The Standing Chandelier: A Novella. Lionel Shriver
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he was rounding on was computer networks, a field transforming so quickly that most of what he was studying was out of date) than Jillian would mention having discovered a great five-minute recipe for parmesan chicken.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