Property

by Lionel Shriver

  “There’s nothing you can say. That’s the point. There’s something you’d have to do.”

  Weston wished that real life had a pause button. When watching a smart TV, you could always freeze the frame before an exciting scene, and leave to take a leak or grab a snack. Meantime on-screen, no one pushed the protagonist off a ledge to fall twenty stories to the pavement. As if to activate his personal remote control, he found himself sitting perfectly still. If no one spoke, and no one moved, he and Paige could remain in this instant and not the next one. As soon as the program advanced, they would be living in a different world where his life was bound to be worse. For when you said things, there was no taking them back. That was the other button real life lacked: a rewind.

  Paige said, “You have to stop seeing her.”

  “That’s out of the question.” The answer was reflex.

  She started to cry. Weston realized they’d been talking several feet apart, and any man who did not rise and comfort his lover when she was weeping was a monster. He was not a monster.

  “That was what I told my sister you would say.” She snuffled on his shoulder and got a string of watery snot on his shirt. “And it’s okay. It’s all my fault, in a way. This isn’t the first time I’ve fallen in love with the wrong man. I just didn’t—read the situation right. I took you at your word that you were free, but you’re not free. Because all this time I think you’ve been in love with Jillian. With Frisk. She probably loves you, too, and I don’t know why you two aren’t together already. It seems like a bad-timing problem, but I wish you’d figure it out, or you’ll just put your next girlfriend through the same thing. I wish I’d understood what was going on sooner, because for me it’s too late. Now I’m going to feel horrible. I’d have loved to marry you. I thought that after so many dead ends I’d finally found someone. But it’s like Princess Diana said: ‘There have always been three people in this relationship.’ I can’t marry you if it means constantly having to look over my shoulder. Wondering where you are and what you’re saying about me and why it’s taking you so long to come back from the tennis court.”

  They had sex that night, but in a spirit of Paige’s sacrificing herself on the altar of him. She was too wide open, defenseless, almost splayed. The feel was a little warped. As they coupled, too, he couldn’t help but notice the odd tear drizzle down her temple and pool in her ear. He was so afraid that she was thinking this was the last time that he couldn’t ask. When her alarm went off, though neither was rested, he got up with her, as if now she were the one who shouldn’t be trusted, and had to be watched.

  Before she left for work—where she would be useless, and coworkers would ask if something was the matter; her face was puffy and bruised looking, her eyes squeezed and red—he sat her down. Listen, he said. What she was asking was monumental. He and Frisk had been fast friends for—Yes, yes, Paige interrupted wearily. Twenty-five years. He wasn’t refusing to comply with her wishes outright, he said. But he wasn’t an impulsive man, and it took him longer than most people to know his own mind. So she had to let him consider this. In the meantime, he said, he had to know what he was considering. The details. She wasn’t saying that he had to see Frisk less often, or with a chaperone, but that he had to cut off the friendship altogether? Paige nodded. And that included tennis? When he asked for that last clarification, it was hard to get the words out. In some ways, she said, especially tennis. Okay, he said, so what was the time frame? (He worried he was sounding too businesslike, but there was clearly an element here of drawing up a contract.) For the first time since she imploded the night before, Paige looked a measure less crestfallen—no, a measure less destroyed. She had never looked crestfallen, but destroyed. The time frame? she repeated. In the instance that he’d really do as she asked? So that they were getting married after all? Well, she had obviously put up with this situation as his girlfriend, she said, and for longer than she should have. But she wasn’t putting up with it as his wife. Assuming they weren’t talking about some old-fashioned long engagement, he would have until their wedding day to sort it out. To say good-bye, and give Jillian his good wishes, or whatever it was that people did when they’d never speak to each other again.

  “This is a small town,” he reminded her. “We’ll run into each other regardless.”

  “Okay, I’m not being ridiculous,” Paige said, rolling her eyes. “You can still say hi. But you might find in the end you’d be doing her a favor. I mean, why is a woman that good-looking still single in her midforties? She may not realize it, but she could be holding out for you. In any case, she certainly uses you as a crutch. If you let her go, she might find someone. As things stand, she doesn’t feel the need to do online dating or anything. She always has her Baba, like a stuffed bear.”

  There was a final condition. About the wedding, if there was one—here and only here did Paige sound a note of vengefulness—“She’s not invited.”

  When he reran that conversation with Paige after she left for the university, Weston was alarmed by how rapidly their tenses had changed, from the conditional/subjunctive to the simple future to the present. “You would have until the wedding” had slid to “We will run into each other,” until Paige was allowing, “You can still say hi.” Although officially no decision had been taken, the very grammar of this dilemma was moving too fast and getting away from him.

  It would have to be a tennis day. Having clocked the day of the week, Paige had charged at the door, “You’re going to tell her, aren’t you? About the whole conversation, and my awful ultimatum, and then you’ll decide what to do about it together.”

  The nasty twist of that parting shot, which he left unanswered, alone illustrated how impossible this situation had grown overnight. Preserving his nonaligned status by being so stoically methodical with Paige before she left, he had tried to carve out extra time for himself, in which to examine all the angles. Yet absent resolution, staying in the same house with Paige even one more day could prove untenable. The longer he delayed giving his girlfriend an answer, too, the more he’d express being torn—the more he’d indicate that marriage to Paige wasn’t important enough for him to pay a price for it, and the more he’d indicate that his friendship with Frisk was too important. Weston’s mind was forever chewing mental cud, and he wasn’t accustomed to having to do something rather than merely mull it over. Starkly, either he announced this very evening that a detonator was ticking on his friendship with Frisk, or Paige moved out.

  Over a sodden bowl of muesli, fragments of that excoriation of Frisk kept hitting his brain like shrapnel. He supposed that, looked at a certain way, some of his girlfriend’s accusations were sort of true. Frisk was a little self-… self-centered, self-involved, self-absorbed? But who wasn’t self-something? It might not have been obvious from the outside, but he himself was wholly and unapologetically self-absorbed. His own nature may have been the source of endless frustration, but of tireless fascination also, to the point where he regarded the study of Weston Babansky as his real career.

  Besides, he wondered if you couldn’t describe just about anyone in terms that were both accurate and lacerating. You could probably savage the personality of everyone on the planet if you wanted to, though there remained the question of why you would want to. And some folks were destined to stand more in the firing line than others. Frisk had a flamboyance that thrust her head above the parapet. She was something of an acquired taste, but Weston had acquired it, and he worried that Paige’s aspersions might make him more critical, more susceptible to perceiving what had so recently seemed his best friend’s strengths as her flaws. After all, any virtue could be cast as a defect. Optimism might look like credulity; self-assurance could come across as conceit. So while he clearly shouldn’t repeat any of Paige’s broadside to Frisk, he’d also have to be mindful about not rehearsing the diatribe in his own head. The recollection made him shudder. It was called “character assassination” for good reason. He felt as if he’d witnessed a murd
er.

  Exhausted, he’d be sluggish on the court. How extraordinary, that he wasn’t looking forward to a hit.

  Mobilizing his gear that afternoon as if sloshing through floodwater, Weston acknowledged that the one thing he did owe his girlfriend was some serious soul searching. Maybe there was something wrong with his relationship with Frisk, something unsavory. Maybe they crossed a line. Truly, Paige didn’t demand the same broad-mindedness from him. He had difficulty conjuring a mirror image in which Paige ran off to spend hour upon hour with another man, of whose intentions he was suspicious. The imaginary rival remained a paper doll. Yet she had to be right. He wouldn’t like it.

  Presumably when meeting as veritable strangers on the street they would learn to say hi, but they didn’t bother with formal greetings yet. Leaning against her bike, helmet off and headband on, Frisk simply raised her eyebrows and laid a censorious finger on her watch. He was fifteen minutes late.

  Silent chiding sufficed, and she let the annoyance go. “You know, I’ve been flying on such a high ever since you came to see the chandelier,” she jabbered en route to the net post. “I’m so excited you like it!”

  He wanted to ask, Do you worry that my reaction to your lamp thing, or anything else really, matters too much to you? But he didn’t.

  “You’re quiet,” she noted, unsheathing the Dunlop 7Hundred.

  “I didn’t get much sleep.”

  “You’re not getting down in the dumps again, are you?”

  “You could say that,” he conceded.

  Frisk’s magenta shorts were on the skimpy side, and as he watched her sashay to her baseline Weston concluded that she wasn’t wearing underwear. She should be wearing underwear, shouldn’t she? Something sporty with wide elastic—a little baggy, cotton, and plain.

  Was he still attracted to her? Well, what did that mean? That he wanted to jump her? That he actively thought about fucking her? No, he didn’t. He didn’t think he did. He had, after all, fucked her already, which strangely enough, though he was not a linguistic prude, he didn’t like the sound of. He could naturally recall those two periods when they got down to it—perhaps the affairs were only a few months apiece, though in his head they took up the space of a few years. The memories were stored more as a jagged sequence of stills than as video. In the rare instance that these images strobed his mind, he tended to flinch. He no sooner summoned what she looked like naked than made the picture go away.

  “Baba, I know you’re tired,” she shouted across the net. “But I don’t usually start a point and you just stand there!”

  “Sorry,” he called from his baseline. “Distracted.”

  She was a comely woman and he was a hale heterosexual whose testosterone levels had not yet dropped to zero. She had good legs—long and sinewy, with well-developed calf muscles, though in her forties the skin above her knees was starting to crinkle, from years of too much sun. She had a taut figure, and hilarious hair. He loved her face, though he didn’t know what that meant, either, except that it was true: he loved her face. Blue eyes with shocks of green, thin lips and a mouth slightly too wide, and he liked it wide. Yet this breakdown was unhelpful. He treasured her presence. He was accustomed to her presence, at ease in her presence, and her appearance was utterly inseparable from the whole of her: the whooping laugh, the zany ideas, the unreliable crosscourt backhand. So the answer to his point of inquiry was a worthless I don’t know.

  Weston did at last bear down on the ball, focus on which reprieved him from still more mental cud chewing that resolved nothing. They were well matched in a broad sense, but who was beating whom swung drastically back and forth from session to session and hour to hour, and by the end he was getting the better of her. In fact, during the final thirty minutes he marshaled a degree of sheer power from which he may often have sheltered her, perhaps subconsciously. She could hit a heavy ball for a woman, but he still had the gender advantage if he chose to employ it.

  “You know, you seemed almost angry,” she said on the bench. “I’m used to your getting mad at yourself, but toward the end there you seemed mad at me.”

  The distance between their thighs was about an inch. Which wasn’t enough if she didn’t have any panties on, and Weston discreetly rearranged himself farther away.

  “I’m not angry at you. I was just trying to really connect for once.”

  He was dismayed that she accepted the denial so readily—“You sure wore me out, anyway!”—before segueing to her current fixation without dropping a beat: “By the way, you were right about that Christmas tree quality. I’ve started leaving the chandelier on at night while turning all the other lights off, and it’s magical. Every December when I was little, I used to get up at six a.m. even when school was out—so I could listen to ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ turned down low and bask in the glow of the tree. I was always crushed whenever my parents finally decided it was too dried out and a fire hazard. Now I don’t ever have to take down the tree.”

  She was irritating him, and it was a terrible feeling. Maybe Paige was right, that this chandelier contraption was egomaniacal. And he’d never noticed before how often his tennis partner touched his arm while she talked.

  Frisk went on to explain about how she’d started making her own kimchi and the smell was taking over the whole cottage. He shared a recipe he’d tried recently, a new twist on crab cakes, but his heart was so little in the telling that he forgot to mention the mango chutney—and that was the twist.

  Weston’s subsequent non sequitur was not premeditated. Nevertheless, he needed to investigate the question pressing in on him: Is there something wrong here, have we all along been doing something wrong? So after she related how last week during a tutorial her student kept emitting such evil farts (“there must be an intermediate state in physics that’s halfway between a gas and a solid”) that she had to keep excusing herself for a bathroom break or drink of water just to get out of the room, he said, “Oh, right. I asked Paige to marry me last night.”

  Dropping that bombshell was an observational experiment. He watched her face. The face that he loved—that he either loved innocuously or loved dishonestly. Whatever was happening in that face, it was complicated. Which meant something in itself. And her pause implied a reckoning. Did one reckon with good news?

  “Wow,” she said after the elongated beat. “You’ve sat here all this time, telling me a slightly lame recipe for crab cakes, and then it’s like, also, I’m getting married, and don’t forget the cilantro?”

  “We’ve never been hung up on telling stories in hierarchical order.”

  “If an extraterrestrial spaceship had landed on the Chevaliers’ lawn this morning, I think I might have let you know before telling the anecdote about Fart Boy.”

  Equates Paige with invader from outer space.

  “… was this proposal something you’ve been planning for a long time?”

  From the very outset, solely concerned with whether Baba has been concealing his intentions from her.

  “Awhile.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve never mentioned the idea. Mister Mysterious!”

  Inference corroborated. Subject cares more about enjoying privileged communication with ostensible “best friend” than about life-changing content of revelation. Indicative of narcissism and/or unhealthy obsession with Baba–Frisk relationship.

  “I don’t tell you everything,” he said.

  “Oh, you do, too!” she exclaimed, prodding his arm again.

  “I don’t even tell myself everything.”

  “You tell me what you haven’t told yourself. That’s one of the main things I’m for.”

  “I do occasionally talk to my own girlfriend,” he reminded her.

  “All lovers require editing. That’s why I can tell you that ‘I’m so aroused!’ is a turnoff, but I wouldn’t have told Sullivan that in a million years.”

  Implicitly relegates Baba–Paige relationship to subsidiary status. Marriage proposal = emotional tr
ump, palpable evidence that Baba–Paige relationship is primary. Subject in denial.

  “You know, you still haven’t asked if Paige said yes,” he said.

  “Well, of course she did. She’s smitten with you. It’s amazing you didn’t call to cancel tennis, because she’d already dragged you off to the registrar at town hall.”

  Instinctively associates Baba getting married with not playing tennis. Good guess, by coincidence, but for Frisk, not playing tennis = end of world [see ET mention above; Paige = calamity/Armageddon]. Once again, Paige/marriage = threat.

  On reflection, since he had plenty of experience with therapy, Weston added a second note: Describes Baba–Paige relationship in terms suggesting unequal emotional involvement. More comfortable with Paige being “smitten’” w/Baba than w/Baba being smitten with Paige. Assumes Paige must be driving force behind marriage (“dragged” to town hall), imputing passivity or unwillingness to Baba.

  “You don’t seem all that happy about my news,” he submitted carefully, as if dropping a catalyst into a test tube with a pipette.

  “I might be happier if you seemed happier. But you’re acting so morose. I asked before we played if you felt down, and you said yes. That’s not the way I’d expect you to feel after popping the question. Hey”—another touch, on the shoulder—“maybe not leaping and frolicking, but at least a smile?”

  Actively looks for signs that Baba does not really want to marry Paige.

  His obligatory smile was pained.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” she pressed on.

  Actively dissuades Baba from marrying Paige.

  “When am I ever sure of anything?” he said. “Except that obviously, if I did propose, then on balance I decided that yes, it’s a ‘good idea.’”

  “Then why are you so disturbed?”

  Deliberately exaggerates what Baba believes is carefully controlled affect. But Weston could no longer sustain a clinician’s arch distance, and put down his mental pen.

  Why am I disturbed? he considered. Let me count the ways. Because I am starting to see things from my lover’s point of view, and I don’t want to. Because from that perspective, I am either a cruel two-timer or conveniently delusional. It seems that I have been trying to have it both ways at a good woman’s expense. I put my would-be fiancée through unnecessary suffering out of selfishness. I have heard my whole life that men and women can never be friends. I have nursed the vain notion that you and I are exceptions to that rule, not because this is necessarily true, but because being a supposed exception suits my purposes: I can have my cake and play tennis with it, too. But I am also disturbed because I love you, and whether that love is corrupt, or covertly flirtatious, or interfering with my ability to fully embrace another woman without holding something back, it is still love, in all its near-indestructible dreadfulness, and I am about to take a sledgehammer to my own heart.