Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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