The Standing Chandelier

by Lionel Shriver

  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 William 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 spontaneous invitation to stay for dinner. Nonetheless, they finished the Sauvignon blanc.

  Weston had been contemplating the matter for a while, and it was a rare rumination that he hadn’t chosen to bounce off Frisk. Paige came across at first as a little unadorned and sexless, which is why it had taken him a while to notice her when he was working with the admissions office on the William and Lee website. But that was before you took her clothes off. She had a perfectly proportioned body that made so many other women seem like mere packaging. To his surprise, too, the heat between them hadn’t cooled once the novelty wore off. To the contrary, the more familiar they became with each other, the more they relaxed and let fly. Maybe it was advantageous that she didn’t advertise herself as a honeypot—disguise would keep other men’s hands off her—and he liked the sensation between them of having a secret. He recognized something in her, too—a difficulty in figuring out just how to be with people. When he saw this awkwardness in someone else, he could see how attractive it was when you didn’t like artifice, and would rather be genuinely uncomfortable than insincerely at ease. He’d come to treasure her faux pas, like that fracas over Frisk’s fur coat. Blurting about the “barbaric garment” had hardly oiled the wheels that night, but she couldn’t help but say what she was thinking. Which made it so much easier to trust her.

  Paige was the more determined to overcome this inbuilt ungainliness, and her being more sociable than he was—the sociability was a discipline; her doses of company were almost medicinal—had so far been beneficial. Since they’d been together, he’d increased his circle of acquaintances by a factor of three, and now, haltingly, counted one or two as friends. She took an interest in the arts, especially visual art. While many of the exhibitions they’d traveled to see had left him cold, there were memorable exceptions. After years of Frisk’s jaundiced views of the museum and gallery establishment, he was grateful to be introduced to a few painters and sculptors who weren’t phony. Paige conceived fierce opinions, while he was more wont to see multiple sides to an issue, so she pushed him profitably to stop waffling: yes, on balance, it did seem that the bulk of climate change was probably man-made. Few women would have been so tolerant of his late hours, too. (Some internal clock in him was six to seven hours out of sync with other people’s. Try as he might, he could never hit the sack at midnight. Aiming for a more civilized schedule, he’d set an alarm for nine a.m., not arise until eleven, and still feel so cheated of sleep that the following day he’d snooze through the afternoon.) What’s more, Paige accepted his mood swings. When he stopped talking and sank in front of late-night TV for days on end, she recognized the funk for what it was and didn’t take it personally.

  He’d worried at first about the vegetarianism, but they’d worked it out. At home, he’d eat legumes and eggplant, and the new dishes she brought to their table richly expanded his gastronomic range. He was “allowed,” if that was the word, to order meat when eating out, so long as he brushed his teeth as soon as he got back.

  He was forty-eight. He was pulling in a good living at last, and was surprised that making money made him feel more emotionally grounded; perhaps financial precariousness induced instabilities of other sorts. In the last thirty years, he had sampled enough women to have lost interest in variety. An isolate, he’d always thought of himself as a man who treasured his solitude above all else. Yet the last year and a half of cohabitation had been effortless, which wasn’t so much a tribute to Lonely Guy Gets a Life as it was to Paige Myer in particular. He suffered under no illusion that he’d grown into a more accommodating character. The women he could put up with who could also put up with him were very few, if indeed there was more than one.

  Leery of restaurant theatricality, Weston didn’t feel the need to conspire with a chef to plant a ring in the molten middle of a flourless chocolate cake. Yet the day after the viewing of the chandelier, he did offer to make dinner (a zucchini lasagna with pecorino and béchamel), and he opened a red whose cost exceeded his usual $12 limit. It wasn’t ideal to have chosen a weeknight, but he was eager to erase Paige’s irritation that he’d stayed too long at Frisk’s the previous evening, for which a motherfucking marriage proposal was sure to compensate. Eagerness outweighed anxiety. He was optimistic.

  “But from your description,” Paige said, digging into her lasagna, “it sounds goofy. Busy and trashy and kitchen sink.”

  The confounded thing was that Paige bent over backward to see the goodness in just about anybody else. She had a weakness for social strays, dragging home office assistants with bottle-bottom glasses and bad dandruff the way other women adopted mangy, big-eyed kitty cats with no collar. The only person in the world about whom he’d heard her be overtly unkind was Jillian Frisk.

  “Then you’ll have to take my word for it.” He didn’t want to get short-tempered, this of all nights. “I thought it was beautiful.”

  “Still.” She wouldn’t let it go. “You have to admit that the whole concept is on the egotistical side—”

  “It’s a celebration,” he cut
her off. “Of a life, and it could be anyone’s life. Warmth toward your own past, and a sense of humor about your idiosyncrasies, doesn’t make you self-obsessed.”

  He was overdoing the defense, but Weston was tired of being enticed into criticizing his best friend, which made him feel weak and two-faced. Yet somehow he had to imbue this meal with a more convivial vibe or put off his proposal for another time. For that matter, maybe what was making him testy was having an agenda and not addressing it. He and Paige were now sufficiently attuned that whenever one of them suppressed a thought, the atmosphere queered. So, with a deep breath, he refilled their glasses to announce, “Look, I was going to wait until after dinner, but if I don’t get this out I’m going to bust.”

  She immediately looked frightened—withdrawing from her food with a stricken wince, as if he’d just destroyed her appetite. If he weren’t so determined to plow ahead, he might have considered that terrified reaction. He trusted her, but maybe the trust didn’t run both ways.

  He moved the plates out of the way, leaned in, and slid his glass forward until it kissed hers. “I shouldn’t really be taking this hand,” Weston extemporized, holding her fingers between his, “when I want to ask for it.”

  Either the construction was too clever, or fear had clouded her wit. She looked uncomprehending.

  “I’m asking you,” he spelled out, “to marry me.”

  “Oh!” Breaking the clasp, she sprang back, and her eyes filled with tears.

  Now it was his turn not to get it. “Is that a yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This wasn’t going the way he expected. The lasagna was starting to congeal.

  “It’s too soon? Too sudden? Too … what?”

  Paige stared at her lap, worrying her napkin. “I want to be able to say yes. But I talked about this for a long time with my sister, more than once. I made her a promise, which was really a promise to myself. I can’t tell you how hard it is for me to be disciplined about this. I’d love to throw my arms around you and say, ‘What took you so long?’ But I can’t accept unconditionally.”

  “What’s the condition?” A lump was already wadding in Weston’s gut. He didn’t bother to formulate to himself the nature of her stipulation, since she would spit it out soon enough. But he could have anticipated the ultimatum without much strain.

  “Jillian,” she said.

  Lord, how lovely it would be, once in a while in this life, to be surprised.

  “You know how you meet some people and think they’re really great right away?” Paige continued. “But then they don’t wear well, and what was superficially appealing is disappointing or even annoying in the long run. And then there are the other people, who you don’t take a shine to at the start—who seem like creeps, or drive you nuts. But you stick with it, and get to know them better, and little by little they grow on you after all. So it can turn out that it’s the very people who put you off at the beginning who you end up liking better than anybody.”

  Despite himself, Weston’s expression must have looked hopeful.

  “Well, this thing with me and Jillian isn’t like either of those,” Paige said, meeting his eyes at last, and that was that for feeling hopeful. “I couldn’t stand her when I met her, and I can’t stand her now that I’ve gotten to know her better. She acts as if her not doing anything professionally makes her so special, when most people don’t do anything. She absolutely has to be the central focus in any given group of people, and whenever conversation strays from her latest goofball project, or her latest goofball outfit, she stops paying attention. She’s basically undersocialized. She only pretends to be interested in anyone else—though I guess the pretending means she’s socialized to a point—and whenever she asks about my life, it’s obvious she’s only going through the motions and doesn’t care. I’m not even convinced she’s that interested in you. You’re just a great audience for her, and that’s the main thing she needs from anybody. She has no sense of tact—which is just another form of being inconsiderate, of not bothering to pay attention to anyone else. So it never occurs to her to maybe keep her mouth shut about how great fracking is, because other people present might find her idiotic opinions offensive. For that matter, her opinions about anything important are all over the map. Since she doesn’t read newspapers or even watch TV news, I’ve come to the conclusion that she doesn’t have opinions—she just tries on a position like another outfit. She’s not a serious person, West! She lives her life in, like—a playroom! And there’s something so crafted about her. All presentation, no substance. With these big stagey entrances she makes. With all the feathers and jumped-up enthusiasm. It’s fake. I have no idea what’s behind the prima donna song and dance, aside from a woman who’s hopelessly self-centered, and maybe a little lost. Like a lot of people who come across as egotistical, all that high-octane vivacity could be just overcompensating for underconfidence—since she’s clearly too frightened to go out into the world and make her mark. That’s me bending over backwards to be understanding, but I’m not a gymnast. I can’t maintain that position for very long.”

  This—whatever you call the perfect opposite of ode—came out in such a rush that Paige was breathing hard. Weston asked dryly, “Is that all?”

  “No, come to think of it. She also drinks too much. Way too much, making her a bad influence. Every time you go over there without me, you come back soused.”

  “Are you trying to convince me to despise my own best friend?”

  “No, this is obviously my problem—but it’s getting worse. Like those private coinages of hers that she repeats all the time whenever we go over for dinner, and she always serves popcorn as an appetizer? Which is cheap, by the way, in every sense. Practically free, and déclassé. So a substandard bowlful always has ‘low loft.’ Having only a few dead kernels at the bottom indicates a ‘high pop ratio.’ A batch lifting the lid on the pot is ‘achieving lidosity.’ You think it’s enchanting, and I’m glad for you about that, I guess. But I couldn’t find it enchanting on pain of death. I think it’s dorky. Every time she says this stuff it’s fingernail-on-a-blackboard for me. Her very voice grates. You’d think she’d learn to speak at a volume that isn’t pitched for the hard of hearing! The stress of pretending to get along with her is wearing me out.”

  “If you want to keep the socializing to a minimum—”

  “If it were just a matter of your friend getting on my nerves, maybe I could simply avoid her, and we could keep making excuses for why I’m busy and can’t come with—though if we’re really talking about getting married, a there’s-somewhere-I-gotta-be routine could be hard to keep up over a lifetime. She’d figure it out. And then it would be an issue, and she’d get all touchy and wounded the way she does. Still, maybe that would be manageable. If that were the only problem, we could choreograph some sort of elaborate dance and never end up in the same room.

  “But it’s worse than that. She acts as if she owns you. I’m never sure what you two are talking about all that time after tennis—because you’re always gone for way longer than the couple of hours you play. I can’t help but worry that you’re talking about me. And I worry the discussion isn’t always nice, since nice things are usually a little boring, and for some reason they never take very long to say. I can’t bear this paranoia. It’s worse than when you go see your shrink. At least a shrink is supposed to keep his mouth shut, and be a little objective. If you also need to confide in a regular person, a civilian, and I’m going to be your wife, then you should be confiding in me.”

  “I can confide in more than one person, can’t I?”

  “You can confide in more than one person who’s a man. You’re going to claim I’m ‘insecure.’ Maybe I am, but maybe I have a right to be. If you two always had a platonic relationship, that would be one thing. But you’ve been involved with each other, you said, not once, but twice. You’ve played it down, but I’ve gotten the impression that both times it was kind of a big deal.”

&n
bsp; “We’ve both been involved with multiple people since. That’s ancient history.”

  “It doesn’t come across as ancient history. I still pick up a feeling between you two. It’s not—well, it’s not wholesome. There’s an electricity, an energy, and it leaves me out. When she’s around, you hardly touch me, have you noticed? Structurally, this situation is lopsided, too. I’ve had boyfriends, but then I’ve broken up with them or they with me, and we’ve gone our separate ways. I don’t have anyone in my life who remotely duplicates Jillian’s role in yours. I don’t see anybody else socially three or four times a week, not even a girlfriend. I’d appreciate your trying to picture how you might feel if I saw one of my exes that often. And we hung out on a park bench for hours at a time and shared each other’s secrets. Wouldn’t that make you anxious? Wouldn’t you worry what we talked about?”

  “Half the time, it’s about how many minutes you should sous vide salmon.”

  “Right—half the time. Wouldn’t you worry about the other half? And imagine if this male pal of mine went through long periods of being unattached, and gave every sign of being emotionally dependent on me, to say the least. I think you’d get the jitters. Especially if this hypothetical guy was—I’ll give Jillian this much, and I might feel a little different if she weren’t—fucking good-looking.” Paige didn’t often curse.

  Maybe this was where he was supposed to say, Only up to a point, or But she’s not aging very well, or I’ve never noticed one way or another, or Fair enough, but not my type, further gilding the lily with the white lie, I may not have mentioned it, but truth is we were a lousy match in the sack. Maybe out of loyalty he was even supposed to claim, Give me a break! Between the two of you, you’re the knockout in my book. There was no way any man in this position could remain in the realm of credibility and win.

  “It’s hardly her fault that most people would consider her reasonably attractive.” Judicious. But even his insertion of reasonably was pure suck up, and probably backfired. The qualifier made him sound evasive and condescending.