Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

thermos from the fridge, collected his cell, wallet, and keys, and put them by the door. “At least if we did ask her,” Weston tossed off on the way to the bedroom to dress, “with Gareth-and-Helen, and Bob, it would be balanced.”

      “Bob doesn’t balance anything, because Bob is gay,” she called after him. “I wish Jillian would at least get another boyfriend.”

      “You couldn’t bear the last one!” Weston called, pulling on his shorts.

      “He was an idiot. Jillian has terrible taste in men.”

      Tennis shoes in hand, Weston came back out pushing his head through his T-shirt. “Thanks.”

      Paige looked up sharply, taking in the garb. “But you’re not ‘a man.’ To her. Supposedly.” Her demeanor had suddenly frozen over.

      “I’m running late. This’ll have to wait.” Weston yanked his laces, and headed to the carton of balls in the corner to withdraw a new can.

      “But it’s Saturday.”

      “Frisk … she … got inexplicably caught up in something she’s working on yesterday, and lost track of the time. Not like her, but anyway, we rescheduled. May not get our two hours on a weekend, but one’s better than nothing. See you around six or so. Seven at the latest.” With a wisp of a kiss, Weston snatched his racket and fled. If they did play two hours, he would not be home till eight.

      He hadn’t wanted it to be true, and Weston was as capable of self-deceit as the next person, whatever his pretensions to self-knowledge. So it had taken him too long to pick up the pattern. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Paige got in a bad mood.

      WESTON KNEW THIS much about himself: he was prone to confuse thinking about something with doing something about it. So as far as he was concerned, in often turning his mind to Paige’s exasperating and no-little-inconvenient antagonism toward Frisk, he was doing his job.

      That Saturday afternoon they were freakishly able to play not two hours but three. Afterward, as Weston kept glancing at his watch in the dimming dusk, Frisk urged him to attend a private unveiling of her latest project, about which she’d been oddly secretive for months. But despite all Weston’s industrious cogitating, it was more challenging than it once had been to arrange to stop by Frisk’s cottage on his own. He introduced the idea to Paige the following week with an ingratiating cynicism that made him dislike himself.

      “I have no idea what it is,” he said, paving the way for what he didn’t wish to regard as “permission” to visit his best friend after hours. “I only know she’s made a big deal out of it, and she’s been working on it for a bizarrely long time. You can be sure it’s a little crazy, per usual.”

      “Can’t she just bring it along this weekend, now that she’s virtually invited herself to dinner with the history crowd? She could wrap it up in birch bark.”

      “I got the impression it doesn’t transport easily. And whatever it is, I’d think you’d be glad to get out of pretending to admire it.”

      Weston himself had tried to maintain a studious neutrality in relation to Frisk’s creations. He took at face value her reluctance to participate in the professional art world, and one upside to her having carved out the right to “make stuff” outside the aegis of galleries—she did give things away, but she never sold anything—should have been release from assessment. Yet it was infernally difficult to suspend your critical faculties. In cosmopolitan culture—and the better educated in isolated college towns like Lexington held on to every signature of sophistication for dear life—the impulse to appraise was deeply ingrained: this knee-jerk need to no sooner see, hear, taste, or read a thing than to determine how “good” it was. The fashioning of an opinion was almost synonymous with apprehension of the item in question, so that you hardly had a chance to take something in before you got busy deciding what you thought of it—as if failure to come up with an instantaneous verdict made you remiss, or slackwitted. So Frisk’s often whimsical contrivances had given him practice at detachment. Surely there was something to be said for simply looking, without immediately going to work on an estimation, as if you were expected to value the article at hand for insurance purposes.

      He did appreciate Frisk’s refusal to acknowledge the artificial boundary between fine art and craft, a line she crossed merrily back and forth all the time. And in one respect he didn’t resist discernment: whatever she made, she made well. If his casual attendance at various galleries in Lexington and even DC was anything to go by, that made her the exception among most would-be artists, whose technical proficiency was often woeful.

      Frisk was a better-than-competent carpenter and a skillful welder. The phantasmagoric tiling affixed to her claw-foot bathtub was neatly grouted. Her coffee table slatted together from logoed yardsticks, which hardware stores gave away to customers for free advertising in the 1970s, wasn’t only ingenious, and nicely variegated with accents of red and yellow, but flat. Composing her pointillistic self-portrait made entirely of buttons, she had meticulously picked the residual threads from the holes of the secondhand ones, and had sacrificed several of her own shirts when the color of their fasteners helped fill out the demanding proportion of the surface taken up by the mass of hair—even if the resultant facial expression was unnervingly dazed. However wonky and unwearable Paige might find those strings of beads and found objects, the necklaces would never fall apart—much to his girlfriend’s despair.

      Moreover, whatever withering appraisals others might level at what she never even dignified as “her work,” Frisk wasn’t hurting anybody. Every time he entered the house of horrors of a major newspaper, Weston elevated sheer harmlessness to the pinnacle of achievement.

      She wasn’t asking for much, either: a smile, a handclap, or a good long stare. Such modest acknowledgment was the least he could supply her, and having showered after tennis on a Wednesday in May, he braved Paige’s tight-lipped silence and promised to be back for dinner.

      Frisk met him at the door in one of her floor-length getups. Once black and dotted with tiny red chrysanthemums, the dress had grayed and relaxed from multiple washings. The fabric looked soft—not that he was about to touch it. The near rag had doubtless been cadged from a church basement jumble sale, but especially with the hair it cast her as a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia. She’d arranged the living room lighting so low it was almost dark. In the middle, resting on her hand-hooked shag rug, loomed an obscure object over six feet tall, poking here and there against the drape of its bedsheet.

      “Don’t look now, but your house is haunted,” he said, kissing her cheek hello.

      “And how,” she said, insisting on uncorking a Sauvignon blanc before the viewing. She wasn’t usually this dramatic about unveilings, which had never been so literal. Ordinarily, whatever she’d made would be propped in a corner, and she’d point.

      “I call it ‘The Standing Chandelier,’ and if I’m honest with myself, this time I really want you to like it.” She clinked her glass against his. “Ready? Close your eyes.”

      Weston played along. There was a rustle, then a click.

      “Now.”

      If a “chandelier,” it was upside down. The object was more of a standing candelabra, with multiple branches welded onto a central trunk in an irregular, botanical pattern. It glittered with dozens if not hundreds of tiny lights, most of them white, with a few incidental accents of yellow and blue. On examination, the lights illuminated a host of miniature assemblages, like individual installations on a minute scale. He knew her life in sufficient detail to infer the provenance of their constituent parts. Her wisdom teeth—pulled in her midtwenties. An admission ticket to the Stonewall Jackson House, where she used to work. The ebony trident-shaped mute would be a memento from that hot fling with a violinist during the fiddlers’ convention. The lavender roll tied with a bow he recognized as the last grip she replaced on her trusty Dunlop 7Hundred, and there were other tennis references, too. One of the arms of the candelabra was neatly wound with a busted string; another enclosure included a rubber vibration dampener and a puff of chartreuse that could only have