Montaigne’s Heiress

I think that how people live says a lot about them. Scratch that. I know that how people live says a lot about them.

Mother lived in a place that was decaying around her. My grandmother chose the living room colors, and painted over the 1970s dark wood panelling first with nauseating bubblegum pink, and then with an annoying fluorescent shade of blue. Mother complained about both colors – and the fact that the gaps in the wood panelling had never been filled in, so that the paint sunk into the recesses – but never did anything about it. The furniture was breaking down under her enormous weight. Her favorite place to sit was an enormous oversized easy-chair… which she just fit into. The upholstery was hideous, but it didn’t matter – she would always sit on a towel (ostensibly to protect the chair, as she went around without underwear) – because within a year the springs on the chair were so worn down that it was like sitting on a hard bench of compressed cotton.

In the dining room, partially blocking out the sight of the mis-hung (originally vertically striped, but now hanging at an angle of some 30 degrees) wallpaper, was a 64″ jumbo tv. Mother had to place it in the dining room, because if she put it on one of the living room walls she couldn’t see the whole screen from her chair. This television was invariably on, and playing either Oprah or Dr. Phil. The only art in the entire house was a framed Renoir – a bad reproduction of a lady in a black and white striped dress with a parasol. Mother did not choose that art.

It got worse in mother’s bedroom, where a mattress and a box-spring sat on the floor. The room’s only other furniture was yet another television. In the afternoons, mother would sprawl on this bed and watch soap operas. When she was gone to work at night, I used to jump up and down on this bed – to get rid of “excess” energy and tension. (I still hop up and down in one place sometimes whenever I’m impatient or upset.)

Like mother, everything was shabby and dirty and indifferent. The kitchen crawled with roaches. The white tile on the floors was invariably dirty. The wallpaper clashed with the Renoir and with the television in the dining room, and the sickly yellow of mother’s bedroom walls lent a funerary air to that room. The whole house felt as though it was about to crumble. As though that was the place that people went to die. (This was eventually proven correct, when one of the couches in the living room was replaced with a hospital bed for my grandfather, who was – not quickly enough – dying.)

Anyway… enough about that house.

The apartment that I have just rented and am looking into furnishing is a good apartment, but it’s not the apartment I want. The place I’m moving into is about a block from the harbor in a small town in Connecticut. It has the usual granite countertops, etc, nice dormered living room and bedrooms, and won’t get too dark – I think – despite the dearth of windows. There is a master bedroom, a smaller bedroom to use as an office, and a living room which looks out towards the harbor. I don’t plan on buying much furniture, since nobody will ever come to the apartment except me.

The apartment I want however…

The apartment is in a high-rise building right around 23rd street. It’s on a very high floor, and has floor-to-ceiling glass on three walls. The windows face towards the skyscrapers uptown, and the places where the walls meet look like two prows of a ship cutting through waves – sailing towards the skyscrapers. It’s furnished very simply and sparsely – a few pieces of mid-century modern-esque furniture (like this, for instance) – a couch and two chairs – form a semicircle (or two sides of a rectangle) facing towards the front windows. They have their backs to the black-and-white modern kitchen, and to the bedroom behind – entirely closed in, but with white drapes hung on the walls to simulate windows. Black and white, and modern, is the theme of that apartment.

Right now, that apartment I want is kind of like me – or… at least the way I fancy myself. It’s kind of… sterile, if you catch my drift. Black-brown and white. No accents – I thought about adding blue silk accent pillows to the description, but they seemed out of place in my mind’s eye. That apartment – with its white furniture and drapery and carpets – is not a place for children. Not a high-traffic place with a lot of entertaining. There are no guest rooms. It’s a portrait gallery with no portraits in it, really – it is built to show off the city behind its glass walls… but also, I think (since there are no drapes on those walls of windows), built to show off the inhabitant inside. Living alone on top of the world in the sight of 8 million people. A beautiful – too beautiful – but lonely place.

Before that, the ideal house was something like this – extremely small – placed out in the middle of a prairie somewhere in Wyoming.

The house I was going to buy in TX if I didn’t get into Columbia was a 1920s Craftsman-style which was gorgeous on the outside but needed a lot of work – the plumbing and electric was all original to the house.

In the eulogy that “my husband” wrote a month or so ago, he talked of having a large house with a number of always-filled guest rooms, and children, and animals. Some sort of rambling Colonial with bright furniture and a homey atmosphere came to mind. Right now, I can’t see myself in that house, or that place, or that lifestyle. What has to change in order to make me want that? Should I even set that as a goal or move towards it? I don’t think so. I think that whatever changes are needed will come about organically – without my setting it as a goal – as a consequence of other work. I may be wrong… but that’s sort of what I feel like.

So I’m moving into a quiet, sheltered, dormered affair in a small harborside town. When I stepped into it, it felt “safe.” I’ve already thought of art for it – this, and this, and this. All sort of painterly and otherworldly. My favorite paintings – The Ambassadors, Las Meninas, and others… seem to have no place in this apartment. Which may yet be alright. The Almond Blossoms seems to be more like where I am than Las Meninas does.