Interior Design

by Philip Graham

  The next evening he was at Debby’s house, helping her with algebra. They sat on the carpet in her room, books open and paper scattered, while her parents called up regularly to ask how their homework was coming along. Bradley stammered out the solutions to the problems, and Debby was pleased—his nervousness was so flattering. When she had enough of answers she already knew, she stretched out on the floor, yawned, and then glanced up at Bradley. The night before she had made a long distance call to her sister in college. “Let him take off just one thing,” her sister had said. “He’ll be chained to you after that, he’ll want to know what’s under the rest of your clothes.” Debby put her hand on his knee and smiled before she turned away.

  Bradley wanted to touch the back of her neck where her dark hair seemed to burst out of nowhere, but he was at the center of an invisible stage, his curious angel the audience. Debby looked over her shoulder and reached for Bradley. Though he knew he shouldn’t touch her, he tried to convince himself that her beckoning hand had just waved his angel away. He tentatively stroked her wrist and she snuggled against him. Instead of pushing her away, he gently touched Debby’s neck and she arched her back. After a long moment he finally cupped his hand and slowly placed it over a breast, the cloth of her blouse softly tickling his palm.

  Bradley let Debby lead his hands to one button after another until the thought of his angel, capable of anything, returned. Debby saw his face blank over. Shocked that he was resisting what she offered, she coaxed him into unfastening her belt, and before long she forgot everything her sister had advised.

  When Debby was finally, stunningly exposed beside him, Bradley felt the habitual urge to describe what he saw. Never any privacy, never alone? he thought. He closed his eyes, refusing to explicate Debby, but already he could sense the presence of an angry, invisible hand. “No!” Bradley shouted, “No!” Debby sat up, frightened by Bradley’s cries, by the sound of steps up the stairs. The door to her room opened. Debby held her skirt against her, but she could tell from her father’s brief, horrified glance that he could see right through it. And then he was after Bradley, who was still shouting, his eyes still closed.

  *

  In college Bradley majored in Accounting and immersed himself in long spreadsheets, half hoping that his angel would eventually grow bored by the regularity of numbers. But that intimate presence had become a habit he couldn’t cast out; Bradley sometimes wondered if Father Gregory had felt this way. He tried to remember the Father’s long-ago words but could only see his lips moving: a silent, distant performance.

  He always sat by himself in the dormitory dining hall, tired from programming long columns of audits and inventories, and though he was proud of his secret eloquence, Bradley listened with envy to the chaotic accumulation of speech and laughter that rose and fell in the large hall. He understood grimly that he had forgotten how to talk to other people, and he tried to imagine how his voice might sound as part of those alien give-and-take rhythms. But he spoke directly to no one, for he was afraid not to believe in his angel’s possessive will, and when he felt words brimming up he panicked: he released them as sudden laughter, great huffing gulps of sound that held no happiness.

  Soon Bradley couldn’t stop these cheerless bursts, and he began to haunt the local comedy club whenever he felt the need to speak. Sitting alone at the bar, he held back a welter of words and hoped his awkward laughter blended in with the hearty convulsions of the strangers around him. He stared at the rows of bottles lined up beneath the mirror, those almost transparent bodies filled with clear or strangely colored liquids: how he envied the way they could be so easily emptied.

  One night he arrived for the Open Mike Spotlight, the least entertaining show of the week, and he had to endure long stretches before he could join in with any appreciative guffaws and snorts. Yet he couldn’t stop watching the painfully amateur failures who grasped at even the most modest reward from the audience. That night’s barmaid, frightened by his desolate laughter, considered refusing him another beer—whatever tormented the poor guy, no drink would drown it.

  Finally, after a middle-aged man’s ten-minute repertoire of personal noises, the MC announced “Last call.” Bradley finished his beer, edged off his stool, and was alarmed to discover he was walking toward the stage. He wanted to stop, but he felt the same as when that roller coaster had started its slow climb and there was no turning back. He stepped into the spotlight, absolutely uncertain of himself. As he adjusted the mike he listened to the loud, amplified crunks, the murmur of distant and unfamiliar voices. They were waiting, listening, and Bradley remembered his parents’ funeral, when he had been the mute center of everyone’s attention. His throat constricted—if he didn’t speak right now he might never speak again. A few people in the audience began to applaud ironically.

  “Better be careful,” Bradley heard himself say, “God doesn’t like irony.” Where is this coming from? he thought, but more words rose up and he released them. “Irony introduces ambiguity, which undermines the power of God’s Word, and His punishment is the Angel of Irony.”

  There were a few hoots, and the MC began to edge toward the stage. They think I’m a fanatic, a crank, Bradley realized with alarm. “No, wait,” he said, “I’m only trying to be helpful. You see, the Angel of Irony is drawn to irony but, ironically enough, can’t understand it. Maybe one day that angel will float nearby when you say something like, ‘It sure would be great to live in this little dump for the rest of my life.’ Then it’ll grant you your wish and you’ll be stuck in that dump no matter what you try to do.”

  Bradley paused, struck by the fluidity of his strange thoughts and the booming sound of his amplified voice. He looked out at the audience, their faces pale disks in the dark. Were they waiting for a punch line? He had none, so he plunged on.

  “And what about your personal angel? There’s one sitting right beside you now and yet somehow taking up no space at all. Since an angel has no substantial presence it can compress itself to the size of a synapse, can follow the extraordinarily swift and winding ways of a thought. But it must have some weight: imagine that this extra bit of almost nothing attaches to a memory or the beginning of a thought and subtly alters its forward motion, veering it, however slightly, to another neuron. Could our daily indecisions,” he continued, exhilarated, “be the contrast between what we truly want and where our concentrated knot of angel has taken us? Maybe we’re compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they’re attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates.”

  The audience was terribly quiet, but Bradley felt more words forming and he could hold nothing back. “It’s late. Maybe you’d like to leave, right now, and get away from all my idiotic words, but your angel swerves you away from such a thought. Your angel is vain. Trained by a life of eavesdropping, it can’t resist listening to such delicious talk. And maybe it’s anticipating the pleasure, when everyone applauds, of its transparent body fluttering in the small explosions of the surrounding air.”

  Finally emptied, Bradley felt almost weightless, actually released from that burrowing presence, and this purging was pleasurable, a loss that was simultaneously gain. But then the oppressive need to describe returned, and he couldn’t help listening carefully to the applause, that indecisive clapping of hands that was both restrained and enthusiastic, conveying at the same time curiosity, appreciation, and resistance.

  *

  Although no one could really call his monologues comedy, Bradley became a regular at the club, and soon he was known informally as the Angel Man. Ignoring the clink of glasses, the whoosh of the tap at the bar, he held on to the microphone stand as if it tethered him to the stage, and the intensity of his concentration quieted the occasional heckler. He was immediately filled with words that metamorphosed into phrases and sentences, hungry for that exhausted moment after a performance when, briefly emptied of his angel, he had to clutch the plush curtain backstage and ease into its swaying.

  But often hi
s eloquence didn’t seem his own, and Bradley suspected that his angel was confessing its inexplicable qualities. “Consider this,” Bradley found himself saying one evening, “since an angel has no voice, it assumes the vocal inflections of its human companion, and what we sometimes believe to be private thoughts are actually communications from our angels.” Yet as he listened to himself—or was it to his angel?—Bradley wondered if he might be able to pour out all those words inside until they couldn’t be replenished, if one night he might finally be deserted.

  He returned to the club as often as possible, pushing his impromptu inventions and never repeating himself. “Imagine how different angels are from us,” he said one evening, “because what we can’t do without, angels don’t need: food, clothes, houses, doorways, or cars….” For one dizzy moment Bradley had nothing to say, and he was filled with a wild thought: Could this really be the last emptying?

  Bradley closed his eyes, and in the dark he briefly created he saw a young girl’s face appear, a dot of memory he immediately knew belonged to Lisa, that girl who sat in the back during catechism class. She regarded Bradley with total disinterest, and then her features altered and multiplied into his mother’s and father’s, both imperturbably facing him. He reached out to prevent their escape, but there were no wrists to grasp.

  Hearing nervous coughs, Bradley opened his eyes and simply stood there, searching foolishly through the audience for his parents’ faces. Then he noticed a young couple sitting at a front table: the man smiled a steady, peculiar smile, but it was the woman’s impassive gaze, which seemed not to see Bradley at all, that drew him. He needed to speak to her, only to her, and at once he felt a great stillness inside him.

  “Imagine a being who shares your secrets,” he began, leaning forward on the stage, “the ones you manage to conceal from everyone. Compared to your angel, your intimacy with your spouse is similar to your occasional dealings with a salesclerk. Are you here tonight with a husband, a wife? Look at that stranger beside you, so unable to challenge the secret knowledge of your angel.”

  Diane didn’t dare glance over at her relentlessly devout husband who had come here just because he loved to be appalled. All evening she’d had to pretend she was bored, but now the Angel Man seemed to speak directly to her, and Diane was afraid he saw past her false face and knew how stunned she was by his words.

  “Remember, to angels we are both storm and ballast,” Bradley said, anxious for even the barest flicker of interest on the woman’s face. “We’re a promising harbor for an angelic grip, but we are also the most turbulent of passages, the tightest of squeezes for an angel once it truly wants to slip inside us.”

  Diane watched the Angel Man, his face so peaceful in the spotlight. She thought of her husband’s angel: twisted in his heart, its wings crushed and worthless, its sad contortions resembling his fist on the table. She could sense him stirring angrily in his seat, aware of the attention she was receiving. She dreaded going home, where she was helpless before the unyielding injustice of his opinions, where even her dreams couldn’t escape the sound of his angry voice. She kept her face a blank.

  “We’re sometimes too voluminously primitive,” Bradley continued, “a catalogue of imperfections, for angels to truly enjoy us. I sometimes wonder why angels hover beside us if we’re such an inexpressibly crude version of themselves, for they have more facets than we can imagine, each one lit by a light we can’t see. Perhaps our angels are prodigiously unfaithful, and they temporarily leave us, from boredom or exhaustion, to enter the mind of a new and excitingly unfamiliar human. Perhaps my own angel has done this. Perhaps it will someday leave me forever for someone new.”

  He stopped and stared at the woman’s stiff face. She isn’t even listening, he thought, at best she’s holding back a yawn. He looked out over the rest of the faces in the audience, but they all seemed to recede from him.

  Diane imagined his angel speeding toward her, whispering the sorts of secrets she had listened to all evening. The lone spotlight dimmed and she could just make out, “Whoever receives my angel, you’re welcome to every dogged attention it’s capable of, and may it give you better fortune than it ever gave me.” She looked up in gratitude, but the Angel Man had turned his back on her and the rest of the audience. As he walked offstage, Diane felt dangerously, deliciously weightless, and her lips tingled with forbidden words. And what could her husband do, she thought, if her words were not her own, how could he possibly reply if she howled out at him in an angelic rage? Already she saw him open-mouthed and speechless before her.

  Bradley stopped backstage, giddily empty, and he clung to the heavy folds of the curtain. He kept repeating to himself those last words, hoping to stave off his angel’s possible return. Through the curtain he could hear the rasp of chairs pushing back, murmuring voices, footsteps. He envied that crowd out there, leaving to return to their own lives. Then he thought, I’m the only life my angel has. And this seemed to be its own strange comfort, one that might forever help him to endure his companionable loneliness. But this insinuating idea also alarmed Bradley, and he checked an urge to describe the dark curtain, even though it shimmered along its length from his slightest touch.

  Interior Design

  These days I just won’t get out of bed, so I lie here, idly kicking the sheets into strange patterns—a ripple of dunes, a mountain range—and I imagine I’m a peasant woman in Turkey, working alongside her husband, carving out a home from one of those cliffs of soft volcanic rock. I can see our faces and hands dusty and smeared with stone shavings and sweat, two strange creatures chipping away new rooms as we need them, and I wonder if we’ll agree on every odd turning we take in the rock, every little nook or window we each wish.

  All my life I’ve longed for something like this with a gnawing eagerness: to live among the eighty percent of the world’s people who build their own homes. Unfortunately, I belong to that remaining, privileged minority: the suburbanites, who make themselves content in their cozy cubes with a narrow hall or a window’s unwanted view; and the apartment dwellers, who live in rooms silently echoing with the habits of former tenants. So as an interior designer I always saw myself as a medium, helping my clients discover the house they wanted to have in the house where they already lived. I wanted to be invisible, to interfere as little as possible with my clients’ desires, working within the constraints of their imaginations and the building code.

  I asked, “Where would you really like to live?” and I listened to their idiosyncratic, secret dreams of home. Together we created an interior as familiar as the self, made the walls as comfortable as skin: I simply settled into someone else’s mind and gave it doors and windows. There was always an urgency to my work, because I believed there’s an ideal home inside each of us that slowly shrinks unless it’s found.

  I did my first work in the heartland, for people living in small towns who wanted their homes to counter the vast, flat spaces around them. My first clients were an elderly couple who imagined something they called Polynesian Splendor: vistas of golden beach, palm fronds, and clear tidal pools. What could be better than a home that was also a vacation, a prison that was its own parole? And that’s what I gave them, though the details had to be mundane as well as exotic, because I knew these folks weren’t going to leave, they just wished they could. I decided to work with local products and craftspeople: plastic palm trees from K Mart, quarry sand for the back porch. The mural painted over the indoor pool was inspired by a cheesy Dorothy Lamour movie poster, yet I made sure touches of phosphorescent paint were applied here and there, so that in the dark those tropical stars would shine, those shells glint.

  Soon, the aspiring displaced sought me out, and dotted throughout miles and miles of fields were private escapes hidden in ordinary houses: two unmarried sisters and their series of indoor fountains commemorating a trip to Old Faithful; or a widower who turned the tower of his three-story Victorian into a lighthouse and cast nightly beams across his fields, where the s
hadows of corn stubble could have been anything. With all my clients I worked on the cheap, I even gave discounts, because I didn’t want to make too much money, I wanted to work off my father’s sins.

  I remember him returning home in the evenings, taking off his coat with great deliberation, and regarding me and my two younger sisters as if we were carpet stains that Mother hadn’t cleaned up yet. He barely had to speak to remind us we were failures for not having been born boys and that Mother was the failure who produced us.

  “Hello Phyl,” he said to Phyllis, who nodded.

  “Hello Pat,” he said to Patricia, who smiled her guilty smile.

  “Hello, Jo,” he said, looking at me.

  “Josephine,” I always corrected him.

  My father was a house builder, and his office was a demonstration home where the furniture displayed in all the rooms was three-quarter sized. The smaller the furniture, he slyly reasoned, the larger the rooms looked, so when potential customers walked casually through his demonstration home they believed they were in much fuller spaces. I thought this was a terrible way to make a living, to ensure that a home grew smaller once a family moved in with their full-sized furniture. Think of it, an entire house a subtle, secret lie! Their walls static but always closing in, the family would become increasingly irritable and argue over nothing. Throughout my childhood I wanted my father to be a fireman, someone who saved homes.

  We moved from place to place before Father’s dissatisfied customers could accumulate, and over the years he filled our successive homes with three-quarter-sized cast-offs from his old displays. Each chair and table was a hard example of his special talent for belittling those around him. My mother was already shrunken under his steady contempt and Phyllis and Patricia, with their carefully imposed silences, were ripe for squeezing themselves into reduced limits. My sisters fit so well that Father soon took them along to work on weekends, where they became part of his devious display and helped his sales. I was never invited to the showroom because, happily, I was too tall for my age.