I’ve just told Quatorze that it was one of the ten most productive meetings of my life. We sat down, after lunch, with blank legal pads, and when we got up a few hours later, I not only knew what had to be done (and what I had to do) between now and whenever the love seat with the ball-and-claw feet comes back from the upholsterer. As well as what ought to wait until afterward. The mover who picked up the love seat will be retained again (presumably). This time, the top half of the breakfront will be taken from the apartment to the storage unit, where the other half of the pair of loveseats that belonged to Kathleen’s grandmother will be picked up, and brought back to the apartment, via a stop at the upholsterer’s. Isn’t this fascinating? Let’s hope not. Let’s hope that I do the assigned homework and that absolutely nothing of interest occurs on the moving day, whenever that’s to be.

(Soon, though.)

Without our spending much money — almost nothing, quite seriously, on acquisitions; the reupholstery, a kind of maintenance, is what’s typical of our outlays — we’ll have a fairly different living area in a month or so. The big round glass tabletop, mounted on a stout pedestal, will take the place of our chaste but impractical late-Georgian reproduction dining table. The pedestal is currently doing yeoman duty as a side table; the glass tabletop is parked behind the breakfront. Once I’ve got the table set up, I’ll be able to invite up to eight people to dinner any old time, and if a few of them don’t show up, there will be more room (and food) for everybody else. I’ll be able to roast beef, pork, and capon again. I’ll bake cakes, knowing that less than half (at most!) of each gâteau will survive the meal. Dinner rolls! Soups! Stews! The dishes that serve five or more people are the ones that can be prepared ahead of time, or left to cook slowly for an hour or two. I’m longing to make them again.

Meanwhile, because the round table will be much too big for Kathleen and me to sit opposite when we’re alone, I’m going to move our smallish Pembroke table into the foyer, right ouside the kitchen door, and have a go at lifting the wings of an evening and serving dinner for the two of us on that.

There was no time for farther remark or explanation. The dream must be borne with, and Mr. Knightley must take his seat with the rest round the large modern circular table which Emma had introduced at Hartfield, and which none but Emma could have had power to place there and persuade her father to use, instead of the small-sized Pembroke, on which two of his daily meals had, for forty years been crowded. Tea passed pleasantly, and nobody seemed in a hurry to move.

Small Mr Woodhouse’s Pembroke may have seemed to Jane Austen, but I’m quite sure that it was larger than ours.

A New York apartment of less than luxurious size is like a sailboat. Everything not only has a place but must be kept in its place, or insanity ensues. Taking things out and putting them away eat up a lot of one’s time, in addition to making one jealous of spinster aunts with nothing better to do. Even after twenty-six years in this apartment, I haven’t got the hang of it. I’m still stamping out the legacies of my suburban upbringing, with its chock-full deep-freeze and its walk-in closets full of paper towels. Not to mention the dishes that it was no problem to hold on to, even if they were rarely used more than once in a decade (not that I lived anywhere in my life for as many as ten years before this place). To make things worse, the houses that I grew up in were graced with empty bookshelves. It wasn’t that my parents weren’t readers, exactly; but they certainly weren’t amateur librarians. The fact that they could have been, that they had room for plenty of books, has confounded me for half of my adult life. I don’t have the room. It is not helpful to remember what my parents didn’t do with their built-in bookcases, empty of books. I have the books, all right, but — ! I digress. Small changes in the arrangement of small apartments can change the entire flow of daily life within them.

Another nice change in the coming shuffle will be the relocation of our good prints, to the selfsame foyer, where they’ll be much easier to look at than they are in the blue room, where clutter makes it difficult to get near to almost every bit of wall.  This will make room for a print that I bought last spring, on the installment plan, from The Old Print Shop; it will hang in the vicinity of another one, by the same artist, that I have loved living with for over twenty years. 

Meanwhile: who’s going to take the “Edward” wine glasses from Williams-Sonoma off my hands? Will it be Ms NOLA, who has first dibs? Or will it be Fossil Darling, who, just the other day, spontaneously announced the need for new stems. “Funny you should mention that,” quoth Quatorze…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Gotham Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.