“THIS ISN’T at all what I would have expected, Matthew!” Liz exclaims, exactly as Matthew had hoped she would. He brought her into the living room in the dark. Under these conditions, the place never fails to impress a visitor. There’s so much glass that one seems to be floating, and the manifold illumination of the city, uneven and intriguing, picks out details at random and stipples the chrome and glass with color. “I mean, this is nothing like what you used to like,” Liz says.
“I wanted a change. I think part of me always wanted to be Fred Astaire.”
Liz gives him a look, and then she gives Belinda a look. She decides not to ask whether part of her always wanted to be Ginger.
“How did you put this together? Did you design this yourself?” She looks at Belinda again. “Or did you have help?” Belinda smiles and shakes her head.
“Nope,” says Matthew. “I did it myself. Picked everything out. I just kept looking. I went to every furniture store in the city, every lighting place, every place that sells home furnishings. I knew I wanted it to be black and white and chrome. I didn’t think I could go too far wrong if I stuck to that idea. It really worked, I think.”
“This stuff must have cost a fortune.”
“Well — some of it was expensive.” The thought crosses his mind that he shouldn’t be giving Liz the impression that he has money to spend. “But not that expensive.” Now he’s ashamed of the thought. “It’s amazing, though, how much I could have spent if I’d been willing to — or if I’d been able to afford to. There were some chairs I fell in love with. Dining chairs. Armchairs. Designed by Richard Meier. You know who he is?”
Liz shakes her head.
“An architect. Anyway, he designed some chairs that I saw in a magazine. So I went to Knoll to sit in one and find out how much they cost.”
“Mm.”
“They had one in the window. Exactly the chair I wanted. I went right in and sat in it.”
“What? In the window?”
“Well, yes, but it’s just kind of an extension of the display area. So I sat in the chair, and I liked it. How often does anybody get excited by a chair? This was the best chair I’d ever seen. It wasn’t all that comfortable. It’s not upholstered. It just has a wooden seat.”
“No cushion.”
“Certainly not,” he says with an indulgent smile. He’s never spoken to Liz like this before, never felt so sure of himself. “One would not put a cushion on this chair. Anyway, a beautiful woman came up to me and said hello. The perfect clerk for Knoll. Definitely this year’s model. Sleek, understated. Smooth hair, you know, cut short. A simple dress. Gray, I think. But snug, and — ”
“Get back to the chair.”
“Okay. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. Something like that.
“‘It certainly is,’ I said. ‘I want it. In fact, I want four.’ I really wanted eight, but I knew I wouldn’t have room. Four were all I could fit. ‘How much?’ I asked.
“‘Are you an architect or decorator?’ she asked.
“‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just a normal person.’ She didn’t even laugh at that, just smiled.
“Well. She flipped through a book. She poked at a calculator. Nice calculator. Braun. She looked up and smiled again. Nice modern smile. ‘Thirteen hundred dollars,’ she said.
“Well, that didn’t seem too bad to me. It was up a notch from the kind of money I’d been spending, but what the heck. Then she showed me this matching table. While I was drooling over that, trying to decide whether it would fit in the apartment, she poked the calculator again, and she said, ‘So that would be seventy-two hundred for the four.’ Are you awake?”
Liz is asleep.
Belinda snickers, almost silently. Matthew turns toward her and shrugs.
Belinda gets up. “I’ll get a blanket for her,” Belinda whispers. “Where are they?”
“I’ll get it,” says Matthew.
Carefully, with exaggerated efforts at silence, walking on tiptoes, Matthew and Belinda cover Liz with the blanket. Then Matthew removes the folding screen that he uses to hide his television set — a small, three-panel screen, like a shoji screen, white paper panels framed with wood, painted black, with black wood grilles that make a pattern of rectangles over the paper — and sets it up so that it hides Liz.
[to be continued]
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🎧 497: “This isn’t . . .”