Property: A Collection

So far, only once had Paige Myer’s entry into Baba’s life caused Jillian genuine alarm. It was a fall afternoon, 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 big effort thereafter to seem affable, expressing if anything excessive appreciation of the lentil salad and quinoa—but the whole rest of the evening was one long recovery from the fur coat.

In any event, that mild debacle was long behind them. By the time Paige graduated to Baba’s Longest-Lasting Girlfriend Ever, Jillian made getting along with her a priority. There may have been an indefinable disconnect between the two women, but Jillian was sure they could bridge the void with the force of their good intentions. She wanted to have amicable relations with her best friend’s girlfriend, and obviously Paige would want to have amicable relations with her boyfriend’s best friend. Some inexorable transitive principle must have applied. If A likes B, and B likes C, then A likes C, right? And vice versa. Jillian wasn’t a moron, either, and recognized the importance of taking a step back from Baba when Paige was present. Having known the woman’s boyfriend for twenty-some years conferred an unfair advantage. Paige doubtless knew, too, that Jillian and Baba had slept together, and that was awkward.

Accordingly, Jillian came to pride herself on inserting an artificial distance between herself and her best friend during the numerous instances that she popped around for a drink or had the two of them over for dinner, sometimes further diluting the undiplomatic intensity between the two tennis partners by inviting another couple as well. In Paige’s presence, she would ask Baba formal questions about the websites he was working on, when she was acquainted with them already, and had been discussing their particular annoyances après tennis for weeks. She was equally solicitous of Paige’s travails in admissions, entering into the difficulty of balancing academic excellence with racial and economic diversity, or asking how you kept applicants from private schools from always having the edge—though this was the kind of stiff, topical discussion that Jillian didn’t especially enjoy.

All told, she assessed her friend’s transition to coupledom as a success for everyone concerned. Paige was on the serious side for Jillian’s tastes, but as Baba pointed out, she had admirably strong convictions, of which Jillian had learned to be respectful (well—had learned to sidestep). Once Paige relaxed (which took at least a year), a sly, cutting sense of humor emerged—for example, in regard to college applicants who in their essays cast skiing holidays as “making a contribution to local communities.” Jillian had come to appreciate Paige Myer, and she was grateful that finding a kindred spirit had so contented her best friend that he was considering coming off Zoloft. Jillian didn’t quite understand what drew them together, but she didn’t have to. She assumed that in private Paige shared her boyfriend’s passion for parsing emotions and divining the fine points of complex relationships.

For that matter, Jillian largely failed to understand what drew anyone to anyone. It was one of those mysteries of the universe that the vast majority of people were able to convince someone else to singularly adore them, when any given suitor was free to choose from billions of alternatives—and these successful bondings encompassed portly shop assistants with prominent nose hair, severe-looking Seventh-Day Adventists with a penchant for hoarding felt-tip pens, and timid Filipina housemaids with wide, bland faces and one leg shorter than the other. It was astonishing that so many far-fetched candidates for undying devotion managed to marry, or something like it. Were it up to Jillian to fathom why her peers might logically invite lifelong ardor in order for them to pair off, the species would dwindle, until our worldwide population could snug into a boutique hotel. So what the hell, she’d long ago given up on second-guessing romantic attraction.

Meanwhile, Jillian had embarked on her most ambitiously futile project yet. Forty-three seemed just old enough to afford a retrospective. Were she a writer, she might have accrued sufficient experience to start a memoir. She was not a writer, but still being something of a curator of her own life, and having remained in the same cottage for fourteen years, she’d accumulated all manner of flotsam—the residue of multifarious adventures that she might convert from clutter to precious construction materials. At first she titled the assemblage “The Memory Palace,” but the expression was derivative. At length, she settled on a fresher designation: “The Standing Chandelier.”

AMBLING INTO THE living room in his bathrobe, Weston seemed to have walked into a conversation that, one-hand-clapping, was already under way.

“You know, this pretense Jillian has,” Paige said, apropos of nothing, “that she’s not really an artist—”

“Frisk likes to make stuff,” he objected, rubbing his eyes. “That’s all. It’s posing as an Artist that’s pretentious.”

Paige was dusting. While any given day of the week was as good as any other to him, weekends meant something to her, and this swabbing, scouring, and polishing on a Saturday seemed a waste. The A-frame did have a more focused feel to it once she finished, even if he couldn’t consciously detect how anything had changed. Yet the swish-swish of the cloth today conveyed an impatience. It may have been three in the afternoon, but he’d just gotten out of bed (having had to set his alarm to do so), and this was far too much vigor in his surround before coffee.

“But not really doing anything, and all her dumb little jobs. There’s something a little spoiled about it.”

“I don’t follow,” Weston said.

“It has to do with … class, really. Like, if she came from humble roots, having no ambition, and not participating in the art world proper, would seem like having low self-esteem. But because her father’s a surgeon, being a big nobody is supposedly brave or something. Admirable and daring and original. Whereas the truth is that Jillian won’t play the game because she doesn’t want to lose.” Swish-swish, went the cloth. “She’s just afraid of judgment.”

“Who wouldn’t want to avoid judgment?”

“People who can make the grade, that’s who. There’s nothing upsetting about being judged if it turns out that everyone thinks you’re wonderful.”

“Uh-huh. And these days, when does that happen? Look at the internet. It’s nothing but a lynch mob, braying about how shit everything is. I don’t blame Frisk for not wanting to stick her neck out. Perfect formula for getting your head chopped off.”

“She doesn’t call herself an artist, because then she’d have to be a bad artist. Most of the junk she cobbles together is just—kooky. God, I wish you could find a way of telling her to stop bringing by those necklaces, made of feathers and, like, bat guano. You’d think she’d notice I never wear them.”

This interchange required some serious caffeine, so Weston passed on the caffetiere and went straight for the espresso machine. He was reminded that one thing he liked about Paige was pushback. When he and Frisk conferred, they tended to agree on everything, which was restful, but it wasn’t sharpening. “You tell her to stop with the necklaces, then,” he said.