The Artificial Albatross

The year we became minimalists was the same year we gave up meat. You decided these things were for one another, and so this is what we did. Some years previous, when we had decided to be two women in love, we were incredible disasters. I had sloppily painted the walls a burnt orange and draped silk scarves atop the lamps, rather than replacing their spent bulbs.

We survived only on food that could be delivered to our door, as late as we might want it. You liked Italian, but we learned early on spaghetti didn’t travel well, so we stuck mostly to the Vietnamese place on Polk, the one that never seemed to close. We feasted in our unmade bed, passing back and forth the waxy cartons of lemongrass beef, sliced ginger pork, squid curried with vegetables, summer rolls we dipped again and again into tamarind sauce (always thick with sugar).

Later, when we were tired, we dropped the containers to either side of the bed and fell asleep, noses touching. In the mornings, and sometimes the afternoons, we coiled our limbs together, willfully ignoring a succession of alarms. We were late for everything, and a mess getting there. After you mistook a dusty, shriveled prawn beside the nightstand for your favorite missing earring, we agreed maybe there was a good reason or two against eating in bed.

Still, in that first year, it felt like something big and good, it felt like maybe the way we thought we had always wanted to live. We carried a great number of plants into our apartment, and while nearly all of them perished quickly of thirst (or wilted at slower speeds in sunless corners), we never doubted our green thumbs, the dead leaves trampled into the rugs with little concern. How certain we were that it was all taking root. But these things now had met a sudden and systematic disappearance: walls recoated white, scarves removed, potting soil tossed to the curbside.

You disposed of the furniture while I worked at the gallery. I didn’t question it (you always had a plan), but I was baffled over rooms of inventory made desolate with such ease. A vintage and broken record player, four lamps, a sofa, two armchairs, a dining room table, trunks, bookshelves, and the half-formed figures of the small sculptures I’d not finished—all this evicted in mere hours from our third-story walk-up.

I circled the perimeter of each vacant room, marveling. The emptiness rendered the ceilings impossibly high. You lounged calmly on the hardwood floor, your eyes conducting lazy study of my reaction. The boards gleamed around you; they had been polished and stunk of lemons.

“This is like a crime scene,” I said.

You shrugged.

“Where did it all go? How did you get it all out?”

You said, “Let’s cook dinner.”

You stir-fried tofu cubes with a teriyaki sauce and broccoli, serving the meal on brand new white dishes, which we carried to the living room. The careful movements of our forks against the fine porcelain produced an echo, amplifying the vacuity. This seemed to please you.

Within days you purchased a new sofa, delivered to us the following Saturday. It was a giant white slab, the backrest visible only in a small portion of the sofa’s middle, peeking out like a rectangular fin, the upholstery soft looking and rich, a single cut of finely woven cloth.

As the movers struggled to wedge the sofa through our narrow front door, I thought of a dream I’d had a few months back, you and I standing in a room made entirely of raspberry Jell-O, red, gummy walls and a wobbling floor and ceiling, how in the dream I was sad because I wanted the house to be made instead of vanilla pudding, but there was simply no changing it. When I reported this to you the next morning, you shook your head, telling me I had better stop eating so late at night; digestion was making a mess of my rem cycles.

I signed for the beast while...