I've got this paperback on the table entitled Salt by some guy from the Caribbean and it's half-assed interesting and I'd like to finish it. I've been trying to finish it for six months, but every time I pick it up it seems like something else comes along and gets in the way. And now she calls. When my ex starts something there's no ending it. So I said "Hello Linda, what's up?" because, after all, she wouldn't call me unless something was up, and she says "Oh, nothing, really" which I know is a big, fat lie. "So how are you?" she asks, and between bites of mashed potatoes and gravy I said "Fine."
"Listen," she said, "I brought a new living room set." And I answered "Really?" not really giving a shit and wondering what I had to do with it and if she was just calling up to gloat. I felt like asking if she had run out of friends to talk to but I bit my tongue instead and said "That's nice."
"So," she said, "I was wondering if you wanted to buy our old one."
"Buy our old one?"
"Sure" she said. "I'm asking $500 for it. That's a really good deal and I thought I would offer it to you first."
It's not a really good deal and I'm sure I'm the last person she knows that she hasn't offered it to.
But I remember the couch real well.
It has a nice cream-colored background stitched through with soft lines of colored pile--light blue, rust, brown, orange. The overall effect was to give it a deep beige color, from a distance, but it was pleasing to look at, especially up close. It had nice, low arms of a dark walnut, I believe, and it looked good, that cream-color with the dark wood arms. We bought the couch from a store in Walla Walla that was going out of business and only had one piece left of a two-piece set. We looked all over for the love seat that went with it and eventually found a match in Hermiston, Oregon, so we bought it and strapped the box on top of our Mercury Zephyr and drove some hundred odd miles home at about 45 miles an hour. It was hot, and I remember stretching our legs and drinking cold apple cider at a roadside stand where a bunch of little Mexican kids played soccer in a flat, bare field strewn with dirt clods. The cottonwoods were in bloom and even though it was 99 degrees outside and the sun flamed in a brilliant blue sky it looked like a blizzard where we were standing, a summer-time blizzard of cottonwood fluff. We picked cottonwood fluff out of that loveseat for years.
And I remember that we found tiny worm-holes bored into the walnut arms. They didn't seem to hurt anything, and they had been they had been there for a while--they were varnished over--but it seemed odd, and we worried that the worms were alive and would eat up all our furniture. We didn't have a lot of money in those days, and a little thing like buying living room furniture was a big deal to us. I welded trailer hitches and she waited tables and it takes a lot of pancakes and trailer hitches to pay for a couch. When we found them I remember us sitting there, hip to hip, poring over these little holes, tracing them with our fingers.
When we brought it home we made love, "breaking it in" we called it, and we fell asleep that way. And when we woke up the soft thread piles had made pink indentations in our skin. We were spotted like leopards, and Linda got the idea that we could play connect the dots with lipstick and so we painted ourselves all over in a burgundy mosaic and chased each other around the house. In the morning I couldn't get all the lipstick off and when I went to work everybody wondered what the heck was wrong with me--was I coming down with something? I told them I was allergic to tofu and ate some by mistake in Chinese take-out.
I remember Linda the summer she was pregnant and it was hot as hell and we didn't have any air conditioning. She laid on the couch and she was so sick--just miserable--and I used to fan her on the weekends and make fresh lemonade--she craved lemonade--and we would listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" on the radio. "It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon . . ."
And I remember the day I came home from work and found writing on the arm. My daughter had written all over it with a ballpoint pen. Of course, the ink didn't show, but the pen engraved every word in the woodwork. I called her into the living room and she denied it--she blamed it on her little brother--but he was only a year or two at the time, and we both knew he didn't do it. It was a nice try, but I spanked her anyway. She's twenty-two, now, and has a son of her own.
I pushed a piece of pot roast around the plate with my fork and lost the page in my paperback.
"So, what do you think?" Linda asked, and I chewed a little while and thought it over.
It was a pretty good old couch, all right, and my wife, my ex-wife, I knew took good care of it. She was a fanatical housekeeper. Whenever she would get mad she would clean the house. She dusted everything, even the light bulbs. She washed the shelves in the closets. Then she would vacuum--"Hoovering," she called it--a word I didn't hear again until I visited Ireland. We had a spotless house. Even the couch.
Well, almost spotless. If you look real close I could show you where my son spit out his cough medicine when he had the flu. And if I remember right there's a coffee stain on the middle cushion from when I jumped up and ran out of the house the time he wrecked his bike down the street. He did a face-plant on the asphalt and took half the hide off the right side of his head, poor little guy. He did it again a month later, but he never gave up. He rides dirt bikes today, and he's still fearless.
And I remember walking home one evening, when the car ran out of gas down the street, and finding the door unlocked and the house dark. There was an old jeep parked in the driveway and when I came in I could hear the tinny sound of a cheap transistor radio playing in the living room. It was playing "Bye-bye, Miss American Pie . . ." and my daughter was on the couch making out with her boyfriend, and the house was dark and they didn't know I was standing in the kitchen watching. I wanted to kill the little son-of-a-bitch, but then I remembered that I was young and in love once, too, so instead I snuck back outside and took a long walk. When I finally came home I made a lot of noise in the entry, stomping around knocking imaginary mud off my boots, and when I walked in they were sitting hand in hand and looking decent, if a little flushed in the cheek.
I couldn't tell you how many hours I spent on that couch doing math homework with my son. He didn't like school. He never seemed to fit in or catch on. I had to work a lot those days, and I depended on Linda to keep him lined-out, but she was a high school dropout herself and didn't take much interest in the kid's schooling. I remember once he made a "D" and the teacher sent home a note that he was close to failing. I told him I'd give him fifty dollars if he raised his grade to a "B."
"What will you give me if I make an "'A,'" he asked.
He might just as well have asked me what I'd give him to paint the moon blue, but I told him I'd give him a hundred dollars. Even though I missed a car payment, it was the best hundred dollars I ever spent.
Towards the end I got to know that couch pretty good. I spent a lot of nights on it, wrapped up in a blanket, listening to the clock tick. I had time to relish every stain and scratch. It was soft, that couch. It had these nice end pillows that were cylindrical--rolled up like a cotton burrito. When I slept on them my neck felt good. After a while those pillows like to wore out.
I left that house one spring day with two suitcases and a radio, and it was all I ever got. I didn't get a blanket or a pillow, not my tools, my winter clothes, not even my camera (which she didn't know how to use). I left her a nice house in the country all but paid for. I could have sued for half, but I let it go. I told myself it was for the kids, and in a way it was, but when it came to Linda I might just as well have argued with the wind.
"You know" I said at last, "when I moved out I gave you that couch."
"You didn't give it to me" Linda said, her voice rising a full octave. "It was mine."
I got an old couch in my living room that's ugly as a bruise and has a low spot in the middle big as death valley. The hide-a-bed part broke and hangs down onto the floor. If I sleep on it the springs burrow into my back and I wake up feeling like I been used for a hockey puck. My apartment's hot in summer and cold in the winter. I've got crack heads for neighbors down stairs. If I leave my dishes in the sink when I go to work they're covered with roaches when I come home. I look out my window in either direction and I see concrete and sky for as far as the eye can see, one as gray as the other.
"You keep it," I said at last, "or sell it. Get rid of it. Throw it out. Give it to charity. I don't care, but thanks for asking." She said "O.K." and I hung up the phone and sat down. I thumbed through my book, looking for the place where I left off reading. After all, it's only a couch, right?
