Happy Life
cohabitation
The apartment smelled like cardboard and possibility. Sarah stood in the center of what would become their living room, turning slowly, mapping the bare walls with her eyes while Marcus wrestled a dolly up the front steps. Through the window, Lake Merritt caught the late afternoon sun and threw it back in sheets of copper light.
“Babe,” Marcus called from the hallway, his voice strained under the weight of something. “Where does the couch go?”
Sarah looked at the living room’s layout. The window was the obvious focal point, the whole reason they’d chosen this unit over the cheaper place on Grand Avenue. “Along the east wall,” she said. “Facing the window.”
Marcus appeared in the doorway, one end of their secondhand sectional balanced on the dolly, his friend Terrence holding up the other end with visible resentment. They shuffled it inside, and Marcus paused, scanning the room.
“I was thinking against the window,” he said. “TV on the east wall.”
“Then you’d have glare all afternoon.”
“Not if we get blackout curtains.”
Sarah felt something tighten behind her sternum. They’d been married for eleven days. She smiled and said, “Let’s figure it out later.”
They spent the next three hours in the pleasant fog of physical labor, ferrying boxes from the U-Haul, unwrapping plates, arguing cheerfully about which cabinet should hold the glasses versus the mugs. Terrence left around six with a case of beer as payment, and then it was just the two of them, sitting on the floor of their kitchen, eating Thai food out of containers.
“I love this place,” Marcus said. He reached over and squeezed Sarah’s knee. “I love that we’re here.”
“Me too.” Sarah leaned into him. “We should figure out the bedroom next. I want to get the bed set up before midnight.”
The bedroom was where it started to fracture, just slightly, like a hairline crack in new plaster.
Sarah found the chair first. She’d wrapped it in two moving blankets and taped them tight, the way you’d swaddle something fragile, and when she pulled the blankets away she ran her hand along the armrest where the velvet had gone bald from years of use. She carried it toward the bedroom window and set it down, then stood back and looked at it the way you check on a photograph after hanging it, adjusting the angle until it felt right. She placed her brass floor lamp beside it and turned it on, even though the sun was still up.
Marcus came in carrying a long cardboard box and a canvas tool roll. He knelt on the floor and unpacked the legs first, four hairpin legs he’d welded himself, and he checked each joint with his thumb, pressing the welds the way a doctor presses a pulse point. Then he slid the walnut slab from the box. There was a long scratch near one edge, and he frowned at it, tracing it with his fingernail, already calculating what grit sandpaper would take it out. He stood the slab on its side and surveyed the room. The outlet cluster on the south wall was right next to the window. Perfect.
He looked up and saw the chair already sitting there.
“Oh,” Sarah said from behind him.
“Hm,” Marcus said.
They stood there, each beside their respective artifact, and the room felt suddenly smaller than its square footage suggested.
“The desk could go in the living room,” Sarah offered, though her voice pitched upward, turning it into a question.
Marcus set the walnut slab against the wall. “It could. But then I’d be up late mixing beats while you’re trying to sleep in here, and you’d hear everything through the wall.” He paused. “The chair could go in the living room. Next to the bookshelf.”
“It’s where I read before bed. If I read in bed I can’t fall asleep.”
“You could try.”
“Marcus.” She sat down in the chair and pulled her knees up, folding herself into it the way she always did, and he recognized the posture. He’d seen it a hundred times in her old studio on Piedmont Ave, always in that chair, always with her feet tucked under her, always with a book or a journal balanced on the armrest. It was the posture of someone settling into the one place where they fit exactly.
“Tell me about it,” he said. He sat on the bare mattress across from her.
“You know about it. It was my grandmother’s.”
“I know it was your grandmother’s. I don’t know what it means.”
Sarah was quiet for a moment. “Her house in Richmond had this window that looked out over a garden. She kept the chair right next to it. When I was little I’d sit in her lap in this chair and she’d read to me, and I could smell the jasmine coming through the screen.” She paused. “The garden’s gone now. The house got sold after she died. This is the only piece of it that still exists.”
Marcus looked at the chair, at the bald patch on the armrest that Sarah kept touching without noticing.
“Put it in the corner,” he said. “I’ll put the desk in the hall closet. I’ve been wanting a project anyway; I can reframe the shelving, run a power strip in there.”
He said it lightly, like it was nothing, but Sarah watched him glance back at the walnut slab leaning against the wall. He’d told her the story of building it a dozen times: the pandemic, the empty months, how he’d gone to his friend’s garage just to do something with his hands, and how the desk was the first thing in his adult life he’d made from raw material. She’d seen the way he wiped it down every Sunday before calling his mother, a small ritual of maintenance that was really a small ritual of pride.
“Wait,” she said. “A closet?”
“It’ll work. I measured one like it at the open house, remember? Five feet deep.”
“Marcus, you built that desk with your hands. You’re not putting it in a closet.”
He looked at her.
“What if we move the bed to the opposite wall?” she said. “Off-center. Your desk fits along the south side, and the chair keeps the window.”
He studied the room, remapping it. The bed would lose its centered position. The layout would be asymmetrical, unconventional.
“The outlet cluster is on the south wall,” he said slowly.
“Exactly.”
“And your lamp plugs in by the window.”
“Exactly.”
He picked up the walnut slab and carried it to the south wall, holding it at desk height, testing the fit. Sarah watched from the chair. It worked. It wasn’t what either of them had pictured, but it worked.
They moved the bed. Marcus bolted the hairpin legs to the slab and set his laptop on the surface, adjusting the height of his stool. Sarah angled the brass lamp toward the window where the last daylight was thinning over Oakland. The apartment was still full of boxes, still half a mess, still becoming whatever it would become.
Marcus opened his laptop. Sarah picked up her book. For a few minutes the only sounds were the soft click of keys and the turn of a page, two rhythms that had nothing in common and everything to do with each other.