to the memory of the summer sun as he warmed himself at the woodstove, once an uncommonly lonely wintertime advanced—it made absolutely no sense, did it, to be mean to Frisk. Ironically, Frisk alone would have been able to understand that being mean to Frisk was one surefire method of being mean to himself. For it seemed that Weston had become the bad guy coming and going. He was a terrible person because he was unfaithful to his fiancée, and he was a terrible person because he was unfaithful to his best friend. Mooning over Talisker, Weston would suppose morosely that if he simply disappeared himself from this equation, both women would be fine. To retreat into self-pity was cowardly, but recall: he was a coward.

  The better course for the month of August wasn’t to stop feeling sorry for himself, but to start feeling sorry for the other parties, too. He had already to battle resentment in relation to the woman he was pledged to marry, which was no fit state in which to embark on a life together. But any expectation that Weston would accede to her wishes gladly was absurd. Cutting off the friendship with Frisk was bound to feel like cutting off his arm. Then again, the more sizable a sacrifice his fiancée appeared to be demanding, the more amply it was demonstrated that she was right to demand it.

  As the reckoning neared, feeling sorry for Frisk came naturally. The way this scenario was playing out, Weston and Paige would walk off into the sunset hand in hand. Frisk would be left with nothing—not even her most cherished possession, relinquishment of which Paige only held against her. (That said, several guests from William and Lee had been entranced by the lamp, as a consequence of which she had grown somewhat less hostile toward the object itself.) So partly as a reward for the chandelier, since it was the only reward that Frisk would reap, from the wedding present onward Weston was kind to her.

  Too kind? He worried that his compassion was oppressive. Perhaps he was afflicting her with the same good intentions that must suffocate the terminally ill, whose friends and relatives continuously testify to the upstanding character of the dead-to-be. After the stink of all those flowers, the relentless puff of praise and pillow plumping, he wouldn’t be surprised if cancer patients come to beg for the restorative of a harsh word.

  For he would catch himself announcing, apropos of not much, that the hours spent with Frisk were “some of the most enjoyable of his life,” or over-reassuring that despite the inexplicable disintegration of her forehand he “still loved playing with her more than anyone.” She’d eye him suspiciously, wondering what his problem was. Theirs was a knockabout friendship, and they were supposed to be taking each other for granted.

  “Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if you and I had made a go of it?” Frisk asked idly on the bench, a few days into the Month of Nauseating Niceness.

  “Not really,” Weston said quickly. She was making him anxious. “Dwelling on the counterfactual is a waste of energy.”

  “The counterfactual! Well, la-di-da. Maybe we’d have bombed because you have a rod up your ass.”

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” he reiterated firmly.

  “Well, that’s weird. And fancy-pants, too. It doesn’t bear thinking about. As if you’re afraid to think about it. And since when are you afraid to think about anything? I was only speculating. It’s not as if I’m about to rip your clothes off or something.”

  He tucked the exchange away, as evidence that he had made the correct decision. There wasn’t a great deal of evidence accumulating along these lines, so the encounter became strangely precious.

  It was August fifteenth, a Wednesday. Considering that memories of their summer assignations tended to blur into one long, searing session, the fact that
Weston would later recall the exact date would alone prove depressing. Frisk’s demeanor was bubbly, as it had been ever since delivering her wedding present, which she appeared to believe had magically pressed a reset button. In Frisk’s view, his warmer disposition was an effort to make up for having been churlish, crabby, and detached for months. She’d no doubt dismissed the dyspeptic humor as one more funk of the sort they’d survived for decades: arising from no cause, subsiding from no cure.

  “I thought the Wrist Epilepsy wasn’t so bad today,” she announced.

  “Yes, your forehand’s been much more solid the last three or four times we’ve played,” he said. This was true. That deadly flopping forward during her follow-through seemed to be a barometer of something, and he’d established this much: when he was mean to her, it got worse.

  “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “This wedding-and-picnic thing. What’s the dress code? Are we still supposed to ritz it up, with heels and flounces? Or is the idea more checkered tablecloth, and even jeans are fine?”

  Weston focused on the rookies flailing on court no. 2, as if strokes better suited to badminton were terribly fascinating. “The concept is casual, but it is a wedding, so some women are likely to dress up.”

  “Well, what’s Paige wearing? I gather you’re not supposed to show up in anything that outshines the bride.”

  “You know her tastes.” Squinting, he followed the incompetents’ ball as it sailed over the fence, regretting that they hadn’t hit it in this direction, so that he could fetch it for them. Anything to interrupt this line of inquiry. “Simple, no lace.”

  “I’m picturing a sleeveless sheaf, matte finish, all clean lines no trim, but with killer shoes.”

  The description was so astonishingly on target that for a moment he had to question whether Frisk really paid no attention to other people. “Something like that,” he said vaguely.