This is an unfinished and on-going piece about specific pieces of furniture and how they tie into the tasteful, vivid moments Kyle and I have shared.
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1. A table. First, is a table. Stretched mahogany, waxed. Borrowed. Nearly the length of my tiny kitchen at 40 Hartwell Street. It’s the big white house on the corner. Kyle sits across from me, at that table. It is late September. I hear the tea kettle heating up slowly. Tiny bubbles scream under high pressure. He sips his tea slowly. I take large gulps. The thought of leaning over and kissing him crosses my mind. It confuses me– i’ve never had these kinds of impulses, not for him. I use a small spoon to mix honey into my tea. Our fingers are too afraid to touch, just as our words hide truths behind unnamed pronouns. We tell our deepest secrets without using names. There are boxes and bags of loose-leaf tea tucked within the cabinet above the stove. It’s past midnight. The two of us—we are the epilogue to a birthday party with the candles and the frozen cheesecake and the tearing of wrapping paper. Mugs become empty and bladders become full. It makes for a good excuse to leave the table and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I mouth words, attempting to read my own eyes, searching for a hint of dishonesty. No, not one. Just truth and myself. I take my place where my cup sits. One of my housemates descend the staircase and stumbles into the kitchen for a glass of tap water. She stops. Looks at us, all sleepy and suspicious. I wonder, does she know already? That when she sets her glass down and falls asleep, while the teacups are emptied of everything but the wet leaves that lay shriveled and cold at the very bottom, that I will return from the bathroom to him standing in the middle of my kitchen in that dim light and embrace him with my face pressed into his chest as I inhale deeply?
2. Second is a couch. First, it belonged to my oldest cousin Alissa. She was older and free and promised to take me to Mexico when I turned eighteen. She never did. At the time, she was living next to the asbestos-coated ruins of the Twin Towers sometime in the 2000’s. You could see the collapsed remains from the one, big window. I remember sleeping on the couch, brown like a leather cafe armchair, but lumpy and cotton-filled. I was much younger then. When she moved, she gave the couch to my second oldest half-brother. He sets it against the only window of the living room of his house on Ray Street. I sink into it, holding a giant juice box filled with white wine that he bought me. There’s a board game coated in dust on a shelf behind the TV. He is a drug dealer and that’s that. I’m the delivery boy. He moves out without a word, someone else moves in. I move out of the dormitories and move into the big white one on the corner. Our landlord, a small Chinese woman, offers us some furniture from a previous house. The house on Ray Street. It all smells like marijuana. My brother is long gone. Part of the door frame breaks in the attempt to get it into our living room, and we do it and it is there and now it belongs to me. That couch. Kyle and I. We move to the couch after countless cups of tea in the dimly lit kitchen, late September. He suggests we sit someplace where he could be closer to me. I am still trembling from our first kiss, some sort of electricity only generated by human lips upon lips. I think of bridges. Building bridges with our lips.
“This feels right,” I say. “This…it’s so foreign to me.”
We pull back and look into each others’ eyes. His are a shade of subdued blue like a rainy afternoon. I notice my reflection in his irises. A new phenomenon, I tell him. I can’t recall what I wore, maybe it was dark green like the pine forest in the dead of winter and a pair of panties I never wanted anyone to see. It’s all shed, his skin and mine. The light from the street float between our interlocking shadows. In his ear, I whisper, consume me and he enters my most sacred place where, with his hands and hips and knees makes love and all sorts of neat things. He says above me, I don’t want you to sacrifice anything because you don’t want to sacrifice anything, either. In the morning, the light filters through the bed sheets someone hung as curtains and I awake to him, naked, too.
3. The mattress he’s had for fourteen years. It is twin sized, so his feet hang off the end. So do mine. Underneath the off-white bed-sheets, it’s all baby blue and floral, cut in diamonds by small threads. The middle of it is slightly sunken in. It gives Kyle his bad back. The sides are frayed. To him, it is just another piece of furniture. At seventeen, he loses his virginity on this mattress while his brother sleeps in the next room. It is sometime after 2 a.m. on a Wednesday and I just got off from work at the Alexander Library. October sheds its leaves and the world becomes frigid. I remember walking directionless to his house. I remember the stretch of Easton Avenue, quiet. The stoplights change when nobody is around to see. He leaves the door unlocked for me. I make my way to the basement, untie my shoes, move silently into his room. He mumbles something, turns and makes room. I slide under the covers and encase his body with mine like a wasp’s wing. As the world becomes colder and colder, the temptation of sleeping next to a breathing, human body grows greater and greater. I find myself pressed against his sleeping body almost every night. His mattress grows warmer as my house grows bitter and cold towards my absence. Will Winter be bearable this year? I think as I drift to sleep with him for the first time.
4. Fourth is the king-sized bed in the downstairs room of my house. It wasn’t always there. The room used to be full of cabinets with toolboxes and car parts. Laid out of place was a single bed where only my father slept that year. It was supposed to be a bed for my little sister. She wasn’t so little, however, all the poison she’d pushed down from her childhood began to resurface. The violation of her most intimate place as a child. So, she became afraid of sleeping alone, for fear of being violated where she lay to dream, the place following sleep where she goes to escape. My father wasn’t afraid of sleeping alone so he took her place in that single bed. I like to think that maybe, he was actually conquering the fear of doing so. One day, that bed became empty and the tools were moved and used and the parts of the car were put in motion again. Now, there is a king-sized bed in the red-painted room. The day after Thanksgiving, Kyle and I rise from his blue, floral mattress and with our bad backs, make our way to my house in northern Jersey. I live on Aspen Road in West Orange where there are no aspen trees, only a dead end and a cul-de-sac. It’s the white house at the very top of the hill. We sit in my living room with our hands folded in our laps. My mother asks nice questions but is more enthralled with the Filipino soap opera on the television. My father talks only about what he knows most about: cars, building things, his garden, how it used to be. We keep our hands folded in our laps until they go to sleep, until we are expected to leave for the post-Thanksgiving dinner. It is quiet. We are pining. The sound of the TV becomes washed out under our heavy breathing. I untangle our hands and pull him to the red-painted room with the king-sized bed and shut the door. Quiet. We remove only our pants until our legs are bare and the space underneath us spread wide and open as we move, silent, in the sea of sheets.
5. Fifth is a bathroom mirror on the first floor of the house on Duke Street. There is one window and it overlooks the neighbor’s backyard. Their son is sixty-five and calls the cops on Kyle’s band when they play. Wistful. The mirror remains clean while the rest of the bathroom grows filthy, like bread that’s been molded over. Does it remain clean so the human beings can see their own filth? Nobody cares about the bathroom because nobody cares about each other in this house. It is a place for cold strangers. He rents the basement only because it is someplace quiet where he can be alone, like a grave one could exit. The two of us stand before this mirror and brush our teeth. The first time we brush our teeth together, our eyes are blood-shot and our tongues reek of whiskey and coffee. It is Halloween. It is also his twenty-first birthday. I am wearing his fitted cap and his brown hair is a mess. My toothbrush is purple, his is blue. When I brush my teeth in that mirror, I watch his eyes watch mine.
6. The front seat of my 1999 Nissan Altima. We are horny on Parkway South. Our hands, too, travel in that direction. I moan as we pass Exit 139. We radiate heat. My eye-sight begins to shift and the lights of the cars pulsate luminously, bursting in my vision. My knees tremble. I follow the lines on the road. I think: stay within the lines! like a kindergartener with a coloring book. But the crayon in his hands colors passionately, moves too wildly, surely it will pass the lines! I moan some more. Surely it does. Suurely. Kyle shifts his legs apart. He’s grown and I see this with the corner of my eyes. It pushes against his jeans. Let me out! It pleads. So I do and it’s dark and my soft fingers wrap around him. Pulsating and delicate. I pray the other drivers cannot see that his left arm and my right are crossed and that he and I are writhing in pleasure. Exit 130 to Route 1. Let’s stop somewhere, I nod with flushed cheeks. I make a right at the Hotel Classique where only half the sign is illuminated. The parking lot is unnecessarily wide; it snakes far enough around. I park beside a lone pick-up truck. The front seat of my car is pushed down as far as it goes: I lay on my stomach as he moves above me and behind me. The glass begins to fog. Surely, a bedroom on wheels.
7. Jiyun hides a key under the front mat for us. We’re in hasidic Williamsburg. Take the J to Marcy Ave. Walk past all the jailed up shops with Jewish names, turn right. Heave open the welded iron and ivy-shaped door, let the long-skirted woman out first. Walk down the hallway past the other apartments; hear the mothers shrieking and the dogs whining and the children barking. Number four. There are Christmas lights above the doorway. Walk past the bikes hanging from wires above the shoe racks and around the kitchen to the spiral staircase that leads to the basement. There, to the left, is a couch with mismatched pillows. It pulls out into a sofa bed. That’s seventh. It is January of the new year, two-thousand and twelve, the year we’re all supposed to die as the planets realign. 189 South 9th Street, Apartment 4. Kyle and I are at the forefront of our journey North, to Montreal. This place is a community for wanderers to stay and meet and feel at home in a city where if you are nothing, you go unnoticed and remain unnoticed. Here, I meet a young girl from Estonia in film school. Love Connection, a band from Australia, a journalist from London. I’ve forgotten their names. There’s a door by the coat rack that leads to the backyard. It’s all cement. I walk past a naked mannequin wearing sunglasses, leaning against the brick. A single wooden table and mug full of cigarettes. Broken glass lines the edge of the building. Jiyun comes out with us to Think Coffee, a cafe where you can have a glass of wine or a cold beer with your text book. That night, we make grilled cheese sandwiches for the house and dip them in tomato soup. In the dead of night on the pull-out sofa bed, we make love silently so not to wake the sleeping travelers.
8. to be continued…
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