The Hole

When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?”

The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side.

My building is an old Boerum Hill brownstone with a criminal exterior renovation. Inside my bedroom, though, the floors slant and the ceiling droops. It’s a beautiful princess bedroom, if the princess never got saved and lived forever unmedicated in her virginal bedroom. It’s a room of illusions, and the nook is its most illusive element. The nook is the last thing I see every night before I go to sleep. Goodnight Moon, good night dollhouse room, good night nook.

He was the first person I dated after a catastrophic college relationship. He was sweet. He reminded me of a portrait of a medieval saint or a beautiful lesbian. He asked questions.

“What are your dreams for the future?” Don’t know. “What did you want to be when you were small?” Taller. “Where does the door in the nook go?” Not sure. “Have you ever opened it?” Never. “Never?” Never ever. From my bed he would stare at it, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more he pushed. “What if there’s something amazing up there?” And what if there isn’t. Here we are in my bed, I thought, no point in fantasy.

He believed doors were made to be opened. I believed, firmly, that some doors should not be. Locked basement doors, closed bedroom doors, the door to a safe, the attic door in a horror flick, a patio door on a burning summer day when the AC is on, the seventh door in Bluebeard’s Castle. He argued for letting in the elements; I, for the threat of a draft. I could unleash a spirit or an alien or a doll left up there imbued with the spirit of a child born during the Depression or of some creep who studied acting at an Ivy League. A ghost is like a pet or a child, and I’m not responsible enough to handle a poltergeist.

Unfortunately, my refusal to deal with the door rendered the whole nook a lost space. There, above my head, was a nook the size of a rich child’s tree house, and I was neglecting it. It was large enough that I imagined I could stand in it fairly comfortably. Being raised in Manhattan, I started to obsess about the nook. I could rent it out as a fourth bedroom. I could use it as off-season storage for several lumpy hand-knit sweaters I felt too guilty to get rid of. I could build a library in it for books I’d stolen and borrowed. In fact, he was upset that I’d never read any of the books he’d lent me. He noticed I was using his favorite book as a coffee coaster.

Our relationship, like most organically sweet things, rotted. When he dumped me, he said there was a disconnect. He said maybe we’d find our way back to each other, and I said we would not. A classic door-half-open divide: he tried to keep it open, but I bolted it shut.

A few days after we broke up, I propped a chair against the wall and scrambled upward. Halfway into the nook, my arm strength dissolved. I dangled, my tush protruding from the wall, wiggling stupidly. I considered shouting for my roommate. Then, I considered her laughing at me. Maybe, I thought, I should just allow myself to be stuck. It’s fine to be stuck. I continued up. There I crouched, panting, in the crawl space, jamming at that ungiving door. With a crack it broke.

From the waist up I stuck out through the ceiling. I could see over Brooklyn. Brooklyn could see over me—a ghoulish, dust-covered, and bizarrely grinning woman escaping from an attic. I wedged myself up further. Suddenly, I was on the tilted roof. The door was open and there was nothing to be scared of. When one door closes, God opens a trapdoor.

 

Nicolaia Rips is the author of the memoir Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel.

My Ugly Bathroom

My bathroom is ugly. My bathroom is so ugly that when I tell people my bathroom is ugly and they say it can’t be that ugly I always like to show it to them. Then they come into my bathroom and they are like, Holy shit. This bathroom is so ugly. And I say, I know, I told you.

Let me list the elements of my ugly bathroom: the sink has plastic handles and it’s impossible to clean behind the faucet. Or, you can clean behind it but it’s difficult, so it’s always grimy. The sink itself, the basin, is made of some sort of plastic material that probably used to be white and is now off-white.

The water pressure in the sink is almost nonexistent. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the sink itself but when your bathroom looks like this you don’t think, Oh wow, I really want to improve the water pressure, because bad water pressure goes with the decor.

The textured ceiling looks like a birthday cake that was frosted with canned white frosting by a person who hates whoever’s birthday it is.

The shower is maybe the worst part of the bathroom. When people come to visit us we have to tell them that the shower is disgusting and even then they cannot manage to remember not to look crestfallen when they see it. It too has fairly poor water pressure and is really tiny and the inside of it is cracked and the shelves in it are too small to fit bottles of shampoo and they are always falling down when you are taking a shower and if you have your eyes closed you think you are being attacked.

The floor is linoleum and cracked all around the edges.

I have left out the most important detail which is that this bathroom has redwood paneling that goes up to about four feet and then the rest of the bathroom is painted the same color as the ceiling. One tiny window looks out onto nothing. The curtain on it is the same curtain that was here when we used to rent this place. We lived here for a long time before we purchased it from the owners. It’s one of those two-part curtains that has a small shade across the top of the window and a smaller one that hangs below it. I can’t even tell you what it looks like, which should embarrass me, but I am always too tired to think about it.

I am glad that it is there because we used to live next door to this real asshole and I didn’t want him to see me naked for my sake, and we are about to live next door to some nice people and I don’t want them to see me naked either for their sakes.

We have a new kitchen. I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you that I don’t really love our new kitchen. When I was growing up my parents never redid our kitchen. It wasn’t a very efficient space for cooking or hanging out in. It was annoying. I was like, You guys both have jobs, let’s fix up the damn kitchen.

I like having a beautiful kitchen that’s really easy to cook in. I appreciate the original placement of tiles that my partner did, which I consulted on, and I like how the garbage can pulls out  from under the counter and you can just sweep scraps into it, and I like having a dishwasher, which I have never had as an adult until just a few months ago and which has changed my life. So I don’t want to say I don’t take pleasure in comfort and beauty. But I want my shitty bathroom to stay the way it is.

I get so sick of everyone thinking that everything they use has to be nice. Can’t some stuff just be crappy? Why do we have to get rid of perfectly functional stuff just so that every corner of our vision can twinkle with magic and possibility?

I don’t think having an ugly bathroom makes me a good person. It just makes me someone who is able to feel satisfaction with one specific place that is far from perfect.

There is much that I want. Some of it would make people think I am shallow and self-serving, and some of it would make people think I am deep and caring and full of desperate hope. My bathtub is nice in the sense that it is large and porcelain. It is the bathroom’s best feature. When I am in this tub I can pretend that I don’t want anything at all, that I am perfectly satisfied. If the bathroom were nice, I would start thinking about all the things that aren’t. This sounds absurd, but as a very tense person, I know exactly what conditions can relax me. It is necessary for me to protect these conditions. I do not have a good job right now, so there is no present danger of the bathroom being renovated. But I will be vigilant when there is.

 

Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in California. She writes a Substack.

Bedbugs

I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made a movement that seemed to say: Ouch. I scanned the bed: there was a constellation of ink-colored droplets. 

The bedbug summer was in 2019. I had just turned twenty-three. I was working at Vogue as an assistant. I was making very little money. I thought I was punk because I would often show up to work with a gin hangover, plug in a pair of headphones, and play YouTube videos where various artists performed industrial music. I thought I was punk because all of my clothes were from the garbage or had been gifted to me by people who also worked at Vogue (okay, I did buy stuff, like the bra). I thought I was punk because I was dating a former child jazz prodigy who lived in a DIY venue in Gowanus with no shower, no kitchen, but massive windows, hardwood floors. A posh nightclub had opened up next door and I sometimes went there to pee because I liked the soap. It all made me feel very cool even though in reality it was pathetic. My boyfriend slept on a twin-sized cot inside of what was functionally an electrical closet. He was the first person I called about the bedbugs. That evening he took me to the nightclub and bought me a cocktail. He had a freckle inside his eyelid and it looked like a wet pebble. I was totally in love with him.

It was not a good situation. The next morning, there was a large man in my apartment. It was the Fourth of July. The man was wearing a hazmat suit. He was going to do what he called a radical intervention re: the bugs. It involved a breakthrough in technology. He had come from New Jersey in a Sprinter van. He met us at an ATM on Newkirk Avenue so we could pay him in cash. My roommate tried to blame the whole thing on me. And why wouldn’t she? She had a nice boyfriend in medical school who liked to cook her dinner. I told her that she was insane, to make me pay for the whole thing. This was New York City. Nefarious individuals could have come into our home during the night and sprinkled the bedbugs on our sheets. We had to at least get the landlord involved. The landlord called us gullible idiots and then said she’d split it three ways because the exterminator we picked was too expensive. The man left our house. I still was not itchy. On the internet it said not everyone was allergic to bedbugs. I liked this fact: I was some kind of biological miracle? I did not want to spend any more time in the bedbug apartment so I went to my boyfriend’s DIY venue and poured a bottle of Bailey’s into an XL Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup, and then we took the subway to Far Rockaway. 

After a few weeks, the bedbugs were physically gone, but I continued to see them everywhere. In my clothes. In my backpack, which I had taken to ironing at least twice a day just to be safe. I had given them to everyone at Vogue, probably. There was this thing where my boyfriend told me that a woman he used to fuck also had gotten bedbugs, not long before we started dating. I started flipping over the mattress on his cot to inspect it every time he went to the bathroom after sex. I would crawl around on the floor completely naked, aiming my iPhone flashlight at the ground, like a coal miner. I was subsisting on a lot of Cool Blue Gatorade and really cheap Thai food. Around this time I was attacked by a cat in a bodega. It became clear to me that my boyfriend was probably addicted to smoking marijuana. I had basically stopped letting people into my apartment, including myself. 

I decided I was being punished, Old Testament–style. I would sit at my desk at work and think of how I had been affected by each of the biblical plagues:

(1) Water turning to blood: I had been menstruating for almost a decade at this point.
(2) Frogs: I had seen frogs in various ponds. 
(3) Lice: I had been spared from this one, so far.
(4) Flies: I am from upstate New York and they are always talking about black fly season there. I had personally experienced this—a swarm of them around my head in the High Peaks Wilderness.
(5) Livestock pestilence: I used to eat semi-rancid deli meat when depressed.
(6) Boils: To this day I am a hormonal acne sufferer.
(7) Hail: Again, from upstate New York. There is a joke among locals that is like, What are the seasons in upstate New York? Winter, winter, winter, roadwork. Ha ha ha.
(8) Darkness: Constant, neverending.
(9) Locusts: This was the bedbugs.
(10) Slaying of the firstborn: A false positive from a pregnancy test purchased at a pharmacy near the Jules Joffrin station in Paris. The father would’ve been this guy Antoine, who used to pick me up from school at La Sorbonne and then have sex with me while we watched music videos by the artist Micachu and the Shapes on the television in his apartment in Belleville. He was a decade older than me. He was one of the first people that I’d ever had sex with. If we’d had a daughter she would’ve been so pretty. 

By the start of the fall, I had completely lost my mind. It was comical. I started seeing a therapist and was swiftly diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. My boyfriend had made it clear to me that even though I loved him, he did not love me. I was tired of being punk. I was tired of walking around in a bikini as a shirt. It was all such a weird season. In January 2020, after a long breakup—far overdue—I moved to a small but stunning apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone. There were no bedbugs there. My new roommates were nice. I pushed my bed into a corner and sat on the fire escape and drank wine out of a mug. The plagues were over (or so I thought). A few months later, I realized that all my clothes were infested with moths. 

 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published non-fiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.

I Love Birds Most

Given a space to inhabit unobserved, I will immediately convert it into a physical representation of the inside of my brain. My annual trip to the old Zillow listing for the farm I bought eight years ago leaves me stunned every time: it was once the kind of house one could list on Zillow! Now it is mine; I have filled the walls with pictures,hung the surplus ones on the ceiling, crowded every surface with dioramas and precarious unidentifiable objects that look like chess pieces from outer space. There is nowhere to sit in the house except on the floor with the dogs (and, every hatching season, with the emu chicks who run figure eights around the obstacle art). Like my brain, it’s a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

My house, the physical building, is an arranged marriage of two old farmhouses that were dragged from different parts of the country and clumsily conjoined. I decline to speculate on which side is holding up the other. There is a secret spiral staircase, accessed through a cupboard door, with ludicrously uneven treads; the wavy glass windowpanes cast distorted shadows. The two halves of my house must have each accommodated entire families, but the current inhabitants between them, in descending order of population, are: eggs, birds, dogs, me. 

Every morning around eleven, having done the farm rounds and broadcast feed to the loyal birds, I commence with the small-scale batch production of objects that promise but do not fulfill utility. I tend to work compulsively and repetitively, making hundreds of variations of the same thing until I exhaust my supply of the necessary materials or my own fascination with it. There are blown-out, intact eggshells equipped with antennae or working motion sensors; eggshells hinged to open like boxes, or with latched hatches, lined with poppy red flocking; emu egg dirigibles rigged with ball chains, hanging from the kitchen rafters. Over the  past six months, I’ve manufactured thousands of one-inch hollow resin spheres, each kitted out with some combination of magnets, O-rings, and fishing tackle and beads. Each one of them is perfect, and the only people who see them are the bewildered tradesmen who need access to the circuit breaker in my kitchen.

I love birds most for the combination of complexity and stupidity they exhibit: their deep-seated, unplumbable impulse to perform elaborate, apparently pointless procedures. The contents of my house demonstrate that it is an impulse I share.

Kate Riley’s story “L. R.” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of the Review.

The Smoker

This one time, my dad bought me a house in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a two-story fake Colonial with yellow aluminum siding on Hawkins Street. We bought it from the bank for $55,000; it was one of many properties under foreclosure in the city in 2009. Dad and I had spent a few days driving around and looking at these houses. In one driveway, I found a dirty playing card depicting the biggest penis I could ever imagine—I still have it. In one basement, the realtor had to disclose, the former owner had tied his girlfriend’s lover to a chair, tortured him, and then shot him in the head.

The man who had lived in my house on Hawkins Street had owed more on the house than it was worth. It was in an undesirable part of town, or so I was told, but I loved the neighborhood. The houses were small. There was a permanent lemon icee stand a block away. I was about twenty steps away from a bodega that functioned as the neighborhood grocery store. My next door neighbor was an elderly lady from Portugal who spoke almost no English and yet complained to me about all the dogshit in my backyard while bragging about the tomatoes in her garden, which looked exactly like her breasts beneath her housedress, heavy and sliding. We were separated by a chainlink fence.

The layout of the house was nothing special. When you walked through the front door, you could go up the staircase on the left. Or you could walk straight down the hall, past the small living room, to the kitchen, and from the kitchen you could take a u-turn and step down to the side-door to the driveway, or continue on down to the basement. I had never had a house of my own. When we signed the papers, I felt myself moving into a new phase of my life, a rite of passage with my father in the chair next to me. It was a beautiful and slightly terrifying experience I know I was very lucky to have, and I loved the house, I loved the light and the intimacy of the rooms, and I loved writing in that house. I wrote McGlue in that house. But more than anything, I loved that house because Dad and I renovated it together. Every day for months, he drove down from Massachusetts with his tools. We’d work all morning sanding and painting, breaking down walls, laying tile, whatever, then go have foot-long Subway sandwiches at the Walmart, hit the Home Depot, and go back to work until it was dark and the rush hour traffic had died down. This was the most time I had ever spent with Dad. It was fun and emotional and felt like the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy.

The biggest issue that needed to be addressed—the thing that made the house unlivable—was the nicotine. I don’t mean that the place smelled of cigarette smoke or old cigarettes or ash or the butts stubbed out on the greasy parquet floor. I mean that there was nicotine syrup soaked into the walls. Have you ever smoked a cigarette in a small room in Providence in the summer, in the still of the night? Cigarette smoke is distilled in the lungs, and upon exhalation, the nicotine adheres to the moisture in the environment, the droplets land, the nicotine is absorbed, and the poison never leaves. The interior of the house had a layer of nicotine varnish that made everything sepia and gross. You cannot scrub this stuff off anything except, maybe, stainless steel. So Dad and I had to rip out all the walls.

I can’t really remember what the kitchen was like when we got the house, although I’m sure Dad took a picture. I just remember using a sledgehammer. I had been an on-and-off smoker for many years—something I tried (and probably failed) to hide from my parents. (I finally quit last year thanks to Chantix and the grace of God.) I mention this to stress that I was used to the smell of smoke. But this was something different. It was, literally, the smell of carcinogens. And yet the demolition was kind of sad. When I was breaking up the walls in the kitchen, I found horsehair in the plaster, and a sloppily potato-printed wallpaper I wished I could keep.

Upstairs was a slightly different story. The previous owner had painted the walls orange, laid huge white tiles down the hallway, and installed some kitchen cabinets in a windowless area by the bathroom. An old fridge stood awkwardly, wedged as far is it could get under the sloped roof ceiling. It appeared to be a half-renovated rental unit. It wasn’t a bad idea, and I did use that fridge while the real kitchen downstairs was being gutted and renewed. I mention this because it it was part of the interrupted life of the house. The previous owner wanted to turn the upstairs into an independent apartment. He had obviously failed to keep up with the mortgage. Maybe if he’d finished sooner, and rented out the upstairs, everything would have been okay.

One day, when Dad and I were at work in the kitchen, a guy pulled into the driveway, walked in through the side-door, took one look at the place, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t introduce himself or say hello. We knew exactly who he was. I tried to talk to him. He kind of waved me away, and looked at the crumbled drywall on the floor. He didn’t come any further into the house. Dad and I put down our tools and stood, a little penitent, while he smoked. Finally, he threw the cigarette on the floor, crushed it under his sandal, opened his mouth to speak, but began to cry instead. It was horrible. It was heartbreaking. It was so bad. I looked at my dad. He made no expression. There was nothing to say or to do. We just stood there, respectfully, gazing downward as the man cried and rubbed his face and pulled another cigarette out and lit it. Finally, when he was done crying, he turned to us and said, “I used to live here.” He kicked at some broken plaster on the floor. “I’m so sorry,” I said. He waved his hand as though to say, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” He took one more long, hard drag, coughed for about a minute straight, and then went out the side-door and drove away.

 

Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist and screenwriter. Her latest novel, Lapvona, is out now.

A Place for Fire

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

We were still in Colorado when we booked a first appointment with a realtor in Rhode Island. In the hour before our video call, my husband suggested we make a list of must-have and nice-to-have features in a house. He wrote “3 BR” in the must-have column on a page in his notebook, because we each wanted our own office, then leaned back in his chair. “Built-in bookshelves would be nice,” he said. We’ve always wanted built-in bookshelves. We didn’t yet know we were going to run out of space in the shipping container we’d rented and would have to throw out all the shelves we owned. “A fireplace,” he added thoughtfully. I went into my strident mode, a part of my bad personality that for some reason I cannot change. “A fireplace isn’t optional!” I said, taking the pen and writing “fireplace” in the must-have column. “I’m not going to buy a house without a fireplace.”

We’d spent eleven years in Denver, all in the same apartment, not because we liked the apartment so much, but because every year, when our lease renewal came up, we never felt much like moving. We had moved out there from Boston with eighty or ninety boxes of books, and we didn’t want to pack them up again. We kept hitting that snooze button. Finally John convinced me to move back to New England—he was born in Connecticut, and he never stopped missing it, the trees and the stone walls and all that. What pushed us over was the housing market, which was more reasonable in Providence than in Denver. John kept showing me listings for adorable Colonials with mortgage payments not much higher than our rent. They looked cozy, and I thought I could be happy in New England if we had a little house to settle down in—one last move for us and for the books—if we could cozy up together on a couch and read by the fire.

We drove across the country at the end of March 2022, arriving in John’s hometown in early April—an old mill town in Southeastern Connecticut, an hour from Providence. Our plan was to stay with his mother for a few months. This had a dual purpose. We’d save money on rent and recoup the costs of moving while we looked for a permanent place to live. We could also help Linda with some things around the house, and keep her company—John’s father had died the previous fall. We felt useful, helping her clean out the basement, which had flooded the previous summer, and manage the yard, and so did she—on nights when we had to work late, Linda made dinner.

It’s strange to return. I lived in Boston in my twenties, and now I’m in my forties. One weekend in April we visited friends in Cambridge, then stopped in Harvard Square to buy Linda a Mother’s Day present. There was still a bitter chill in the wind that morning, and as we drove around looking for a spot to leave the car, we kept passing places where I remembered being cold. Once I slipped on some ice coming out of a bar on Mass Ave. It must have been 2007. There was frozen, jagged snow all over the sidewalks, and I tore my jeans and scraped up my knees and the palms of my hands. A couple days later I got food poisoning—it was particularly miserable, vomiting while down on my wounded knees.

During the spring and into summer, whenever anybody asked me how the house hunt was going, I’d make the same unfunny joke. We’re facing two problems, I’d say, and they’re related. The places we like, we can’t afford, and the places we can afford, we don’t like. During the nine or so months between our decision to move and the actual move, housing prices had gone up something like 25 percent. We had told our realtor the absolute top of our range. A week or so later, he asked for a reminder of that figure, quoting back a number fifty thousand dollars higher than the one we’d given him. I didn’t know how to respond. The places in our price range lacked our must-have features, to say nothing of nice ones. I felt like a fool.

When I was twelve or so, my parents converted their wood-burning fireplace to gas. The idea was that it would be so much easier to light and extinguish that we’d use it more often. But the fireplace lost almost all of its appeal. It no longer gave off any real heat, and it didn’t smell delicious—it didn’t smell like anything—and worst of all, it didn’t crackle. I love the sound of a wood fire, and I got through many a winter in that Denver apartment by burning a special kind of candle with a crackling wooden wick, and by playing ASMR white noise videos on YouTube with names like “Cozy Reading Nook Ambience” and, my favorite, “Crackling Campfire on the Windy Tundra of Norway.” My family’s new gas fireplace offered no drama. As Jun’ichirō Tanizaki once wrote of electric heaters, “without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost.” After the conversion we only lit a fire once a year, on Christmas, and in a perfunctory fashion. In Providence, I thought we might have to settle for a gas fireplace. But most houses we looked at had no fireplace at all. And with interest rates increasing, we couldn’t afford those houses either.

It was a world-historically terrible time to try to buy property. People kept saying that prices were bound to come down eventually, so we decided to wait. We had a place to live. I thought I could do it—not indefinitely, maybe, but almost indefinitely. Then in October I sprained my ankle; I was on crutches for a week, and wore an orthopedic boot for several more. I missed long walks desperately. My anxiety ratcheted up. We told our realtor we’d start looking again after the holidays. Around Thanksgiving I started having nocturnal panic attacks—I’d wake up with a shock, like I’d been shocked with a defibrillator, then start sobbing uncontrollably. I listened to a podcast about why people cry—there’s a theory that it serves a social function more than anything else. Literally, a cry for help. In December we both got COVID—for the first time, somehow—and had to cancel our trip to Texas to see my parents. On my third day of COVID, I threw out my back and cried laughably hard. The tears seemed to actually leap from my eyes—projectile tears. I am sometimes amazed by the depths of my own self-pity.

One good thing about time passing is, you get to watch It’s a Wonderful Life again. My mother-in-law had never seen it, so we all watched it together. I’ve seen it dozens of times, but on this occasion I heard a line I’d never noticed before. George is trying to explain to his father that he doesn’t want to stay in the family business, which is a building and loan association. “I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office,” he says. “I want to do something big and something important.” His father says, “You know, George, I feel that in a small way we are doing something important. Satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.”

Roof and walls and fireplace. I thought of philosophers and their furniture: Plato’s “chairness,” Wittgenstein’s disappearing chair: “I say ‘There is a chair’. What if I go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight.? —‘So it wasn’t a chair, but some kind of illusion’.” Not all houses have a fireplace, but I read somewhere that when children draw houses they often add a chimney with smoke coming out. I remember doing this myself, the chimney coming out of a pitched roof, though our own roof was flat. I remember believing that snow smelled like fire, because every time it snowed, I smelled woodsmoke in the air.

There’s a big stone fireplace at Linda’s, and ever since the clocks changed, once or twice a week John will ask me, in his soothing voice, Would you like me to build you a fire tonight? I’ll open a book but only look at it part of the time, because I love looking at a fire. If there’s a TV on in a bar, I’ve noticed, and there almost always is, the movement pulls your eye to it, no matter how boring what’s on is. A fire is the same, but a fire is never boring. It’s mysterious that it isn’t. Or maybe it’s not mysterious. It’s this miracle life-giving thing you can build in your house, the same thing cave people built in their caves. I have not lived a day without a sunset, but a sunset is never boring. Apart from being beautiful, it reminds you there’s a giant ball of fire in the sky and we only see it half the time. The transitions remain interesting.

 

Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Normal Distance, out from Soft Skull in September 2022, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the “On Poetry” column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer.