Property: A Collection

“But anything that occupies that much space is an imposition.”

“I realize how hard it is for you to take it this way, but that chandelier is important to her, and I’m sure it was hard for her to part with it. That was a lavish gift. Emotionally lavish.”

“In which case, it’s even more inappropriate. It’s excessive, as usual. She has no business giving you an ‘emotionally lavish’ gift. What’s wrong with a set of coasters?”

“That chandelier was a labor of love.”

“A labor of love for herself! Those knickknacks glued every which way are all about her. A wedding present should be about us. Honestly, I no sooner begin to see the horizon beyond which we can stop fighting over that woman than she moves into our house. As a leering, beady-eyed monstrosity, peering at us while we eat. It’s not any different than if Tracey Emin gave us her filthy bed. With used condoms, cigarette butts, and smears of menstrual blood on the sheets.”

“Now it’s not only Frisk who’s going overboard. You can’t equate a used condom with a toy whistle.”

“I’m just having fun.” Paige leaned over to kiss him, and the discussion was over—for tonight.

IN RETROSPECT, THE expectation had been crazy. For three solid months, Weston would bop around the court with Frisk, interspersing chatty, musing dinners, in the full knowledge that at the knell of August twenty-sixth a curtain would drop on the whole relationship. In this loopy version of events, the friendship would still perk along as if nothing were the matter. Frisk would keep bearing down on that erratic but occasionally devastating crosscourt backhand. Weston would share his recipe for quick-pickling fresh vegetables in miso paste. And then one day—August twenty-fifth, say—it would be, Oh, by the way, we’re never going to meet again, so long, it’s been real.

In contrast to this fantasy, his treatment of Frisk all summer had been perfectly wretched. Unconsciously or otherwise, he’d been trying to gradually widen a distance between the two—just as you work a baby tooth loose with your tongue until it clings by a thread, making the extraction itself almost painless. Well, so much for the application of dentistry to human relations. He’d been subjecting Frisk to flat-out torture. Were his accelerating remoteness meant to make the imminent severance any less agonizing for himself, even there the technique had backfired. Acting like a prick had made him feel only worse, and for weeks, he’d done nothing but suffer.

An alternative to the working-the-baby-tooth model glared. What’s less excruciating, inching into a cold swimming pool, or diving in? Peeling a Band-Aid slo-mo, or ripping it off? So why not get it over with?

Because he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to, he didn’t have to yet, so he wouldn’t.

Weston Babansky was a coward. He hadn’t taken a bold, difficult decision in May; he’d taken half a decision. The easy half. Ever since the announcement to Paige that he would comply with her terms—ever since his sorrowful, downcast concession that he could see why no wife should be asked to tolerate another woman waiting in the wings, another confidante, an ex-lover of all things, and a rather intemperate one at that, who wasn’t always artful about negotiating the spiky geometry of the triangle—day-to-day domestic life had certainly been more tranquil. The late-night scenes over his best friend had subsided. Paige was patient with his continuing to see Frisk on court, albeit with a tinge of triumphalism. He hated to think that she would take enjoyment in another woman’s impending pain, though Weston had a bad habit of holding others to standards he wouldn’t meet himself. Anyone would feel the frisson of victory on summarily trouncing a perceived rival.

A lifelong procrastinator, he’d been cashing in on the benefits of ditching Frisk while not paying the price. The hard part was the other half of the decision, which, being the hard part, was obviously the whole decision: telling Frisk. Because he had just enough wit to realize that, when you announce a relationship is going to be over, it is over right then.

The sole argument in his defense was that if he was trying to eat and have cake, it had not so long before been very good cake. Overoptimistic and idiotic, obviously, the aspiration was also tender: he’d hoped to safeguard one last summer with his favorite tennis partner.

Yet predictably, his fiancée’s having articulated all that was wrong with the woman had made Weston more irritable with Frisk—which is to say, at all irritable—and more inclined to nitpick. That paean to Paige, for example, had been so strained, so conspicuously trying-too-hard, that he’d wanted to hit her. The unremitting corruption of her forehand (why ever would a player with a perfectly serviceable stroke suddenly install a fatal flip of the wrist—for variety?) actually moved him to rage, and expressing the fury as mere frustration required ungodly self-control. However curtailed their courtside debriefs, he found himself listening with a different ear: there she was, talking about herself again. When he told her about revisiting the National Gallery with Paige, her questions were flat, few, and generic. It must have been true, after all, that Frisk didn’t really care for him, that she used him only as an audience.

It goaded him, too, how insensitive Frisk remained to the fact that Paige disliked her. Was his best friend dense? She’d had enough experience with detractors by now, so how could she still be so poorly attuned to positively semaphoric social cues? What did it take for Frisk to get the message? Did Paige have to march into the room wearing a T-shirt printed I HATE YOU? Physically attack her with a coal shovel?

In times past he’d have been endeared, yet even the billowy overkill of Bubble Wrap around the chandelier had been vexatious. Showing up at the A-frame out of the blue, staging a trashy striptease on the lawn, taking over the living room for an hour and a half, appealing to Paige for a bowled-over gratitude that would never be forthcoming … The whole production demonstrated Frisk’s weird obliviousness to other people, her blindness to the fact that what they wanted might be contrary to what Frisk wanted. For Christ’s sake, if she’d simply asked him whether he thought the lamp would make a suitable wedding present, he might have figured out a diplomatic way of fending the present off.

But here was the super weird thing: he was delighted to have it. Though Weston was not about to emphasize as much to Paige, he adored the Standing Chandelier, which melted him, and induced an emotional falling sensation, every time he laid eyes on it. Since the lamp had arrived in their possession, he had routinely basked in its glimmer for the long hours after Paige went to bed. Maybe Frisk did have a problem with alcohol, because something about the light it gave off went irresistibly with whisky.

Obviously with a D-day looming, Weston was always going to find it a challenge to have a wonderful time while steeped in dread. Yet if his intention was to conduct a final halcyon season as a monument to all the bucolic seasons that went before it—to which he might later refer as a keepsake, raising his hands to the memory of the summer sun as he warmed himself at the woodstove, once an uncommonly lonely wintertime advanced—it made absolutely no sense, did it, to be mean to Frisk. Ironically, Frisk alone would have been able to understand that being mean to Frisk was one surefire method of being mean to himself. For it seemed that Weston had become the bad guy coming and going. He was a terrible person because he was unfaithful to his fiancée, and he was a terrible person because he was unfaithful to his best friend. Mooning over Talisker, Weston would suppose morosely that if he simply disappeared himself from this equation, both women would be fine. To retreat into self-pity was cowardly, but recall: he was a coward.

The better course for the month of August wasn’t to stop feeling sorry for himself, but to start feeling sorry for the other parties, too. He had already to battle resentment in relation to the woman he was pledged to marry, which was no fit state in which to embark on a life together. But any expectation that Weston would accede to her wishes gladly was absurd. Cutting off the friendship with Frisk was bound to feel like cutting off his arm. Then again, the more sizable a sacrifice his fiancée appeared to be demanding, the more amply it was demonstrated that she was right to demand it.

AS THE RECKONING neared, feeling sorry for Frisk came naturally. The way this scenario was playing out, Weston and Paige would walk off into the sunset hand in hand. Frisk would be left with nothing—not even her most cherished possession, relinquishment of which Paige had been entranced by the lamp, as a consequence of which she had grown somewhat less hostile toward the object itself.) So partly as a reward for the chandelier, since it was the only reward that Frisk would reap, from the wedding present onward Weston was kind to her.

Too kind? He worried that his compassion was oppressive. Perhaps he was afflicting her with the same good intentions that must suffocate the terminally ill, whose friends and relatives continuously testify to the upstanding character of the dead-to-be. After the stink of all those flowers, the relentless puff of praise and pillow plumping, he wouldn’t be surprised if cancer patients come to beg for the restorative of a harsh word.

For he would catch himself announcing, apropos of not much, that the hours spent with Frisk were “some of the most enjoyable of his life,” or over-reassuring that despite the inexplicable disintegration of her forehand he “still loved playing with her more than anyone.” She’d eye him suspiciously, wondering what his problem was. Theirs was a knockabout friendship, and they were supposed to be taking each other for granted.

“Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if you and I had made a go of it?” Frisk asked idly on the bench, a few days into the Month of Nauseating Niceness.

“Not really,” Weston said quickly. She was making him anxious. “Dwelling on the counterfactual is a waste of energy.”

“The counterfactual! Well, la-di-da. Maybe we’d have bombed because you have a rod up your ass.”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” he reiterated firmly.

“Well, that’s weird. And fancy-pants, too. It doesn’t bear thinking about. As if you’re afraid to think about it. And since when are you afraid to think about anything? I was only speculating. It’s not as if I’m about to rip your clothes off or something.”

He tucked the exchange away, as evidence that he had made the correct decision. There wasn’t a great deal of evidence accumulating along these lines, so the encounter became strangely precious.

IT WAS AUGUST fifteenth, a Wednesday. Considering that memories of their summer assignations tended to blur into one long, searing session, the fact that Weston would later recall the exact date would alone prove depressing. Frisk’s demeanor was bubbly, as it had been ever since delivering her wedding present, which she appeared to believe had magically pressed a reset button. In Frisk’s view, his warmer disposition was an effort to make up for having been churlish, crabby, and detached for months. She’d no doubt dismissed the dyspeptic humor as one more funk of the sort they’d survived for decades: arising from no cause, subsiding from no cure.

“I thought the Wrist Epilepsy wasn’t so bad today,” she announced.

“Yes, your forehand’s been much more solid the last three or four times we’ve played,” he said. This was true. That deadly flopping forward during her follow-through seemed to be a barometer of something, and he’d established this much: when he was mean to her, it got worse.

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “This wedding-and-picnic thing. What’s the dress code? Are we still supposed to ritz it up, with heels and flounces? Or is the idea more checkered tablecloth, and even jeans are fine?”

Weston focused on the rookies flailing on court no. 2, as if strokes better suited to badminton were terribly fascinating. “The concept is casual, but it is a wedding, so some women are likely to dress up.”

“Well, what’s Paige wearing? I gather you’re not supposed to show up in anything that outshines the bride.”

“You know her tastes.” Squinting, he followed the incompetents’ ball as it sailed over the fence, regretting that they hadn’t hit it in this direction, so that he could fetch it for them. Anything to interrupt this line of inquiry. “Simple, no lace.”

“I’m picturing a sleeveless sheaf, matte finish, all clean lines no trim, but with killer shoes.”

The description was so astonishingly on target that for a moment he had to question whether Frisk really paid no attention to other people. “Something like that,” he said vaguely.

“See, I was considering red, and I was worried about being too loud.”

He turned to her. “Since when do you worry about being loud?”

She laughed. She didn’t take the rejoinder the wrong way, and she should have.

“Also, I wanted to ask you about the food,” she continued. “I assume your family coming from Wilmington, and Paige’s from Baltimore, means they’ll probably show up empty-handed, or at best bring, like, commercial pie. So I’d be happy to bring more than one thing. Either that, or I could make a serious quantity of something, because the problem with potluck is all these tiny dishes, and then everyone takes a timid tablespoon, and you end up with a plate that’s incoherent—”

“We’re having a barbecue,” he cut her off.

“Oh!” she said, as if taken aback by his tone. About time, too. “I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned that before. If you need someone to mind the coals, you know you can trust me not to burn the chicken.”

“Paige’s friends from the History Department are manning the grill.”

Weston had moved on to looking riveted by a nondescript brown bird foraging in the crabgrass, thus keeping his gaze trained a good hundred degrees from his tennis partner’s face. But he could tell she was peering at him.

“What about setup? I could help to put up tables, and lug cases of champagne—”

“All the bases are covered.”

The fact that she hadn’t pulled up short by now suggested experimental intent, as if she were delivering an escalating electrical shock to a lab rat and recording its response. “Still … It might be good to have, say, a carb—enough that everyone could have some? I told you about that Lebanese freekeh with roasted vegetables, which came out smashing. The recipe would be easy to multiply—”

“Frisk!” For this lab rat, the fibrillation had crossed a critical threshold. “You’re not invited to the wedding! Why else do you think you never got the email?”