Paige, for example, had been so strained, so conspicuously trying-too-hard, that he’d wanted to hit her. The unremitting corruption of her forehand (why ever would a player with a perfectly serviceable stroke suddenly install a fatal flip of the wrist—for variety?) actually moved him to rage, and expressing the fury as mere frustration required ungodly self-control. However curtailed their courtside debriefs, he found himself listening with a different ear: there she was, talking about herself again. When he told her about revisiting the National Gallery with Paige, her questions were flat, few, and generic. It must have been true, after all, that Frisk didn’t really care for him, that she used him only as an audience.
It goaded him, too, how insensitive Frisk remained to the fact that Paige disliked her. Was his best friend dense? She’d had enough experience with detractors by now, so how could she still be so poorly attuned to positively semaphoric social cues? What did it take for Frisk to get the message? Did Paige have to march into the room wearing a T-shirt printed I HATE YOU? Physically attack her with a coal shovel?
In times past he’d have been endeared, yet even the billowy overkill of Bubble Wrap around the chandelier had been vexatious. Showing up at the A-frame out of the blue, staging a trashy striptease on the lawn, taking over the living room for an hour and a half, appealing to Paige for a bowled-over gratitude that would never be forthcoming … The whole production demonstrated Frisk’s weird obliviousness to other people, her blindness to the fact that what they wanted might be contrary to what Frisk wanted. For Christ’s sake, if she’d simply asked him whether he thought the lamp would make a suitable wedding present, he might have figured out a diplomatic way of fending the present off.
But here was the super weird thing: he was delighted to have it. Though Weston was not about to emphasize as much to Paige, he adored the Standing Chandelier, which melted him, and induced an emotional falling sensation, every time he laid eyes on it. Since the lamp had arrived in their possession, he had routinely basked in its glimmer for the long hours after Paige went to bed. Maybe Frisk did have a problem with alcohol, because something about the light it gave off went irresistibly with whisky.
Obviously with a D-day looming, Weston was always going to find it a challenge to have a wonderful time while steeped in dread. Yet if his intention was to conduct a final halcyon season as a monument to all the bucolic seasons that went before it—to which he might later refer as a keepsake, raising his hands to the memory of the summer sun as he warmed himself at the woodstove, once an uncommonly lonely wintertime advanced—it made absolutely no sense, did it, to be mean to Frisk. Ironically, Frisk alone would have been able to understand that being mean to Frisk was one surefire method of being mean to himself. For it seemed that Weston had become the bad guy coming and going. He was a terrible person because he was unfaithful to his fiancée, and he was a terrible person because he was unfaithful to his best friend. Mooning over Talisker, Weston would suppose morosely that if he simply disappeared himself from this equation, both women would be fine. To retreat into self-pity was cowardly, but recall: he was a coward.
The better course for the month of August wasn’t to stop feeling sorry for himself, but to start feeling sorry for the other parties, too. He had already to battle resentment in relation to the woman he was pledged to marry, which was no fit state in which to embark on a life together. But any expectation that Weston would accede to her wishes gladly was absurd. Cutting off the friendship with Frisk was bound to feel like cutting off his arm. Then again, the more sizable a sacrifice his fiancée appeared to be demanding, the more amply it was demonstrated that she was right to demand it.
AS THE RECKONING neared, feeling sorry for Frisk came naturally. The way this scenario was playing out, Weston and Paige would walk off into the sunset hand in hand. Frisk would be left with nothing—not even her most cherished possession, relinquishment of which Paige had been entranced by the lamp, as a consequence of which she had grown somewhat less hostile toward the object itself.) So partly as a reward for the chandelier, since it was the only reward that Frisk would reap, from the wedding present onward Weston was kind to her.
Too kind? He worried that his compassion was oppressive. Perhaps he was afflicting her with the same good intentions that must suffocate the terminally ill, whose friends and relatives continuously testify to the upstanding character of the dead-to-be. After the stink of all those flowers, the relentless puff of praise and pillow plumping, he wouldn’t be surprised if cancer patients come to beg for the restorative of a harsh word.
For he would catch himself announcing, apropos of not much, that the hours spent with Frisk were “some of the most enjoyable of his life,” or over-reassuring that despite the inexplicable disintegration of her forehand he “still loved playing with her more than anyone.” She’d eye him suspiciously, wondering what his problem was. Theirs was a knockabout friendship, and they were supposed to be taking each other for granted.
“Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if you and I had made a go of it?” Frisk asked idly on the bench, a few days into the Month of Nauseating Niceness.
“Not really,” Weston said quickly. She was making him anxious. “Dwelling on the counterfactual is a waste of energy.”
“The counterfactual! Well, la-di-da. Maybe we’d have bombed because you have a rod up your ass.”
“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” he reiterated firmly.
“Well, that’s weird. And fancy-pants, too. It doesn’t bear thinking about. As if you’re afraid to think about it. And since when are you afraid to think about anything? I was only speculating. It’s not as if I’m about to rip your clothes off or something.”
He tucked the exchange away, as evidence that he had made the correct decision. There wasn’t a great deal of evidence accumulating along these lines, so the encounter became strangely precious.
IT WAS AUGUST fifteenth, a Wednesday. Considering that memories of their summer assignations tended to blur into one long, searing session, the fact that Weston would later recall the exact date would alone prove depressing. Frisk’s demeanor was bubbly, as it had been ever since delivering her wedding present, which she appeared to believe had magically pressed a reset button. In Frisk’s view, his warmer disposition was an effort to make up for having been churlish, crabby, and detached for months. She’d no doubt dismissed the dyspeptic humor as one more funk of the sort they’d survived for decades: arising from no cause, subsiding from no cure.
“I thought the Wrist Epilepsy wasn’t so bad today,” she announced.
“Yes, your forehand’s been much more solid the last three or four times we’ve played,” he said. This was true. That deadly flopping forward during her follow-through seemed to be a barometer of something, and he’d established this much: when he was mean to her, it got worse.
“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “This wedding-and-picnic thing. What’s the dress code? Are we still supposed to ritz it up, with heels and flounces? Or is the idea more checkered tablecloth, and even jeans are fine?”
Weston focused on the rookies flailing on court no. 2, as if strokes better suited to badminton were terribly fascinating. “The concept is casual, but it is a wedding, so some women are likely to dress up.”
“Well, what’s Paige wearing? I gather you’re not supposed to show up in anything that outshines the bride.”
“You know her tastes.” Squinting, he followed the incompetents’ ball as it sailed over the fence, regretting that they hadn’t hit it in this direction, so that he could fetch it for them. Anything to interrupt this line of inquiry. “Simple, no lace.”
“I’m picturing
