Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ on their usual bench at Rockbridge, a few months into this new relationship.

      “By the way,” he introduced. “I’ve been teaching Paige to play tennis.”

      Jillian narrowed her eyes and glared. “You’re trying to replace me.”

      He laughed. “You’re such a baby!”

      “On this point, yes.”

      “You and I aren’t exclusive, you know. We both sometimes play with other people. Sport is promiscuous.”

      “There’s having a bit on the side, there’s being a whore, and there’s also throwing over an old, predictable partner for sexier fresh meat. And there are only so many days in the week. Why wouldn’t my three afternoons seem imperiled?”

      He was enjoying this. It was the kind of jealousy in which one could bask, and he brought it to a close with obvious regret. “Well, you can relax. The tennis lessons have been a disaster.”

      Jillian leaped up and did a little dance. “Yay!”

      “It isn’t becoming to take that much joy in another woman’s suffering,” he admonished.

      “I don’t care whether it’s becoming. I care about nailing down my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday slots.” She sat back down with zest. “Tell me all about it.”

      “I made her cry.”

      “You didn’t.”

      “It’s just—it would take years to narrow the skills gap. She’s a complete newbie, and she wasn’t doing it because she especially wanted to play tennis. She just wanted to do something with me—and in that case, we’re better off going to the movies. I’m not sure she has much aptitude, and I definitely don’t have the patience. The boredom was claustrophobic. I don’t know how the pros can stand it. I had to call a halt to the lessons, because if we kept torturing ourselves we were going to split up. She made me feel like a tyrant, and I made her feel inadequate.”

      “Did you two come here?” Jillian asked warily.

      “No, I took her to the university courts.”

      “Good. Rockbridge would have been traitorous.”

      “The guys next to us, the last time we went on this fool’s errand—Paige sent so many balls into their court that they started smashing them back two courts over. You’d have loved it, you ill-wishing bitch,” he said fondly.

      “I’d have loved it,” she concurred. “Except I’m not ill wishing. At least so long as she stays off my fucking tennis court.”

      ADMITTEDLY, THE FIRST time they all met could have gone better. Inviting Jillian to dinner sometime that January, Baba had been unusually anxious about the introduction, her first intimation that this relationship was hitting a harmonious major chord. Getting ready that night, Jillian considered that it might have been politic to bunch back the hair into a less in-your-face look, but she hadn’t timed her shower well, and the tresses were still damp. Going back and forth over what to wear, she worried that plain jeans would seem disrespectful of the occasion, so she went the opposite direction. In retrospect, the fawn-colored boa was a mistake, even if the finishing flourish had presented itself as irresistible in her bedroom mirror. But it wasn’t the boa that got her into trouble.

      When she first burst into Baba’s kitchen, she realized she must have been anxious, too, since in the flurry of delivering the wine and divesting herself of the tiny present wrapped in birch bark, she forgot to really take in the new girlfriend—what she looked like, how she seemed. Although nearly as at home in Baba’s A-frame as she was in her own cottage, Jillian was officially the guest. Thus she naturally got confused at first about whose job it was to put whom at ease. “I’ve been doing a little beadwork, see,” she babbled with her coat still on, nodding at the package. “You can find all kinds of wild costume jewelry from yard sales, thrift shops, whole boxes of the stuff on eBay … Anyway, you get a lot more interesting effects when you break up the strings and mix the elements in different combinations …”

      One didn’t exactly unwrap birch bark, and the gratuity simply fell out of the fragile assemblage into Paige’s palm. In her hand, suddenly the necklace looked a little cockamamie. “Oh,” she said. “How nice.”

      “I’m still experimenting,” Jillian carried on, “throwing in other found materials, like pinecone, gum-wrapper origami, pieces of eraser, even dead batteries …”

      Paige’s gaze scanned slowly back up. “Don’t you think,” she said, “that after all the progress we’ve finally made on animal rights, it might not be wise to be seen in public wearing a fur?”

      Jillian gestured dismissively at her wrap. “This old thing? I picked it up secondhand years ago for five bucks. I’ve no idea what it’s made of—muskrat, beaver? I don’t much care, because even in this polar vortex what-all, it’s incredibly warm.”

      “And it’s incredibly uncool,” Paige said.

      “I guess warm and uncool mean kind of the same thing,” Baba inserted gamely, and the girlfriend glowered.

      It took Jillian a moment to register that she and Paige had managed a disagreement, a serious disagreement, with Jillian not two minutes in the door. “I bet the animals that gave up their lives for this coat were dead before I was born,” she submitted. “Even if we leave aside the question of whether they’d have been bred and raised in the first place without a fur trade, my refusing to wear this coat doesn’t bring the critters back to life, does it? I mean, why not redeem their sacrifice?”

      “Because walking around in a barbaric garment like that is like voting,” Paige countered. “It’s advertising the killing of animals for the use of their body parts.”

      “Isn’t that what we always do when we eat meat?” Jillian asked tentatively.

      “I don’t eat meat,” Paige said stonily.

      “Well, then, you’re admirably consistent. Fortunately it’s nice and warm in here,” Jillian said, slipping off the barbaric garment, “so we can dispatch with the conversation piece.” She braved a despairing glance at Baba, and she probably shouldn’t have.

      Once the threesome was settled in the living room—it might have been more graceful if Jillian had a date, too, but she hadn’t been about to rent one—she was able to take the measure of Baba’s new heartthrob. Late thirties; shorter than Jillian, but then most women were. After they did the whole where-are-you-from bit, it was clear that the girlfriend’s Maryland accent had been thoroughly compromised by a northern education and academic colleagues from all over the map, leaving her vowels appealingly softened yet any suggestion of the hayseed picked clean. Paige had a compact figure and a somber, muted style: neat, close-cut hair, sweater, wool slacks, and now rather out-of-fashion Ugg boots. She was nice looking, though an incremental disproportion about her features made her face more interesting than plain old pretty. In any case, her expression was etched with an alertness, or with whatever elusive quality it was that wordlessly conveyed intelligence, which made mere prettiness seem beside the point. If her bearing was a shade wary and withholding, that could have been the result of circumstance. After all, a forgivable shyness and social discomfort could easily be mistaken for their more aggressive counterparts: aloofness and hostility. Jillian made a СКАЧАТЬ