Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

had been taken, the very grammar of this dilemma was moving too fast and getting away from him.

      It would have to be a tennis day. Having clocked the day of the week, Paige had charged at the door, “You’re going to tell her, aren’t you? About the whole conversation, and my awful ultimatum, and then you’ll decide what to do about it together.”

      The nasty twist of that parting shot, which he left unanswered, alone illustrated how impossible this situation had grown overnight. Preserving his nonaligned status by being so stoically methodical with Paige before she left, he had tried to carve out extra time for himself, in which to examine all the angles. Yet absent resolution, staying in the same house with Paige even one more day could prove untenable. The longer he delayed giving his girlfriend an answer, too, the more he’d express being torn—the more he’d indicate that marriage to Paige wasn’t important enough for him to pay a price for it, and the more he’d indicate that his friendship with Frisk was too important. Weston’s mind was forever chewing mental cud, and he wasn’t accustomed to having to do something rather than merely mull it over. Starkly, either he announced this very evening that a detonator was ticking on his friendship with Frisk, or Paige moved out.

      Over a sodden bowl of muesli, fragments of that excoriation of Frisk kept hitting his brain like shrapnel. He supposed that, looked at a certain way, some of his girlfriend’s accusations were sort of true. Frisk was a little self-… self-centered, self-involved, self-absorbed? But who wasn’t self-something? It might not have been obvious from the outside, but he himself was wholly and unapologetically self-absorbed. His own nature may have been the source of endless frustration, but of tireless fascination also, to the point where he regarded the study of Weston Babansky as his real career.

      Besides, he wondered if you couldn’t describe just about anyone in terms that were both accurate and lacerating. You could probably savage the personality of everyone on the planet if you wanted to, though there remained the question of why you would want to. And some folks were destined to stand more in the firing line than others. Frisk had a flamboyance that thrust her head above the parapet. She was something of an acquired taste, but Weston had acquired it, and he worried that Paige’s aspersions might make him more critical, more susceptible to perceiving what had so recently seemed his best friend’s strengths as her flaws. After all, any virtue could be cast as a defect. Optimism might look like credulity; self-assurance could come across as conceit. So while he clearly shouldn’t repeat any of Paige’s broadside to Frisk, he’d also have to be mindful about not rehearsing the diatribe in his own head. The recollection made him shudder. It was called “character assassination” for good reason. He felt as if he’d witnessed a murder.

      Exhausted, he’d be sluggish on the court. How extraordinary, that he wasn’t looking forward to a hit.

      Mobilizing his gear that afternoon as if sloshing through floodwater, Weston acknowledged that the one thing he did owe his girlfriend was some serious soul searching. Maybe there was something wrong with his relationship with Frisk, something unsavory. Maybe they crossed a line. Truly, Paige didn’t demand the same broad-mindedness from him. He had difficulty conjuring a mirror image in which Paige ran off to spend hour upon hour with another man, of whose intentions he was suspicious. The imaginary rival remained a paper doll. Yet she had to be right. He wouldn’t like it.

      PRESUMABLY WHEN MEETING as veritable strangers on the street they would learn to say hi, but they didn’t bother with formal greetings yet. Leaning against her bike, helmet off and headband on, Frisk simply raised her eyebrows and laid a censorious finger on her watch. He was fifteen minutes late.

      Silent chiding sufficed, and she let the annoyance go. “You know, I’ve been flying on such a high ever since you came to see the chandelier,” she jabbered en route to the net post. “I’m so excited you like it!”

      He wanted to ask, Do you worry that my reaction to your lamp thing, or anything else really, matters too much to you? But he didn’t.

      “You’re quiet,” she noted, unsheathing the Dunlop 7Hundred.

      “I didn’t get much sleep.”

      “You’re not getting down in the dumps again, are you?”

      “You could say that,” he conceded.

      Frisk’s magenta shorts were on the skimpy side, and as he watched her sashay to her baseline Weston concluded that she wasn’t wearing underwear. She should be wearing underwear, shouldn’t she? Something sporty with wide elastic—a little baggy, cotton, and plain.

      Was he still attracted to her? Well, what did that mean? That he wanted to jump her? That he actively thought about fucking her? No, he didn’t. He didn’t think he did. He had, after all, fucked her already, which strangely enough, though he was not a linguistic prude, he didn’t like the sound of. He could naturally recall those two periods when they got down to it—perhaps the affairs were only a few months apiece, though in his head they took up the space of a few years. The memories were stored more as a jagged sequence of stills than as video. In the rare instance that these images strobed his mind, he tended to flinch. He no sooner summoned what she looked like naked than made the picture go away.

      “Baba, I know you’re tired,” she shouted across the net. “But I don’t usually start a point and you just stand there!”

      “Sorry,” he called from his baseline. “Distracted.”

      She was a comely woman and he was a hale heterosexual whose testosterone levels had not yet dropped to zero. She had good legs—long and sinewy, with well-developed calf muscles, though in her forties the skin above her knees was starting to crinkle, from years of too much sun. She had a taut figure, and hilarious hair. He loved her face, though he didn’t know what that meant, either, except that it was true: he loved her face. Blue eyes with shocks of green, thin lips and a mouth slightly too wide, and he liked it wide. Yet this breakdown was unhelpful. He treasured her presence. He was accustomed to her presence, at ease in her presence, and her appearance was utterly inseparable from the whole of her: the whooping laugh, the zany ideas, the unreliable crosscourt backhand. So the answer to his point of inquiry was a worthless I don’t know.

      Weston did at last bear down on the ball, focus on which reprieved him from still more mental cud chewing that resolved nothing. They were well matched in a broad sense, but who was beating whom swung drastically back and forth from session to session and hour to hour, and by the end he was getting the better of her. In fact, during the final thirty minutes he marshaled a degree of sheer power from which he may often have sheltered her, perhaps subconsciously. She could hit a heavy ball for a woman, but he still had the gender advantage if he chose to employ it.

      “You know, you seemed almost angry,” she said on the bench. “I’m used to your getting mad at yourself, but toward the end there you seemed mad at me.”

      The distance between their thighs was about an inch. Which wasn’t enough if she didn’t have any panties on, and Weston discreetly rearranged himself farther away.

      “I’m not angry at you. I was just trying to really connect for once.”

      He was dismayed that she accepted the denial so readily—“You sure wore me out, anyway!”—before segueing to her current fixation without dropping a beat: “By the way, you were right about that Christmas tree quality. I’ve started leaving the chandelier on at night while turning all the other lights off, and it’s magical. Every December when I was little, I used to get up at six a.m. even when school was out—so I could listen to ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ turned down low and bask in the glow of the tree. I was always crushed whenever my parents finally decided it was too dried out and a fire hazard. Now I don’t ever have to take down the tree.”

      She was irritating him, and it was a terrible feeling. Maybe Paige was right, that this chandelier contraption was egomaniacal. And he’d never noticed before how often his tennis partner touched his arm while she talked.

      Frisk went on to explain about how she’d started making her own kimchi and the