shop assistants with prominent nose hair, severe-looking Seventh-Day Adventists with a penchant for hoarding felt-tip pens, and timid Filipina housemaids with wide, bland faces and one leg shorter than the other. It was astonishing that so many far-fetched candidates for undying devotion managed to marry, or something like it. Were it up to Jillian to fathom why her peers might logically invite lifelong ardor in order for them to pair off, the species would dwindle, until our worldwide population could snug into a boutique hotel. So what the hell, she’d long ago given up on second-guessing romantic attraction.
Meanwhile, Jillian had embarked on her most ambitiously futile project yet. Forty-three seemed just old enough to afford a retrospective. Were she a writer, she might have accrued sufficient experience to start a memoir. She was not a writer, but still being something of a curator of her own life, and having remained in the same cottage for fourteen years, she’d accumulated all manner of flotsam—the residue of multifarious adventures that she might convert from clutter to precious construction materials. At first she titled the assemblage “The Memory Palace,” but the expression was derivative. At length, she settled on a fresher designation: “The Standing Chandelier.”
AMBLING INTO THE living room in his bathrobe, Weston seemed to have walked into a conversation that, one-hand-clapping, was already under way.
“You know, this pretense Jillian has,” Paige said, apropos of nothing, “that she’s not really an artist—”
“Frisk likes to make stuff,” he objected, rubbing his eyes. “That’s all. It’s posing as an Artist that’s pretentious.”
Paige was dusting. While any given day of the week was as good as any other to him, weekends meant something to her, and this swabbing, scouring, and polishing on a Saturday seemed a waste. The A-frame did have a more focused feel to it once she finished, even if he couldn’t consciously detect how anything had changed. Yet the swish-swish of the cloth today conveyed an impatience. It may have been three in the afternoon, but he’d just gotten out of bed (having had to set his alarm to do so), and this was far too much vigor in his surround before coffee.
“But not really doing anything, and all her dumb little jobs. There’s something a little spoiled about it.”
“I don’t follow,” Weston said.
“It has to do with … class, really. Like, if she came from humble roots, having no ambition, and not participating in the art world proper, would seem like having low self-esteem. But because her father’s a surgeon, being a big nobody is supposedly brave or something. Admirable and daring and original. Whereas the truth is that Jillian won’t play the game because she doesn’t want to lose.” Swish-swish, went the cloth. “She’s just afraid of judgment.”
“Who wouldn’t want to avoid judgment?”
“People who can make the grade, that’s who. There’s nothing upsetting about being judged if it turns out that everyone thinks you’re wonderful.”
“Uh-huh. And these days, when does that happen? Look at the internet. It’s nothing but a lynch mob, braying about how shit everything is. I don’t blame Frisk for not wanting to stick her neck out. Perfect formula for getting your head chopped off.”
“She doesn’t call herself an artist, because then she’d have to be a bad artist. Most of the junk she cobbles together is just—kooky. God, I wish you could find a way of telling her to stop bringing by those necklaces, made of feathers and, like, bat guano. You’d think she’d notice I never wear them.”
This interchange required some serious caffeine, so Weston passed on the caffetiere and went straight for the espresso machine. He was reminded that one thing he liked about Paige was pushback. When he and Frisk conferred, they tended to agree on everything, which was restful, but it wasn’t sharpening. “You tell her to stop with the necklaces, then,” he said.
“No, if I start telling Jillian what I really think, there’s no telling where it will lead. Like, I can’t bear the way she calls you ‘Baba.’ It’s such a dumb name. Like rum baba, or baba ghanoush. Or like Bill Clinton’s white trash nickname—Bubba.”
“So is your problem that it’s culinary, or that it’s redneck?”
“My problem is it’s not your name. And it’s presumptuous. This little claiming, like, ‘You’re my special friend with a special name that I gave you that only I get to use.’ You’d think she’d have the good grace to at least call you Weston when I’m around.”
“It would sound artificial,” he said wearily. “After well over twenty years? Like coming here and suddenly calling me ‘Mister Babansky.’”
“I could live with ‘Mister Babansky,’” Paige muttered. “A little regard for boundaries would be more than welcome.”
Weston always woke slowly, emerging from bed in a bumbling, bearlike state that Paige commonly found beguiling; on more promising Saturday afternoons, she’d have tackled him back to the sheets. One of the perks of keeping such different schedules was that sex was a daytime activity, which had nothing to do with sleep. Paige was an inventive lover, with an appetite her low-key apparel and cropped, easy-maintenance haircut might seem to belie. He was well aware that Frisk found his relationship a measure perplexing—she was never good at keeping such thoughts to herself, even if she imagined she was being tactful; Frisk’s version of discreet was everyone else’s foot-in-mouth disease—and the often psychotropic frenzies with Paige, whose exquisitely subtle breasts drove him wild, were a big piece of the puzzle. A piece he tended to underplay with Frisk. Guys had been thin on the ground for her recently, and he didn’t want to rub her nose in his good fortune.
“The truth is,” Paige continued, having moved on to Windexing the wineglass rings on the coffee table, “it kind of grates when you call her ‘Frisk,’ too. Like you’re football buddies in a locker room. That last-name thing, it’s a gruff, shoulder-clapping palliness you usually get over after high school.”
Weston wondered whether he could train himself to refer to Frisk as Jillian at home. The rechristening would take vigilance, but if it made a difference to Paige, the effort might pay off. On the other hand, such constant mental editing was a drain. He didn’t think of his tennis partner as Jillian, and he was well aware that a first-name basis in this instance would amount to a demotion. He would be humoring Paige, too, and that wasn’t a direction he wanted to go. A matter for private debate later. In the interim, he would try to stick to pronouns.
Taking a slug of espresso, he shot an anxious glance at the clock. “What’s biting your butt today?”
“Oh, we’d talked about asking Gareth, Helen, and Bob over in a couple of weeks—our usual History Department crowd—and then I thought, right, great, you’re no doubt expecting we’ll ask Jillian, too.”
“We don’t always ask her.” Jesus, this was exhausting.
“No, but the last time we didn’t, you just had to tell her all about the evening with Vivian and Leo—”
“I couldn’t resist telling her about that nightmare ‘free-form berry tart.’ How the cream cheese pastry kept springing leaks and we had to put it in the freezer—”
“You said you thought she felt hurt.”
“That may have been my imagination. She doesn’t expect to come over every time we entertain.” He didn’t think of himself as someone who entertains.
“But whenever we knock her off the guest list, you feel guilty.”
“A little guilty,” he said, having considered the question for a moment. “And a little relieved. I don’t enjoy being caught in the middle.”
“Then don’t put yourself in the middle.”
“Finding yourself in a position isn’t the same as putting yourself there.”
“Oh,