The Standing Chandelier: A Novella. Lionel Shriver
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 William 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 any need to do something about it, any more than she ever experienced the urge to fuck a dining room.
So far, only once had Paige Myer’s entry into Baba’s life caused Jillian genuine alarm. It was a fall afternoon, on their usual bench at Rockbridge, a few months into this new relationship.
“By the way,” he introduced. “I’ve been teaching Paige to play tennis.”
Jillian narrowed her eyes and glared. “You’re trying to replace me.”
He laughed. “You’re such a baby!”
“On this point, yes.”
“You and I aren’t exclusive, you know. We both sometimes play with other people. Sport is promiscuous.”
“There’s having a bit on the side, there’s being a whore, and there’s also throwing over an old, predictable partner for sexier fresh meat. And there are only so many days in the week. Why wouldn’t my three afternoons seem imperiled?”
He was enjoying this. It was the kind of jealousy in which one could bask, and he brought it to a close with obvious regret. “Well, you can relax. The tennis lessons have been a disaster.”
Jillian leaped up and did a little dance. “Yay!”
“It isn’t becoming to take that much joy in another woman’s suffering,” he admonished.
“I don’t care whether it’s becoming. I care about nailing down my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday slots.” She sat back down with zest. “Tell me all about it.”
“I made her cry.”
“You didn’t.”
“It’s just—it would take years to narrow the skills gap. She’s a complete newbie, and she wasn’t doing it because she especially wanted to play tennis. She just wanted to do something with me—and in that case, we’re better off going to the movies. I’m not sure she has much aptitude, and I definitely don’t have the patience. The boredom was claustrophobic. I don’t know how the pros can stand it. I had to call a halt to the lessons, because if we kept torturing ourselves we were going to split up. She made me feel like a tyrant, and I made her feel inadequate.”
“Did you two come here?” Jillian asked warily.
“No, I took her to the university courts.”
“Good. Rockbridge would have been traitorous.”
“The guys next to us, the last time we went on this fool’s errand—Paige sent so many balls into their court that they started smashing them back two courts over. You’d have loved it, you ill-wishing bitch,” he said fondly.
“I’d have loved it,” she concurred. “Except I’m not ill wishing. At least so long as she stays off my fucking tennis court.”
Admittedly, the first time they all met could have gone better. Inviting Jillian to dinner sometime that January, Baba had been unusually anxious about the introduction, her first intimation that this relationship was hitting a harmonious major chord. Getting ready that night, Jillian considered that it might have been politic to bunch back the hair into a less in-your-face look, but she hadn’t timed her shower well, and the tresses were still damp. Going back and forth over what to wear, she worried that plain jeans would seem disrespectful of the occasion, so she went the opposite direction. In retrospect, the fawn-colored boa was a mistake, even if the finishing flourish had presented itself as irresistible in her bedroom mirror. But it wasn’t the boa that got her into trouble.
When she first burst into Baba’s kitchen, she realized she must have been anxious, too, since in the flurry of delivering the wine and divesting herself of the tiny present wrapped in birch bark, she forgot to really take in the new girlfriend—what she looked like, how she seemed. Although nearly as at home in Baba’s A-frame as she was in her own cottage, Jillian was officially the guest. Thus she naturally got confused at first about whose job it was to put whom at ease. “I’ve been doing a little beadwork, see,” she babbled with her coat still on, nodding at the package. “You can find all kinds of wild costume jewelry from yard sales, thrift shops, whole boxes of the stuff on eBay … Anyway, you get a lot more interesting effects when you break up the strings and mix the elements in different combinations …”
One didn’t exactly unwrap birch bark, and the gratuity simply fell out of the fragile assemblage into Paige’s palm. In her hand, suddenly the necklace looked a little cockamamie. “Oh,” she said. “How nice.”
“I’m still experimenting,” Jillian carried on, “throwing in other found materials, like pinecone, gum-wrapper origami, pieces of eraser, even dead batteries …”
Paige’s gaze scanned slowly back up. “Don’t you think,” she said, “that after all the progress we’ve finally made on animal rights, it might not be wise to be seen in public wearing a fur?”
Jillian gestured dismissively at her wrap. “This old thing? I picked it up secondhand years ago for five bucks. I’ve no idea what it’s made of—muskrat, beaver? I don’t much care, because even in this polar vortex what all, it’s incredibly warm.”
“And it’s incredibly uncool,” Paige said.
“I guess warm and uncool mean kind of the same thing,” Baba inserted gamely, and the girlfriend glowered.
It took Jillian a moment to register that she and Paige had managed a disagreement, a serious disagreement, with Jillian not two minutes in the door. “I bet the animals that gave up their lives for this coat were dead before