The Craigslist Sofa

Mark’s fortune and burden in life was being married to a creative person. He usually liked the end product but the road to my getting through one of my benders was steep and scattered with the remains of paint, masking tape, dirt, fabric, stain, glue sticks, thread, and a lot of wacky ideas. I knew that the strain of my creativity often drove him bat shit crazy. I knew this because it drove me bat shit crazy.

I’ve changed the paint color of every room in this house so many times I’ve lost count. When I recently looked at an old photo of me and Mark and the background was a dark yellow I had two thoughts – what a great picture and that was not one of my best color choices. I painstakingly painted a white picket fence on the walls of my daughter’s bedroom. I measured, penciled it in, edged it out with a tiny paintbrush, painted each picket, and repeated the process around the entire room. Two years later I thought it looked amateur and painted over it. I once decided that our small kitchen was suddenly going to be an eat-in kitchen and dragged in a table. As five of us were crammed around it, Mark started eating off everyone’s plate. We all looked at him like he was crazy and I asked him what he was doing. “Oh my bad,” he said, “with this Dreamhouse Barbie table you’re forcing us to sit at I couldn’t tell which plate was mine.” I had him and Will dig wine bottles (“Not the big ones, you guys!!”) out of the glass recyling bin at the shopping center so I could turn them upside down and bury them halfway to create a border around a brick patio. I have dyed clothes that weren’t the right color (and then really weren’t the right color) and spray painted everything. Whenever I was down in the basement, spraying away without a mask or a window open, Mark would yell at me that I was killing a couple million brain cells.

I swapped out the pillows on the couch depending on the season or boredom and would get mad when Mark didn’t even notice. I rearranged the furniture all the time and then would say to him, “Don’t you think this works so much better?” He didn’t because HE DID NOT CARE. One time I rearranged the furniture while he was out of town. I heard him come in late at night, run into something, and say, “Son of a bitch.” I pretended I was sleeping when he came to bed and faked like I just woke up when he crawled in next to me. “I’m so glad you’re home,” I sleepily said. He said, “If you could leave a light on for me the next time you move the couch in a different place that would be really helpful,” and showed me the bruise on his leg the next day.

What drove Mark crazier than anything was me bringing home old shit from the side of the road, an estate sale, or Craigslist. It almost always involved him in some way as I may have a good eye but not the upper body strength to deliver the goods. I’d always start the conversation the same way. “So I found this really cool thing that I think would work great in here……..” Mark would ask what we needed it for which was his way of putting the brakes on my creative mojo. I was never deterred.

A few years ago I told Mark that the couch in the living room needed to go. It was too big and SO TUSCAN LOOKING. He didn’t even know what SO TUSCAN LOOKING meant so those sorts of conversations had to take place over the span of months. I had to introduce the idea, bring it up casually but not too much, I had to sigh a lot when I had to push the couch to vacuum underneath it (which I only did when he was around) and then complain that it was bad for my bum shoulder. I had to wear him down but not let him know I was wearing him down.

My plan was to slipcover whatever couch we got so it did not need to be new. The slipcovers were going to cost a bunch of money which was Phase B of the plan that I hadn’t introduced Mark to yet. I’d search every day on Craigslist and show him when I’d come across a possibility. He’d nod, go back to his computer, and then I’d say, “But I don’t know, it might be too whimpy looking.” Since he didn’t know what the point of any of this was, he’d say, “Whatever you think,” which was the equivalent of telling The Elves in Charge of My Overthinking to start pulling the fire alarm every ten minutes.

Finally I found something I liked that was the right size and I arranged to look at it on a Saturday morning. I told Mark the plan and he said he had a rewrite on a paper that had to be sent off on Monday morning so the weekend would not work. “Maybe next weekend,” he said. I said, “Do you not understand how Craigslist works? You don’t tell people next weekend because a hundred other people are wanting to buy the same thing. This isn’t a furniture purchase, Mark, this is a contest and we are going to win.” Then I swore that I only needed one hour of his time and so he agreed.

We drove out to the house and the couch was practically new so I said, “Done deal, now let’s get this in the back of our car and take it home.” Mr. Craig looked out the window, Mark looked out the window, even Mrs. Craig looked out the window. They all agreed that the couch wouldn’t fit in our compact SUV and there I stood, stranded on the Island of No Bueno. Mark asked if the legs came off. The conclusion was that they likely didn’t and he said we should pass on the couch because of that. I said, “Nope, I’ve been looking for a couch for months. This one fits, I’ve measured, and we need to buy it.” Then I came up with the idea to go to Home Depot (“Mark, it’s not even out of our way!!”), rent one of their trucks for ONE HOUR, and then he could go to work. This was not at all what Mark wanted to hear but he said he’d give up another hour and so we drove there. “I’ll handle it,” I said and went to the desk to rent the truck where they asked me for my insurance information. I tore my purse apart looking for it, ran out to the car looking for it, and tried to find my policy number online with no luck. By this point Mark really needed to get going so I called Mr. & Mrs. Craig to say that we would pick up the couch the next day.

That Sunday morning we went to Home Depot to get the truck and pick up the couch. On the way home, Mark said, “I hope we can figure out how to get the legs off this couch,” and I thought oh dear god here he goes again with the damn legs on this couch but kept my mouth shut because I had been teetering on the edge with the mister all weekend. We got the couch off the truck, me going backwards through the front door and then the oddest thing happened.

It did not fit.

That’s when Mark’s rage meter hit Defcon 5 which caused me to babble like a moron. “I swear I measured, Mark. Wait, let me show you the measurements. I wrote them down. They’re in my purse. It’s in the car. Why don’t you get my purse out of the car and there’s a little piece of paper in there folded in the part where I keep my lipstick. Not the front zipper part where I keep my floss and ibuprofen but the back zipper part. You’ll see, it’s right there,” and I was nodding and smiling and sweating and he just kept looking at me. Finally he said, “This is why I asked about the legs coming off. Because if the legs came off we could unscrew them and this wouldn’t have been any problem. And I looked at him and said, “Oh, I get it now. You should have said that from the beginning. I probably would have understood it better.”

He did not look at me. He told me to MOVE. He told me he was going to shove it and make it through the doorway. I said let me help you shove it and he said that if I said one more word that Craigslist couch was going to be shoved so far up my … and I scooted out of the way and Mark pushed and shoved and got it through. I jumped up and down and said I loved him and I was sorry and I’d never put him through that again and neither one of us believed it. Before he left to go to work, I looked him in the eye said, “I want you to know that I really appreciate you and everything you did this weekend to get this couch home and it’s going to look fantastic when it’s done. So whatever fantasy you have, whatever, I’m game. You think about that while you’re doing your little sciency work and get back to me tonight.”

That night he said to me that he actually had a fantasy that he’d been thinking of for a long time. I told him to be explicit so I could get a visual. “Okay,” he said, “close your eyes. It’s a Saturday, we’re both wearing jeans, you’re wearing that black leather jacket I like, we go out to lunch and we’re flirting the whole time because something great is about to happen. We even get dessert. We share it and everyone around us can feel the sexual tension, the server, even people at other tables. We leave the restaurant, I rest my hand on the back of your neck and can feel the heat coming off of you, we walk down the street. I guide you to a store, and hold the door open for you to walk through. It smells good in there and you look at me and say, oh Mark, I’ve always liked this store. How did you know?”

My eyes popped open. “Oh my god, Mark, are we having sex in the store?” I ask him. “In the middle of the day? In a store? I don’t think it’s legal to do that.”

“Wait,” he said. “Close your eyes, I haven’t gotten to the best part.”

“We go in there, a salesperson asks if we need help. I say we do and we buy a couch. We buy a couch and pay a delivery fee. A few weeks later they come in our house carrying the couch. They put it where we tell them. They leave. We sit on the couch.”

“Oh geez, Mark,” I said, “that’s not a fantasy. That’s what normal people do.”

“Yes, yes it is,” Mark said. “That’s my fantasy, to go out and buy something like normal people do.”

A month before Mark died we did exactly that. Went out to lunch, shared dessert, walked down the street, and went into a store and bought a sectional. It came in dozens of color choices and I looked at every single one. Mark had biked in the summer heat that morning so between that and pretending to gave a fat rat’s ass about fabric choices (plus all that pulsing sexual tension), he fell asleep on the floor model.

I thought about asking him on the way home if he ever imagined his life with someone else, someone normal and not creative but I knew the answer.

He would have hated it.