Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

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      Frisk was a better-than-competent carpenter and a skillful welder. The phantasmagoric tiling affixed to her claw-foot bathtub was neatly grouted. Her coffee table slatted together from logoed yardsticks, which hardware stores gave away to customers for free advertising in the 1970s, wasn’t only ingenious, and nicely variegated with accents of red and yellow, but flat. Composing her pointillistic self-portrait made entirely of buttons, she had meticulously picked the residual threads from the holes of the secondhand ones, and had sacrificed several of her own shirts when the color of their fasteners helped fill out the demanding proportion of the surface taken up by the mass of hair—even if the resultant facial expression was unnervingly dazed. However wonky and unwearable Paige might find those strings of beads and found objects, the necklaces would never fall apart—much to his girlfriend’s despair.

      Moreover, whatever withering appraisals others might level at what she never even dignified as “her work,” Frisk wasn’t hurting anybody. Every time he entered the house of horrors of a major newspaper, Weston elevated sheer harmlessness to the pinnacle of achievement.

      She wasn’t asking for much, either: a smile, a handclap, or a good long stare. Such modest acknowledgment was the least he could supply her, and having showered after tennis on a Wednesday in May, he braved Paige’s tight-lipped silence and promised to be back for dinner.

      Frisk met him at the door in one of her floor-length getups. Once black and dotted with tiny red chrysanthemums, the dress had grayed and relaxed from multiple washings. The fabric looked soft—not that he was about to touch it. The near rag had doubtless been cadged from a church basement jumble sale, but especially with the hair it cast her as a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia. She’d arranged the living room lighting so low it was almost dark. In the middle, resting on her hand-hooked shag rug, loomed an obscure object over six feet tall, poking here and there against the drape of its bedsheet.

      “Don’t look now, but your house is haunted,” he said, kissing her cheek hello.

      “And how,” she said, insisting on uncorking a Sauvignon blanc before the viewing. She wasn’t usually this dramatic about unveilings, which had never been so literal. Ordinarily, whatever she’d made would be propped in a corner, and she’d point.

      “I call it ‘The Standing Chandelier,’ and if I’m honest with myself, this time I really want you to like it.” She clinked her glass against his. “Ready? Close your eyes.”

      Weston played along. There was a rustle, then a click.

      “Now.”

      If a “chandelier,” it was upside down. The object was more of a standing candelabra, with multiple branches welded onto a central trunk in an irregular, botanical pattern. It glittered with dozens if not hundreds of tiny lights, most of them white, with a few incidental accents of yellow and blue. On examination, the lights illuminated a host of miniature assemblages, like individual installations on a minute scale. He knew her life in sufficient detail to infer the provenance of their constituent parts. Her wisdom teeth—pulled in her midtwenties. An admission ticket to the Stonewall Jackson House, where she used to work. The ebony trident-shaped mute would be a memento from that hot fling with a violinist during the fiddlers’ convention. The lavender roll tied with a bow he recognized as the last grip she replaced on her trusty Dunlop 7Hundred, and there were other tennis references, too. One of the arms of the candelabra was neatly wound with a busted string; another enclosure included a rubber vibration dampener and a puff of chartreuse that could only have been shaved from their usual Wilsons (extra-duty felt for hard courts). She’d discovered that delicate curlew skull on a walk along the Maury River, the long tweezer of a beak still perfectly intact; it was one of her prize possessions. He spotted some keys, perhaps to old apartments, like the share with that O’Hagan shrew; a diminutive pewter cowbell, a souvenir from the solo Alpine hike through Switzerland on which she got lost for three days; a ribbon-wrapped coil of hair, a distinctive henna with the odd blond highlight, which could only have been snipped from her own head.

      There were signatures of childhood: a small windup helicopter (which still worked); an inch-high troll doll trailing pink hair, meant to fit on the end of a pencil; a red-and-gold kazoo and a plastic whistle. The pair of red salt and pepper shakers hailed from her very first airplane journey—museum pieces, from a domestic in-flight meal. One round, green cloth cameo was embroidered with a spool of thread, another with a tent—though the merit badges were few, because Frisk hadn’t lasted long in the Girl Scouts. The 1981 Susan B. Anthony silver dollar was a present from her father on her graduation from sixth grade, the shining feminist symbolism dulled somewhat when the coin was pulled from circulation.

      She’d even fabricated exquisitely reduced versions of earlier handiwork. The self-portrait was duplicated with minuscule beads instead of buttons (and at two inches square, the facial expression was more focused). She alluded to the yardstick coffee table by gluing together a dollhouse edition made of painted flat toothpicks, their enamel repeating the red and yellow accents of the life-size version. The claw-foot bathtub was now shrunken to a hollow half acorn, its tiling painstakingly approximated by individual squares of glitter. A woven rug, about the size of a commemorative stamp, echoed the colors of the very carpet on which the chandelier stood.

      But this contraption wasn’t a tree of junk; it wasn’t like opening a jumbled drawer in a study whose owner never cleaned out her desk. Each collection of objects was a composition, often enclosed in inventive containers: a bright Colman’s mustard tin with windows cut out; a classy Movado watch box with its dimpled satin pillow, from Frisk’s one splurge on jewelry that wasn’t from Goodwill; a wide-mouthed, strikingly faceted jar that he recognized as having once held artichoke-heart paste, because he’d given it to her on her last birthday. Some of the boxes were made of tinted transparent plastic, while the cardboard ones were wallpapered inside, with velvet carpeting or miniaturized hardwood floors. Each still life was lit, and she’d been scrupulous about hiding the wires in the tubular branches. As ever, the workmanship was sound, and when he gave the trunk a gentle shake, nothing rattled or fell off. What’s more, the lamp spoke to him. It conveyed a tenderness toward its creator’s life that would invariably foster in the viewer a tenderness toward his own.

      “Well?” Frisk prodded. “You haven’t said anything.”

      For once Weston didn’t have to concentrate on withholding judgment. As Paige had observed, there was nothing to be feared from judgment when everyone would say that what you’d made was wonderful. So that’s what he did. He said, “It’s wonderful.”

      “You like it!”

      “I love it. It reminds me a lot of Joseph Cornell.”

      Her face clouded. “Who’s that?”

      “Well, so much for Washington and Lee’s art education. Paige and I saw an exhibit of his work at the National Gallery. He put all these bits and pieces in little boxes, and hung them on the wall.”

      “So you’re saying it’s imitative?”

      “You can’t copy someone you’ve never heard of. And the comparison is a compliment. That retrospective was one of the only exhibits Paige has dragged me to that wasn’t a waste of time. Cornell strikes a great balance between serious art and a childlike, kind of sandbox fucking around. And to my knowledge, he never made any ‘standing chandelier,’ either. You know, what’s especially amazing,” Weston noted, taking a couple of steps back, “is that it works on every level. Each little arrangement is perfect. But it also works as a whole. It’s like a Christmas tree you can keep lit year-round.”

      She was so excited that it broke his heart to turn down her СКАЧАТЬ