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, no? Anyone with volition in a position he doesn’t like can move somewhere else.”
He didn’t have time for this. He pulled the chilled thermos from the fridge, collected his cell, wallet, and keys, and put them by the door. “At least if we did ask her,” Weston tossed off on the way to the bedroom to dress, “with Gareth-and-Helen, and Bob, it would be balanced.”
“Bob doesn’t balance anything, because Bob is gay,” she called after him. “I wish Jillian would at least get another boyfriend.”
“You couldn’t bear the last one!” Weston called, pulling on his shorts.
“He was an idiot. Jillian has terrible taste in men.”
Tennis shoes in hand, Weston came back out pushing his head through his T-shirt. “Thanks.”
Paige looked up sharply, taking in the garb. “But you’re not ‘a man.’ To her. Supposedly.” Her demeanor had suddenly frozen over.
“I’m running late. This’ll have to wait.” Weston yanked his laces, and headed to the carton of balls in the corner to withdraw a new can.
“But it’s Saturday.”
“Frisk … she … got inexplicably caught up in something she’s working on yesterday, and lost track of the time. Not like her, but anyway, we rescheduled. May not get our two hours on a weekend, but one’s better than nothing. See you around six or so. Seven at the latest.” With a wisp of a kiss, Weston snatched his racket and fled. If they did play two hours, he would not be home till eight.
He hadn’t wanted it to be true, and Weston was as capable of self-deceit as the next person, whatever his pretensions to self-knowledge. So it had taken him too long to pick up the pattern. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Paige got in a bad mood.
WESTON KNEW THIS much about himself: he was prone to confuse thinking about something with doing something about it. So as far as he was concerned, in often turning his mind to Paige’s exasperating and no-little-inconvenient antagonism toward Frisk, he was doing his job.
That Saturday afternoon they were freakishly able to play not two hours but three. Afterward, as Weston kept glancing at his watch in the dimming dusk, Frisk urged him to attend a private unveiling of her latest project, about which she’d been oddly secretive for months. But despite all Weston’s industrious cogitating, it was more challenging than it once had been to arrange to stop by Frisk’s cottage on his own. He introduced the idea to Paige the following week with an ingratiating cynicism that made him dislike himself.
“I have no idea what it is,” he said, paving the way for what he didn’t wish to regard as “permission” to visit his best friend after hours. “I only know she’s made a big deal out of it, and she’s been working on it for a bizarrely long time. You can be sure it’s a little crazy, per usual.”
“Can’t she just bring it along this weekend, now that she’s virtually invited herself to dinner with the history crowd? She could wrap it up in birch bark.”
“I got the impression it doesn’t transport easily. And whatever it is, I’d think you’d be glad to get out of pretending to admire it.”
Weston himself had tried to maintain a studious neutrality in relation to Frisk’s creations. He took at face value her reluctance to participate in the professional art world, and one upside to her having carved out the right to “make stuff” outside the aegis of galleries—she did give things away, but she never sold anything—should have been release from assessment. Yet it was infernally difficult to suspend your critical faculties. In cosmopolitan culture—and the better educated in isolated college towns like Lexington held on to every signature of sophistication for dear life—the impulse to appraise was deeply ingrained: this knee-jerk need to no sooner see, hear, taste, or read a thing than to determine how “good” it was. The fashioning of an opinion was almost synonymous with apprehension of the item in question, so that you hardly had a chance to take something in before you got busy deciding what you thought of it—as if failure to come up with an instantaneous verdict made you remiss, or slackwitted. So Frisk’s often whimsical contrivances had given him practice at detachment. Surely there was something to be said for simply looking, without immediately going to work on an estimation, as if you were expected to value the article at hand for insurance purposes.
He did appreciate Frisk’s refusal to acknowledge the artificial boundary between fine art and craft, a line she crossed merrily back and forth all the time. And in one respect he didn’t resist discernment: whatever
