Property: A Collection

“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.

“I don’t tell you everything,” he said.

“Oh, you do, too!” she exclaimed, prodding his arm again.

“I don’t even tell myself everything.”

“You tell me what you haven’t told yourself. That’s one of the main things I’m for.”

“I do occasionally talk to my own girlfriend,” he reminded her.

“All lovers require editing. That’s why I can tell you that ‘I’m so aroused!’ is a turnoff, but I wouldn’t have told Sullivan that in a million years.”

Implicitly relegates Baba–Paige relationship to subsidiary status. Marriage proposal = emotional trump, palpable evidence that Baba–Paige relationship is primary. Subject in denial.

“You know, you still haven’t asked if Paige said yes,” he said.

“Well, of course she did. She’s smitten with you. It’s amazing you didn’t call to cancel tennis, because she’d already dragged you off to the registrar at town hall.”

Instinctively associates Baba getting married with not playing tennis. Good guess, by coincidence, but for Frisk, not playing tennis = end of world [see ET mention above; Paige = calamity/Armageddon]. Once again, Paige/marriage = threat.

On reflection, since he had plenty of experience with therapy, Weston added a second note: Describes Baba–Paige relationship in terms suggesting unequal emotional involvement. More comfortable with Paige being “smitten’” w/Baba than w/Baba being smitten with Paige. Assumes Paige must be driving force behind marriage (“dragged” to town hall), imputing passivity or unwillingness to Baba.

“You don’t seem all that happy about my news,” he submitted carefully, as if dropping a catalyst into a test tube with a pipette.

“I might be happier if you seemed happier. But you’re acting so morose. I asked before we played if you felt down, and you said yes. That’s not the way I’d expect you to feel after popping the question. Hey”—another touch, on the shoulder—“maybe not leaping and frolicking, but at least a smile?”

Actively looks for signs that Baba does not really want to marry Paige.

His obligatory smile was pained.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she pressed on.

Actively dissuades Baba from marrying Paige.

“When am I ever sure of anything?” he said. “Except that obviously, if I did propose, then on balance I decided that yes, it’s a ‘good idea.’”

“Then why are you so disturbed?”

Deliberately exaggerates what Baba believes is carefully controlled affect. But Weston could no longer sustain a clinician’s arch distance, and put down his mental pen.

Why am I disturbed? he considered. Let me count the ways. Because I am starting to see things from my lover’s point of view, and I don’t want to. Because from that perspective, I am either a cruel two-timer or conveniently delusional. It seems that I have been trying to have it both ways at a good woman’s expense. I put my would-be fiancée through unnecessary suffering out of selfishness. I have heard my whole life that men and women can never be friends. I have nursed the vain notion that you and I are exceptions to that rule, not because this is necessarily true, but because being a supposed exception suits my purposes: I can have my cake and play tennis with it, too. But I am also disturbed because I love you, and whether that love is corrupt, or covertly flirtatious, or interfering with my ability to fully embrace another woman without holding something back, it is still love, in all its near-indestructible dreadfulness, and I am about to take a sledgehammer to my own heart.

“Oh,” Weston said lightly. “You know me, I’m moody.”

JILLIAN INEVITABLY CONTEMPLATED the matter, and would have liked to have been happier, which wasn’t the same as being happy. But then, while many people are overjoyed when they decide to get married themselves, it’s hardly normal practice to hoot and sing hallelujah when someone else does. Understandably, too, Baba’s new circumstances underscored her own—she hadn’t even dated for over a year—and thus his announcement moved her to feel a tad pensive, a degree more concerned that she for one was destined to remain single. Worse things could happen, of course. Having proved in Jillian’s experience more durable than romance, friendship often provided a form of companionship as good as marriage, if not better.

When she scrutinized herself—which made her feel like Baba—she didn’t appear to feel doleful or pissed off or excluded, because she was already integrated into Paige and Baba’s social life. Paige was already acclimated to her boyfriend’s amity with an old college classmate, which had lasted his adulthood through. So there was no reason that anything would change after a wedding. Apart from a possible honeymoon, it would be back to tennis and a musing debrief thrice a week, punctuated by twosome, threesome, and several-some dinners, liberally lubricated with libation.

Any self-interested consternation that Baba was taking himself off the market would be irrational. Back in the day, they had each had opportunity to pursue the other as marriageable material, and they had each walked away. The two of them as an item were not meant to be. What was meant to be was exactly what they were. In fact, in the more recent go-round, Jillian had been the one who’d cut it off, and she could never bear women who got huffy when other women picked up their discards. You either wanted a guy or you didn’t. If you didn’t, it made no more sense to get retroactively possessive than it did to become incensed that a neighbor was walking around in a shirt that you’d donated to the Salvation Army.

Yet the following several weeks felt indefinably out of kilter. If this summer were a bed, it would be rumpled and unmade. Baba canceled tennis dates more often than he once did (that is, he canceled at all). Shit happens, and she’d overlooked his being late that afternoon in May when he delivered the perplexingly leaden report of his proposal. But the tardiness grew chronic. She’d wait around for twenty minutes, fidgeting in anxiety that they’d lose no. 3—their favorite, if only for being customary—because a lone player couldn’t hold a court. By the time Baba finally showed up, Jillian would have grown cross, which meant playing in a humor at odds with the buoyant spirit of the whole endeavor.

This was the summer, too, that she developed an odd glitch in her forehand follow-through—a destructive crook of the wrist as the ball left the strings that hooked the shot to the net. One of the commonalities that suited them to each other on court was a tendency to exasperation with the shortcomings of their own games and an inexhaustible patience in relation to the other’s frustrations. So Jillian would have expected to grow provoked by the spastic innovation herself, but not for Baba to find it just as infuriating.

“You should really consider taking a few lessons,” he announced testily on a water break. “Iron it out.”

She was nonplussed. “Since when do we take lessons?”

“A little humility goes a long way in this sport, and a few sessions with a professional can be invaluable. I’m sure you could find a coach at Washington and Lee who moonlights. And it’s not that expensive. If you don’t think you can afford it, you can always go back to leading those tourist walkabouts around Lexington landmarks.”

He knew full well she’d given up that part-time job because they weren’t accommodating about releasing her on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.

“But I know what I’m doing wrong,” she said. “I just can’t seem to stop.”

“When I know I’m doing something wrong,” he said tightly, “I stop.”

Most disconcerting was Baba’s new reluctance to linger after a session. There was always an appointment, or he’d promised to have an early dinner with Paige. Was he trying to establish some new protocol now that he was getting hitched? Meanwhile, Jillian had issued a routine dinner invitation to the couple—she reminded Baba that his fiancée had still not seen the Standing Chandelier, about which so far other friends had been spectacularly enthusiastic—but those two could never arrive at a date. She knew he’d come to cast a wider social net with Paige—all to the good, since in times past, tennis aside, unless Jillian hauled him through the door, he was capable of spending weeks on end holed up with a computer—but she hadn’t thought he’d become one of those gadflies out and about every night. Hard to arrange anyway, in a town of eight thousand people.

She’d have understood his being busy and distracted if he and Paige were in the process of planning a massive wedding. But the event on August twenty-sixth was meant to be modest. The invitations apparently went out by email to a guest list of under fifty (Jillian was surprised they could even marshal these dozens of well-wishers when Baba had long been such a hermit, but then everyone had cousins). They were eschewing the catered cakes, goodie bags, and hired DJs of the marriage-industrial complex for a simple ceremony followed by a potluck picnic. That night, to make the day more of an occasion for out-of-towners, they’d have a party with drinks and snacks back at the A-frame, with music streamed from Baba’s Mac. About all that would have been taking up her tennis partner’s time was putting together the playlist.

Jillian had offered to ask the Chevaliers if they’d be open to letting the picnic take place on their grounds. In August, the estate’s owners would be down in Byron Bay, Australia, and she was sure that they’d happily grant permission so long as everyone cleaned up after. The hills were rolling, the lawn luscious. It would be so much more private than the Boxerwood Nature Center, and not as impersonal as the Golf and Country Club, which would charge an arm and a leg—

“Jordan’s Point Park,” he cut her off. “It’s pretty, it’s public, and it doesn’t involve easily offended rich people. But thanks anyway.”

He didn’t sound very thankful. “Okay, never mind, then.”

BY THE FOURTH week of July, Jillian’s follow-through glitch was worse than ever, losing her every third point or so. Constant apologizing made her meek, and meekness weakened her strokes, when one of the aspects of her game that Baba had always relished was that she gave as good as she got. She was playing like a girl. She was playing like a girl who sucked. Tennis was a hard enough sport without the additional burden of worrying that your partner was bored or otherwise not having a good time. And he was not having a good time—or at least that’s what it looked like from the other side of the net that Friday, when he started losing numerous points from his own unforced errors, his motions phlegmatic, as if he couldn’t be bothered to chase her dreary little shots. Careful not to seem pouty or petulant or weepy and instead making a matter-of-fact and indisputable observation that this wasn’t working, Jillian suggested as they gathered balls at the net that they call it quits prematurely. It was the first time in twenty-five years that they’d curtailed their play in the absence of rain, dark, injury, or hail.

With the half hour’s early retirement, for once Baba couldn’t claim that he had to rush off elsewhere.

“Sorry,” she said again on the bench. Though it must have been ninety degrees, so frequently had she futzed up that she’d barely worked up a sweat. “Maybe I should take those lessons.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, staring glassily straight ahead. He didn’t seem very attached to the advice anymore.

When neither said anything for a couple of minutes, there was none of the serenity that usually characterized their silence. It was awkward. Awkward the way it would have been with just anyone.

“Baba.” She took a breath. “Is there some reason that you and Paige can never find a single free evening to come to the cottage for dinner?”

“We have been pretty busy. But,” he added, “it’s possible I feel protective.”

“How’s that?”

Kneading his knees, he seemed to struggle with and overcome some impulse, and then to proceed in a spirit of grim resolution. “Well, face it, Frisk. As for the whole getting-married thing, you haven’t exactly been on board.”