Furniture

Above the refrigerator, tucked among the warranties, I came across a page from an old catalog. An image of a lamp—athletic is the appropriate way to describe it—the same lamp that vaults over the living room sofa today. Of course, the page is from a time before the apartment resembled some machine tuned to our rhythms, each piece of furniture apposite, driving toward something Lucy and I are much closer to now.

         I was perfecting my omelet then. For lunch, Lucy and I would eat eggs hunched at the coffee table. When we buttered our toast the table trembled. The glasses shook and whatever we were drinking sloshed onto the veneer, washing it from caramel to putty.

         “Enough!” one of us would cry.

We would exclaim often, frustrated at the furniture. We lived among things we wanted to replace, things so out of step with our idea of a home that they were invasive. The particleboard desk, even sequestered in its nook, cast a deceptive air over one end of the living room. And the credenza was simply untenable. Its cabinet concealed a crude gouge, like an itinerant hiding an unsavory past. The product of soft wood and sloppy handling, etc.

I looked for alternatives. Each week five or six or ten catalogs appeared curled against the metal walls of our mail slot like waves bearing jetsam. A mail carrier once remarked, “You like to shop, or you just don’t know you can un-tick a box?” 

“We like the option of shopping,” I answered confidently, defensively. I clutched the slippery sheaf of mail.

But of course we didn’t subscribe. Were outsiders to have scrutinized our catalogs (they did not), they would have thought we were schizophrenic or prone to fits of after-dark shopping, urged on by impulse and Ambien. At the time, though, I relished the possibilities. Piled on that crude desk were pieces of every style, prices high and low, materials authentic and synthetic. I sifted. More than once Lucy came over and rubbed my back. “What’s wrong with your face?” she would say and I would point to an armoire, broad and taupe; I would point to a plant stand shaped like an I-beam stretched the wrong way and marked Hot Deal.

There were glamorous catalogs—I called them journals—that ran eighty-five pages. They were printed on heavy stock and perfect bound. They contained essays on décor and the histories of those societies to which the collections paid homage, authored by advanced degree holders. Lucy might set a journal on our shaky coffee table, in lieu of an art book, I suppose, where it would sit for a few days. The pieces were so far beyond our budget that the journals were good for little else. For a week we displayed an issue touting outdoor chaise lounges with heavy stone wheels, designed to call attention to a marvelous technology commonly taken for granted. Each chaise cost more than three thousand dollars. We’ve never had a backyard.

Then there were the zines, slim mailers that were scratchy to the touch or reeked of dyes. Some were printed on leaves as light and slick as Bible paper. The zines promoted brands we’d never heard of, when they were branded at all. Businesses with no phone numbers, with webpages that breached for a season and then disappeared beneath the surface of an error message. I recall a twelve-pager that featured a spring/summer collection produced, advertised, and made available for purchase solely, I believe, for our benefit. Not that we recognized it then. The staging was—to speak generously—avant-garde: a couch laden with pastries, its crushed velvet seat obscured by delicate crusts. Whether or not the furniture was intended for us, it was too strange. It was not—at least, not then—furniture with which we hoped to live. One chair was seatless and another nothing more than a ball upholstered with pilled fabric. I flipped through the mailer and dropped it in the bin, then found ink smeared on my fingertips.

From where I sit today, on a barstool that conforms perfectly to my figure, it’s all clear. We hoped—valiantly!—to evade compromise of any kind. We hoped to live with things that satisfied us. A chair we couldn’t afford wouldn’t do and neither would a chair resembling something coughed up by a very large cat.

There was opportunity in every next page of every catalog. As the sheets rustled beneath my fingertips, this ritual of maybe firmed up, like albumen in a hot pan. My daily Surya Namaskar. I might wince at a clumsy magazine rack, take offense at its price, then consider where it could fit. I transposed a pool blue sideboard from a sprawling downtown loft into our living room. There was little to show for my practice. Still the wobbly coffee table, the marred credenza.

The vintage store opened just as I started to lose faith. I was busy with eggs when Lucy charged into the kitchen to apprise me, is how I remember it. “Vern, the cinderblock building.” She spoke through gasps. Butter spattered in the pan. “The display window has a tulip chair—or something like it—with this terrible green seat. And across from it one of those benches that belong in a waiting room for, like, a dentist with a good eye. Things we recognize, I mean.” She described a vinyl banner rigged to the store’s façade. She nudged me in the ribs. “Maybe we can toss some of the old mail on the desk.”

         “Maybe we can toss the desk.” I felt a rush as I said it. The laminate wrapping the desk’s edge had begun to peel, revealing a sticky cross section that brought to mind static on an old television set.

         Lucy smiled. She pointed to the stovetop and said I was improving. I looked down at an omelet that would make Monsieur Pépin cry.

At the store, I touched the furniture, gave the pieces hearty pats to test their sturdiness. I might walk up to something, pat it twice, then survey the grain of its wood or leather, depending. I might inhale deeply. Sometimes I coughed up dust but often I simply stood, the smell of some old object coating my nostrils. If we asked, the shop owner would divulge a piece’s history—or, I should say, some detail she’d deemed desirable. Most preciously, Lucy and I told ourselves, the furniture was attainable and sensible. Of course, it had already been attained, by people for whom it must have, at some point, made sense.

Following the grand opening (an affair replete with bunting and streamers but lacking discounts), we shirked hobbies. I continued my pursuit of the perfect egg principally because it was convenient—we must eat—though with diminished vigor. In a spare hour before dinner or a party at a friend’s, Lucy would say, “We can go to the exhibition,” or, “We can see what’s new.” On one trip, a replica of Sottsass’ mirror beckoned. I looked at our reflection and pointed to Lucy’s collar where it was turned up in the back. “Stop,” she told me, slipping her arm around my waist. She pulled us close together. This has always been her preferred public intimacy. We looked at ourselves until her eyes shifted to trace the frame. “I hadn’t seen one in person but this looks too pink, too saturated.” She was right, the rippled frame burned magenta. “It’s cloying.”

“Lascivious,” I said.

“We look ruddy. Like, whoever duped it just had to give it their own twist, and now you can’t even see yourself right.”

Still, we celebrated having looked a week later, when a shelving system occupied the wall where the mirror had leaned.  An index card stationed on the dry bar claimed the unit to be authentic Vitsoe. The lacquered shelves stretched deep into the store, longer than any wall in any home I’ve set foot in.

For all of the turnover, the things in the store were never the right ones.

“Imagine this in the nook,” I said, gripping the corner of some heavy, elegant console table. The thought made me giddy and discouraged.

“Like a stallion in a hen house,” Lucy agreed.

“Some people would force it.”
        “They would be desperate—or shortsighted. ‘It’s what’s here, might as well,’ they’d say and force it.”

No. For all our browsing, we accrued only tchotchkes: a brass wine bottle opener of remarkable craftsmanship and vulgar design; a series of glass shapes labeled sculpturettes; a set of coasters on which were depicted, in varying artistic styles, toasting practices from around the world; a second set of coasters, enameled, in the form of green pimiento stuffed olives. We bought a beautiful suede umbrella, totally superfluous, and hung it on a coat tree near our front door for everyone to see. Guests commented on these objects. Lucy and I developed a reputation as people who curate our stuff.

“Thank you,” we would say, nodding, sitting on the bulky couch that had reared Lucy’s cousins. A gift from her aunt, who, downsizing, offered us the couch and then a cardboard box containing three cervical collars, still in their packaging.

The zines surged after we started visiting the store. Sometimes twelve in a day. One afternoon I opened the mail slot and the waxy sheets cascaded to the lobby’s tiled floor. I squatted and pushed the slim catalogs into a heap. Then, still crouched, I opened one on a picture of a lamp that arched like a fly ball. Its head was trained on a carpet littered with small metal cones that made heavy divots in the pile. They reflected slashes of light against the walls of the room. The words Easy To Clean were stamped over the ad copy. When I got back to the apartment, I cut out the page and hung it on our refrigerator.

         Throughout the evening I found myself staring at the page. I examined, first, the lamp’s cartoonish arm. I traced it with my finger, I entertained its physics. On a later viewing I scrutinized the cones. They rested too heavily on the carpet, glowed harshly—unnaturally bright, even beneath the lamplight—as if each small form concealed something sacred. I rose after midnight and sipped at a cool glass of water, taking in the otherworldly scene from the dim glow of the street. As if through a dream, it communicated a message.

         In the morning I whisked eggs. On my laptop, Julia Child agitated a pan. The eggs capitulated and, in seconds, folded themselves into an omelet.

         “Spry,” Lucy commented. When I turned I saw her looking at the fridge. “Where’s this from?”

         “There’s an address at the bottom.”

She leaned forward and laughed. The web address sprawled the width of the page. The slim volume I yanked it from was brandless.

“It can’t really look like that, right? It’s like a bowling ball tied to a noodle.”

“I think it’s graceful,” I said, “like a leap.” I whisked the eggs some more then tossed a knob of butter into the hot pan. “It’s affordable.”

“Cheap or not, the way it hangs is . . .” She trailed off and slouched. “Grotesque? Like, what’s it made out of, to do that?”

On the screen, Julia dealt with the next batch of eggs. She shifted her wrist and the eggs responded. They changed states irreversibly, transformed into something satisfying.

“I think it’s a little unbelievable. I don’t dislike it exactly, but, even if we were sitting here with—whoever happened to be over, it could be anyone, is my point—would they believe it?”

“If it lit the room they would,” I said. Lucy shrugged. “I’m not married to it. I just wanted to look at it for a while.”

I slipped the eggs into the pan and with the spatula traced a curve through the liquid, imitating the lamp’s arm. I was rapt. As I stood at the stove watching the eggs firm, stirring and pulling them inward, I could think of nothing else. It was a reaction, like Lucy’s skepticism, that I now associate with the lamp’s suitability.

         A day later, a four-pager dedicated to a single product, a low table. Svelte, like a ray, its perimeter was gently curved, almost blurred as if in motion. Each page featured a photograph of the table from a different angle. In each senseless image, its surface was garnished with a mound of postage stamps, some flitting away, like leaves clicking off the roof of a speeding car. I took down a wedding invitation and taped the entire pamphlet to the refrigerator, next to the lamp.

“It looks incapable of wobbling, which is a point in its favor,” Lucy said. We were walking to the store. “Like a jet. Steady.”

         “It could work. It feels fresh.” Fresh is how I thought of the pieces then. Though today I’d say right or correct is just as accurate.

         Lucy stuck out her lip. She nodded.

         We wandered into the store and paused at the end of an aisle where a Hoosier cabinet stood laden with cookware. Lucy reached past a stack of enameled mugs and turned the knob on the sifter. There was a metal-on-metal sound and the bin let go a faint gasp of flour. I looked over my shoulder, expecting someone to reprimand us. When I turned back Lucy was holding up a heavy gauge aluminum pan. She turned it so I could see the bottom.

         “A Stanish?” I asked, not quite believing it.

         “This is the one, right?” she asked. “What that guy took with him.”

         “Well, stole, really,” I said, taking the pan from her and running my thumb around its thick, flat rim. “What Jasper Goedoier stole and took with him and worked over a camp stove for, like, a month.” I started to sweat. My work on the omelets had been inspired by Goedoier, a cook who, frustrated, having decided that none of what was around appealed to him, stole a Stanish pan and left his job for a county park. He cooked omelets out of a tent for four or five weeks. When he returned, he said the experience gave him perspective. He reached minor fame as something magazine features called an egg savant. They always included a photo of him with a shaved head and beatific expression, then printed some words about success on his terms.

         “We have to take it—buy it, I mean,” Lucy said.

         I walked around the shop gripping the handle, cradling the frying pan close to my chest whenever I leaned to examine something, an amber ashtray (I didn’t smoke), a telephone bench (of course we had no landline). I bent to look at the mirrored shelf of a bar cart and the pan knocked against the cart’s guardrail. A moment later a man turned the corner. He wore a loosely knit sweater covered in cat hair, with a run near the hem. In one hand he held a box of ant traps.

         “Can I help you?” he said. We’d seen him here before, shifting furniture and grunting. Before we could answer he took a water bottle from his pocket and, tucking the box of traps under his arm, drank. Almost immediately he began coughing and water ran down his chin.

         We watched him for a moment and Lucy, stifling a laugh, pulled a tissue from her bag. The man shook his head then wiped his face on his sleeve.

When he stopped choking he excused himself.

         “Are you an associate here?” she asked.

         “The chief associate, you could say.” He waved further into the shop, toward the office. “I’m married to the owner. Is there anything particular you had in mind? I see you’re admiring our antique bar cart. That’s solid brass there and, over there, crocodile leather wrapped around the handle. I oiled the wheels myself.” He massaged his throat.

         “We’re just looking today,” I said reflexively.

“Well, tell me what you like and I can recommend something to look at,” he said. “I’m sure one of our pieces will work for you; everything we have’s worked out for someone, you know.”

Lucy gave a loud sigh and told him we’d just take the pan, rapping a knuckle on the Stanish where I held it snug against my stomach.

         When we reached our apartment building Lucy veered toward the mailboxes, key in hand. She swung open the door to the mail slot.

         “Oh!”

         “What?” I asked.

         She stepped back holding a single, slim catalog. I inspected the slot, as if she might have missed some five or six other pieces of mail.

         “Go ahead,” she said.

         I turned the pages, past pieces of pottery adrift in a gradient, past a bookshelf cast from a single piece of material, meandering in on itself like a lazy river viewed from above. On the last page was a barstool. It propelled itself upward from our carpet on long, slender legs. Our coffee table, cantankerous and askew, huddled below the stool’s seat and behind the stool lay Lucy’s aunt’s couch, looking enervated. Outside the window, though, was not our street, but a lawn on which loomed a rusted harrow.

         We stared at the image of our living room, confused but not perturbed. It took a moment for me to grasp that we—Lucy and I specifically—had been granted an option. As if our perseverance, our staunch unwillingness to accept any of those unsatisfactory things sold in the catalogs and even at the vintage store, qualified us for a few fragments of our home: this stool or the pieces stuck to the refrigerator, maybe. And while we never discussed it I believe Lucy understood this, too. She didn’t ask any questions or worry for our safety but grunted and said, “Why wouldn’t they know? Anyway, the fabric looks durable.”

The last time we walked into the store the owner and a couple of customers were standing around a refectory table.

“The previous owner cared for precision,” the proprietor said, resting a manicured hand on the wooden tabletop. “He was a blind piano tuner, now retired.”

The customers nodded gravely. “He must have tuned by ear,” said one of them, a woman pinching a battered Ziploc baggie that held some sort of rind.

“With great precision.”

Farther in the shop, there was a sacrificial looking plinth made of solid marble. On top, Le Corbusier’s lounge marked the contour of a human. Across from this display was a media console with tambour doors, which served as a platform for a homely chair from the piano tuner’s dining set. From each piece of furniture hung a bright orange tag, twisting lazily.

I ran my knuckles across the woven cane door of a nearby cabinet. “I think this is falling apart,” I said. The cane was yellowed and dry; it crackled at my touch. I turned and watched Lucy squat before the media console.

“Doesn’t this look like a fire hazard?”

“What?” she said, her head in the console. She emerged and followed my hand to the cane cabinet.

“Light a candle near it and the whole building’ll burn down,” she said. “It’s drab.”

Summoned by our critique, the chief associate appeared from behind a bookcase. He wore the same sweater. It was free of cat hair, though the run had grown. “Well, it’s about context,” he said. “It’s from a warmer climate. You see, the previous owner was something of a traveler and picked this up abroad. In his milieu, it fit in perfectly.”

We said nothing. From the front of the shop, we heard the owner praising the dull table.

The man drew very close to the cane cabinet. As if he were speaking to it, he said, “Appreciate the detailed fisheye pattern of the weave. Now, of course here, among these pieces—great as they are, it’s a mix, I’ll admit—it’s so abstracted. But in the proper space it would sing.”

He turned and looked at us hopefully. His forehead, milky pale, shone with sweat.

It looked like it would croak and ask for a glass of water. I said, “I’m not sure our apartment’s the venue—”

“Ah, but it could be! I’m restoring a rattan seating set downstairs, another phenomenal weave. The pieces would make for an adventurous display. You know, you’ve ventured out and stumbled upon—paradise, palm trees and beaches. You’re importing paradise into your home.”

“An adventurous display of wicker?” Lucy said.

“Right,” said the man, discouraged. He pulled a rag from his beltloops and wiped his forehead.

Lucy gestured to the plinth. “Do you have a coffee table that’s—that weighs less than a ton?”

“Those clean, severe edges,” the associate began, unable to help himself. But Lucy cut in. “It makes me think of an altar, pagan rituals.”

“I’m not sure the floor can handle it,” I added. “It might collapse.”

“Right.” The man passed the rag across his forehead again. “Just over here.”

As we walked, he volunteered histories of the inventory.

“This spindle headboard belonged to a doctor of erudite and grisly diseases,” he called back. “The physician slept four hours a night, claiming the spindles’ fluted design permitted superior airflow and a more restful—er—rest.

“A shoe rack once installed in a dancer’s closet, equipped to store professional footwear. Perfect for a burgeoning artist.”

“Think they’re dead now?” I said to Lucy. Ahead of us, the associate gagged. He avoided this type of detail.

Like the journals that had clogged our mail slot, the man was a fount of words. With an auctioneer’s patter he spouted details about each piece, its past owners, how it featured in their lives. The wealthy and influential—those who he believed we admired—flirted with the flamboyant, the garish, while humble teachers, mechanics, clerks aligned themselves with works of understated beauty. Not a word of what he said was true, maybe. Craning his sweaty neck, he called back to us lie after lie, maybe. But it all could have been true. Here, the polished and stacked refuse accepted his provenance.

As he expounded, the rag, now slung across his neck, grew darker at its middle. I tuned him out. I focused on the churn, the continuum of stuff. I saw everything in the store heaped. Item by item it moved, not a collapse but a flow—a torrent. An enormous paper lantern was swept up, no longer viable. Its warm glow rushed to the center. Other things tumbled to shore, desperate to be seen and purchased. Viewed this way I knew nothing here would fit us, that whatever we might buy here, design and origin notwithstanding, would be its own sort of compromise.

“Here’s one you might prefer. Much lighter, ethereal by comparison. Teak construction. Custom crafted in the sixties.” He wiped his forehead.

Lucy and I stared at the table in silence. It had a rectangular top and a shelf formed by several slats. It was identical to the unsteady centerpiece of our living room.

“Does it have a story?” Lucy said, looking crestfallen.

“Oh, of course. It’s a piece that’s undergone a rather cosmopolitan transformation. The woman who sold it to us—a corporate president or vice president, someone with a title, you know, an absolute tiger—”

“We bought ours online,” Lucy interrupted.

The associate turned to me and smiled. “Well, you won’t find anything like that here.”

When we left the store each piece of the piano tuner’s set was marked with a sign that read Sold.

         At the apartment, Lucy rushed to the kitchen. She pulled the pamphlet down from the fridge and set to ordering the low, winglike table.

We shed the old furniture piece by piece, buying what was presented to us in those slim, inky zines. We measured time in shipping windows. Eight to twelve business days. Four to six months.

         As our home metamorphosed, the catalogs dwindled. First to go were the journals; I believe someone finally explained to the manufacturers we were not their market. Then the zines, though more slowly. With each new purchase fewer catalogs reached our mail slot. But the content of what did arrive grew more suited to us. It grew, Lucy conjectured, more focused. The senders directed our attention toward the next acquisition. They maintained their faith in us; when months passed between orders, they did not ramp up to the old volume. We were believers now. They sent us mailers at steady intervals, gentle reminders of what lay ahead, what we were to pursue next.

         I’ve been warned off eggs, the toll on my cholesterol too great to manage. But I still prepare omelets for our guests in the Stanish pan. I watch them savor each bite and I feel the wholeness of the moment. And when they finish, they look up, examine the furniture. They tell Lucy and me we have a home like no other.

A.G. Trimes lives and writes in New York. His stories have been published in The Columbia Review, Clarion, and The Rialto Books Review, among other publications.