Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

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.”

      “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.

      “The issue isn’t ‘most people.’”

      “I don’t think of her that way.”

      “So you’ve told me repeatedly. Whatever folks say over and over starts sounding shifty. As if they’re trying to talk themselves into something.”

      “I don’t know what else I can say to make you feel safe.”

      “There’s nothing you can say. That’s the point. There’s something you’d have to do.”

      Weston wished that real life had a pause button. When watching a smart TV, you could always freeze the frame before an exciting scene, and leave to take a leak or grab a snack. Meantime on-screen, no one pushed the protagonist off a ledge to fall twenty stories to the pavement. As if to activate his personal remote control, he found himself sitting perfectly still. If no one spoke, and no one moved, he and Paige could remain in this instant and not the next one. As soon as the program advanced, they would be living in a different world where his life was bound to be worse. For when you said things, there was no taking them back. That was the other button real life lacked: a rewind.

      Paige said, “You have to stop seeing her.”

      “That’s out of the question.” The answer was reflex.

      She started to cry. Weston realized they’d been talking several feet apart, and any man who did not rise and comfort his lover when she was weeping was a monster. He was not a monster.

      “That was what I told my sister you would say.” She snuffled on his shoulder and got a string of watery snot on his shirt. “And it’s okay. It’s all my fault, in a way. This isn’t the first time I’ve fallen in love with the wrong man. I just didn’t—read the situation right. I took you at your word that you were free, but you’re not free. Because all this time I think you’ve been in love with Jillian. With Frisk. She probably loves you, too, and I don’t know why you two aren’t together already. It seems like a bad-timing problem, but I wish you’d figure it out, or you’ll just put your next girlfriend through the same thing. I wish I’d understood what was going on sooner, because for me it’s too late. Now I’m going to feel horrible. I’d have loved to marry you. I thought that after so many dead ends I’d finally found someone. But it’s like Princess Diana said: ‘There have always been three people in this relationship.’ I can’t marry you if it means constantly having to look over my shoulder. Wondering where you are and what you’re saying about me and why it’s taking you so long to come back from the tennis court.”

      THEY HAD SEX that night, but in a spirit of Paige’s sacrificing herself on the altar of him. She was too wide open, defenseless, almost splayed. The feel was a little warped. As they coupled, too, he couldn’t help but notice the odd tear drizzle down her temple and pool in her ear. He was so afraid that she was thinking this was the last time that he couldn’t ask. When her alarm went off, though neither was rested, he got up with her, as if now she were the one who shouldn’t be trusted, and had to be watched.

      Before she left for work—where she would be useless, and coworkers would ask if something was the matter; her face was puffy and bruised looking, her eyes squeezed and red—he sat her down. Listen, he said. What she was asking was monumental. He and Frisk had been fast friends for—Yes, yes, Paige interrupted wearily. Twenty-five years. He wasn’t refusing to comply with her wishes outright, he said. But he wasn’t an impulsive man, and it took him longer than most people to know his own mind. So she had to let him consider this. In the meantime, he said, he had to know what he was considering. The details. She wasn’t saying that he had to see Frisk less often, or with a chaper-one, but that he had to cut off the friendship altogether? Paige nodded. And that included tennis? When he asked for that last clarification, it was hard to get the words out. In some ways, she said, especially tennis. Okay, he said, so what was the time frame? (He worried he was sounding too businesslike, but there was clearly an element here of drawing up a contract.) For the first time since she imploded the night before, Paige looked a measure less crestfallen—no, a measure less destroyed. She had never looked crestfallen, but destroyed. The time frame? she repeated. In the instance that he’d really do as she asked? So that they were getting married after all? Well, she had obviously put up with this situation as his girlfriend, she said, and for longer than she should have. But she wasn’t putting up with it as his wife. Assuming they weren’t talking about some old-fashioned long engagement, he would have until their wedding day to sort it out. To say good-bye, and give Jillian his good wishes, or whatever it was that people did when they’d never speak to each other again.

      “This is a small town,” he reminded her. “We’ll run into each other regardless.”

      “Okay, I’m not being ridiculous,” Paige said, rolling her eyes. “You can still say hi. But you might find in the end you’d be doing her a favor. I mean, why is a woman that good-looking still single in her midforties? She may not realize it, but she could be holding out for you. In any case, she certainly uses you as a crutch. If you let her go, she might find someone. As things stand, she doesn’t feel the need to do online dating or anything. She always has her Baba, like a stuffed bear.”

      There was a final condition. About the wedding, if there was one—here and only here did Paige sound a note of vengefulness—“She’s not invited.”

      WHEN HE RERAN that conversation with Paige after she left for the university, Weston was alarmed by how rapidly their tenses had changed, from the conditional/subjunctive to the simple future to the present.