Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 chaper-one, 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 murder.

      Exhausted, he’d be sluggish on the court. How extraordinary, СКАЧАТЬ