Interior Design (9 page)

“No, no, no,” I said, “you're all wrong, we're like the X. Our sex makes us different right from the start, so we're like the opposite bottom legs of the X. But that difference attracts us, and when we make love, we're joined together in the middle. Then we move apart until we make love again.”

He wouldn't agree. I hated that—I wanted us to be the same letter, and though the X and Y are right next to each other in the alphabet it was no consolation. “X, X, X!” I screamed at him, red-faced like a child, and I slapped a sponge and soap bar into the dishwater, just for emphasis. I had come to that. Frederick stood up, and his look of contempt forced me to slam the kitchen cabinets. I thrilled to the sound of the spaghetti and cereal boxes shuddering inside. Frederick almost spoke, but then he turned to leave, tripping over his chair. He gasped and they both tumbled down.

I stood at the sink and watched him lying there beside the overturned chair: I waited for him to give it a good kick, to shout at it, to smash it in anger. But he simply rubbed his shoulder. I kept waiting, until he began to pull himself up. Then I rushed over and we made our usual, insufficient apologies, enough to last us another evening.

Later that night, after a half hour of ineffectual clutching, we turned out the bedroom lights and I felt that the ominous patch of navy blue I'd consigned to one corner had grown into the surrounding dark. I lay there listening to Frederick's satisfied breathing. I tried so hard to imagine his hand rising to strike the chair, but his fist kept dissolving into the air until I finally fell asleep.

*

The next morning I woke in bed alone—Frederick had already left for the office. Furious at him for sneaking off like that, I kicked away at the clinging sheets, felt the satisfaction of my anger releasing, and then I understood how terribly dead Frederick's world must be. He didn't assume in his deepest self that a chair was somehow alive and could be hurt. Punching it was a childish but endearing form of revenge he was incapable of pursuing, and what I had thought were just contrary arguments were actually his most personal way of seeing. The true essence of our house had escaped him: for Frederick, furniture was just furniture.

Then everything in the room became dead for me as well and shed its invisible skin: the carpet was mere tufted wool, the bed- frame only painted pine, the blue walls an ordinary acrylic blend. And though this lasted only a few seconds, it was unbearable. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I was once again surrounded by resonant expanses of blue and white. But I was no longer floating. I was falling, and I didn't know where I'd land.

I couldn't see Frederick again. I was afraid he would infect me with that hidden deadness of objects. Worst of all, I realized I had done something I'd tried to avoid all my life: I had imposed an interior. I had forced Frederick to live with an alien vision and I actually hoped he would eventually tear it all down, though what he tore down would be me. Everything ends, I thought bitterly, even houses collapse. I fingered the white quilt and remembered my teenage days of sexual discovery in a thick woods, romping on a leafy bed among empty beer cans and old condoms within a scattered stone foundation—all that was left of an abandoned house. In a way, those exuberant scramblings had briefly made it a home again. Would young kids someday find a haven here?

I knew I had to leave, though I was everywhere in that house. I knocked over all the furniture so my soul couldn't be stolen, but I was afraid that when Frederick returned he might simply set it all upright again, merely perplexed and angry. So before I left I crawled about the porch and drew my face again and again: in sorrow, pain, anger, reproach, and fear, each face partially superimposed on the other like a chain of dismaying portraits before his doorstep. I imagined him arriving home and, seeing what I'd drawn, know instantly that I'd left. I wanted him distraught, unaware he was scuffing up my faces as he rushed inside, only later realizing that he'd tracked chalk all over the floor. And when he discovered what he'd done, would he see those smears as my sadness, would they seem more than mere chalk?

*

I returned to my nearly empty apartment and surveyed its comforting, spartan denial; then I pulled out the phone and slept.

My dream had changed. My body was no longer weightless, airy. I was plunging through that limitless darkness, the air pressing against my back. I fell for so long I grew accustomed to the resistance of the wind and barely noticed it. But somewhere in my descent I worried about where I was falling to. Perhaps the pressure I felt wasn't the wind. What if it was the ground? Perhaps I had already landed and was lying on my crushed back. In the complete darkness, how could I be sure? I could certainly try to move my outstretched arms, but I didn't want to finally know.

I remained still until I woke and saw the gray dullness of early morning light. I recognized across from me the outline of my bedroom window, recognized my heart's staggering beat like my own fleeing footsteps. I
have
landed, I thought, right where I'll always land, in my own room. I closed my eyes again but I still saw those same boundaries: the familiar walls and ceiling that will always face me, the same windows and door forever resisting my exit. How can I possibly escape my home when it's inside me?

And I'm not the only one who lives here: I'm bursting with accommodations for my daily, involuntary family reunion. My sisters, shorn of their current angry husbands and crowd of kids, skulk down a hall. My mother manages to find any unassuming corner, where she keeps to herself behind that maddeningly faint twist in her lips, harboring complexities I can't imagine, and I cannot animate her, I cannot make her speak. My father marches out of his room whenever he wants to command attention, trotting out his repertoire of contempt. “So, you finally inflicted yourself on someone's home,” he begins, but I don't have to listen further because I know those terrible words in advance—they're my own, I have them memorized. He's really me, my own harsh and unrelenting critic that I've given my father's face and voice. These phantoms aren't my family—they're familiar faces I've put on my perplexing, hidden impulses.

So I've decided to lie here and design myself a new life, with the freedom of one of those desert nomads who sews the skins of her goat herd to make the family tent. I can feel the thick thread, rough against my dark hands in the dry air, while my children play around me. And I imagine that when my husband and I make our night noises, our thrashing is echoed above by those taut skins skitting in the wind: with my eyes closed and swishing my hands against the bed sheet, I can believe I'm almost there. But first I have to evict my current occupants and empty the rooms, and I'm going to start with Frederick.

He should be the easiest to banish, having spent so short a time here, yet when I try to change his name, his height, his weight and face into someone less Frederick, I never succeed. I can't help returning to the room he occupies inside me. It's empty, with nothing on the walls, not even a window. On the floor is a box of colored chalks I've placed there to force him to imagine his room and sketch a chair against a wall, a sofa in the corner, even draw his own window and fill it in: maybe a city street with a luncheonette and gallery across the street, or a clutch of forest with a path leading into the shadows. But he draws nothing and, as always, he will not speak to me.

Though lately I've noticed Frederick fingering the chalks, and I'm certain that one day he will finally animate his room. When I come to visit there will be a bed drawn on the floor, and a smudgy figure within it left by his body where he slept. On the wall is a shelf, and on the shelf a photograph, though I will not be able to make out the details of the faces. There will also be a window, and a view: a star-filled evening sky, with the dim shadows of mountains on the horizon. His window will look so real he must have tried to force his way through it, because there will be chalk stains on his forehead almost indistinguishable from bruises. I will think that perhaps I misjudged him, perhaps he
had
thought of striking the chair and splintering it in rage and only restrained himself in embarrassment before me. Yet these are thoughts that are not good to think. I won't say one word to him, though he will stand there waiting, and when I leave his room he'll listen to my footsteps down the hall until they can't be heard. He'll wait for the silence to settle and then, if I am very lucky, when he opens the door I will let him make his escape.

Beauty Marks

Martin sits on the couch and stares at the papers scattered over the coffee table—it still feels strange writing under a roof instead of the sky in an open African courtyard. Barbara has long since gone off to bed, and maybe now he should take out his secret maps of the Isono farms, examine them. Instead he listens to the faint, familiar mysteries he hadn't known he'd missed: little snaps and disembodied groans from the wooden floors, a sudden whir in the refrigerator, a rush of water down the pipes from another apartment.

He picks up one of his pages and reads: “An Isono can't be given a field to farm until marriage, and one can't be married until initiated and ritually scarred.” Martin is certain it's too soon to make sense of this, even if his dissertation advisor
did
say to charge right in. The loops and curves of his handwriting might as well be abstract designs.

In the kitchen the dirty dishes in the sink lose some precarious balance and settle with a quick clatter. My job, Martin thinks, and he walks in and starts washing the evidence of Barbara's attempt at an African dinner. She'd even set a candle on the floor, its flicker evoking village firelight. The okra sauce had really hit the spot, but those balls of Bisquick were poor substitutes for white yams. Still, he'd eaten what he could without complaining, even though each bite made him think of Kwamla, lying wasted on that straw pallet in the village and waving away whatever food his wife, Yani, offered.

Sighing, Martin sets the last dish in the drainer. Outside, an occasional car passes with a soft growl through the sprawling university town. He's restless in these cramped rooms, and hungry. There's an all-night convenience store nearby, so he steps out the door and down the stairs.

Summer is really ending—instead of his body's sticky sweat he feels the unfamiliar rise of goosebumps. Enjoying the strange sensation, he steps quickly down the street, though soon he wishes he'd gone back for a jacket—rain is on the way, and the bare branches above him twist in the cold wind. A few homeless people—poor souls!—huddle under flapping newspapers in the dark alcove of a tobacco shop. They stare through him as he hurries by.

He's thoroughly chilled by the time he pushes open the glass door, the bell chiming behind him, and he walks down fluorescent-lit aisles, past dog food and canned ravioli, past chips of all persuasions. Stopping at the percussive purr of the coffee machine, he pours himself a cup, then slips a plastic-wrapped burger and a pouch of fries in the microwave—anything warm will do.

The oven beeps and he pulls the irradiated things out. Martin forces himself to eat the tough meat, the tasteless dry fries, and he scans the racks of tabloids. Gossip about the dead seems to be a theme this week: Elvis has married Natalie Wood, Ari and Jack have been fighting over Jackie since her arrival, Janis Joplin begs John to forget Yoko. Okay, Martin thinks, so what's an anthropologist to make of all this? The afterlife must be an unexpected hothouse: no rest for the dead, eternal job security for sleazy reporters.

Outside it's drizzling and even colder than before. Martin heads for home in a half-trot. Cars pass by on the wet pavement with a hissing glide, and he begins to run, hoping no patrol car will drive by to see a young man dashing away from a convenience store at night.

Back at the apartment the radiator squeals and grunts as if alive. Martin gently spreads an extra wool blanket over Barbara and slips into bed. She turns in her sleep, and Martin drapes an arm over her waist before drifting into a strange mixture of sleepy images: Kwamla, his face still round and healthy, sits in his mud house before a television, its screen hissing and crackling from bad reception. Martin is beside him, turning the dial for a clear channel, when a phone rings—the distant sound must come from the forest. Kwamla turns his worried face to Martin. “I'll be right back,” Martin promises. He runs to the edge of the thick brush and pushes his way through, because it's somehow very important that he find that phone before the ringing stops.

*

Barbara stirs against Martin, her legs snug against his, and she opens her eyes to a ceiling of white plaster, not thatch. Outside there's the whoosh of morning traffic instead of the pounding of wooden mortars and pestles. She breathes in the dry, heated air, closes her eyes again, and catches the last bit of her dream: Yani's dark face leaning so close and whispering a secret, though Barbara can't hear her, and as Yani's face fades Barbara wishes it had been Martin's—she still hasn't met him in any of her dreams since their return.

She pushes away the blankets. Martin moans sleepily and turns to her, his hair flattened against his head, eyes half open. He smiles and tickles the rise of her ribs.

“How late did you stay up?” she asks.

“Not too late. I jotted down some notes until I almost fell asleep in the chair.” His hand slinks up slowly to her breasts.

“What did you dream?”

Martin closes his eyes, appears to concentrate. “I can't remember.” He puts his fingers to his lips and whispers, “Hush.” Then he's above her, his face looming over hers, and Barbara imagines she's still asleep and dreaming his gentle motions.

For breakfast Martin serves an array of cereal, bacon, buttery waffles, more than she can eat. Watching him gobble down his eggs, Barbara marvels at how easily he's become an American again. She'd prefer sweetened corn porridge but keeps this to herself, knowing that last night's dinner wasn't a success. Maybe this morning would be a good time to write about Isono food taboos.