Kitabı oku: «The Standing Chandelier: A Novella»

Jillian Frisk found the experience of being disliked bewildering. Or not bewildering enough, come to think of it, since the temptation was always to see her detractor’s point of view. Newly aware of a woman’s aversion—it was always another woman, and perhaps that meant something, something in itself not very nice—she would feel awkward, at a loss, mystified, even a little frightened. Paralyzed. In a traducer’s presence, she’d yearn to refute whatever about herself was purportedly so detestable. Yet no matter what she said, or what she did, she would involuntarily verify the very qualities that the faultfinder couldn’t bear. Vanity? Flakiness? Staginess?

For an intrinsic facet of being disliked was racking your brain for whatever it was that rubbed other people so radically the wrong way. They rarely told you to your face, so you were left with a burgeoning list of obnoxious characteristics that you compiled for them. So Jillian would demote her garb from festive to garish or even vulgar, and suddenly see how her offbeat thrift shop ensembles, replete with velvet vests, broad belts, tiered skirts, and enough scarves to kill Isadora Duncan three times over, could seem to demonstrate attention-seeking behavior. A clear, forceful voice was to the leery merely loud, and whenever she suppressed the volume the better to give no offense, she simply became inaudible, which was maddening, too. Besides, she didn’t seem capable of maintaining a mousy, head-down demeanor for more than half an hour, during which the sensation was tantamount to a Chinese foot binding of the soul. Wide gesticulation when she grew exuberant was doubtless histrionic. Smitten by another smoldering black look from across a table, she would sometimes trap her hands in her lap, where they would flap like captured birds. But in a moment of inattention, the dratted extremities always escaped, flinging her napkin to the floor. Her full-throated guffaw would echo in her own ears as an annoying laugh. (Whatever did you do about an annoying laugh? Stop finding anything funny?) Then on top of all the ghastly attributes she embodied, merely being in the presence of someone who she knew couldn’t stand her slathered on an additionally off-putting surface of nervousness, contrition, and can’t-beat-them-join-them self-suspicion.

But then, Jillian should have known better by now, having enough times withstood the gamut from distaste to loathing (yet rarely indifference). When people didn’t like you, if this doesn’t seem too obvious, they didn’t like you. That is, the problem wasn’t an identifiable set of habits, beliefs, and traits—say, a propensity for leaning against a counter with a jauntily jutted hip as if you thought you were hot stuff, overusage of the word fabulous, a misguided conviction that refusing to vote is making a political statement, a tendency to mug the more premeditative with a sudden impulse to go camping this very afternoon and to make them feel like spoilsports when they didn’t want to go. No, it was the sum total that rankled, the whole package, the essence from which all of these evidences sprang. Jillian could remain perfectly still with her mouth zipped, and Estelle Pettiford—a fellow crafts counselor at the Maryland summer camp where Jillian worked for a couple of seasons, whose idea of compelling recreation for fifteen-year-olds was making Christmas trees out of phone books in July—would still have hated her, and the girl would have kept hating her even if this object of odium didn’t move a muscle or utter a syllable through to the end of time. That was what slew Jillian about being disliked: There was no remedy, no chance of tempering an antipathy into, say, forbearance or healthy apathy. It was simply your being in the world that drove these people insane, and even if you killed yourself, your suicide would annoy them, too. More attention seeking.

Glib, standard advice would be not to care. Right. Except that shrugging off the fact that someone despised you was impossible. The expectation was inhuman, so that, on top of having someone hate you, you cared that someone hated you and apparently you shouldn’t. Caring made you even more hateable. Your inability to dismiss another’s animus was one more thing that was wrong with you. Because that was the thing: these sneering, disgusted perceptions always seemed to have more clout than the affections of all the other people who thought you were delightful. Your friends had been duped. The naysayers had your number.

There was Linda Warburton, her coworker during a stint leading tours at the Stonewall Jackson House, who grew insensibly enraged every time Jillian brewed strong coffee in the staff kitchen—Jillian made strong everything—as the girl preferred her java weak. After Jillian began going to the extra trouble of boiling a kettle so that Linda could dilute her own mug to her heart’s content, the accommodation to everyone’s tastes seemed only to drive the lumpy, prematurely middle-aged twenty-five-year-old to more ferocious abhorrence: Linda actually submitted a formal complaint to the Virginia Tourist Board that Jillian Frisk wore the bonnet of her costume at “an historically inaccurate cocky slant.” There was Tatum O’Hagan, the clingy, misbegotten roommate of 1998, who’d seemed to want to become bosom buddies when Jillian first moved in—in fact, the brownie-baking sharing of confidences became a bit much—but who, once Jillian inserted a merciful crack of daylight between the two, came to find her presence so unendurable that she posted a roster of which evenings one or the other could occupy the living room and which hours—different hours—they could cook. There was the officious Olivia Auerbach only two years ago, another unpaid organizer of the annual Maury River Fiddlers Convention, who accused her of “distracting the musicians from their practice” and “overstepping the necessarily humble role of a volunteer.” (And how. Jillian had a sizzling affair with a participant from Tennessee, who knew how to fiddle with more than his bow.)

Tall and slender, with a thick thatch of kinked henna hair that tumbled to her elbows, Jillian had trouble being inconspicuous, and that wasn’t her fault. She supposed she was pretty, though that adjective seemed to have a statute of limitations attached. At forty-three, she’d probably been downgraded to attractive—in preparation, since postmenopausal flattery went unisex, for handsome; gosh, she could hardly wait for well preserved. So she might plausibly dismiss this bafflingly consistent incidence of female animosity as bitchy takedown in a catwalk competition. But when she glanced around Lexington, which flushed every fall with an influx of fetching freshmen from Washington and Lee—whose appearance of getting younger each year helped track her own decay—Jillian was often awed by the profusion of beautiful women in the world, not all of whom could have been unrelenting targets of antagonism. To the contrary, in her high school days in Pittsburgh, when Jillian was gawky and still uncomfortable with her height, students flocked to sunny blond bombshells, who often benefited from a reputation for kindness and generosity purely for bestowing the occasional smile. Her problem wasn’t looks, or looks alone, even if the hair in particular seemed to make a declaration that she didn’t intend. Jillian had hair that you had to live up to.

So looking back, it had been naive in the extreme to have innocently posted photographs of various homespun creations in the early days of social media, in anticipation of a few anodyne responses like, “Cute!” or “Super!”—or in anticipation of no response, which would have been fine, too. When instead her set of handmade dishware attracted, “You’re a talentless, amateur hack” and “Suggest trampling these misshapen atrocities into landfill,” Jillian drew back as if having put a hand on a hot stove. By the time that comments on such applications escalated to routine rape threats, she had long since canceled her accounts.

It did seem to irk some sorts that Jillian was a self-confessed dabbler. She taught herself a sprinkling of Italian, for example, but in a spirit of frivolity, and not because she planned to visit Rome but because she liked the sound—the expressive mamma mia up and down of it, the popping carbonation it imparted even to little pencil: “piccolla matita.” Yet the phase was to no purpose, and that was the point. Jillian pursued purposelessness as a purpose in itself. It had taken her some years to understand that she’d had such trouble settling on a career because she didn’t want one. She was surrounded by go-getters, and they could have their goals, their trajectories, their aspirations—their feverish toiling toward some distant destination that was bound to disappoint in the unlikely instance they ever got there. Some folks had to savor the world where they were, as opposed to glancing out the driver’s window while tearing off somewhere else. This was less a prescriptive ideology than a simple inclination to languor or even laziness; Jillian cheerfully accepted that. She wasn’t so much out to convert anyone else as to simply stop apologizing.

It was curious how furious it made some people that you didn’t want to “make something of yourself” when you were something already and had no particular desire to change, or that you could declare beamingly that you were “altogether aimless” in a tone of voice that implied this was nothing to be ashamed of. Jillian had recently been informed at the bar of Bistro on Main that, for an expensively educated woman with a better-than-middle-class background who enjoyed ample “opportunities,” having no especial objective aside from enjoying herself was “un-American.”

Jillian had the kind of charm that wore off. Or after enough romantic diminuendos, that’s what she theorized. Even for guys, whose gender seemed to preclude the full-fledged anaphylactic shock of an allergic reaction, the profusion of her playful little projects, which were never intended to make a name, or get a gallery, or attract a review in the Roanoke Times, might appear diverting and even a measure entrancing at first, but eventually she’d seem childish, or bats, or embarrassing, and men moved on.

With one crucial exception.

She’d met Weston Babansky while taking a poorly taught English course when they were both undergraduates at Washington and Lee. Their instructor was disorganized, with a tendency to mutter, 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 vivants 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 William 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.

Jillian finally settled on a suitably diffuse degree on cross-fertilization in the arts (which got her adulthood off to a thematically 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 how unarousing it is to be officially informed that your partner is ‘aroused.’ Though at least Sullivan’s swooning beat Andrew Carver’s. That guy kept crooning, ‘Oooh, baby! Oooh, baby, baby, baby!’ Made my skin crawl.”

“That’s it,” Baba announced. “I’m not sleeping with you, Frisk, if you have to have script approval.”

That was a vow he would break. Perhaps tragically at different junctures, each fell in love with the other—abruptly, hard, all in. The first go-round, Baba had a steady girlfriend, and they conducted a torrid affair on the side until, feeling guilty over the disloyalty to his main squeeze, he reluctantly called it off. During their reprise—two, three, four years later? The chronology had grown hazy now—Jillian misinterpreted their reinvolvement as the idle entertainment of what were then called fuck buddies and later friends with benefits. So when she had a weekend fling with a dashing bartender, she naturally told Baba all about it after tennis. He was literally struck dumb—collapsing so inertly onto their regular bench that it was a wonder he was not still slumped there to this day.

In this one-two punch, which of the two had suffered more grievously was a matter of some dispute, and after both sexual terminations there ensued an agonizing interregnum during which they didn’t talk or, worse, play tennis. Jillian would never forget migrating on her lonesome to their regular after-hit bench, kneeling on the ground, and resting her forehead on the rough, paint-peeling front slat in a position that could only have been called prayerful. And then she wailed, that was the word for it, and the cries emitted from the very center of her diaphragm, the part of the body from which one is taught to sing in opera. The theater would have been melodramatic had anyone been watching, but at least to begin with she was by herself. Until a teacher rushed to the parking lot and shouted, “Are you all right?” He must have thought she was being attacked—which in a way she was. Intriguingly, she could no longer recollect whether she made that pilgrimage in the aftermath of being rejected or doing the rejecting, for it was a hard call which role had been the more awful.

Weston Babansky and Jillian Frisk were best friends—a relationship cheapened by an expression like BFF, which notoriously referenced a companion to whom you wouldn’t be speaking by next week. They had known each other for twenty-four years, and never in all that time had an interloper laid claim to the superlative. That exercise in mutual devastation was inoculating, and raised the relationship to what at least felt like a higher spiritual plane. Post-romance, post-sex, neither was tortured with curiosity about the twining of each other’s limbs. Baba wasn’t circumcised; Jillian refused to shave her bikini line: their secrets were out. It was a certain bet that, having survived the worst, they really would be best friends forever, thereby proving to the rest of the world that there was such a thing.

The millennium onward, Jillian had lived in a sweet, self-sufficient outbuilding of an antebellum estate, which she kept an eye on when the owners were abroad. She lived rent-free, and received a modest stipend in addition for receiving packages, retrieving the mail, taking trash cans to the curb and back, watering the potted plants in the main house, holding the gate open for the gardener, and agreeing not to take overnight trips if the Chevaliers were away. It was a cushy situation that all those aspirants desperate to be film directors might have seen as a trap. But the four-room cottage was just big enough to accommodate flurries of industry—the melees of crepe paper, plywood, rubber cement, and carpet tacks when Jillian plunged into another purposeless project. She’d been given free rein to redecorate, so refinishing the oak flooring, stitching tablecloths, tiling the bathroom, stripping tables, and repairing rickety rocking chairs kept her agreeably occupied when more elaborate creations weren’t commanding her attention. A few years back, Baba had finally bought a house, like a good grown-up—an unconventional A-frame whose rough-hewn, homemade quality always reminded her of a tree house—but Jillian enjoyed all the advantages of a homeowner, as far as she could see, without the grief.

Patching together the stipend and a variety of odd jobs, Jillian approached earning her keep like quilting. She continued to tutor, in addition to subbing at Rockbridge County High School, so long as the gig didn’t involve supervising any after-school activities on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, her regular tennis days. She got on well with children; if nothing else, they seemed always to love her hair. Having youngsters in her orbit took the sting out of the fact that it was looking as if she’d never have a family of her own. Having had plenty of exposure, she wasn’t sentimental about kids, and often suspected their parents were a little envious that when her lessons were done she got to go home alone.

About the absence of a lover who stuck around, she was more wistful. Yet the urgency of finding a lifelong soul mate that had infused her twenties and thirties had given way to a state far more agreeable than some sullen resignation. She was still open. She had not given up. But she would rather be on her own than go through yet another roller-coaster ride of mounting intoxication and plummeting heartache. She had a rich life, with a smattering of interesting friends. She had tennis, and she had Baba.

Who had himself run through a surprisingly large population of women. Contrary to type—the subtle misfit, the mild sociophobe, the loner who might be expected to fall hopelessly head over heels once his defenses dropped—Baba had ended nearly all these relationships himself. The very ear for individual notes in an emotional chord that Jillian found so captivating meant that one or more of those notes, for Baba, was always a touch off-key. We are all audiences of our own lives, and in listening to the symphony of his feelings, Baba was like one of those musical prodigies who could detect one missing accidental—B flat, not B natural—in the fifth chair of the viola section, ruining the whole piece for him, while less attentive concertgoers would find the performance tuneful.

Yet for the last couple of years, a duration unheard of, he’d been seeing a somewhat younger woman who worked in admissions at William and Lee, and a year ago—another first—Paige Myer had moved into his house.

Jillian wasn’t precisely jealous; on second thought, not at all jealous. When he started seeing Paige, Weston Babansky was already forty-five, and a lasting attachment was overdue. Jillian loved Baba in a round, encompassing, roomy way, and if she still found him technically attractive, the sensation was purely aesthetic. She enjoyed being in his physical company the way she enjoyed sitting in a smartly decorated restaurant. This pleasing feeling didn’t induce any need to do something about it, any more than she ever experienced the urge to fuck a dining room.

So far, only once had Paige Myer’s entry into Baba’s life caused Jillian genuine alarm. It was a fall afternoon, on their usual bench at Rockbridge, a few months into this new relationship.

“By the way,” he introduced. “I’ve been teaching Paige to play tennis.”

Jillian narrowed her eyes and glared. “You’re trying to replace me.”

He laughed. “You’re such a baby!”

“On this point, yes.”

“You and I aren’t exclusive, you know. We both sometimes play with other people. Sport is promiscuous.”

“There’s having a bit on the side, there’s being a whore, and there’s also throwing over an old, predictable partner for sexier fresh meat. And there are only so many days in the week. Why wouldn’t my three afternoons seem imperiled?”

He was enjoying this. It was the kind of jealousy in which one could bask, and he brought it to a close with obvious regret. “Well, you can relax. The tennis lessons have been a disaster.”

Jillian leaped up and did a little dance. “Yay!”

“It isn’t becoming to take that much joy in another woman’s suffering,” he admonished.

“I don’t care whether it’s becoming. I care about nailing down my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday slots.” She sat back down with zest. “Tell me all about it.”