Property

by Lionel Shriver

  “We’re having a barbecue,” he cut her off.

  “Oh!” she said, as if taken aback by his tone. About time, too. “I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned that before. If you need someone to mind the coals, you know you can trust me not to burn the chicken.”

  “Paige’s friends from the History Department are manning the grill.”

  Weston had moved on to looking riveted by a nondescript brown bird foraging in the crabgrass, thus keeping his gaze trained a good hundred degrees from his tennis partner’s face. But he could tell she was peering at him.

  “What about setup? I could help to put up tables, and lug cases of champagne—”

  “All the bases are covered.”

  The fact that she hadn’t pulled up short by now suggested experimental intent, as if she were delivering an escalating electrical shock to a lab rat and recording its response. “Still … It might be good to have, say, a carb—enough that everyone could have some? I told you about that Lebanese freekeh with roasted vegetables, which came out smashing. The recipe would be easy to multiply—”

  “Frisk!” For this lab rat, the fibrillation had crossed a critical threshold. “You’re not invited to the wedding! Why else do you think you never got the email?”

  He’d been afraid he would explode, and he had exploded. That announcement had not been on the agenda for the afternoon.

  Skipping even the clichéd incredulity of “What?” she dropped the boppy deportment cold. She was still and grave. “Why. Not.”

  “Paige doesn’t like you.” He hadn’t intended to say that, either. He hadn’t intended to say that, ever.

  “Ah.” She sat back on the bench. Her expression reminded Weston of doing a find-and-replace in a large Word file. There was a lag, and then a window popped up, 247 replacements made. “I’ve been having dinner with you guys for coming up on three years. You’d think I would have noticed.”

  “Yes, well. I’ve been surprised you haven’t.”

  “Here I was thinking your girlfriend and I got on pretty well.”

  “I think it’s a chemistry thing,” he said, unsure whether the irremediable nature of chemistry made it better or worse.

  “Is it?” He might have expected her to cry, but instead she was cool and clear. Unsettlingly composed, in fact. “Something inexpressible, then. Nothing she could put her finger on.”

  “Sort of,” he said glumly.

  “So she wouldn’t have cited any of her problems with me in particular.”

  “Oh … She has mentioned your being, well, a little showy, a little self-involved. You know, her whole style is lower profile and more self-effacing. But I don’t see what’s to be gained from going into any detail. It would just hurt your feelings.”

  “No, we wouldn’t want to do that.”

  They sat.

  “I can only infer,” she resumed, “that this ‘dislike’ goes back a ways?”

  “She’s felt uncomfortable around you for a while, yeah.”

  “So you and I have been chatting after tennis for years, and you’ve never said a word about Paige being ‘uncomfortable.’”

  “It’s not nice, is it? I don’t even think I should have told you just now.”

  “Because you and I only tell each other nice things.”

  “We tell each other what’s helpful, or try to.”

  “We used to tell each other the truth. And now we’ve gone this whole summer, you sitting there knowing I’m not welcome at your wedding, and letting me prattle on about what to wear.”

  “I’m sorry. I was putting off telling you, obviously. This isn’t easy for me, either.”

  “This discomfort, which I hadn’t realized before is a synonym for loathing—it’s not only because I’m too colorful for quiet, unassuming Paige, is it? I mean, it wouldn’t have anything to do with jealousy, would it?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Good. Let’s call it that.”

  He’d never have expected her to be so icy. “She finds you a little possessive. Of me.”

  “I do possess you. In my way. Or I used to.”

  “Then you can see why that might be difficult for her.”

  “No, I can’t. She possesses you, too, in a different way. I don’t see why there’s a conflict.”

  “You usually have a more nuanced sense of how people work.”

  “Here’s my nuance: if she trusts you—and if she doesn’t, she has no business marrying you—then she should be cool with inviting your best friend to your wedding, even if I’m not her favorite person in the world. Since I assume everyone else on the guest list hasn’t been vetted for being too ‘showy’ or ‘self-involved.’”

  When Paige had laid out her case, the just course seemed so clear. Weston had to stop himself from clapping his hands over his ears. “That’s the way it seems to you.”

  “Of course it ‘seems that way to me’; that’s why I’m the one who’s saying it. But it also seems to me that this situation is a great deal more complicated than my now being free to make other plans for August twenty-sixth. It’s not just that I’ve been absolved of any requirement to make a big vat of freekeh beforehand. Because if I’m not invited to your wedding”—she leaned forward—“what else am I not invited to?”

  Weston pressed the pads of his fingers to his forehead, now granular with salt. My life, he thought. You are no longer invited to my whole life. She’d been his best friend cum beloved tennis partner for a quarter century, and she was right. He owed her the truth.

  It might have been tasteless or insensitive, but pure force of habit moved him to say when they parted, “See you on Friday.” Yet he’d actually been planning to play with her, too, as he would also have shown up at Rockbridge County High School with his racket, water, sweatband, and a new can of Wilsons on the twentieth, twenty-second, and twenty-fourth the following week. All summer, he had clung to Paige’s permission that he could run out the season with Frisk until August twenty-sixth, and it was merely the fifteenth. Only when Frisk stared and said, “Have you lost your mind?” was the new order real to him, as it would be even more so on Friday—sleeping feverishly into the late afternoon because there was no four p.m. tennis date for which to wake.

  By the following summer, Jillian had found three other people to hit with in a rotation every week, and the variety was probably better for her game. But she was surprised to discover that she didn’t care about her game. She kept up the sport to get relatively painless exercise, but tennis as she had once conceived it—the soul of the present tense, the one activity that from moment to moment was exactly what she wanted to be doing and nothing else, a pure kinetic joy—had long been synonymous with her friendship with Baba, and playing with anyone else wasn’t the same.

  At least seeing the three poor substitutes put her in contact with a handful of other adults besides the parents of her students. For a long time after the breakup—she didn’t think you were supposed to “break up” with friends, but she didn’t know what else to call it—she avoided people.

  She could no longer trust her own judgment. Competent animals could sniff out threat. They instinctively distinguished their own kind, and anodyne adjacent wildlife, from predators. So it was in the spirit of biological imperative that she reviewed her many intersections with Paige Myer. Their first meeting: That hadn’t been a slightly inept young woman with a tendency to blurt her fiercely held convictions. It was an outburst of immediate, uncontrollable aversion of a kind Jillian should have recognized. Because Paige would already have heard as much about Jillian as Jillian had heard about her, chances were high that Paige had prehated her, much as one preorders a book, or a burial plot. Some characters might be so beguiling on introduction that they are able to penetrate a shield of prepared enmity with the sword of their fearsome charm, but examples of prevailing against prehatred are probably few.

  Thereafter: Paige wasn’t bashful, and she wasn’t quiet. She was subdued around Jillian because that’s what
people were like when the whole night through they were shoving a fist in their mouths and waiting for a guest to leave.

  The presents (the shawl, the fig preserves): camouflage.

  Various admirations (of the necklaces, the button self-portrait, even the high-loft popcorn): fake. Jillian made a note to self: she was as big a pushover for flattery as every other bozo.

  Jillian’s respectful efforts to act more formal with Weston Babansky in Paige’s presence: wasted. Read as patronizing. Though it wouldn’t have helped had she acted in another manner instead, as any alternative approach would have backfired, too.

  The point was, if Jillian Frisk couldn’t tell the difference between a shy, diffident, openhanded new acquaintance and a nemesis gunning for her most precious asset from the get-go, she shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

  The near agoraphobia following that awful August was aggravated by a still more pernicious mistrust. Launching into the outside world requires feeling faintly palatable. At the least, in social settings you have to adopt the default assumption that others’ initial reaction to you will be neutral, and healthy characters walk into a room expecting to be actively liked. But for months, Jillian felt hateable. Lest she appear “showy,” she dressed in small colors, wearing slack T-shirts and tired jeans that disguised her figure. She kept her hair bunched, and often skipped showers so that its tendrils wilted. Lest she seem “self-involved,” she conducted all phone calls with such a paucity of autobiographical content that her mother in Philadelphia accused her of being secretive. When she met the disappointing tennis partners, she volunteered little enough about her off-court life that they stopped asking, and consigned the relationship to the sports friendship, a perfectly agreeable but utilitarian arrangement whereby you never saw one another other than to play. In general, Jillian tried to say and do as little as possible, because whatever she expressed and however she behaved was bound to inspire disgust.

  Mind, one of the primary reasons most people dislike someone is that the other party doesn’t like them; thus so many antagonisms come down to a chicken-and-egg issue of who started it. Yet Jillian found Paige Myer strangely difficult to despise in return. There simply wasn’t that much prospectively odious material to work with. Baba’s renunciation naturally feeling like a betrayal, Jillian might have taken refuge in righteous indignation—alas, a deflective, huffy emotion, in this case hopelessly subsumed by sheer woundedness. She couldn’t hate him, either, which would only pile betrayal upon betrayal. You were supposed to love a wife more than a pal, right? So it made sense that Baba had thrown their friendship under a bus, the way earlier generations of gallants threw capes over puddles.

  Consuming the better part of a year, her bereavement was so deep and enduring that she might have wondered whether, as Baba had insinuated that dreadful Wednesday, the undercurrents of the friendship were indeed improper. Except that no romance had wrecked her this thoroughly for this long, regardless of how besotted she’d been to begin with. In the end, the unique severity of the loss seemed to exonerate their amity as innocent after all.

  Inevitably, she would catch sight of him. He did give their old courts wide berth; it was tacitly understood that she’d been awarded Rockbridge, as if having been bequeathed no. 3 in a divorce settlement. But downtown Lexington was tiny, its eateries few. The first time she spotted Baba coming out of Macado’s on Main Street, she ran away, cowering around the corner on West Henry. Not an adult response. She got better at fielding these intersections, nodding from down the block if she caught his eye, sometimes cracking a despondent half smile. He was always the one who broke the gaze first to look down at the sidewalk. Then he’d glance back up and flutter a lifeless wave, having trouble raising his hand, as if the once keen sportsman had contracted some terrible muscle-wasting disease. On each sighting, he looked thinner—unattractively so. All that vegetarianism.

  By late spring, however, Jillian started to feel hardier, and reconsidered the plan she’d conceived over the winter to pick up stakes. She had a sweet arrangement with the Chevaliers that she was unlikely to duplicate elsewhere. She loved her cottage, its floors refinished with darker lines patterning the edges of the rooms like tribal tattoos. Her reputation as a lively, infectiously enthusiastic tutor had spread widely enough—to nearby Kerrs Creek, Mechanicsville, and Buena Vista—that she didn’t want for work, even if her secret with the boys was that most of them developed crushes. It was a comely, close-knit municipality that she had made her home, and on the face of it, the rejection of a tennis partner was a lunatic reason to leave town.

  As the weather warmed and her skin turned golden, she began to feel braver, donning more revealing skirts and the flouncy thrift shop tops she had shunned for months. She went back to wearing hats—wide brimmed, straw, with ribbons. She let her hair down in every sense, and kept it washed. She rediscovered that a broad grin in Sweet Things Ice Cream Shoppe was all it took to win an extra-generous scoop and free sprinkles. A widowed client raising two sons, who by the by was rather dishy, had started asking her to stick around after lessons for a glass of wine. The only individual in her orbit who appeared to find her “hateable” was Jillian herself. So she tried the Ice Cream Shoppe smile in her bedroom mirror, and the reflection smiled right back.

  Whether she precisely forgave Baba—whom she was starting to think of as Weston—was a moot point. The purpose of forgiveness was to lay planks over a gorge in the interest of forging ahead, and instead her erstwhile soul mate had raised one of those stark black-and-yellow end signs meant to alert motorists to the termination of a cul-de-sac. How she felt about Paige, likewise never again actively germane to Jillian’s affairs, was equally irrelevant. Although forevermore a particular place in her mind was destined to ache when she brushed against it, she was apparently capable of moving on.

  But as the loss of her best friend gradually healed over, another hole in her life continued to gape.

  The back right quarter of her living room was empty. She had never chosen to rebalance the room by returning the armchair there. What was done was done: Weston had forsaken their friendship to appease his wife. But one injustice could be righted.

  On the exact date at the end of July marking the one-year anniversary of a big mistake, Jillian wrote the following email:

  Dear Weston,

  I hope you don’t mind my contacting you this way. While I do miss you sometimes, I am well, and I am not trying to stir up trouble. I trust that you and Paige are very happy.

  A year ago, I gave you and your fiancée a wedding present that cost me a great deal of time, energy, and love. The materials I used to construct it, like my own wisdom teeth, are irreplaceable. So it was very difficult for me to give away my handiwork—which was literally imbued with my own DNA. Had things gone differently between the three of us, however, rest assured that I would still be delighted to have given my creation a new home, where I could be certain it would be cherished.

  As it happens, you accepted the gift under false pretenses. The evening I bestowed it, you were already planning to bring our friendship to a permanent close. You were also keenly aware that your wife-to-be disliked me, a fact that you concealed from me, allowing me to make a fool of myself by proceeding as if she and I had warm, harmonious relations. Had I benefited from access to both these pieces of information at the time, I would never have given you the Standing Chandelier—of which I am now not only dispossessed, but which I can’t even visit.

  I would like it back. I don’t mean to be an Indian giver. (Paige wouldn’t approve; I think that expression is no longer PC, though I don’t know of another expression that has replaced it.) We could arrange an exchange, just as many newlyweds take their ugly ceramic cheese boards back to Pottery Barn and trade them for store credit. I’ll replace the chandelier with a set of nice wineglasses or something, and then you can break them.

  In any case, I can’t imagine Paige treasures a reminder of someone she detests. I would even think that an intimate me
mento of our long but cruelly truncated friendship would be painful for you also. I would be glad to come by to pick it up when neither of you are home. Perhaps you could leave a key and instructions with a neighbor. I would even bring the bubble wrap.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jillian Frisk

  “That is so completely lacking in class,” Paige announced over Weston’s computer in the A-frame’s second-floor alcove. It was before dinner in early August. “Okay, sure, once in a while a wedding is called off. Then, yes, a couple with any integrity returns the presents—voluntarily, I might add. But I’ve never in my life heard of anyone giving a wedding present and then demanding it back.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, isn’t it?” Weston said tentatively.

  “It is not. You always want to make everything out as complicated. This is straightforward. It’s crass.”

  “While she obviously tried to write that email politely, I agree that the request itself is a little spiteful. So what do you want to do? Knowing she begrudges our having it—I don’t know how I’d feel about keeping that thing.”

  Paige gave him an affectionate poke. “You never know how you feel. Maybe we could consult a year from now and take a barometric reading of the Babansky soul.”

  She was right. He functioned on emotional hold, operating a more protracted version of the seven-second delay on radio broadcasts to check for Federal Communications Commission obscenity no-nos. He had put off showing Paige the email for the last three days, because his own reaction to it was so undiscernibly mixed—a sludge of dread, sorrow, and irritation.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Paige added. “If she was going to be so gauche, what took her so long? It’s been a year.”

  “Maybe it took her a while to figure out what she felt, too.”

  “That’s generous. As usual, given the subject matter. I would have hoped she’s just been getting on with her life, but clearly she’s been stewing this whole time. Writing that same email over and over in her mind. And even so, she can’t control herself! That line about how she could give us some glasses instead, ‘and then we could break them.’ The bitterness, it’s like having a double espresso thrown in your face, no sugar.”