toy box and then from the helicopter inside, unpacking the cotton balls from around the curlew skull, checking that the wisdom teeth were still securely glued in place, and peeling off every little scrap of residual tape from the structure. On reflection, the theater would have been flashier had she delivered the gift while Baba was home during the day. Then Paige could have walked in, and voilà! Jillian could have switched on the power. As it was, unpacking was so time-consuming that Paige drifted off to work on dinner, and Baba started reading “Talk of the Town” in last week’s New Yorker. With no outlet in reach, she had to ask for an extension cord, and lacking spares on hand Baba had to resort to a power strip whose disconnection would disable his stereo speakers.
At last, after Jillian had whisked around the floor filling three enormous black trash bags with Bubble Wrap, she tied her ribbon (alas, crumpled) around the trunk, and the moment was upon them. Baba called Paige away from her cutting board, and she returned to the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Baba had helped Jillian position the lamp at its most becoming angle—though some rearrangement of furniture might be required in order to show off her creation to its best advantage and make it look at home here. She hit the switch.
“Well,” Paige said. “That’s really something, isn’t it.”
Baba seemed to take in the chandelier anew. When he said, “It’s wonderful,” he hit a note of wistfulness as well as awe, and the assertion didn’t flush Jillian with quite the same heat as the first time he said that. But then, these infusions of perfect satisfaction don’t necessarily come around more than once.
“Thank you,” Paige said formally. “I’m sure no one else will give us a wedding present anything like yours. And it’s always going to remind us of you, isn’t it?”
As Jillian explained the derivation of a few elements, Paige’s expression remained more polite than fascinated, and she cut the museum tour short. No one sat down. She was mildly surprised not to be asked to stay for a bite, though she’d arrived without warning, and maybe they had only two stuffed peppers or something. While that shouldn’t have precluded a refresher of the wine, that glass must have been the end of a bottle. And sure, it wasn’t a long walk back to the cottage; the summer evening was soft. Still, even if she’d have declined, it might have been nice to have at least been offered a ride home.
“YOU HATE IT.” They had waited to speak until hearing Frisk crunch safely to the end of the gravel drive.
“I hate the fact of it,” said Paige. “Though I’ll grant it’s not quite as ugly as I’d pictured.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do with it if you find it a torture.”
“For now, we’re not going to do anything,” she said, U-turning briskly to the kitchen to resume chopping onions. “One upside of the long-term prospects for that friendship—meaning, it has no long-term prospects—is that after the wedding, we can do whatever we want with it, and she’ll never know. In the meantime, on the off chance she comes back here again—unannounced, with the standard presumption—I guess we haven’t any choice but to let that hulking contraption take up a third of our living room to keep from hurting her feelings.”
It hit Weston then, the absurdity of protecting Frisk’s feelings for four more weeks, only to summarily crush them. The illogic recalled capital cases in which condemned men fell ill, and the state devoted all manner of expensive medical care to reviving convicts it planned to kill.
“I know you think she means well,” Paige recommenced at dinner. “But it’s so inappropriate! For a wedding present? For one thing, it’s physically intrusive. It’s huge. And I’d never seen it. She had no idea whether I’d like it.”
“Most people like it,” Weston mumbled.
“But anything that occupies that much space is an imposition.”
“I realize how hard it is for you to take it this way, but that chandelier is important to her, and I’m sure it was hard for her to part with it. That was a lavish gift. Emotionally lavish.”
“In which case, it’s even more inappropriate. It’s excessive, as usual. She has no business giving you an ‘emotionally lavish’ gift. What’s wrong with a set of coasters?”
“That chandelier was a labor of love.”
“A labor of love for herself! Those knickknacks glued every which way are all about her. A wedding present should be about us. Honestly, I no sooner begin to see the horizon beyond which we can stop fighting over that woman than she moves into our house. As a leering, beady-eyed monstrosity, peering at us while we eat. It’s not any different than if Tracey Emin gave us her filthy bed. With used condoms, cigarette butts, and smears of menstrual blood on the sheets.”
“Now it’s not only Frisk who’s going overboard. You can’t equate a used condom with a toy whistle.”
“I’m just having fun.” Paige leaned over to kiss him, and the discussion was over—for tonight.
IN RETROSPECT, THE expectation had been crazy. For three solid months, Weston would bop around the court with Frisk, interspersing chatty, musing dinners, in the full knowledge that at the knell of August twenty-sixth a curtain would drop on the whole relationship. In this loopy version of events, the friendship would still perk along as if nothing were the matter. Frisk would keep bearing down on that erratic but occasionally devastating crosscourt backhand. Weston would share his recipe for quick-pickling fresh vegetables in miso paste. And then one day—August twenty-fifth, say—it would be, Oh, by the way, we’re never going to meet again, so long, it’s been real.
In contrast to this fantasy, his treatment of Frisk all summer had been perfectly wretched. Unconsciously or otherwise, he’d been trying to gradually widen a distance between the two—just as you work a baby tooth loose with your tongue until it clings by a thread, making the extraction itself almost painless. Well, so much for the application of dentistry to human relations. He’d been subjecting Frisk to flat-out torture. Were his accelerating remoteness meant to make the imminent severance any less agonizing for himself, even there the technique had backfired. Acting like a prick had made him feel only worse, and for weeks, he’d done nothing but suffer.
An alternative to the working-the-baby-tooth model glared. What’s less excruciating, inching into a cold swimming pool, or diving in? Peeling a Band-Aid slo-mo, or ripping it off? So why not get it over with?
Because he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to, he didn’t have to yet, so he wouldn’t.
Weston Babansky was a coward. He hadn’t taken a bold, difficult decision in May; he’d taken half a decision. The easy half. Ever since the announcement to Paige that he would comply with her terms—ever since his sorrowful, downcast concession that he could see why no wife should be asked to tolerate another woman waiting in the wings, another confidante, an ex-lover of all things, and a rather intemperate one at that, who wasn’t always artful about negotiating the spiky geometry of the triangle—day-to-day domestic life had certainly been more tranquil. The late-night scenes over his best friend had subsided. Paige was patient with his continuing to see Frisk on court, albeit with a tinge of triumphalism. He hated to think that she would take enjoyment in another woman’s impending pain, though Weston had a bad habit of holding others to standards he wouldn’t meet himself. Anyone would feel the frisson of victory on summarily trouncing a perceived rival.
A lifelong procrastinator, he’d been cashing in on the benefits of ditching Frisk while not paying the price. The hard part was the other half of the decision, which, being the hard part, was obviously the whole decision: telling Frisk. Because he had just enough wit to realize that, when you announce a relationship is going to be over, it is over right then.
The sole argument in his defense was that if he was trying to eat and have cake, it had not so long before been very good cake. Overoptimistic and idiotic, obviously, the aspiration was also tender: he’d hoped to safeguard one last summer with his favorite tennis partner.
Yet