Property: A Collection

The back right quarter of her living room was empty. She had never chosen to rebalance the room by returning the armchair there. What was done was done: Weston had forsaken their friendship to appease his wife. But one injustice could be righted.

On the exact date at the end of July marking the one-year anniversary of a big mistake, Jillian wrote the following email:

Dear Weston,

I hope you don’t mind my contacting you this way. While I do miss you sometimes, I am well, and I am not trying to stir up trouble. I trust that you and Paige are very happy.

A year ago, I gave you and your fiancée a wedding present that cost me a great deal of time, energy, and love. The materials I used to construct it, like my own wisdom teeth, are irreplaceable. So it was very difficult for me to give away my handiwork—which was literally imbued with my own DNA. Had things gone differently between the three of us, however, rest assured that I would still be delighted to have given my creation a new home, where I could be certain it would be cherished.

As it happens, you accepted the gift under false pretenses. The evening I bestowed it, you were already planning to bring our friendship to a permanent close. You were also keenly aware that your wife-to-be disliked me, a fact that you concealed from me, allowing me to make a fool of myself by proceeding as if she and I had warm, harmonious relations. Had I benefited from access to both these pieces of information at the time, I would never have given you the Standing Chandelier—of which I am now not only dispossessed, but which I can’t even visit.

I would like it back. I don’t mean to be an Indian giver. (Paige wouldn’t approve; I think that expression is no longer PC, though I don’t know of another expression that has replaced it.) We could arrange an exchange, just as many newlyweds take their ugly ceramic cheese boards back to Pottery Barn and trade them for store credit. I’ll replace the chandelier with a set of nice wineglasses or something, and then you can break them.

In any case, I can’t imagine Paige treasures a reminder of someone she detests. I would even think that an intimate memento of our long but cruelly truncated friendship would be painful for you also. I would be glad to come by to pick it up when neither of you are home. Perhaps you could leave a key and instructions with a neighbor. I would even bring the bubble wrap.

Yours sincerely,

Jillian Frisk

“That is so completely lacking in class,” Paige announced over Weston’s computer in the A-frame’s second-floor alcove. It was before dinner in early August. “Okay, sure, once in a while a wedding is called off. Then, yes, a couple with any integrity returns the presents—voluntarily, I might add. But I’ve never in my life heard of anyone giving a wedding present and then demanding it back.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, isn’t it?” Weston said tentatively.

“It is not. You always want to make everything out as complicated. This is straightforward. It’s crass.”

“While she obviously tried to write that email politely, I agree that the request itself is a little spiteful. So what do you want to do? Knowing she begrudges our having it—I don’t know how I’d feel about keeping that thing.”

Paige gave him an affectionate poke. “You never know how you feel. Maybe we could consult a year from now and take a barometric reading of the Babansky soul.”

She was right. He functioned on emotional hold, operating a more protracted version of the seven-second delay on radio broadcasts to check for Federal Communications Commission obscenity no-nos. He had put off showing Paige the email for the last three days, because his own reaction to it was so undiscernibly mixed—a sludge of dread, sorrow, and irritation.

“One thing I don’t understand,” Paige added. “If she was going to be so gauche, what took her so long? It’s been a year.”

“Maybe it took her a while to figure out what she felt, too.”

“That’s generous. As usual, given the subject matter. I would have hoped she’s just been getting on with her life, but clearly she’s been stewing this whole time. Writing that same email over and over in her mind. And even so, she can’t control herself! That line about how she could give us some glasses instead, ‘and then we could break them.’ The bitterness, it’s like having a double espresso thrown in your face, no sugar.”

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