Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

so that you couldn’t tell when he was addressing the seminar or talking to himself. She’d been impressed by the fact that after class Weston—or “Baba,” as she christened him after they’d grown to know each other better—was reluctant to bandwagon about Steve Reardon’s execrable lectures with the other students, who railed about paying tuition through the nose for this rambling, incoherent mishmash with a relish that alone explained why they didn’t transfer out. Instead Baba was sympathetic. The first time they had coffee, he told Jillian that actually, if you listened closely, a lot of what Reardon said was pretty interesting. The trouble was that qualifying as an academic didn’t mean you were a performer, and teaching was theater. He said he himself didn’t imagine he’d be any better up there, and on that score he was probably right. Weston Babansky was inward, reflective, avoidant of the spotlight.

      Already subjected to multiple aversions, Jillian appreciated his sensitivity—although there was nothing soft or effeminate about the man, who was three or four years older than most of their classmates. No sooner did he express an opinion than he immediately experienced what it was like on its receiving end, as if firing a Wile E. Coyote rifle whose barrel was U-shaped. It was one of the many topics the two had teased out since: how careless people were with their antipathy, how they threw it around for fun; how these days people indiscriminately sprayed vituperation every which way as if launching a mass acid attack in a crowded public square. Sheer meanness had become a customary form of entertainment. Since the disapprobation she’d drawn that she knew about was doubtless dwarfed by the mountain of behind-the-back ridicule that she didn’t, Jillian herself had grown ever more reluctant to contrive a dislike even for celebrities who would never know the difference—pop stars, politicians, actors, or news anchors, whose high public profile presumably made them fair game. She’d catch herself saying, “Oh, I can’t stand him,” then immediately hear the denunciation with the victim’s ears, and wince.

      It turned out that Baba was also a northerner, and in respect to his future, equally at sea. Best of all, they were each on the lookout for a tennis partner—ideally one who wouldn’t scornfully write you off the moment a wild forehand flew over the fence.

      Lo, from their first hit they were perfectly suited. They both took a long time to warm up, and appreciated wit as well as power. They both preferred rallying for hours on end to formal games; they still played proper points, which would be won or lost, but no one kept score—more of Jillian’s purposive purposelessness. It didn’t hurt that Baba was handsome, though in that bashful way that most people overlooked, with the stringy, loose-jointed limbs of a natural tennis player. He was ferocious, hard hitting, and nefarious on court, but the killer instinct evaporated the moment he exited the chain-link gate. His tendency to grow enraged with himself over unforced errors was Jillian’s secret weapon. After three or four of his backhands in a row smacked the tape, he did all the hard work for her: he would defeat himself. He was complicated, more so than others seemed to recognize, with a dragging propensity for depression to which he admitted as a generality, but never actively inflicted on present company.

      She also found his understated social unease more endearing than the facility of raconteurs and bons vivant who greased the skids at parties by never running out of things to say. Baba often ran out of things to say, in which case he said nothing. She learned from him that silence needn’t be mortifying, and some of their most luxuriant time together was quiet.

      Baba was something of a recluse, who kept odd hours and did his best work at four a.m.; Jillian had joked that if the courts had lights, she’d never get a point off him. She was the more gregarious of the two, so after they’d exhausted themselves bashing balls back and forth it was Jillian who delivered the bulk of the stories for their ritual debrief on a courtside bench. For a man, he was unusually fascinated with teasing out fine filaments of feeling. Thus they used each other as sounding boards about the friends and lovers who came and went. Baba was neither perturbed nor surprised when one of the seniors in Jillian’s dormitory suite came to so revile her company that the moment Jillian entered the suite’s common area the girl flounced back to her room. “You have a strong flavor,” he said. “Some people just don’t like anchovies.”

      “Liver,” Jillian corrected with a laugh. “When I walk in, she acts more like someone slid her an enormous slab of offal—overcooked, grainy, and reeking.”

      In fact, which badinage proved the more engaging was a toss-up: the assertion and reply on court, or the tête-à-tête when they were through. One conversation seemed a continuation of the other by different means. As a walloping approach shot could be followed by a dink, Baba would no sooner have questioned on the bench whether it was really worth his while to complete his degree at Washington and Lee (the interest he was rounding on was computer networks, a field transforming so quickly that most of what he was studying was out of date) than Jillian would mention having discovered a great five-minute recipe for parmesan chicken. The conversational ball skittered across all four corners of their lives, from lofty speculative lobs about how, if energy was neither created nor destroyed, could that mean there was necessarily life after death—or even life before life?—to single put-aways about how Jerry Springer had a campy appeal at first, but ultimately was unendurable. It was with Baba that Jillian first began to haltingly explore that maybe she didn’t want to “be” something she wasn’t already, and with whom she initially considered the possibility of making things outside the confines of the pompous, overwhelmingly bogus art world. Together they agreed on the importance of owning their own lives, and their own time; they viewed the nine-to-five slog of a wage earner with a mutual shudder.

      After graduation—Jillian finally settled on a suitably diffuse degree on cross-fertilization in the arts (which got her adulthood off to a the-matically pertinent start by serving no earthly purpose), while Baba’s major had more of a science bent (she could no longer remember what it was)—she loitered in Lexington, tutoring lagging local high schoolers in grammar, vocabulary, and math, often for SAT prep. That was the mid-1990s, when the internet was taking off, and as a freelance website designer Baba easily snagged as much work as he cared to handle. So from the start, they both did jobs you could do from anywhere.

      But if you could be anywhere, you could also stay put. Lexington was a pleasant college town, with distinguished colonial architecture and energizing infusions of tourists and Civil War buffs. Virginia weather was clement, spring through fall. And what mattered, other than Jillian’s pointless, peculiar projects—the hand-sewn drapes with hokey tassels, the collage of quirky headlines (“Woman Sues for Being Born”)—was being able to play tennis with your ideal partner three times a week.

      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