Property

by Lionel Shriver

  Tired of having to defer to the teams, the two retired from the college courts where they might have continued to play as alumnae, preferring the three funky, more concealed public courts at Rockbridge County High School, which were sheltered by a bank of tall trees and blighted with just enough cracks to add an element of chance (or better, something to blame). Especially summers, they’d retire to the bench and muse for an hour or two, while the humid southern air packed around them like pillows. Jillian would ruffle the crystallized sweat on her arms and sometimes lick it, having become, as she said, “a human Dorito.” They still shared recipes and disparaged television programs, but their mainstay was the mysteries of other people.

  “Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t, but you predicted it, and you were right,” Jillian once introduced. “I slept with Sullivan on Friday. Now, it wasn’t terrible or anything, but get this: in the throes of, ah, the thing itself, he starts announcing, full voice, ‘I’m so aroused!’ Over and over, ‘I’m so aroused.’ Now, who says that?”

  “People say all kinds of things during sex,” Baba allowed. “You ought to be able to say whatever you want. Maybe you should be a little easier on the guy.”

  “I’m not criticizing exactly. But still, it’s so abstracted. Removed. Like he was watching himself, or … I mean, most people get off on stuff that goes back to puberty or even earlier, and ‘I’m so aroused’ sounds so hyperadult. Stiff and formal and almost third person. I’m so aroused? Tell me that’s normal.”

  “There is no normal.”

  “But you can’t imagine how unarousing it is to be officially informed that your partner is ‘aroused.’ Though at least Sullivan’s swooning beat Andrew Carver’s. That guy kept crooning, ‘Oooh, baby! Oooh, baby, baby, baby!’ Made my skin crawl.”

  “That’s it,” Baba announced. “I’m not sleeping with you, Frisk, if you have to have script approval.”

  That was a vow he would break. Perhaps tragically at different junctures, each fell in love with the other—abruptly, hard, all in. The first go-round, Baba had a steady girlfriend, and they conducted a torrid affair on the side until, feeling guilty over the disloyalty to his main squeeze, he reluctantly called it off. During their reprise—two, three, four years later? The chronology had grown hazy now—Jillian misinterpreted their reinvolvement as the idle entertainment of what were then called fuck buddies and later friends with benefits. So when she had a weekend fling with a dashing bartender, she naturally told Baba all about it after tennis. He was literally struck dumb—collapsing so inertly onto their regular bench that it was a wonder he was not still slumped there to this day.

  In this one-two punch, which of the two had suffered more grievously was a matter of some dispute, and after both sexual terminations there ensued an agonizing interregnum during which they didn’t talk or, worse, play tennis. Jillian would never forget migrating on her lonesome to their regular after-hit bench, kneeling on the ground, and resting her forehead on the rough, paint-peeling front slat in a position that could only have been called prayerful. And then she wailed, that was the word for it, and the cries emitted from the very center of her diaphragm, the part of the body from which one is taught to sing in opera. The theater would have been melodramatic had anyone been watching, but at least to begin with she was by herself. Until a teacher rushed to the parking lot and shouted, “Are you all right?” He must have thought she was being attacked—which in a way she was. Intriguingly, she could no longer recollect whether she made that pilgrimage in the aftermath of being rejected or doing the rejecting, for it was a hard call which role had been the more awful.

  Weston Babansky and Jillian Frisk were best friends—a relationship cheapened by an expression like BFF, which notoriously referenced a companion to whom you wouldn’t be speaking by next week. They had known each other for twenty-four years, and never in all that time had an interloper laid claim to the superlative. That exercise in mutual devastation was inoculating, and raised the relationship to what at least felt like a higher spiritual plane. Post-romance, postsex, neither was tortured with curiosity about the twining of each other’s limbs. Baba wasn’t circumcised; Jillian refused to shave her bikini line: their secrets were out. It was a certain bet that, having survived the worst, they really would be best friends forever, thereby proving to the rest of the world that there was such a thing.

  The millennium onward, Jillian had lived in a sweet, self-sufficient outbuilding of an antebellum estate, which she kept an eye on when the owners were abroad. She lived rent-free, and received a modest stipend in addition for receiving packages, retrieving the mail, taking trash cans to the curb and back, watering the potted plants in the main house, holding the gate open for the gardener, and agreeing not to take overnight trips if the Chevaliers were away. It was a cushy situation that all those aspirants desperate to be film directors might have seen as a trap. But the four-room cottage was just big enough to accommodate flurries of industry—the melees of crepe paper, plywood, rubber cement, and carpet tacks when Jillian plunged into another purposeless project. She’d been given free rein to redecorate, so refinishing the oak flooring, stitching tablecloths, tiling the bathroom, stripping tables, and repairing rickety rocking chairs kept her agreeably occupied when more elaborate creations weren’t commanding her attention. A few years back, Baba had finally bought a house, like a good grown-up—an unconventional A-frame whose rough-hewn, homemade quality always reminded her of a tree house—but Jillian enjoyed all the advantages of a homeowner, as far as she could see, without the grief.

  Patching together the stipend and a variety of odd jobs, Jillian approached earning her keep like quilting. She continued to tutor, in addition to subbing at Rockbridge County High School, so long as the gig didn’t involve supervising any after-school activities on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, her regular tennis days. She got on well with children; if nothing else, they seemed always to love her hair. Having youngsters in her orbit took the sting out of the fact that it was looking as if she’d never have a family of her own. Having had plenty of exposure, she wasn’t sentimental about kids, and often suspected their parents were a little envious that when her lessons were done she got to go home alone.

  About the absence of a lover who stuck around, she was more wistful. Yet the urgency of finding a lifelong soul mate that had infused her twenties and thirties had given way to a state far more agreeable than some sullen resignation. She was still open. She had not given up. But she would rather be on her own than go through yet another roller-coaster ride of mounting intoxication and plummeting heartache. She had a rich life, with a smattering of interesting friends. She had tennis, and she had Baba.

  Who had himself run through a surprisingly large population of women. Contrary to type—the subtle misfit, the mild sociophobe, the loner who might be expected to fall hopelessly head over heels once his defenses dropped—Baba had ended nearly all these relationships himself. The very ear for individual notes in an emotional chord that Jillian found so captivating meant that one or more of those notes, for Baba, was always a touch off-key. We are all audiences of our own lives, and in listening to the symphony of his feelings, Baba was like one of those musical prodigies who could detect one missing accidental—B flat, not B natural—in the fifth chair of the viola section, ruining the whole piece for him, while less attentive concertgoers would find the performance tuneful.

  Yet for the last couple of years, a duration unheard of, he’d been seeing a somewhat younger woman who worked in admissions at Washington and Lee, and a year ago—another first—Paige Myer had moved into his house.

  Jillian wasn’t precisely jealous; on second thought, not at all jealous. When he started seeing Paige, Weston Babansky was already forty-five, and a lasting attachment was overdue. Jillian loved Baba in a round, encompassing, roomy way, and if she still found him technically attractive, the sensation was purely aesthetic. She enjoyed being in his physical company the way she enjoyed sitting in a smartly decorated rest
aurant. This pleasing feeling didn’t induce any need to do something about it, any more than she ever experienced the urge to fuck a dining room.

  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 lik
es 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 twentysome 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.