Chapter 10

My new house was finished, and it had many rooms, all of which needed furniture. The house had finished well, new life breathed into the antiquated structure. The first floor had a marvelous parquet floor, and the stained wooden beams supporting the second and third floors possessed a sort of patrician bearing. Though the architecture of the interior was novel enough, the pedestrian nature of the materials from which it was built gave the entire structure a continuity, so that the octogenarian brick walls and matched set of gleaming stainless steel ranges and microwaves and refrigerators met seamlessly through the medium of wooden beams and opaque glass that revealed only silhouettes like first impressions.
Maria and I went forth together to select the furnishings through which a building is made into a home, and it was the usual weary struggle that any large-scale commercial activity inevitably becomes. I had imagined that we would purchase furniture that bore some of the characteristics of the house itself: it would be fresh-faced, but its novelty would take the form of a reinterpretation of claw-footed Victorian sofas and the sort of chaise that seemed begging for a languid woman in a white dressing gown to lounge upon while reading some leather-bound books with gold leaf pressed into the lettering on its cover.
Maria was of a different mind, and flushed with the prospect of purchasing fine things for the first time in her life, she seemed determined to furnish the house with art deco pieces of perhaps dubious comfort but with an impeccable sense of form and line and color.
“What about this one?” she asked me, reclined on a nameless piece of furniture that may have born some relation to a sofa, if you used a little imagination. Its seat hugged the floor, and it was spectacularly wide. I sat down.
“It’s not bad. Does it come in any other colors, though? I’m not crazy about the color.”
“I think the orange is nice. It’ll look really good with the color of your floor.”
“I respectfully disagree.”
“Tragically, I don’t really care that much in this particular instance. Or really at all, as far as furniture is concerned.”
“Tyrant.”
“Deal with it.”
“But seriously, there’s a collection of fabric samples that are chained to the back of it. And I really, really, really don’t like the orange.”
“All right. If you insist.”
There was a moment of silence while we flipped through the swatches.
“What do you think? I really like that caramel color.”
“No. How brown do you want your house to be?”
“All brown, maybe. That way when we sit on the couch we can pretend that we live in a toilet.”
“Uh. I think that this kind of psychedelic print might look really nice. It would add some texture to the room, I think.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually. Really, as long as we don’t get the orange, the red, or the black, I’m pretty okay with whatever.”
“Well, let’s look around and see if they have the psychedelic version out on the floor.” So we did, but it was no where to be found. “Should we ask someone about it, do you think?”
“If you really want to get the couch. If you’re not sure, maybe we should look around at other stores and see if there isn’t something that you like more.”
“I think it’s really great, but it’s your house. Do you like it?”
“Well, it’s not exactly what I had in mind when I was imagining the furniture, but I do really like it. If you really like it, I think that we should get it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s just a fucking couch, right? It’s comfortable, it’s not an eyesore, so it meets my criteria.”
“Let’s go find someone, then.”
It was at this point that we encountered one of the very important principles of salesmanship, in which the salesman is obsequiously ever-present if you are just looking around and browsing, but if you actually need their help, they are nowhere to be found. The store was large, and full of parodies of domesticity, furniture arranged to mimic a home, but in ways that created only the image of a home, with none of its character, decorated by the inexorable will of an inventory, a sort of disenchanted decorative subsistence. Some of arrangements bore the mark of a jaded hand, little collections of black and gray and funereal wall hangings and ridiculous table settings.
We walked laps around the store for about ten minutes, and perhaps all of the salespeople happened to be at the opposite end of our circuit the entire time, but there was a fairly considerable delay between our decision to find someone to help us and the actual realization of that desire. The woman that we found was very petite, and wore a bright yellow bandana over her hair. The heels of her shoes clicked very loudly on the floor of the store, like gunshots or tack hammers.
“Do you need any help?” she asked.
“Yes, actually, that would be fantastic. We were just wondering if you have that Insular sofa in the crazy psychedelic print. We didn’t see one on the floor.”
“Let me just check our inventory. Follow me.” She stepped behind the counter and stood silently, with head bent towards the monitor, which from our perspective was just a white, anonymous surface containing no revelations. Her eyes squinted, and her mouth set in an unconscious frown, a slightly worried look, which looked to be her default expression. She tapped one foot while she waited for the computer to reveal answers, a silent cybernetic oracle. “We actually do have one in stock.”
“Is there any chance that we can take a look at it?”
“Oh, that’s no problem at all. Let me just tell the guys in the warehouse to unwrap one. I’ll be back in just one second.”
“Thank you so much.”
The sofa, when revealed, looked more or less the way that I expected. The phantasmagoria of the print was only excused by the simplicity of its lines, and I looked to Maria for guidance.
“What about one of these and then three of those kind of wine-colored ones? I think otherwise it would be kind of distracting.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Do you have three of them in the wine color?” I asked the salesperson, and she looked at the other employee for guidance. His role in the store was evident in his clothing, tattered jeans and scuffed boots, and he had long hair and a sparse beard that surrounded thick-rimmed glasses and an owl’s gaze. His fingers were heavy with rings, and they massaged a hole in a faded concert tee shirt idly. He looked down at his boots and thought for a moment.
“I know that we have two of them. I’d have to check about the third. Give me just one second,” and he departed in long, purposeful strides for cluttered bowels with upended sofas and lights that sputtered into life at his approach. He returned, and the lights died with his departure, as if he projected an electric field that vivified his surroundings. “Yeah, we have three of them.”
“Oh, good. They won’t fit in my car. Is it all right if we come back tomorrow to get them?” He stood mute, and the saleswoman spoke.
“Actually, that’s perfectly fine. Just come with me to the register. We can hold purchased items for up to two weeks in the warehouse, free of charge, and we also have a contract with a moving company. They charge seventy-five dollars, which would just be added to your bill here, and they’ll carry all the stuff into your house.”
“That’s okay. I’ll just come back tomorrow with a truck.”
“Okay. Now if I can just get some information from you,” she said, and then we traveled together down a tedious road of addresses and warranties and return policies, a road that she traveled with somnambulance and rote steps. Finally, we left. This process was repeated endlessly at many stores, as we purchased tables and desks and chairs and bookshelves and lamps and paintings and curtains and rugs. Eventually, it ended.

Moving out of my old house was a simple enough process, as all that I took with me were books and music and a bed. The rest of my things had transformed into rubbish through no fault of their own, and anything that one of my roommates didn’t want was piled into the rented truck and driven to the dump. It took all of one day, just throwing most of my stuff into the back of the truck and driving to the dump and back and repeating the process. Then I moved on to bigger and better things, I suppose.
Moving into the new house was a much more difficult proposition, simply because I foolishly refused to have furniture delivered by a moving company, and thus it was that Johnny and myself ended up moving basically everything into the house ourselves, with Maria’s dubious help thrown into the mix. She carried lamps and picture frames and that sort of thing. The final result was worth it, I suppose.
Our kitchen was stocked with the full spectrum of cooking implements, and copper pots hung on the wall above the stove, more as ornaments than any sort of useful thing, because neither Maria nor I cooked often or particularly well. The couches that we had bought laagered around an enormous rug that sprawled over the intricate parquet, held down by a minimalist coffee table. A television occupied one wall. There was a rabble of small tables that occupied the first floor, holding expensive neo-classical amphorae that leered anamorphic with contemporary ennui, or small mobs of statuary like votive figures to divine patriarchs, bowls of water in which blooms floated like filial devotions.
In hindsight, I should have thought through the decision to put the library on the third floor a lot more thoroughly. I probably carried four or five thousand pounds worth of books up to the third floor, not to mention Maria’s bookshelf, which sat at our bedside laden with her books, many of which were gifts from her parents with inscriptions in their covers. It was a heavy bookshelf, as if each and every one of its hundred some-odd years had metamorphed some piece of the thing into depleted uranium.
It made me wish that Maria and myself would never break up, simply so that I would never, ever have to carry that fucking bookshelf again.
All of the bathrooms had hand towels. The bench built into the wall of the shower was overflowing with shampoo and conditioner and cream rinse and body wash and face wash, and every genus of hygienic product stood in a crowd of related species. Tea tree oil shampoo, which smelled as if it were a powerful decongestant. Body wash that left the bathroom lavender-scented for hours afterwards. Mandarin conditioner that promised the rejuvenating effects of green tea leaves and smelled of sickly-sweet putrescence. Face wash with pumice. Face wash without. Face wash for break-outs. Face wash for oily skin.
I had a bar of soap and a razor with which to shave my head in the shower. I kept a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, and a pair of nail clippers on the counter. This last collection looked indigent and dejected on its side of the counter, like Luxemburg worrying about a blitzkrieging swarm of lotions and foundation and mascara. It was obvious which of us put more effort into their appearance, I suppose.

“Let’s go shopping,” said Maria, her voice muted by the walls of my closet. I lay on the bed reading Foucault. It was easy enough to find the motivation for this comment, I suppose. I had a walk-in closet, which stored three pairs of work pants, a pair of overalls, three pairs of nice trousers in brown, gray, and tan, two pairs of good jeans, two pairs of dress shoes, a pair of caramel motorcycle boots, a pair of infantry combat boots, a pair of running shoes, a pandemic of tee shirts, five long-sleeved button downs, three short-sleeved button downs, a flannel shirt, a pea coat, four sweaters, two sweatshirts, two pairs of sweat pants, maybe twenty pairs of underwear and fifty pairs of socks. Also a suit in a garment bag, that hung beside keepsake dress blue uniform and service alpha uniform. It was not particularly diverse, I suppose. “Why do you have so many pairs of socks?”
“Old habit, I guess. It’s important to take care of your feet when you spend all day walking around, which is what infantry Marines do. I probably have three grand worth of socks in there.”
“And only four or fives pairs that you can wear with dress shoes.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to do something about that.”
“So let’s go shopping.”
“Do you want to get clothes too, or is this more just to make me presentable?”
“More the latter, but if you want to buy me pretty things, I won’t say no.”
“I don’t really have anything better to do. I’ve been reading pretty much all day, and it’s getting a little boring. What sort of things do you think I need?”
“Well, nice socks and new underwear, for one thing. How long have you had some of these pairs of underwear?”
“A while, I guess. Are they really that ratty?”
“Some of them are crotchless, Sid. They didn’t start out that way.”
“I’m going to go ahead and take that as a yes, then. Anything else?”
“Oh yeah. You need new everything, basically. Some nice tee shirts, some nicer dress shirts, new pants, everything. I don’t know how you’ve been getting by with this little.”
“It’s not like I go anywhere besides the bar and the occasional art show, hon.”
“Still. You’re a grown man. You should have an adult wardrobe, not just work pants. And why do you even own a pair of overalls?”
“Have you ever worn overalls? They’re basically the most comfortable thing ever.”
“That may be true, but they’re revolting.”
“Just don’t try and get me to throw them away. I love those overalls.”
“Just so long as you don’t go anywhere in public with me while you’re wearing them.”
“That seems reasonable.”

I stood, inspecting a row of manikins, who stared back implacably. Their bland features poked disingenuously from outfits chosen to demonstrate the manner in which fashion can take a boring, ordinary person, and turn them into something interesting. There was very little variegation in their dress.
They seemed happy enough, I suppose.
Certainly the store bore an air of levity, with blond floors and white walls honeycombed by cubes overflowing with clothing, limned in pale blue shadows. The walls were crowned in large black and white photographs of models who were mostly naked, nudity apparently being the best motivation to purchase clothing. Tables stood at uneven intervals around the floor, silver backed and piled in neat piles with unkempt heads from casually replaced clothing. The employees were dressed in black like priests, with lanyards hanging incongruously from their neck in a tangled riot of color. They were very young, with fresh faces bashful from minor acne, still uncertain of their place in the world. An aging matriarch hovered around the registers, stern-faced, with eyes that seemed to note every detail that occurred in the store.
“What do you think about this one?”
“It’s okay, I guess. You realize that I don’t actually care, as long as you’re happy?”
“I know, but it should make you happy, too.”
“I’m really pretty indifferent, hon. If you pick something that I hate, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter.”


The bar next door was western-themed, although it was doubtful that any of its patrons had ever wrangled cattle or stood spread-legged on a dusty, tumbleweed-strewn lane, duster blowing in the wind, hand on six-shooter, shooting baleful, determined gazes from beneath their broad-brimmed hat. Although banjos and antique rifles and brands and lariats and other kitsch hung from the walls, I heard nary a banjo plucking its way from the speakers, and the crowd seemed to favor gun control more strongly than not. They seemed disinclined to attend a rodeo.
The walls and windows were also adorned with the neon signs of heavy microbrews that were only distributed regionally, and which were unknown a hundred miles away. The soundtrack was some sort of electronic disco. Everyone wore subdued, fashionable clothing and held beer glasses in soft hands. They wore horn-rimmed glasses. They spoke about politics and economics and literature and philosophy. My gut reaction upon entering was to turn around a go home, but Maria was working late, and I was tired of reading and writing, had already exercised for several hours, and was a little lonely, so I stayed.
Maria had gotten a job working for a distributing company that dealt with beer and wine, and indeed distributed the very beer that was brewed next door to our home. It was apparently a busy time of year for them, because within a week of starting work, she had begun to stay late fairly often. One of her coworkers informed me that this would probably continue until the end of the month, at which point they would return to their normal hours. She was not salaried, so the influx of overtime pay made her very happy. She refused my offer to pay her student loans.
I sat at the bar, setting my left foot on the brass rail so that the rail rested between the elevated heel of my boot and the ball of my foot. The bartender was a bald man with brown eyes and soft cheeks, wearing a striped tank top and jeans. He was heavily tattooed, and his ears had glass studs in their gauged piercings. “What can I get for you?”
“Bourbon on the rocks, please.”
“Coming up. That’ll be five dollars.” I handed him my debit card.
“You want me to leave it open?”
“Yeah, that’ll be fine.” After a couple drinks, I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I joined three men with horn-rimmed glasses.
“I’m just saying, I though it was too macabre.”
“Really? To me, it seemed like the distagonist was just a foil against which the morality and piety of everyone else was measured. I mean, murder and necrophilia are clearly criminal and I don’t think he was supposed to be a sympathetic character, but at the same time, he was treated so callously by everyone else in town. They auctioned off his house, they cut off his tab at the grocery store…the only person who was really nice to him was the guy with the junkyard.”
“I don’t know, man. I still didn’t get a whole lot out of it.”
“Different strokes for different folks, I guess,” I said, jumping uninvited into the conversation.
“See, this guy’s on my side.”
“I’m going to disagree. I think that there’s a certain caliber of literature that everyone should appreciate, even if their first impression wasn’t necessarily favorable. I mean, reading Son of God, it’s really obvious that it’s well written. The trick is just figuring out why it was written.”
“I think that the ability to tell that it’s well written on the first impression is more important than actually enjoying the work or really trying to understand it,” I said. “I mean, if you really like it, fine, go ahead and dig in, but at the end of the day, a book is only meaningful inasmuch as it relates to your own experiences. If your friend didn’t like it, then the product of all of his effort will be a well-formulated analysis of the work that’s really more of an academic exercise. I kind of feel like if it doesn’t punch you in the gut a little bit, it won’t really change your outlook. The lessons learned from a book that causes some kind of gut reaction end up mattering more than an abstract understanding of the technical aspects of the thing.”
“I guess that I feel like that methodology is kind of apathetic. There are a lot of books that are really important that don’t connect to a lot of people’s experiences.”
“Literature is wasted on most people anyway. The thing is, he read a book and presumably recognized its quality, but just didn’t like it that much. McCarthy relies on the Bible and a sort of religious sensitivity to make his point. I mean, one of the first thing he says about the guy is that he’s a child of God, like you and me. Obviously I don’t know anything about either of you, but maybe he’s just wasn’t raised religious. Maybe he hasn’t found it necessary to evaluate his moral tenets. But he read the fucking thing. It’s not like he’s going to forget it. If it ends up being something that has a big impact on him later, he’ll figure it out. That’s how I was with Shakespeare. It took me until just recently to understand what the big deal about Shakespeare was.”
“Yeah, I never got it either. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Sidney. I actually just moved in next door. Thought I come by and check the place out, you know?”
“Cool. Yeah man, this is a great bar. We’re here probably more often than we ought to be.”
“Yeah, we basically live here. I’m Steve, by the way.”
“It’s a pleasure.”
“I’m Mark. So what do you do, Sidney?”
“I’m write shitty fantasy books.”
“Yeah? That’s cool.”

One day, I was reading a book in the library. The light filtered through the dingy skylight and the cloud cover above so that it fell in thin blue rays upon the room, and the rows of book stood in ranks, stalwart, as if they were an army capable of conquering the chill of the sky on this particular day. They always looked that way. They had no choice but to stand upright and to recount their contents honestly, whether their reader be virtuous or not, thoughtful or stupid, kind or cruel. They gave their account, and in the Byzantine neural labyrinths of the reader, the content was vivisected, pieces to be enshrined in reliquaries, pieces to be left festering in untrod corridors, pieces to be attached to bits from other things to form that Frankenstein monster that is personality and knowledge, and this monster shifted itself, moving stiff-limbed in halting steps, pieces swelling with carcinomas caused by an irritating environment, new pieces grafted on as the monster reconfigured itself, so that if it had brought a spool of thread with it into the labyrinth and tried to retrace its steps, it would marvel at the tangled skein it had woven and quickly abandon the matted mess.
I had won a small victory regarding the interior design of the house, and lay upon an exceedingly comfortable sofa with claw feet and a floral print. My eyes refused to focus on the page of my book, lighting upon the page for a brief instant before turning to take inventory of the room, and then glazing over as I lost myself in thought. I suppose, that I was disinterested in the book in the sort of way that a satiated person is disinterested in more food, because I had been reading all day. Living with Maria was not as shocking as I had thought it might be. I still did basically the same things, which consisted primarily of exercise, reading, and writing. I rarely saw my former roommates, because they all lived busy lives, and now that we were no longer sharing a home, we never made passing conversation.
It was surprising how much of my time had been occupied by random conversation about nothing when I lived with them. I found myself with an extra three or fours hours every day. I had written three more books since I move in with Maria.
Thinking of my roommates made me miss them, so I called Carl.
“Hello?”
“Hey Carl, it’s Sid.”
“Oh, Sid! How’ve you been? I haven’t talked to you in a while.”
“Yeah, I know. Ya’ll have gotten too busy to make much time for me.”
“More or less. I don’t even have time to sleep, anymore. I don’t know what Andrew’s excuse is, though.”
“I talked to him the other day. He got engaged to Julia, so I think that’s taking up a lot of his time, and he’s also been working on some new exhibit or something. I guess he’s been spending a lot of time with some really artsy kind of people, and they’ve inspired him to do something new. It was kind of hard to tell what the fuck he was talking about. You know how Andrew is.”
“Yeah, I do. He just gets carried away by his passion for art and forgets that the rest of us don’t necessarily share the magnitude of his interest.”
“Yeah. Not to mention the fact that he misuses words a little bit, which doesn’t help anything. What about Johnny? You heard anything from him?”
“Yes, actually. He moved to London, I guess.”
“London? I heard New York. And Paris.”
“No, it’s definitely London. He claims that there’s some big opportunity for him there that he can’t pass up, but I think that he’s developing a little bit of an interest in a fashion designer who lives there.”
“Anybody I would have heard of?”
“Maybe. Her name is Sophia Beata. She’s sort of the up-and-coming thing in fashion right now.”
“It’s not ringing any bells, which I guess probably isn’t too big of a surprise.”
“That’s true. So how’s the new house, and living with your girlfriend?”
“The house is good. The girlfriend’s good. It just takes some getting used to, you know? Like, when we were all living together, I almost always had a friend around, and we sort of ran the house by consensus, in a fairly democratic way. Now, I live in a tyranny of two people, and we sort of take turns running the show. Tragically, my turn is pretty much the time that she’s at work, and when she gets home, she wants to spend time together and do romantic things and all that shit, which is fine, but I want to go out and get drunk and hang out with you guys, but you’re working when I’m really free, so…I guess it’s just taking a little bit of getting used to.”
“Yeah. I’m sure that sooner or later you’ll strike a balance between the intimate, romantic time and the time that you need to spend with your friends.”
“Oh, yeah. Honestly, the problem is really probably just that I haven’t gotten used to the fact that I have to put in a little legwork to hang out with somebody. I got spoiled living with ya’ll, I guess, ‘cause you were just right there.”
“That happens, I guess. Oh, before I forget, did you hear that James went to rehab?”
“No, I hadn’t. I’m kind of surprised that he went already, though. I figured that it would be a few months yet before he hit bottom.”
“I guess he did some coke that was cut with something really nasty, and had to go to the hospital.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess. Hopefully he’ll actually stop.”
“Hopefully. I’m still worried about him. I wish that he would get his act together. It’s just so sad to see him floundering like this.”
“Yeah, it is. I guess that at the end of the day, though, it’s his life, and he’s the one that has to live with his choices.”
“Don’t we all?”
“Probably. So what’s new with you? Are you dating, how’s the record business, all that?”
“Work is good. I haven’t really had time to date lately. I’m not in a particular hurry to find a girlfriend, in any case.”
“Why is that?”
“I just find that a serious relationship takes over your life. I like dating, and I like being in love, but you end up investing so much effort into an uncertain proposition.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s funny how it happens, too. Like, a while ago Maria was working late every night and I didn’t seriously suspect her of anything, but the thought crossed my mind, ‘What if she’s cheating on me?’ I had a really hard time letting it go. And she took me shopping, made me get a new wardrobe. I’m concentrating a lot on the whole thing, and it seems like these little irritants just pop up over and over again. I’m sure she feels the same way. I know that she’s not terrifically excited about her job, but she’s too proud to just stay home and let me pay for everything.”
“That’s probably for the best, Sid. If she were always there, she’d start to get on your nerves. And you’d get on hers. As much as a relationship is about two people coming together, I think that a lot of it has a lot to do with the fact that no matter how hard they try, they’re still two distinct, separate individuals, each of whom has to make their own choices. If you were always together, your choices would start to step on each other’s toes.”
“You’re probably right. You usually are.”
“If you say so. I feel like I’m muddling along with the rest of you. Anyway, it’s nice talking to you, Sid, and we should get together sometime soon, but I actually have to go.”
“Yeah, give me a call sometime and we’ll go have a drink or something. Take care, man.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I closed my phone and leaned back on the couch, then looked at the book that I did not want to read and sighed. I did not know what I wanted to do. But life went on anyway.

I was lying in bed with Maria sleeping beside me, and I could not sleep. She had more reasonable hours at work, and so I saw her more often now. Her face was a delicate green from the glow of her alarm clock, the only light in the room. I tried to remember sleeping alone, and found that I could not. It’s strange how change can erase the past as if nothing had ever happened, as if the content of life did not change, but only its details. Our parents could remember us a squalling infants and clumsy toddlers and teenagers, but for me, the recollection of myself often seemed to be of some other person.
Time marches on, I suppose.
I closed my eyes and attempted to relax, lost in the dark behind my eyelids. Deprived of vision, my hearing became more attenuated, and the air filled with the soft whisper of traffic passing like lapping waves, rubbing whirring on macadam with the sound of friction and surprisingly small contact points. The sound of the brewery, whistles and clangs, provided percussion to the symphony, and the babble of voices rose to overwhelm the bar’s music and the softened again to reveal the music once again, as if a melody were being passed among horns and woodwinds and strings and drunks. The music passive, a quality of the environment, and the intoxicated voices nonsensical on this Friday night, some truncated expression of joy at burst fetters, or companionship, or the potential for fornication. Intoxicated voices shouting gibberish muted by brick walls, but if I were nearby the sentences would stumble over each other into a collapsed tangle, and if it were not crowded the meaning would be blurred by the intoxication, and if they were not drunk the phrases would be stultifying in their tedium or their triviality.
If they were not trivial they would be kind words spread among friends or lovers or family. Or else the titanic utterances between men and women in well-furnished rooms, garbed in conservative suits like modern heraldry, and the sound of these utterances would be indifference towards the huddled masses and greed and self-importance. Perhaps the threat of war as well.
I opened my eyes and looked at Maria, and moving closer to her, I closed them once again. The din of the world receded, and I fell asleep.