A Wild Surmise

Furnishing

27 Furnishing I wonder what to hang over the bed. You don’t care, you don’t look at walls. It took me a long time to understand that difference between us. Every item in a room influences me, every item tunes the air, the air playing across objects makes the room vibrate. Anyone who thinks about atoms will grant me this. I am receptive to these envelopes that rooms are and when I pass from one room to another it changes me. You don’t tune in to this frequency unless I ask you what you would like to see on the wall over the bed. You always answer, “I don’t look at the wall. Why don’t you put something you like.” My answer is, “You might see it while we’re making love. How would that affect you?” You answer, “I won’t see it unless I hit my head on it, but you’ll see it for sure.” Right, very right, I will see it and it will affect me even if it doesn’t hit me on the head, it will be humming there on the wall like a TV screen. 28 So, I asked you if you’d like a mural which you won’t see. I asked it silently because I know the answer. This is our difference. I always ask for more and more specifics while you have already answered to the general category. When we see one of these exchanges coming, we laugh. You like to play them out. They are like the little dramas constantly at work in your head. I could paint a mural of the Monet lily pads because you liked them at Tom’s but the room would shimmer too much for me to sleep and the project is too big anyway. My other choice is to hang Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ over the bed. I hesitate because the panels are difficult to hang straight and I can imagine getting very lost in those scenes. Maybe if I saw them while making love I would get stuck in the picture or take it out of the frame and impose it on you. I am also afraid I might hit my head on it. I know how often I am afraid of hitting my head, even though I have never 29 seriously injured it. When the football drilled me between the eyes and broke my glasses I watched it all the way. I watched so hard I couldn’t feel the fear, everything got too slow for fear. The football kept coming in a perfect arc, I saw more and more of the grain, the raised bumps—some brown some white, then the point where all the panels meet was spinning like a star and everybody was yelling. I’m sure I smiled just before it hit. I think if I hung the Bosch over the bed I would fall into it. I would hit my head on the dancers’ knees just like the time I fell in basketball. Barbara’s knee came up at me very slowly. I thought “Here it comes again, I’m going to hurt my head.” But I was not afraid, really, only for my glasses. It was the second pair I broke that year and I was getting small scars on the bridge of my nose. I have seen things coming at my head like this. I have been transfixed, watching the object arriving like a cow at slaughter watching the mallet descend, but judging, judging all the way. I have seen the pieces of an action slowly coalesce and grind to a halt 30 like the plates of California locking far off underground months before a quake. I wonder about hanging anything over the bed in California because of a mosaic that came down last time. I don’t know how long I could hold off the fear of a mosaic hitting me. Maybe we’ll be moving next year anyway, so I won’t hang anything over the bed just now. ...