The Chair

This is a story that starts in the middle, because by the time I see the picture of the chair it's too late, I'm already smitten and there wasn't going to be any undoing this one, I knew even then. This story starts in the dullest of places, with dull old me sitting on the couch one night, looking at a catalogue. This is typical of my nights and the energy I bring to them: by that point, I have nothing left. This has been true since my children were born. Once I read that if you have nothing left by the end of the day, perhaps it's really because there's nothing more you need.

Turning those pages in the middle of this story, I came across a photograph of a chair for sale. Not just any chair for sale, but a masterpiece of a deeply tufted, leather-and-rivet swallow-you-whole kind of chair with so much soul they couldn't fit it all within its upholstery, and it ended up spilling over into the matching ottoman. You couldn't buy one without the other. No matter: the moment I saw it I felt my heart roll in my chest the way water comes in against the sea wall. I saw that chair and thought I wouldn't be able to wait until it was time to buy it--not because I wanted to sit in it, you see, but because I understood immediately that this would be the perfect chair for the Current Object Of My Affections to sit himself down in. I even said it out loud: I cannot wait to buy this chair for you...

I stay put, but the story moves out from there: I have secured the chair, I have secured the affections of this man I want there, and this is what happens: he comes home every night and sits down. We have a library, most likely, where our chairs are drawn up near the fireplace (my chair is more modest in scale but still, it fits me and I like it) and there is a table between them for us to pile our books on. We have a bit of supper there, and we read or talk about what we're reading and naturally, most nights, once we've gone to bed, there is sex involved. The sex between two people who read a lot is usually pretty good: see how nimble we both are, moving from mind to body the way we do! In this world, everything moves from chair to bed to sleep, and does not include whatever happens beyond the walls of the house. Here, by the time the curtain comes up, the play is already underway. The origin of consciousness is the threshold of that room as we step in.

So now this story has an early middle and a later middle, and because the longer I sit on the couch the more insistent my imagination becomes, my story develops a backstory and that gets its own backstory, too. Where the story began was the only thing real: a fast, dizzying infatuation that slapped me and gave me what felt like the first lungful of air I'd had since my husband died. This is not the first time I've come back from the dead, but it never stops being a surprise when it happens. In my backstory, I am something of a tragic figure. In that story's backstory, that was never meant to be the case but still, things happen, plots change, the mischievous or malevolent or sometimes goofy plans of the gods emerge and here we all are now, or at least I am, come around to this place where I'm buying imaginary furniture for rooms that don't exist. Choreographing hours of sex with people who will never touch me.

I have a friend who has been my friend since we were in the fourth grade together and all this time later, we are still in touch several times a week. Some days it's a race with us, who gets to be the more pathetic of the two; most days I think I'm probably winning. Both of us live in our heads a lot. The difference is partly a difference of degree, and partly who is the more comfortable with things the way they are. He likes his imagination; I am more wary of mine. Once, the year we both turned 40, we spent a whole summer imagining what it would be like if we were married to different people. For both of us, it turned out that our fantasies had less to do with the bedroom and more to do with Thanksgiving dinner. We both spent less time thinking about how we'd feel with a new sexual conquest and more time thinking about what color we'd paint the living room walls. We thus escaped from the mundane, directly into the familiar. He and his wife have been married a long time, just like I was. I know he loves her, same as I loved my husband. I don't know if he still thinks about having dinner with a different wife sometimes. I do know that those little daydreams never left me completely, and now take up even more space in my day, being no longer subject to the hourly interruptions of a current spouse.

And what of those other interruptions, the fact of the real lives we're really leading? The house that contains that chair has great magical powers, and dispatches the difficulties of wives, children, paths not meant to be, with impossible ease. The house of my imagination requires a well-stocked larder: I put all the responsibilities we have to other people, to those other circumstances and places into what resemble the antique canning jars I inherited from my grandmother and set them on a shelf. I think they are pretty there, lodged safely behind the thick blue glass like that, and happily, I am quite unable to hear their complaints.