Interior Design (7 page)

Bradley closed his eyes, and in the dark he briefly created he saw a young girl's face appear, a dot of memory he immediately knew belonged to Lisa, that girl who sat in the back during catechism class. She regarded Bradley with total disinterest, and then her features altered and multiplied into his mother's and father's, both imperturbably facing him. He reached out to prevent their escape, but there were no wrists to grasp.

Hearing nervous coughs, Bradley opened his eyes and simply stood there, searching foolishly through the audience for his parents' faces. Then he noticed a young couple sitting at a front table: the man smiled a steady, peculiar smile, but it was the woman's impassive gaze, which seemed not to see Bradley at all, that drew him. He needed to speak to her, only to her, and at once he felt a great stillness inside him.

“Imagine a being who shares your secrets,” he began, leaning forward on the stage, “the ones you manage to conceal from everyone. Compared to your angel, your intimacy with your spouse is similar to your occasional dealings with a salesclerk. Are you here tonight with a husband, a wife? Look at that stranger beside you, so unable to challenge the secret knowledge of your angel.”

Diane didn't dare glance over at her relentlessly devout husband who had come here just because he loved to be appalled. All evening she'd had to pretend she was bored, but now the Angel Man seemed to speak directly to her, and Diane was afraid he saw past her false face and knew how stunned she was by his words.

“Remember, to angels we are both storm and ballast,” Bradley said, anxious for even the barest flicker of interest on the woman's face. “We're a promising harbor for an angelic grip, but we are also the most turbulent of passages, the tightest of squeezes for an angel once it truly wants to slip inside us.”

Diane watched the Angel Man, his face so peaceful in the spotlight. She thought of her husband's angel: twisted in his heart, its wings crushed and worthless, its sad contortions resembling his fist on the table. She could sense him stirring angrily in his seat, aware of the attention she was receiving. She dreaded going home, where she was helpless before the unyielding injustice of his opinions, where even her dreams couldn't escape the sound of his angry voice. She kept her face a blank.

“We're sometimes too voluminously primitive,” Bradley continued, “a catalogue of imperfections, for angels to truly enjoy us. I sometimes wonder why angels hover beside us if we're such an inexpressibly crude version of themselves, for they have more facets than we can imagine, each one lit by a light we can't see. Perhaps our angels are prodigiously unfaithful, and they temporarily leave us, from boredom or exhaustion, to enter the mind of a new and excitingly unfamiliar human. Perhaps my own angel has done this. Perhaps it will someday leave me forever for someone new.”

He stopped and stared at the woman's stiff face. She isn't even listening, he thought, at best she's holding back a yawn. He looked out over the rest of the faces in the audience, but they all seemed to recede from him.

Diane imagined his angel speeding toward her, whispering the sorts of secrets she had listened to all evening. The lone spotlight dimmed and she could just make out, “Whoever receives my angel, you're welcome to every dogged attention it's capable of, and may it give you better fortune than it ever gave me.” She looked up in gratitude, but the Angel Man had turned his back on her and the rest of the audience. As he walked offstage, Diane felt dangerously, deliciously weightless, and her lips tingled with forbidden words. And what
could
her husband do, she thought, if her words were not her own, how could he possibly reply if she howled out at him in an angelic rage? Already she saw him open-mouthed and speechless before her.

Bradley stopped backstage, giddily empty, and he clung to the heavy folds of the curtain. He kept repeating to himself those last words, hoping to stave off his angel's possible return. Through the curtain he could hear the rasp of chairs pushing back, murmuring voices, footsteps. He envied that crowd out there, leaving to return to their own lives. Then he thought, I'm the only life my angel has. And this seemed to be its own strange comfort, one that might forever help him to endure his companionable loneliness. But this insinuating idea also alarmed Bradley, and he checked an urge to describe the dark curtain, even though it shimmered along its length from his slightest touch.

Interior Design

These days I just won't get out of bed, so I lie here, idly kicking the sheets into strange patterns—a ripple of dunes, a mountain range—and I imagine I'm a peasant woman in Turkey, working alongside her husband, carving out a home from one of those cliffs of soft volcanic rock. I can see our faces and hands dusty and smeared with stone shavings and sweat, two strange creatures chipping away new rooms as we need them, and I wonder if we'll agree on every odd turning we take in the rock, every little nook or window we each wish.

All my life I've longed for something like this with a gnawing eagerness: to live among the eighty percent of the world's people who build their own homes. Unfortunately, I belong to that remaining, privileged minority: the suburbanites, who make themselves content in their cozy cubes with a narrow hall or a window's unwanted view; and the apartment dwellers, who live in rooms silently echoing with the habits of former tenants. So as an interior designer I always saw myself as a medium, helping my clients discover the house they wanted to have in the house where they already lived. I wanted to be invisible, to interfere as little as possible with my clients' desires, working within the constraints of their imaginations and the building code.

I asked, “Where would you really like to live?” and I listened to their idiosyncratic, secret dreams of home. Together we created an interior as familiar as the self, made the walls as comfortable as skin: I simply settled into someone else's mind and gave it doors and windows. There was always an urgency to my work, because I believed there's an ideal home inside each of us that slowly shrinks unless it's found.

I did my first work in the heartland, for people living in small towns who wanted their homes to counter the vast, flat spaces around them. My first clients were an elderly couple who imagined something they called Polynesian Splendor: vistas of golden beach, palm fronds, and clear tidal pools. What could be better than a home that was also a vacation, a prison that was its own parole? And that's what I gave them, though the details had to be mundane as well as exotic, because I knew these folks weren't going to leave, they just wished they could. I decided to work with local products and craftspeople: plastic palm trees from K Mart, quarry sand for the back porch. The mural painted over the indoor pool was inspired by a cheesy Dorothy Lamour movie poster, yet I made sure touches of phosphorescent paint were applied here and there, so that in the dark those tropical stars would shine, those shells glint.

Soon, the aspiring displaced sought me out, and dotted throughout miles and miles of fields were private escapes hidden in ordinary houses: two unmarried sisters and their series of indoor fountains commemorating a trip to Old Faithful; or a widower who turned the tower of his three-story Victorian into a lighthouse and cast nightly beams across his fields, where the shadows of corn stubble could have been anything. With all my clients I worked on the cheap, I even gave discounts, because I didn't want to make too much money, I wanted to work off my father's sins.

I remember him returning home in the evenings, taking off his coat with great deliberation, and regarding me and my two younger sisters as if we were carpet stains that Mother hadn't cleaned up yet. He barely had to speak to remind us we were failures for not having been born boys and that Mother was the failure who produced us.

“Hello Phyl,” he said to Phyllis, who nodded.

“Hello Pat,” he said to Patricia, who smiled her guilty smile.

“Hello, Jo,” he said, looking at me.

“Josephine,” I always corrected him.

My father was a house builder, and his office was a demonstration home where the furniture displayed in all the rooms was three-quarter sized. The smaller the furniture, he slyly reasoned, the larger the rooms looked, so when potential customers walked casually through his demonstration home they believed they were in much fuller spaces. I thought this was a terrible way to make a living, to ensure that a home grew smaller once a family moved in with their full-sized furniture. Think of it, an entire house a subtle, secret lie! Their walls static but always closing in, the family would become increasingly irritable and argue over nothing. Throughout my childhood I wanted my father to be a fireman, someone who
saved
homes.

We moved from place to place before Father's dissatisfied customers could accumulate, and over the years he filled our successive homes with three-quarter-sized cast-offs from his old displays. Each chair and table was a hard example of his special talent for belittling those around him. My mother was already shrunken under his steady contempt and Phyllis and Patricia, with their carefully imposed silences, were ripe for squeezing themselves into reduced limits. My sisters fit so well that Father soon took them along to work on weekends, where they became part of his devious display and helped his sales. I was never invited to the showroom because, happily, I was too tall for my age.

I grew up frightened by and yet longing for furniture. A simple chair with its inviting cushions was a forbidding object, and when I thought of my mother and sisters forever crimped, I was prepared for the discomfort of fitting nowhere in our home. I remember at dinnertime looking at all the plates and glasses, obscenely huge on the runty table, and I insisted on sitting on a telephone book. “It's for my posture,” I explained, though my secret reason was I didn't want to touch that chair, and because I never leaned back—to avoid resting against the tiny wicker backing—I endured those childhood dinners with aching shoulders.

My willful isolation from the contamination of touch also extended to my mother and sisters: I couldn't bear the thought of a stunted embrace. So it was a thrilling release to hear, however cautious and clinical the telling in my school's sex education class, about the grapplings of love. I was proud to discover how girls were much more complicated than boys, that women were born with their ovaries full, an egg waiting decades to be fertilized by a single shrimp of a sperm. My opinion of Father lowered still further for his inability to appreciate us, and then I learned it was the male who determines the sex of the child.

I took no small pleasure in telling my father that
he
was the failure of the family. “I don't need to hear such language from
you
, young lady,” he said.

Mother sat across the room from us, her eyes made dull by patience. Yet there was a minute smile on her face—a smile that I would see at the oddest moments for the rest of my life—and I wondered, was it faint support, or relief that she was momentarily forgotten?

“That's right,” I laughed, “I
am
a young lady, not a stupid son.”

“Don't you talk to me that way,” Father shouted, “you sit down here and…”

“In this creepy furniture? Forget it.” While Father sputtered, my sisters huddled beside their dollhouse: prisoners playing a game of Warden, poking their dolls into furniture even smaller than ours. And then I remembered something else from biology class, about age and the atrophy of bones. I shouted at Father that like everyone else he was going to shrink with old age and die three-quarter sized on a full-sized bed. He stood there silent and trembling, with a face so fallen I ran from the room, furious that my father wasn't as untouchable as I had imagined. That night, and for long after, I dreamt
I
was three-quarter sized: my legs, arms, head and heart, and I was crammed inside that damned dollhouse. My body was bent and buckled, an arm out a window, a leg down a stairwell, and then I reversed and grew so small I could fit in one of those rooms, sitting comfortably on a tiny couch, staring at the blank screen of the plastic television.

Years later, the hardest part of architecture school for me was making models. Whenever I resisted realizing my vision of a building with a miniature version, I discovered that my professors had their own version of my father's frown and they lectured with his voice. But I had long been adept at defying the local measurements, and anyway I found myself more and more attracted to interior design. I devoured every book I could find on any sort of home—nothing could be too exotic—and when I discovered that in Indian longhouses even the placement of the most humble hammock is charged with mystical purpose, I knew that I wouldn't be satisfied with just drywall and doorways, plumbing and thermal units.

*

When those first interior design projects of mine landed me a ten- page color spread in
Plains Living
, I received enthusiastic calls from both coasts. I decided to go East—I didn't like the idea of any earthquake leveling my best efforts, since my father was still selling his houses somewhere and I felt I had a lot of catching up to do. Now, lying here stretched out on my bed, I think, What's so bad about earthquakes? and I pound my arms and legs against the mattress to make even the pillows shake.

But at the time I thought I'd hit pay dirt, since all my new clients could much better afford to reproduce their desires for comfort. There were the sociology professors Jack and Maxine, who were cashing in on the third and final edition of their once popular textbook,
Class Marx
. “We're the last bastion, and we want no false consciousness in our house,” Jack said, and Maxine continued, “Jack and I are noted for the theory that walls were the first form of social obfuscation.” And so they asked for glass panes on the walls to reveal the electrical wiring and the heating ducts, a porthole in the hallway overlooking their bed, even a stained-glass panel on the bathroom door. They requested Lucite steps for the stairway to the second floor, in order to expose those stairs directly beneath that led to the basement. “Get it?” Jack beamed, looking down. “It's a critique of the myth of social mobility!”