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 goofy. Busy and trashy and kitchen sink.”
The confounded thing was that Paige bent over backward to see the goodness in just about anybody else. She had a weakness for social strays, dragging home office assistants with bottle-bottom glasses and bad dandruff the way other women adopted mangy, big-eyed kitty cats with no collar. The only person in the world about whom he’d heard her be overtly unkind was Jillian Frisk.
“Then you’ll have to take my word for it.” He didn’t want to get short tempered, this of all nights. “I thought it was beautiful.”
“Still.” She wouldn’t let it go. “You have to admit that the whole concept is on the egotistical side—”
“It’s a celebration,” he cut her off. “Of a life, and it could be anyone’s life. Warmth toward your own past, and a sense of humor about your idiosyncrasies, doesn’t make you self-obsessed.”
He was overdoing the defense, but Weston was tired of being enticed into criticizing his best friend, which made him feel weak and two-faced. Yet somehow he had to imbue this meal with a more convivial vibe or put off his proposal for another time. For that matter, maybe what was making him testy was having an agenda and not addressing it. He and Paige were now sufficiently attuned that whenever one of them suppressed a thought, the atmosphere queered. So, with a deep breath, he refilled their glasses to announce, “Look, I was going to wait until after dinner, but if I don’t get this out I’m going to bust.”
She immediately looked frightened—withdrawing from her food with a stricken wince, as if he’d just destroyed her appetite. If he weren’t so determined to plow ahead, he might have considered that terrified reaction. He trusted her, but maybe the trust didn’t run both ways.
He moved the plates out of the way, leaned in, and slid his glass forward until it kissed hers. “I shouldn’t really be taking this hand,” Weston extemporized, holding her fingers between his, “when I want to ask for it.”
Either the construction was too clever, or fear had clouded her wit. She looked uncomprehending.
“I’m asking you,” he spelled out, “to marry me.”
“Oh!” Breaking the clasp, she sprang back, and her eyes filled with tears.
Now it was his turn not to get it. “Is that a yes?”
“I don’t know.”
This wasn’t going the way he expected. The lasagna was starting to congeal.
“It’s too soon? Too sudden? Too … what?”
Paige stared at her lap, worrying her napkin. “I want to be able to say yes. But I talked about this for a long time with my sister, more than once. I made her a promise, which was really a promise to myself. I can’t tell you how hard it is for me to be disciplined about this. I’d love to throw my arms around you and say, ‘What took you so long?’ But I can’t accept unconditionally.”
“What’s the condition?” A lump was already wadding in Weston’s gut. He didn’t bother to formulate to himself the nature of her stipulation, since she would spit it out soon enough. But he could have anticipated the ultimatum without much strain.
“Jillian,” she said.
Lord, how lovely it would be, once in a while in this life, to be surprised.
“You know how you meet some people and think they’re really great right away?” Paige continued. “But then they don’t wear well, and what was superficially appealing is disappointing or even annoying in the long run. And then there are the
