Property

by Lionel Shriver

  The bitterness was two-way. Paige herself was sounding a note he hadn’t heard since the previous summer. She was not in the main given to recrimination or viciousness. The only topic that drew these qualities from Paige was Jillian Frisk. Best let his wife get the vitriol out of her system, then. Maybe he should be positively grateful for having obtained such a home remedy. The subject of his old friend could extract the residual traces of rancor from his wife’s character like a poultice.

  “And you said she was polite. But the cordiality is fraudulent,” she carried on, having bent again over his computer. “‘I trust that you and Paige are very happy,’” she read in a mincing tone. “Notice she can’t resist getting in a dig at me with that crack about not being ‘PC,’ when what she really means is that she’s a cultural troglodyte. Because she’s right, you’re not supposed to say ‘Indian giver’ anymore, as if anyone should ever have said it in the first place. And when you realize that, you don’t write ‘Indian giver,’ you write something else. Oh, and I like her saying she doesn’t ‘mean to be’ an Indian giver, when that’s exactly what she’s being.”

  Now was not the time to observe that Paige had just used the very expression that she claimed to deplore. He found it mysterious that she still got so worked up over Frisk, whom she had vanquished in every way. He’d have thought she would feel a touch of pity, or nothing.

  “Oh, and notice how it’s your fault that she ‘made a fool of herself,’” Paige went on. “Just because she’s socially oblivious and never picked up that she got on my nerves. The melodrama, too! Your ‘cruelly truncated friendship.’ And I have to ‘detest’ her. It’s not just that Jillian isn’t my cup of tea.”

  This email forensic was curiously heavy on beverages. “Well,” Weston allowed. “You did say you ‘couldn’t stand her when you met her’ and you ‘couldn’t stand her when you got to know her better’ either. I’m not sure what you call that but detesting someone.”

  “I can’t believe you can quote word for word something I said that long ago.”

  “It was memorable.”

  “Detestation—if that’s the noun—is a feeling that eats you up. So it’s hardly pertinent to someone I never think about.”

  Uh-huh, Weston stifled. “I know I said I wouldn’t communicate with her. But even if you find the email overwritten, or inaccurate about your feelings, I think it deserves a reply. That’s why I showed it to you. So we could decide what to say.”

  “Of course you showed it to me. I’d be alarmed if you didn’t. You haven’t been corresponding with her all along, have you? And are only showing me this one because it involves us both?”

  “We haven’t been corresponding,” Weston said flatly. He might have gone on at greater length, either in umbrage or with fervid reassurance, but amid the range of emotions he battled whenever Frisk arose in their discussions the most dominant was exhaustion, and he kept the denial short. “The point is, she wants the lamp back. So I guess we should let her have it.”

  “You must be kidding! It was a wedding present!”

  “I thought you didn’t like the chandelier anyway.”

  “I don’t like calling it a ‘chandelier’—that part is true. It’s not a ‘chandelier,’ which is a pompous, totally inane thing to call a lamp. Still, even if it’s not entirely to my taste, it’s grown on me. Or at least I’ve gotten used to it. And we rearranged the whole living room to accommodate that thing.”

  In truth, Frisk’s addition to their household cornerstoned the decor of the whole ground floor. It was a great conversation starter with new dinner guests, who often exceeded exuberant enthusiasm to confess to outright envy. Bill from the History Department had gleefully rechristened it “The Memory Palace,” a branding he seemed to believe was sparklingly original; having contrived a new name also encouraged the guy to act weirdly proprietary, as if he were a museum director and this artwork was only resting in their living room on loan. The light the lamp cast was uniquely soft, enclosing, and warm, and Weston couldn’t imagine ever finding a proxy that would duplicate these qualities in a world of glaring compact fluorescents. He still routinely worked beside it during the wee smalls in his regular rocking chair, the radiance emitting from the windows of the Colman’s mustard tin mingling with the glow of his computer. In all honesty, the object reminded him less and less of Frisk; he was now capable of spending whole hours in its presence without her crossing his mind even once.

  Catching himself in this admission moved him to remind Paige, “But this isn’t about a thing. It’s about what it means. Frisk really put her heart into that—” He was about to say chandelier, and thought better of it. “So for her, it’s symbolic of, well, giving her heart. Which we sort of stepped on, or that’s how she would see it.”

  “Is that the way you see it?”

  “It’s just, I’m getting the impression you definitely don’t want to give it back.”

  “Better believe it.”

  “Which would seem, to Frisk, like stepping on her heart twice.”

  “The symbolism? That present is symbolic of Jillian for once in her life doing the traditional, decent thing and giving an acquaintance of long standing a wedding present—even if the present itself was a little weird. For us to acquiesce and let her snatch it back would be to say, yet again, that the rules governing everyone else don’t apply to her, and she can behave as badly as she likes and get whatever she wants, other people be damned.”

  Weston let acquaintance slide. “You didn’t say at the time it was ‘a little weird.’ You called it ‘inappropriate’ and ‘an imposition’ and ‘a beady-eyed monstrosity.’ You compared it to Tracey Emin’s bed.”

  “You’re doing that again. Quoting me verbatim from last summer. What, did you run off and take notes, so you could hang me with them later?”

  “If that lamp is symbolic of anything, it’s symbolic of my friendship with Frisk. Because she’s right on one point: it’s always going to remind you of her. So why on earth would you want to hang on to it?”

  “Because it distresses me that all this time later, with one lousy go-fetch email, you’ll still do her bidding. Which makes me wonder.”

  “Don’t wonder,” he said with annoyance. He was no longer wondering himself. That lamp doesn’t only remind my wife of her adversary. It reminds her of winning. “But what on earth can I write back?”

  “I could draft that email in a heartbeat. ‘Dear Jillian: What you’re asking goes so beyond the limits of decorum that it’s off the charts. A wedding present is forever, just like my marriage. Have a nice life.’”

  “I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

  Her laughter had an unpleasant color. “What a shock.”

  Weston had not replaced Frisk—or, to the degree that he had, he had replaced her with Paige. The confidences, the day-to-day anecdotes, the many ambivalences with which he wrestled, even the recipes, successful and disappointing alike, he shared with his wife. That was as it should be, he supposed. As a consequence of this substitution—this wife swap, if you will—it was possible that some small slice of himself was stifled. But that’s what solitude was for: exploring the unsayable. He was becoming one of those commonplace men whose sole intimacy was with a spouse, while friendship, exclusively with other men, was reserved for talk about movies and football. Except that Weston wasn’t interested in football.

  He was still interested in tennis, and had finally joined the local club, which he could now afford. His partners there were male, and they always played formal matches. He was rising on the ladder. No longer merely rallying with Frisk three times a week, he’d improved his serve.

  It had not been optimal to begin his marriage in a spirit of sacrifice. But he had instructed himself on the necessity of the Frisk forfeiture enough times to begin to believe it. On reflection, Paige’s request had been so justified, its reasoning so solid, that it was astonishing earlier girlfriends hadn’t laid down the same law. (Some of his wife’s romantic pred
ecessors had also found the Frisk situation fishy, but they’d kept the grumbling to a minimum. Either they hadn’t loved him enough to put up a stink, or they knew he didn’t love them enough to capitulate.) Weston being Weston, he had naturally examined the question of whether he should feel guilty about Frisk from every angle. The answer was no. Human relations had a calculus, and sometimes you had to add up columns of gains and losses with the coldness of accountancy. He was a happier man married. Although he would eternally suffer from funks, they were fewer and shorter now. He was glad to have put to rest a quest that would otherwise fester—biology ensured that—and to have escaped the fate of men forever single into their fifties, who reliably earned reputations as strange, gay, emotionally dislocated, or all three. Settledness suited him. Only women were meant to care about safety, but safety was a universally appealing state, and men could snug into it, too. He enjoyed the regular rhythms of his days with Paige, like the rise and fall of swells on a coastal vacation. During his boyhood in Wilmington, an hour’s drive from the Jersey shore, Weston had spent many tireless hours lulled up and down beyond the breakers. If the cost of installing this sensation in his inland adulthood was doing without an alternative rhythm three times a week, so be it.

  After they’d rehashed the Indian giving yet again after dinner and Paige had gone to bed, he poured himself a double Talisker and switched on the chandelier. He was frankly surprised that Frisk had brought herself to rescind the gift, because Paige was right: it wasn’t classy. You’d think Frisk would have restrained herself, if only out of pride.

  Yet after a few sips of whisky, the explanation fell into place. Pride was predominantly a social construct, having to do with witness. And why would Frisk fear his contempt for making an appeal that was beneath her? Aside from those few torturous bumpings into each other downtown—more like hauntings, or disquietingly vivid memories, than proper encounters—Weston played so little a part in her life now that he might have been dead. As for her own witness of this mean-spiritedness, which might invite regret: however inevitable their parting of ways, even Weston couldn’t persuade himself that Frisk deserved his desertion. Whether or not the friendship was unacceptably tinged by mutual attraction, she’d never actually tried to kiss him again, had she? She hadn’t tried to lure him back to bed. Not once convicted of a moving violation, she hadn’t, strictly speaking, done anything wrong. Yet she had been roundly punished. So for Frisk, any passing private chagrin over Indian giving was bound to be swallowed by a far greater sense of grievance. Or grief? Idly, he checked the etymologies online. Both grievance and grief derived from the Old French grever, “to burden.” That was about the sum of it. He had burdened her.

  To resume: you obeyed conventions because you cared what other people thought of you. If Frisk and Weston were no longer friends, then Frisk had no cause to care what he thought of her. She’d have been well aware that the revocation of a wedding present was crass. So? His repudiation of their friendship had freed her from the bonds of seemliness. She had no reason to avoid asking something embarrassing, or even reason to feel embarrassed. For embarrassment as well was a social construct. Without relationship, there is no society. The ties between the two parties had been severed. All that remained was stuff. Thus she had nothing to lose by savaging his good opinion of her, and one thing to gain: her chandelier.

  Here in this living room, the same paradigm repeated. Neither he nor Paige retained an investment in what Jillian Frisk thought of them. Plausibly, the only faux pas more crass than demanding the return of a wedding present was having a nuptial gift rudely retracted and refusing to give it back. So? They had nothing to gain by remaining theoretically in Frisk’s good graces, and one thing to lose: the chandelier.

  Structurally, then, a single disparity distinguished the two squared-off factions: he and Paige had custody of the item at issue, and Frisk didn’t.

  Were he to return the gift, he would do so over his wife’s dead body. What was in it for him, taking all that flack, when at best he’d receive a single thank-you in his inbox as compensation? And Weston liked the chandelier, even liked calling it that, if it might take Paige a few more years to warm to the tag. The grand, eccentric centerpiece had already grown into the very being of the A-frame, as if the trunk of the lamp had extended roots through the oak flooring that were penetrating the ceiling of the utility room and gnarling around the pipes. Secreting its many objets d’art, miniature dioramas, and natural wonders like the curlew skull, the arboreal assemblage gave off enough hint of Yuletide to evoke the ringing refrain And a partri-idge in a pear tree. Squirm as she might to avoid admitting as much, Paige liked the chandelier, too—liked it very much, in fact, and she would come to like it more and more as the years advanced.

  The lamp wasn’t a symbol. All the meaning had been sucked out of it the afternoon he sank back onto their regular bench at Rockbridge to deliver the bad news, its limp elucidation taking so much less time than the rambling rationalizations of his rehearsals. They would all three continue to pretend that the chandelier was a symbol, when really it had become a thing. Frisk wanted the thing. Weston wanted the thing. Improbably, even Paige wanted the thing. A thing of which possession was ten-tenths, like most of one’s belongings.

  The Talisker was finished. At last Weston composed the shortest email he could muster:

  Have discussed. Paige finds request violates social custom. Will continue to enjoy chandelier.

  He’d signed it “B.” to begin with, then changed that to “W.,” couldn’t bear the W, and didn’t sign it at all.

  Though he sent it at past three a.m., the response was immediate:

  She just wants to keep her scalp.

  He’d promised, and this was bordering on correspondence. After deleting not only Frisk’s reply but also its ghost in trash, he swiftly closed the computer like the lid of Pandora’s box.

  The Self-Seeding Sycamore

  Jeannette had no idea that plants could inspire so much hatred.

  For years, she’d left the garden to Wyndham. Weekends outdoors provided an antidote to the windowless stasis of his lab. Though their plot was sizable only by London standards, she’d humored him. (Whatever was there to do? A little watering during dry spells, a ten-minute run of the hand mower round the lawn.) Having begrudged the dear man neither his solitude nor his superfluous pottering, she treasured snapshots of her husband in muddied khaki trousers, bent over a bed, doing heaven-knew-what with a characteristically intent expression. Now, of course, she knew exactly what he’d been doing. How much he’d spared her.

  While still cosseted by mutual spousal existence, she’d scanned with indifference bitter first-person articles about how fiercely people avoid the bereaved—a revelation her own friends had amply illustrated for a year or more. She didn’t blame them. Unintentionally, she and Wyndham had fallen into the heedlessly hermetic unit of two that’s so off-putting from the outside. If she didn’t need friends then, she’d no right to demand their attentions now. Besides, she’d grown less compelling to herself. A widow of fifty-seven had both too much story left, and not enough. It was narratively awkward: an ellipsis of perhaps thirty years, during which nothing big would happen. Only little things, most of them crap.

  The big story that was over wasn’t interesting, either. Pancreatic: swift and dreadful. Yet the pro forma tale did include one poignant detail. Two years ago, she and Wyndham took early retirement, he from private biochemical research, she from her job as a buyer for Debenhams. Some colleagues had quietly disapproved, and soon no one would be allowed to stop working at fifty-five, but to Jeannette and Wyndham that argued for a leap through the closing window. They’d not found each other until their forties, and had made extravagant travel plans for while they were still in rude health. The reasoning was sound; the arithmetic, not. The diagnosis arrived a mere ten weeks after Wyndham’s farewell party.

  She hadn’t kept track of whether fifty-seven was the new forty-seven, or thirty-five, or sixty-f
our—but in any event, whatever age she’d reached was not the age she was. Not long ago, she and Wyndham had mourned his every strand that clogged the plughole, each new crease in her neck when she glanced down. Now? She could not get older fast enough.

  Convinced that a garden took care of itself—it grew, bloomed, browned, and without prodding renewed the cycle—other than hiring a boy to mow, for the year following Wyndham’s death she left the back to its devices. In truth, she missed the sharpness of those first few months, whose high drama would have been impossible to maintain without its sliding into a humiliating fakery, a performance for herself. While still free flowing and unforced, the grief had been so immersive, so rich and pure and concentrated, with the opacity of Cabernet, that it verged on pleasure. Yet from the start the anguish had been spiked with an awful foreknowledge that the keenness of her loss would blunt, leading to a second loss: a loss of loss. Some soft, muffled bufferedness was bound to take over, as if she were buttressed by excess packaging. Unlike the searing period, with its skipped meals and feverish lie-ins, a bufferedness could last forever, and probably would.

  Sure enough, the stab ebbed to ache; a torturous residual presence gave way to absence. Jeannette took refuge in self-sufficiency. She would take nothing, and expect nothing. There must have been millions of such Britons: perfectly neutral social quantities, mutely shopping and tidying up. She would take care of herself, as the garden did.

  So late this April, she was surprised to note on an aimless stroll beyond the slug-trailed patio, simply to escape the house—which had never felt suffocating when she shared it—that flowering shrubs past their prime were pooping mounds of rotting pink blossoms, under which matted grass skulked, dying or dead, a urinary yellow. Ineffectually, she raked the piles of petals with her fingers off the moribund lawn, in idle amazement that flowers could kill. The silky mulch had a nice heavy wetness, reminiscent of her cheeks after an inadvisable third glass of wine. Its original perfume mixed with an aroma deader and flatter, like sweet but fading memories intermingling with her present self-sufficiency.