When I'm in the process of writing a book, I'll phone one of my parents on a regular basis asking, "What do you call..." and then I'll describe some architectural detail (Me: "You know, those, like, short columns that people have in front of their houses, and a lot of the time they're brick or stone and they have a lantern on top and they light the front walkway?" My dad: "A walkway lantern." Me: "No, noooooo, that's not it at all.") or piece of furniture (Me: "You know that thing you put in our foyer that's like a coat rack, except you have a straw hat hanging on it and it's not only for coats because it has a drawer too and a place to rest things on?" My mom: "A coat rack." Me: "Nevermiiiiiiiind. If you'd breast fed me, I'd have my extra IQ points, and I'd automatically know this stuff.") Because along with types of foliage, there are major blank spots in my vocabulary when it comes to home things. And I'm very much a writer about things that go on in homes, probably because I don't like to leave mine, so this past winter I thought I'd take an interior design class and find out the names of all the styles, techniques, and structures that I'd been whatdoyoucall-ing for so long.
But because it turned out that my small class was split between young wives who had just moved here from Mexico to support their husbands' UCLA grad school studies, and the Eastern European wives of some very, very rich dudes-- one's husband was letting her build a place from scratch in the Pacific Palisades and another's had given her license to redo their Hollywood Hills stunner from top to bottom-- immediately I realized the class was going to be less, "What do you call...?" and more, "Emmmmmmmm, how do you say...?"
Old news, but there's something about a group that automatically shuts me down. In fact, it's like you can take the number of people in that group and then divide my potential energy level by that tally, and you'll pretty much know what degree of social lethargy to expect of me at any gathering. I've thought long and hard about this phenomenon, have written about it elsewhere on this blog, and in short, it has something to do with musical theater, the collective singing of "Happy Birthday" at childhood birthday parties, religious services, and Nazis. I bring this up because in high energy groups, especially the ones where women are 1. playing bridal shower games or 2. excitedly talking over one another about the best place to get discounted Oriental rugs in L.A., when the overlapping is reaching a fevered pitch, my voice takes on the wan timbre of someone awakening from a ten-year coma when I finally order myself to weigh in. So in this design class, when every week one of the housewives would tape a sketch of her living room or bedroom to the whiteboard, point to the corner, and say, "Here I'm going to put a..." I'd discretely slap my cheek, pinch my arm, and mentally tell myself to, "Look alive, kid."
And then would begin the inadvertent game of Charades: Pottery Barn edition. The housewife would say, "Emmmmmm, it has, how do you say..." as she violently pantomimed something like horizontal lines through the air.
"Rungs!!! Rungs!!!" would call out another one of the women, and I'd murmur, "Shelves," except my monotone would burrow into the carpet, and so fifteen minutes later the group would arrive at "bookshelf." Except I already knew what a bookshelf was, and I badly needed to know the names of the things I didn't, like this certain type of couch I'd been in love with forever. I'd seen it in movies, usually in the home libraries of stuffy Englishmen, often in the company of a smoldering green pipe, and I'd admired the simultaneous seriousness and whimsy of its design.
While taking the class I'd started to buy a lot of ten dollar design magazines to use for our homework assignments that no one did except me because my parents TOTALLY fucked me up by 1. not breastfeeding and 2. somehow letting me run with the impression that my Hebrew School grades were going straight to the colleges I would eventually apply to, leading to a paranoid and obsessive compulsive relationship toward anything remotely connected to the educational sphere. Anyway, in one of these magazines I saw this couch I'd been seeking throughout adulthood, and this time it was blue, which I thought was a beautiful, beautiful color for the piece-- the most beautiful, to be sure-- and finally, it had a name. The Chesterfield.
And just for that, the class was worth it.
When I moved into my new place last month, I had the movers discard my dad's old tan couch that I'd been toting around for years and that had spent many months in my ex-boyfriend's apartment after we broke up. And my ex-boyfriend sort of gets around, so who knows what was in the seams of that couch, if you understand what I'm saying. This was my opportunity to choose a couch for myself for the first time in my life, and I knew I only wanted a Chesterfield, except the problem was that I wanted a blue one and they're hard to find, and I could only spend so much on the couch and the authentic versions can get crazy expensive.
Ultimately, I found an original Chesterfield on Ebay, except it was caramel colored, had been sitting in a yoga instructor's garage for ages (her mom had brought it back from England decades ago), and came with a rip in one of the cushions. From the visitor counter and the posted questions to the seller, I could see that many prospective buyers were circling the couch, except they were concerned about its condition and decidedly unthrilled the cushions weren't just reversible. Because I'm an industrious little shit, and even more than that, because I suffer from unmedicated OCD, I began emailing every leather restorer within a hundred mile radius. How much and can you fix the rip and will you pick it up and will you deliver and most importantly, can you turn it a rich blue?
And that's how I found David at Specialty Leather Maintenance, who said yes to the blue and to everything else, then quoted me an amazingly reasonable price that made it possible for my Chesterfield dream to come true. He and his wife brought the couch this morning, maneuvered it up my narrow servant's quarters stairs, and boy, do I look British and scholarly sitting upon it, like Sherlock Holmes with an excellent weave.
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