Interior Design (8 page)

Another client lavished a fortune on redesigning his apartment after the recent deaths of his three dearest friends. A quiet, alarmingly thin man who liked to crumple cellophane wrappers and paper cups, he said during our first consultation, “I dream that I'm walking along these rained-out gullies and crevices and it's funny, I wake up crying but I feel relieved.” He wanted his apartment to resemble erosion: the corners of baseboards split apart, a comforting wall of rubble, bookshelves artfully eaten away as if by termites, lampshades carefully ripped to create disjunct slashes of light. All this static decay both commemorated his losses and hinted at an end to them, just as he hoped his own disease would stop at a certain point and go no further.

Almost every one of my projects became a magazine spread, and I was much in demand. But in all of these homes I was a stranger—I helped my clients find their comfort yet it was never mine. Attempting to save others, I began to suspect, was not the same as saving oneself. Something in me still distrusted furniture, as if my father were a noxious, invisible wallpaper waiting to clash with whatever interior I might choose for myself. So I lived in a studio apartment with the barest of essentials—table, chair, bed—that would confound even my conforming sisters, and I was resigned to this spartan shelter because of my recurring dream.

In this dream I was always floating in a vast and empty darkness, my body flat as if lying on my back. I'd been floating for quite a long time, it seemed, and as I drifted aimlessly through this absence of architecture I wondered what patterns my body made, what involuntary dance I was creating. The longer I levitated, like some buoyant vagabond, the more I began to suspect that this floating endlessly was my own form of oblivion. But whatever my fears, I continued to drift.

That strange, characterless space seemed to accompany me through the day, seeping into my thoughts at any moment. Why not define that emptiness, I asked myself, why not design my own dream? I began a little game of mentally collecting furniture, imagining that each piece patiently anticipated a release inside me, just like eggs in the ovaries. I produced a Louis Quinze chaise voyeuse to sit on as I floated, I materialized a hovering halogen lamp, though its small circle of light couldn't possibly penetrate the vast darkness. I felt like my sisters playing with their doll- house, trying to do their best with the space given them, though instead of tiny walls I had an infinite layout, and I conjured up arrangements until I had not a room but an entire home spread out in that nothingness.

It was those private designs that led me to the secret history of objects: they're all the products of desire. The first chair didn't just appear like some mushroom rising out of the floor. Instead, long ago someone, somewhere, thought, “I'm tired,” and only then was a chair built, its wooden existence fitting the need. In the same way, the thought, “I'm cold,” conceived walls and a roof. We actually turn ourselves inside out and find comfort in what we've imagined. If the guitar, the violin, the piano are extensions of us, created to give voice to our longings, then furniture is no less musical, though its song is silent. Lounging on a divan in my dreamy home, I realized that if every object around us is a bit of mind, made material, then my father was guilty of lobotomizing the homes of his clients.

But with that thought my mother suddenly appeared from behind a wardrobe with her ambiguous smile. Then Phyllis and Patricia arrived, their shoulders hunched as they tried out a bar stool, a rocker, which seemed to shrink at their touch. And when I heard my father's thick footsteps—on
what
, in that void?—I let everything vanish and I was back to floating, safe once again.

*

And then I met Frederick. When I entered his office he was jotting down a note, perched on the edge of his seat: his body cantilevered over the desk and casually defying gravity, the fingers of one hand holding him steady while he wrote with the other. I wanted to see how he'd keep that up—observing my clients' relationships to their furniture was always important to me—so when he glanced up and said, “Sorry, just one moment,” I quickly replied, “Please, don't let me disturb you,” and I marched over to a chair.

I looked around: the typical investment counselor's office, computer terminals and telephones the dominant features. On the shelf was a photo of him and a beautiful woman who was obviously a wife, and I was oddly pleased to see there were no children. She was short, maybe three-quarters of his height, I couldn't help thinking. How tall
is
he? I wondered, wishing I'd let him stand up, but he was still precariously balanced and scribbling away. Here's a man on the edge, I thought, and I didn't mind admitting to myself I was right when he finally put down the phone, sat back, and immediately announced he'd just been divorced. I couldn't help gaping at the photograph—how sweet that he still kept it—and he caught me and glanced over too, a furtive, lingering look. I sympathized, knowing what it was like to be gripped by the insistent past, and I thought he was touchingly hesitant when he said, “I have a new house. It's small, but elegant, and … uh, empty. I'm living out of an apartment now. Is it true, from what I've heard of your work, that I'll have to dream up this new home of mine?”

I started in with my usual speech about personal, continuing environments. Frederick nodded, taking a note or two, and he seemed so alone behind his desk, so abandoned. Suddenly I couldn't concentrate: my secret cache of furniture was emptying itself inside me. A Philippe Stark table, a Bank of England swivel chair, octagonal marble tiles, an Alsatian blanket chest and more tumbled out into empty vistas, impeding the responses I made to Frederick's questions, though he didn't seem to notice. Oh god, I thought, what'll I do when my family starts to climb over this jumble? He rose, thankfully, before those apparitions could arrive and he said, “I really think we can work together.” We shook hands, and somehow I was able to notice we were the same height, a perfect match.

But we couldn't begin designing his house because his imagination locked up. All day he carried a blank notepad, unable to snatch a stray idea. Each morning he woke with a vision of nothing, and though he tried setting his alarm randomly for different times in the night, he was never able to snare a single dream. In our meetings in his office he recounted these difficulties in a very businesslike manner, almost as if I were taking dictation, while he tried to avoid glancing over at that damn photo on his shelf.

In an effort to unblock him, we agreed on a tour of his new house. We walked through his echoing rooms, all that bare space so fraught with possibility, yet nothing came to him. “What do
you
dream?” he finally asked me in frustration. I stood there, stirred up by the seductive tensility of the empty room, and I told him about that vast, dreamy void I floated in at night, and as he listened I was suddenly certain about the cause of his trouble: in his mind he was still married to his ex-wife. She was haunting his new house, occupying space that just wasn't hers, and I decided right there to become a home-wrecker: how else could Frederick's house become his own unless I chased her away?

I leaned a little too close to him. “It's warm in here,” I said, and I started taking off my sweater. I could feel it pull my blouse up a bit, exposing my navel, a little circle of darkness to set him off. Frederick reached over for me, and when his hand circled my own I knew he could do whatever he wished.

Afterward, I lay on my back beside him on the hard wooden floor. His hand played with me lazily and I kept dripping: already we were marking our territory. “Tell me that dream again,” he whispered. Lying there, I felt as if I
were
floating, and as I spoke I imagined Frederick above me again, my eyes scanning his face and the ceiling, and then I knew what could be done for the lighting in the room: bury the lights in the ceiling and space them to echo the traffic pattern below, so they could be turned on and off by passing feet. I saw us walking through the room, creating a path of light.

*

We moved into Frederick's empty house, intending to design rooms as we needed them. It was the first time I allowed myself to gather in the hidden signals, and my mind was inflamed with possible order. And although Frederick was still blocked, there was something about his helplessness before an empty space that drove me wild. So
I
began to fill up the house. Every idea I suggested delighted him, and he said, “That's fine, let's try it,” as if our intuitions were identical.

I wanted our bedroom to be my dream, or
our
dream, since Frederick had adopted it. I wanted us to feel we were floating in the air. I took out the windows and replaced them with glass bricks, the thick panes filtering in a hazy, self-contained light like no other. All the walls and the ceiling were painted sky blue, though scumbled in places with white powder for a hint of cirrus, and in one corner the blue gradually deepened to navy—acknowledging the possibility of storm, but easily confining it. Above the turquoise carpeting all the furniture was white—the two wardrobes, the night tables, and the bedframe that seemed to hover on its thin legs—and every edge was rounded, like a solid ooze of cloud. Against the white headboard nestled blue pillows over a white quilt, which in turn covered blue sheets, so when we clambered over each other in bed we kicked up a convulsion of sky and cloud.
We
were the moving parts that made the house breathe and change.

So I finally allowed myself to empty my inner warehouse. I purposely cluttered every room with furniture of all varieties and epochs, a style I secretly titled Cornucopia. I gave in to the warmth of wood, the fluted metal edges of high tech, the plush comfort of a velvet seat, and the laying out of plans gave me a sexual pleasure, each arrangement an inducement to a tryst. On the walls I hung up paintings, prints, and photographs of furniture and nothing else, echoing that flood of furniture when I first met Frederick. I matted and framed them at slight, odd angles that only the most acute eye would unambiguously notice. I liked the tension of the pictures firmly on the walls and yet seeming only momentarily suspended, as though they were about to float down and take their places in the rooms.

This sense of expectancy reminded me of the women in India who daily decorate the earth in front of their houses with elaborate designs of rice powder, the interwoven lines being offerings to the gods. I thought colored chalk would do nicely for our house, though a drawing a day was too much. I had no gods to propitiate, I simply wanted to exemplify the shifting moods of our house, and only when one pattern wore off or was rained away would I start another. Once I began an elaborate motif of numbers—large and small, in every possible color—to influence Frederick's fortune into a limitless success. He tried to help and we knelt on the porch together, our hands dirty with colored chalk. Frederick grew annoyed with himself for his awkward sketching, which he couldn't improve despite my helpful hints. Eventually I eased him out of sight of the street and we smeared each other's faces with our chalky hands until we were harlequin twins, our improvised masks making us familiar strangers, and we made a ferocious, technicolor love.

*

Blissfully domestic, all day I transformed the house into a dreamscape we could walk through wide-awake, and in the evenings I waited for my man to come home and be amazed. But I worried about Frederick. He had stopped trying to remember his dreams. I couldn't understand it—in certain areas he suffered no lack of invention. I was afraid he might resent my success at filling empty spaces, so I kept trying to goad his imagination.

It was October and I had just sketched a giant stadium on the porch, with baseballs flying out—all of them homers for our team. While we watched the Series, a huge bowl of popcorn between us, I said casually, “Hon, did you know there's a country where hosts polish their chairs incredibly carefully, so when a visitor sits on one its smoothness rubs off and makes him a good guest?”

“Shhh,” he said, “a three and two pitch.”

I waited until the strikeout before trying again. “Y'know,” I said, stretching back a little, hoping he'd glance at me, “I read somewhere there are people in Africa who believe your soul lives in your chair. No one else can sit there. And when you're not sitting on the chair you tip it over. So your soul can't be stolen.”

Frederick kept his mouth stuffed with popcorn so he wouldn't have to answer. I knew he was annoyed, but I couldn't help myself, I flicked off the game with the remote control.

“Imagine that,” I said, “a chair isn't just a chair, it's what people
think
a chair is.”

He grabbed the control away from me and mumbled through his popcorn, “Well, that's certainly
one
way to look at it.”

That stopped me. I always told him there were many ways to see something, but it was true that I wanted him to see it
my
way. He knew the contradiction I was caught in. He flipped a kernel in the air and caught it in his mouth, enjoying my discomfort.

All those happy rooms in the house slowly transformed into traps with invisible springs, waiting to be set off by my reproachful suggestions and Frederick's sullen resentment. He didn't want to be a disappointment, so he was trying to make me one. I thought of my mother, enduring too much contradiction with her slight smile that was impossible to read. I wouldn't let
that
happen to me. I fought back.

So we argued over even the silliest things. And then came that evening when, while washing dishes—though I suspected it wasn't my turn—I told Frederick how my father blamed my mother for having girls. Suddenly, incredibly, we were disagreeing over what men and women were most like, the letter Y or the letter X! This was somehow connected with the X and Y chromosomes, though at that point we could have argued over the letters G and K. “C'mon, people are like the Y,” he said, sitting restlessly at the kitchen table. “When we're born, we don't know what sex is, and we grow up together through childhood like the base of the Y. But look, at puberty we become different and split off, we move farther apart the older we get.” His feet tapped at the floor tiles in a most annoying fashion.