Stuart Watson
Unfurnished
Avocado-green shag carpet lay between my sleeping bag and the one wrapped like a tortilla around Ellise. I felt like throwing up, not from the carpet, although it didn’t help, but from the too-much-of-everything the night before. We struggled, trying to find the zipper pulls.
Ellise wore a T-shirt, sexy as day-old mashers. Neither of us offered an invitation to romance, no surprise, since neither of us ever did, much, anymore. Like marriage for her was a place she could hide from all that. After six months, I had given up. Ellise had declared victory.
In the front room, we scanned our new space in the light of day. Rented the night before. Floor-flopped shortly thereafter, without the walk-around. Avocado shag in the living area, decorated with the red velour overstuffed chair we had hauled south from Redding. I wondered a lot during the drive, what other motorists thought of this relic hanging from the Cortina’s trunk beneath the tied-down lid. Did they steal it? Are they destitute? Do they have a bed?
It was our only piece of furniture. After we signed the lease the night before, I sat on one arm while she occupied the seat. She flipped through an old Sunset magazine we found in the laundry room of the apartment villa.
“Look at this,” she said, and held the magazine up. “Polka dot.”
“Dining table?”
“Sure. Festive. Better than what we got.”
We had no table. We needed jobs, but Ellise was all about getting a table and chairs to clash with the floral-print linoleum in the part of the living room we called our kitchen. All electric.
“But … jobs?” I said. We had spent all but a hundred bucks on first, last and security, for two bedrooms up across an alley from the fenced yards of one-level ranchers. No gunshots yet.
In fresh light, Ellise put on her fake-leather fur-lined-collar coat and we went to the thrift store.
A woman behind the counter brought to mind a polyester eclair. Ellise went one way, I went another, in search.
“Paul!” Ellise’s voice, but I couldn’t see where. Half yell, half squeal. Like a 12-year-old. Oh, lord, what have I done. “Come look. It’s magic.”
I followed the sound until I saw her, decked out for a faux winter.
That is where we made the acquaintance of an actual polka-dot dining room table, formica top and four chairs with matching print Nauga crap upholstery, ripped from the pages of Sunset. I imagined us dining there in silence, jaws masticating pasta and ground cattle with a flavor packet.
We were verbally ejaculating all over it. “Look at the chairs,” I said, not really sure what I wanted her to see.
“I know,” she said. “Chairs. It’s got a leaf.”
“Don’t buy anything here,” snarled a guy with a beard to his waist and black-on-black attire. “They’ll rip your ass so bad it’ll feel like you were fucked with a vacuum cleaner.”
He kept moving toward the exit, while I mentally parsed his advisory. Vacuum cleaner? Upright or canister? What about …?
Ellise tugged at my hoodie. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’d hate to get fucked like that.”
I wanted to ask her how she would prefer to get fucked, since she hadn’t shown much interest in that aspect of our married life, and she had few other aspects to counterbalance that void. We had a list of thrift stores. The next one featured furnishings salvaged from roadside “free” disposal. A big maple monster with a ruined finish could be ours for a fourth as much as the polka dot model.
I looked down at its top. Somebody’s family had etched it with history. Initials carved into the surface. Simple excavations that looked like things. Cars. Dogs. A baseball and its stitches. Two of the initials matched mine. I felt a sudden craving for a table just like this, minus the other family. Blank. Ready for my own.
“You can’t have it.”
I turned. Red lipstick spilled a bit beyond the natural edges of her lips. A woman maybe a couple of years older than me, in tight jeans with big frizzy hair and a sleeveless blouse.
“It’s mine,” she said. “My dumbass boyfriend left it at the curb and it was gone in the morning. Him too. Asshole.”
“Didn’t you try to stop him?”
“I was out. Late.”
She pulled cash out of her pocket and paid the cashier.
“You’re paying? It’s yours.”
She looked at the cashier, then me.
“Not when it’s in here,” she said. “These doofs don’t know, don’t care.”
Ellise slipped her arm around my waist. “I liked the polka dot model better,” she said.
The other woman smelled nice, not perfumey. Like shampoo. I wanted more.
“Can I help you load it?”
She smiled, turned toward the door.
I turned back toward Ellise. “Would you grab the other end?”
“Shouldn’t the store people load it? They sold it.”
The woman behind the counter lifted a smoldering cigarette to her lips and ignored us. She opened her mouth to talk and the cigarette stuck to her lipstick, flapping as she said “I’m sales, not warehouse.” I looked at Ellise. She didn’t know what to say. I waited for her to lift her end, then led the table toward the double glass door.
The other woman had a pickup. She helped us hoist the maple monster into the bed.
“You got a way to unload it?” I asked.
She looked at the table, then me, then Ellise, then the table.
“We’ll follow you,” I said.
“Really?” Ellise said. “What about our table?”
“Won’t take long,” I said.
It didn’t. After we set it back in her dining room, she brushed her hair back, smiled my way, extended her hand with a limp wrist. “Donna,” she said. “Can I … pay you?”
I shook my head, her words clacking around like billiard balls inside. Ellise and I drove back to the first store, bought the polka dot number. It seemed OK. I looked underneath, to see if there was any clue about how it might fuck me in the ass.
We strapped it to the top of the Cortina, stuffed the chairs inside, went back to the apartment. I still have nightmares about that rental, the sliding glass door off the main bedroom, onto a cheesy deck that sloped away from the building, like it wanted to fall off the minute somebody stupid stepped onto it.
Once we set it up in the kitchenette, where the carpet ended at a tack strip and the fleur-de-lis linoleum began, I thought it would benefit from decor. I went to our bedroom and brought back my box of used Playboys. I set them in the center of the table, then pondered how we could get phone service if we didn’t already have a phone. I told Ellise I would take the car to the Bayside Bell store and order a hookup.
I did, but when I emerged from the store, I thought about Ellise. Why had I married her? I was twenty-one. She was two years younger, a kid with memories of things her dad did to her. She didn’t want me doing anything.
Instead of turning toward the apartment when I pulled out of the lot, I aimed our car toward the house with the maple table. The sun had set by the time I pulled up in front. The engine purred as I sat there, thinking. I turned it off. Stared at the lights inside the other woman’s house. Ellise and I hadn’t done anything in awhile. Sex with a beautiful woman was all I could think of. I started getting hard.
Is this the day?
I thought of Ellise. She was a sweet person. She didn’t deserve me, cheating on her with the table woman.
I’ve come this far. What am I going to do about it? I want it. I know she wants it. She’s probably inside, looking out, waiting for me to get out and knock on the door.
I sat there into the night, frozen, on the cusp of betrayal. Wanting. Fearing what that last step would bring. My addled brain ran through an endless list of what ifs.
What if I went inside and did the thing? Then I would have to lie?
What if I didn’t lie? What would Ellise do?
What if I did lie? What would the rest of my life look like, staring back at me from my morning mirror?
What if I didn’t go inside, and thought of my big fail every night, before falling into tortured sleep?
What if the table woman got tired of waiting for me to get out of the car and come up the walk and knock on her door, and she came outside and walked down to my car and got inside and fucked me silly? That would be hot, but what if it didn’t happen that way?
What if she called the cops, scared shitless that I was some sort of psycho stalker about to …?
It was brutally dark, no traffic on the road, when I heard the tap on the window beside my head. It was her. I rolled the window down.
“What are you waiting for?”
I stared at her. Luscious. Inviting. Off-limits. Just like my wife. I smiled weakly, rolled the window back up. She stood there a second, then turned away. Dragged her index finger through the dirt on the window and disappeared. Eventually, I fell asleep.
The glare off the rearview mirror of a garbage truck woke me. I started my car and made a U-turn and drove back to the apartment.
The phone guy was fiddling with wires when I got there. The manager stood there, watching the phone guy to make sure he didn’t steal our sleeping bags or rape Ellise. Without a word, I stood next to Ellise and watched him work. I wondered how he knew which wires to connect when he removed the thingy from the wall and all the wires suddenly looked like hairs on an old man’s ear.
I picked up Miss March 1963. The lass had pigtails and a perky bust. Like Donna, back at the house. Probably. I wondered what she looked like, without clothes. Napping after sex. Slightly sweaty. Maybe I would feel surprise, to see a mole beneath her arm, faint blonde hairs.
I looked up to see my wife in her faux coat, looking around, at the walls, the floor, the sink. Wanting to say something. Not knowing where to start, so not starting. Likely, her thoughts went like this: So this is it. Home. For a month, at least.
Then looking around, to see if something anywhere in that apartment offered her a reason to be there, with me, with the phone man. With a polka dot dinette.
When the phone guy left, we looked in the directory for employment agencies. She got a job taking calls from home buyers.
I got a job ringing up sales of munchies to graveyard ghouls. Every night, I waited out the wee hours, hoping nobody high on dexy came in waving a gun without a clue how to keep it from going off accidentally, the terms of what would be this numbskull’s defense at trial for manslaughter. Then I went home and slept while Ellise was at work. We rarely saw each other until we decided to move back to Seattle.
I never went back to Donna’s. I had the spine of a banana slug. Twenty years, four jobs and five relocations later, I rose one night in the dark, packed a bag and walked out and downtown to the bus station.
I didn’t leave a note. What could I say that had gone unsaid every day since my night outside Donna’s house and her table full of family history?
Before I left, I set the car keys on the polka dot table, so Ellise could go somewhere of just her choosing.
Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. He has fiction in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), Erozine, The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal and others. Poems appear in The Muleskinner Journal and The Broadkill Review. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their current “best” dog.