FURNITURE

The anticipation of delivery is impossible. Anxiety and caffeination knot the crevices of my gut. It is too late to reclaim the tiny fortune I have blown. Dust-bunnies skitter and I tumble into reverie. The four ultra seating modules materialize, knife-sharp edges sheathed in velvety grey-green fabric — the color-Nazi’s dub it “Overcast”.

My dream for months, a fevered hovering in the air, pale like a salmon’s belly, polished chrome legs a counterpoint to my carpet’s frenzied Persian geometry. I’m aroused by the pristine coolness, this lust delivering the entitled belonging of mid-century modernity.

Furniture can do that, can make you horny for living, jonesing for an experience that it can both contain and embody. It took me forever to commit: multiple visits to the intimidating showroom — like dates. I even took out a section of the sectional at Easter, a dalliance that brought me ever so close. Eventually, with finality, I called the clerk, fabric swatch clutched in my non-phone hand. I made it official, I proposed with a plastic card and a lump in my throat. And then, the wait: a torturous term of gestation, as each piece got built from scratch in a factory in Gardena, a short drive down the very same Five Freeway that gets me to the job that enables such an extravagant affair of the heart.

It is time for this new love — my passion is palpable. And yet, I cannot seem to let go of my heart’s discards, so wrong-sized for this house, for this life. One by one, the old pieces populate what had once been a garage, filthy and unused except as a place to cram the detritus of this old gypsy’s ridiculous follies. Post-renovation, it’s now “My Little Casita”— my aerie, bright and mirrored, floored with dappled linoleum cushioning the treadmill and barbells, massage table and altar, fantasies spiritual and carnal, made sacred in the fragrant breeze that flutters through the garden just outside.

This is the California I traveled so far to grab, oh, so fucking long ago. And what of those remnant days long past?…mere decorations for the hours of my youth? Like favorite songs, witnesses to a life — whether worth living, only time, more time will tell.

Against one wall, the authentic Hoosier cabinet I found on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn one golden February Saturday, its oak so dark and luminous, capped by a tapped-lead countertop that crowns a base: doored shelves, drawers and a pull-out bin, said to be for potatoes. A narrower piece perches, not affixed, atop the base to boast a pair of opposing leaded-glass doors. Smack-dab in the middle, another bin, smaller, no doubt for flour, so said the salesman, a curly-eared Hasid who had never been anywhere near Indiana. He claimed my Hoosier dated back to the 1890’s; of course, without provenance, but for 130 bucks, who cared? I needed the storage.

The Hoosier sits adjacent to an Empire-style bureau, faux of course, but noble and solid despite the peeling veneer. Carved curlicues on the massive front legs show visible grooves from the gnawing, back when my Springer Spaniel, Basil Rathbone, was an irrepressible puppy with a teething problem. How could I dispose of it, so emblematic of the wild oats of my youth, sown with coincidence and abandon on the fabled, cobbled trails of Greenwich Village in the hoary days of 1978? It fairly jumped out and grabbed me right there on Christopher Street, it bumped me as I stumbled drunk out of some gutterhole of a bar, beers and shots too countless to recall.

But remember I do, proof positive of the preposterous price of this piece: 75 dollars to a greasy-haired Hippie who hawked it: was it even his? Or was he just scamming this wasted fag? I hailed a cab, and stowed the drawers in the big back seat, tied its body to the roof, the hippie and the cabbie screaming furiously: Tie the godamned thing right, why doncha? I rode shotgun clutching the bureau out the window, all the way home to Chelsea — 20 bucks the price to the Puerto Rican who ran the Botanica on the ground floor to help me lug it up four flights, liked to kill us both. I wanted that very night to fold my socks and jeans and skivvies into that chest of drawers. Instead, I passed out.

My gaze finds the curves and edges of a harvest table, carved long and narrow decades ago: gargoyles and castles, vines and fruits twining upward toward the sun-pitted tabletop — memories oozing right out of the wood grain. Just there: it sits amidst rented luxury, that penthouse in DC, scored with Paul our very first morning from the want ads, the day we fled Manhattan — before our love expired. We laid out on this very table glorious spreads of exotic foodstuffs, love-drenched banquets that mimicked our respective Mediterranean bloodlines, his from Lebanon, mine from Italy.

We didn’t know how sour celebration would become. Don’t blame the table, which so beautifully held our culinary dance, his lamb kibbee, my Florentine tartar larded with anchovies; tabboule and orzo, grape leaves and veal bundles, and so it went, a culinary pas-de-deux, dueling desserts the feast’s careening culmination, so fat and sticky. Just like me, only I was sugared well before the guests arrived. As for the table, it longed to return to Pittsburgh, to my rich friend Tom’s ancestral homestead. First a loaner, then a keeper — and why not? Tom had too much as it was, and kept no replicas; the rich want only the real.

I want it too, I wanted it then, I wanted it all, beloved chattel with vivid living stored inside each drawer, each door impossible to shut, each scratch across the surface a wound, not festering, but not quite healed. I don’t imagine I’ll ever sell them, yank their precious bodies from here, this well-earned final resting place — mine perhaps, as well. Could I ever get enough?

The doorbell startles: delivery men await. I wipe my eyes and greet them, my breath constricted as they work. I slip a twenty to the lead man on his exit, then touch my finger to the box’s edge. They crave my blade inside their seams; they ache to open up, to reveal their unfurled narrative, the urgent dreams before us.
Suddenly, I am alone. No, not alone. There is furniture.