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 Washington 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
