perfectly intact; it was one of her prize possessions. He spotted some keys, perhaps to old apartments, like the share with that O’Hagan shrew; a diminutive pewter cowbell, a souvenir from the solo Alpine hike through Switzerland on which she got lost for three days; a ribbon-wrapped coil of hair, a distinctive henna with the odd blond highlight, which could only have been snipped from her own head.
There were signatures of childhood: a small windup helicopter (which still worked); an inch-high troll doll trailing pink hair, meant to fit on the end of a pencil; a red-and-gold kazoo and a plastic whistle. The pair of red salt and pepper shakers hailed from her very first airplane journey—museum pieces, from a domestic in-flight meal. One round, green cloth cameo was embroidered with a spool of thread, another with a tent—though the merit badges were few, because Frisk hadn’t lasted long in the Girl Scouts. The 1981 Susan B. Anthony silver dollar was a present from her father on her graduation from sixth grade, the shining feminist symbolism dulled somewhat when the coin was pulled from circulation.
She’d even fabricated exquisitely reduced versions of earlier handiwork. The self-portrait was duplicated with minuscule beads instead of buttons (and at two inches square, the facial expression was more focused). She alluded to the yardstick coffee table by gluing together a dollhouse edition made of painted flat toothpicks, their enamel repeating the red and yellow accents of the life-size version. The claw-foot bathtub was now shrunken to a hollow half acorn, its tiling painstakingly approximated by individual squares of glitter. A woven rug, about the size of a commemorative stamp, echoed the colors of the very carpet on which the chandelier stood.
But this contraption wasn’t a tree of junk; it wasn’t like opening a jumbled drawer in a study whose owner never cleaned out her desk. Each collection of objects was a composition, often enclosed in inventive containers: a bright Colman’s mustard tin with windows cut out; a classy Movado watch box with its dimpled satin pillow, from Frisk’s one splurge on jewelry that wasn’t from Goodwill; a wide-mouthed, strikingly faceted jar that he recognized as having once held artichoke-heart paste, because he’d given it to her on her last birthday. Some of the boxes were made of tinted transparent plastic, while the cardboard ones were wallpapered inside, with velvet carpeting or miniaturized hardwood floors. Each still life was lit, and she’d been scrupulous about hiding the wires in the tubular branches. As ever, the workmanship was sound, and when he gave the trunk a gentle shake, nothing rattled or fell off. What’s more, the lamp spoke to him. It conveyed a tenderness toward its creator’s life that would invariably foster in the viewer a tenderness toward his own.
“Well?” Frisk prodded. “You haven’t said anything.”
For once Weston didn’t have to concentrate on withholding judgment. As Paige had observed, there was nothing to be feared from judgment when everyone would say that what you’d made was wonderful. So that’s what he did. He said, “It’s wonderful.”
“You like it!”
“I love it. It reminds me a lot of Joseph Cornell.”
Her face clouded. “Who’s that?”
“Well, so much for Washington and Lee’s art education. Paige and I saw an exhibit of his work at the National Gallery. He put all these bits and pieces in little boxes, and hung them on the wall.”
“So you’re saying it’s imitative?”
“You can’t copy someone you’ve never heard of. And the comparison is a compliment. That retrospective was one of the only exhibits Paige has dragged me to that wasn’t a waste of time. Cornell strikes a great balance between serious art and a childlike, kind of sandbox fucking around. And to my knowledge, he never made any ‘standing chandelier,’ either. You know, what’s especially amazing,” Weston noted, taking a couple of steps back, “is that it works on every level. Each little arrangement is perfect. But it also works as a whole. It’s like a Christmas tree you can keep lit year-round.”
She was so excited that it broke his heart to turn down her spontaneous invitation to stay for dinner. Nonetheless, they finished the Sauvignon blanc.
WESTON HAD BEEN contemplating the matter for a while, and it was a rare rumination that he hadn’t chosen to bounce off Frisk. Paige came across at first as a little unadorned and sexless, which is why it had taken him a while to notice her when he was working with the admistook her clothes off. She had a perfectly proportioned body that made so many other women seem like mere packaging. To his surprise, too, the heat between them hadn’t cooled once the novelty wore off. To the contrary, the more familiar they became with each other, the more they relaxed and let fly. Maybe it was advantageous that she didn’t advertise herself as a honeypot—disguise would keep other men’s hands off her—and he liked the sensation between them of having a secret. He recognized something in her, too—a difficulty in figuring out just how to be with people. When he saw this awkwardness in someone else, he could see how attractive it was when you didn’t like artifice, and would rather be genuinely uncomfortable than insincerely at ease. He’d come to treasure her faux pas, like that fracas over Frisk’s fur coat. Blurting about the “barbaric garment” had hardly oiled the wheels that night, but she couldn’t help but say what she was thinking. Which made it so much easier to trust her.
Paige was the more determined to overcome this inbuilt ungainliness, and her being more sociable than he was—the sociability was a discipline; her doses of company were almost medicinal—had so far been beneficial. Since they’d been together, he’d increased his circle of acquaintances by a factor of three, and now, haltingly, counted one or two as friends. She took an interest in the arts, especially visual art. While many of the exhibitions they’d traveled to see had left him cold, there were memorable exceptions. After years of Frisk’s jaundiced views of the museum and gallery establishment, he was grateful to be introduced to a few painters and sculptors who weren’t phony. Paige conceived fierce opinions, while he was more wont to see multiple sides to an issue, so she pushed him profitably to stop waffling: yes, on balance, it did seem that the bulk of climate change was probably manmade. Few women would have been so tolerant of his late hours, too. (Some internal clock in him was six to seven hours out of sync with other people’s. Try as he might, he could never hit the sack at midnight. Aiming for a more civilized schedule, he’d set an alarm for nine a.m., not arise until eleven, and still feel so cheated of sleep that the following day he’d snooze through the afternoon.) What’s more, Paige accepted his mood swings. When he stopped talking and sank in front of late-night TV for days on end, she recognized the funk for what it was and didn’t take it personally.
He’d worried at first about the vegetarianism, but they’d worked it out. At home, he’d eat legumes and eggplant, and the new dishes she brought to their table richly expanded his gastronomic range. He was “allowed,” if that was the word, to order meat when eating out, so long as he brushed his teeth as soon as he got back.
He was forty-eight. He was pulling in a good living at last, and was surprised that making money made him feel more emotionally grounded; perhaps financial precariousness induced instabilities of other sorts. In the last thirty years, he had sampled enough women to have lost interest in variety. An isolate, he’d always thought of himself as a man who treasured his solitude above all else. Yet the last year and a half of cohabitation had been effortless, which wasn’t so much a tribute to Lonely Guy Gets a Life as it was to Paige Myer in particular. He suffered under no illusion that he’d grown into a more accommodating character. The women he could put up with who could also put up with him were very few, if indeed there was more than one.
Leery of restaurant theatricality, Weston didn’t feel the need to conspire with a chef to plant a ring in the molten middle of a flourless chocolate cake. Yet the day after the viewing of the chandelier, he did offer to make dinner (a zucchini lasagna with pecorino and béchamel), and he opened a red whose cost exceeded his usual $12 limit. It wasn’t ideal to have chosen a weeknight, but he was eager to erase Paige’s irritation that he’d stayed too long at Frisk’s the previous evening, for which a motherfucking marriage proposal was sure to compensate. Eagerness outweighed anxiety. He was optimistic.
“But from your description,” Paige said, digging into her lasagna, “it sounds