Speaking of the divesting of personal props, there is the matter of this trunk (blurrily pictured). I am still debating whether to keep or donate it, along with some other minor items. (Like, would anyone desire a tambourine? In red? Gently used. Inquire within.)
The trunk has never fit with any of my decorating choices, or I’ve never been able to fit my decorating around it: budget and need always seeming to supersede aesthetic considerations. Not that I’ve been without my vision board of ideal apartment-scapes. I’ve always magpied inspirational layouts from magazines or wherever, but the gap between concept and execution can be vast. With every new place I’ve tried to achieve a singular “look” but usually it falls short of expectations. Though, one of the favorites of my younger days may have been “bunker chic”— in homage to William S. Burroughs’ home on the Bowery—for which I opted to go all gun-metal gray utility shelving and survivalist minimalism. (A choice both inspired and budget-sustaining!)
Still, it is easier to sort of absorb random bits of Ikea furniture and the odd decorative piece to create a comfortable living space, and boy do I miss the days before bedbugs, when the street corner would yield a cornucopia of furnishings—end tables, bookcases, lamps—without fear of infestation. (I feel like there was even some trend piece written in the early 2000s—intern, please to be Googling for me—about people who would rent vans and troll the streets of the Upper East Side on early weekend mornings, collecting the discarded bric-a-brac of the well-to-do.)
I have always rented, since moving to the city eleven years ago, first taking a sublet in Rego Park, Queens sight unseen. The idea of ownership always seeming (and being) so beyond my means. Though I liked the sense of impermanence; I’ve always been quite happy being transient, redefining my boundaries as each circumstance dictated. In college I moved every year, if not semester: one year, in a cheap and spacious apartment, I decorated my bedroom in all black and red, accenting my futon with a zebra stripe pillow I’d swiped from my grandmother’s couch. In another place, a duplex in downtown Orlando, I painted the walls yellow with blue trim, making the boxy space seem bright and poppy.( That the color yellow was once associated with insanity we’ll let pass. I was quite sane then, and content.) When working on Martha’s Vineyard I lived for a time in the basement of a gorgeous house in Edgartown, though it was always sort of damp and sandy, and then later in Vineyard Haven in a converted yoga studio which had belonged to the owner’s ex-wife. There I had use of both the kitchen inside the main house and a glorious outdoor shower. The recently-divorced property owner was quite lonely and wanted very much some company, but as I was young and unwilling to take on that burden I spent too many off-hours holed up, lying on the futon, watching re-runs of the final season of “Beverly Hills 90210.”
(No matter how content though, I am always reminded of Joan Didion and her yellow silk curtains…)
But: the trunk! I was in Massachusetts, touring in a funky, low-budget Midsummer Night’s Dream and sharing a house with my fellow castmates—including S. We’d had a brief sort of thing that had sparked and sputtered during our rehearsal period, before we left New York, and to the hinterlands of Western Massachusetts we’d brought our bruised feelings and halting awkwardness. Basically, it was a bad showmance.+
S., on one of our days off, went shopping nearby and purchased a trunk, similar to the above, from the Christmas Tree Shops— “Don’t you just love a bargain!” the jingle went—and I was oddly covetous.
A few months later, while onto a subsequent tour with a different company of actors but still feeling the residual ache from the end of whatever it was with S., I purchased a trunk similar to his, stowing it in my hotel room and then on our return to the city for Thanksgiving break I lugged it from the parking garage on 42nd and Dyer to my then-apartment Astoria in a cold, drizzling rain.
Then the trunk was, well…I’m sure there’s an analyst who’d delve into interpreting the meaning of the object and my need to obtain it. I am only reminded of exercises in acting class, where we had to imbue a thing—Willy Loman’s suitcases or whatever, say—with “weight,” both physical and emotional. But now the trunk is inert, furniture. It is not imbued with anything but the confines of physical space.
Having lived in New York near 11 years, and in same apartment going on 5 or 6, I still have never felt that I’ve achieved an ideal home place; it is always a game of ascribing meaning to, and later removing it from, objects or larger spaces. New York is still—Didion-like—a glorious, temporary abstraction, no matter how much the weight of permanence keeps bearing down.
(+First: *groan* sorry for that pun! Secondly, S. and I are now and have been for quite some time, friendly and mutually admiring, as is the way it should be in these situations.)
