“Not a particular program? Just call on yourself to watch?”
“And sometimes, not always, I don’t even bother turning the set on.”
“That I don’t understand,” Klotzman said. “Why don’t you turn the set on if you’ve instructed yourself to.”
I thought about it, but had no answer. “I don’t know. I don’t really like television, but that’s not the reason.”
“What did you do instead of watching television?”
“Different things,” I said. “Most recently, I just went to bed.”
“You discovered you were tired?” he asked in his skeptical way.
“I guess. No. I just wanted to lose consciousness.”
He nodded in his annoying way. He liked to demonstrate that he was a step ahead of me, knew what I was going to say before it was actually said. If I didn’t want to surprise myself, I would have been elated to surprise Klotzman.
I’m not very good at noticing the details of my surroundings, but in the middle of one of my sessions, I noted that Klotzman had refurnished his office. The way it came to me was that I felt less at home in my familiar surroundings then I had and one thing led to another and the reason eventually revealed itself. There was a new carpet somewhat lighter or perhaps darker than the old and the furniture had been replaced by furniture not much different than its predecessor.
I stopped whatever else I was going to say and mentioned my observation.
“The place was getting pretty tacky,” he said. “It needed to be spruced up, I felt. What do you think?”
I didn’t want to be too negative. “I suppose I’ll get used to it.”
“Change creates movement,” he said, “new ways of seeing. It’ll be good for you. You’ll see.”
I accepted his point, not knowing what else to do with it. As it turned out, we had a fairly lively session and perhaps my uneasiness with the altered environment had something to do with it.
When I got back to my apartment, I looked over my furnishings, which had been tacky for a long time. and it seemed to me a possibly useful project to refurnish my living quarters, perhaps one room at a time. I didn’t much like the idea of poking around in shops and wondered if it could be done through the mails or by phone. The faded red couch in my living room had two broken springs so that needed to be replaced first.
I didn’t want to mention my project to Klotzman because I didn’t want him to think that I was following his example. So I did nothing about it until one day I thought of asking Eva for advice.
“You could go to a department store,” she said.
I shook my head. The idea didn’t attract me. We were taking one of our periodic walks. “I’m uncomfortable with salesman.”
“You can always say you’re just looking. That you don’t want to be bothered. If it were me, if I were looking for something, I’d do it on the computer over the internet.”
The longer I lived with the faded red couch the more of an eyesore it seemed. I could just throw it out and not replace it or replace it eventually. I only sat on it these days when I was particularly miserable.
A week later Eva asked me if I had gotten a new couch and I said evasively that I was working on it.
I sat on the old couch a few more times to see if it was as uncomfortable as I remembered it. It didn’t seem so bad. It owned its spot in the room. Perhaps I was resisting change.
Eva told me she was seeing Ron again but not as regularly as before. She liked him better, she allowed, when she saw him less. Still it was hard to repeat old patterns.
Easier, I thought, than creating new ones.
The first thing I purchased on the internet was a pair of white socks — no reason not to start small — and when they arrived in the mail it was like getting a gift, one I had no obligation to reciprocate. Why hadn’t I done this before? Of course this didn’t solve the immediate problem. The next thing I ordered was a pair of pants, but they were disappointing. The danger of course was getting the wrong thing or not quite the right thing. If I got a sofa I didn’t like, it would not be so easy to dispose of it. The pants I merely put away in a drawer, thinking that when I took them out again they would be a better fit than they were. In the mean time I pursued the subtle and inconspicuous course of wooing Eva without her knowing it.
“What days do you see Ron?” I asked her on one of our walks.
“Wednesday and Saturday,” she said, “but I’m thinking of cutting it back to just Saturday.”
I nodded, as if, like Klotzman, it was something I knew all along.
“I want to keep my options open,” she said.
“I approve,” I said, and she smiled.
I smiled inwardly in return, giving nothing away.
“If you like,” she said, “I’ll go to a store with you and help you pick out a sofa.”
“I appreciate the offer,” I said, “though I’m not quite ready. One of these days.”
“Are you backtracking? Maybe you’re still attached to the old one. You tell me when you’re ready, Mel.”
“I’m ready and not ready,” I said. “I feel an obligation to the way things were and at the same time in my head I’m prepared for change.”
The next morning I dragged the eyesore sofa four or five inches closer to thedoor in readiness for disposal. I checked out sofas on the internet and some came with pictures that were probably not very accurate. If you bought one of these sofas, the company offered to take the old one away at no extra cost.
For a while, for a long time it seemed, my project was stuck in the rut of indecision. Then one day, trying some obscure merchant on the internet I saw a sofa that greatly resembled the one I wanted to discard. I had, which is rare for me, a kind of epiphany. This was the one I needed to order. Afterward I could pretend, if necessary, that it was the old sofa restored to its former well being. I ordered it without letting myself think about it and so risk changing my mind.
I worried that the picture of it might have been misleading but ten days later when the new sofa arrived and the old eyesore was taken away it was hard to tell the difference. I didn’t sit on it for a few days, wanting to keep it pristine, but sat across from it and watched it breathe. This was change, I decided, but not disruptive change, induced movement at a pace I was ready for.
I was happy for a few days, perhaps a day and a half, after the new sofa entered my life. There had always been papers and books on the old sofa so the new one, the resurrected old one, seemed relatively naked. I took some books off my shelf and put them on the sofa though that didn’t produce quite the effect I had been looking for. I began to miss the old guy as if it were a living thing, a pet perhaps, who had died. I felt in some way I had betrayed the old one with the new which tarnished my initial pleasure in its presence.
I didn’t tell Klotzman about the new sofa but asked him if he missed his old furniture.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
“Don’t you feel you’ve betrayed the furniture that had been with you, served you well, for so long?”
“Please,” he said. “It’s inanimate. It has no feelings. Why are you so concerned? Have you thrown some old furniture out?”
And so I confessed. I let Klotzman talk me out of my obsession with the old couch. “It’s displaced feelings,” he said. “We’ve been through this before.”
At least he didn’t see my getting a new couch a following of his example. I’ll give him that.
Inanimate or not, I couldn’t get over the idea that in some way I had hurt the old couch’s feelings, which I had never meant to do. It wasn’t my fault the old couch had gotten run down. I might have treated it better when it was in its prime.
My life was changing in small ways. I went to the movies for the first time with Eva. There was a time not so long ago I liked to go by myself and sit in the dark sometimes for hours, but I stopped doing that and so stopped going to movies altogether.