Design Flaw

I came home on a Tuesday night to find my sofa had been murdered and replaced with a clone that had been left out in the sun.

Let me back up. My name is Ben, I'm thirty-three, and I do graphic design for a marketing firm out of Logan Square. My girlfriend Paula is thirty-two and she's an interior designer, which sounds like a nice compliment to my job until you live with her. We met three years ago at a design conference, both of us drunk on bad hotel wine, and she thought my impressions of the keynote speaker were funny. I thought her laugh was funny. We've been together ever since, mostly happily, except for one ongoing war.

The war is about our living room.

We rent a two-bedroom on the third floor of a prewar walk-up in East Ridge. The walls are thin enough that we can hear our upstairs neighbor Traci Garcia practicing what I assume is the trombone, or possibly murdering a trombone. The heating pipes clank at random hours like the building is haunted by a very boring ghost. It's a small place, which means every design decision is everyone's design decision, and Paula and I do not agree on design decisions.

So Tuesday. I get home around six thirty, hang my keys on the hook, and stop dead in the living room because the sofa is yellow.

Not a nice yellow. A mustard yellow, the color of old deli mustard, the color of a school bus that gave up. It had been navy blue that morning. I know this because I sat on it that morning eating cereal and it was navy blue.

"Paula?" I called out. "Paula, where's my couch?"

"It's not just yours," she called back from the bedroom. "And it's in the hallway, waiting for donation pickup. I got you a new one."

I walked over and put my hand on the yellow horror. It was new, actually. It was soft and new and smelled faintly of fabric factory, and that made it worse somehow. She'd gone out and bought a whole sofa. While I was at work. About a sofa we never discussed.

She came out of the bedroom with her hair up and a pencil behind her ear, which is her working look, and she had the face of someone who knew exactly what she'd done and had prepared remarks for it.

"Before you start," she said, "the navy was making the room feel cold. The mustard warms up the whole space. Look how it plays against the wood floor."

"Paula. We talked about this."

"We talked about paint samples. You vetoed eleven paint samples. I had to do something."

"You bought a couch."

"It's a warm couch!" She spread her arms at it the way a game show hostess would. "It has good bones. Feel the bones."

"I don't want to feel the bones. I want my couch."

"Your couch is going to a family that needs it."

"Your couch is going to a family that needs it," I repeated, pointing at the yellow thing. "That is a couch a family needs like I need a second job."

And that was the argument, more or less, for ten minutes. She said I was afraid of color. I said she was afraid of consensus. She said the word "beige" like she was spitting out a cherry pit. I said the word "tyranny" and she laughed in a way that hurt my feelings, which I hid badly.

Then we did the thing we do, which is retreat. She went to the bedroom to sulk at her mood board. I went to the kitchen to sulk at my laptop and pretend to check email. The apartment is small enough that retreating is mostly symbolic, like two armies pulling back to opposite ends of a very short field.

Thin walls have a particular quality. You can hear everything. I could hear Paula muttering to herself in the bedroom. Little bursts of it. "Doesn't even look at the swatches." Something about "eleven vetoes." Something quieter I couldn't make out but that had her tone, the flat angry tone she gets, and I sat there at the kitchen table getting more annoyed by the second because I could hear it but couldn't answer it.

And I know, because she told me later, that she could hear me too. I was muttering. I admit it. Things like "buys a couch, just buys a couch." I was rehearsing comebacks to nobody. It's not a good look, muttering alone in a kitchen about upholstery, and I was doing it anyway.

Then the pipes clanked. Both of us, I found out later, had jumped at the same clank in the same way, which is one of those marriage-track things that's funny in hindsight and not funny at six forty-five on a Tuesday.

The bedroom door opened. I heard her heels on the hallway floor, which she only wears around the apartment when she's gearing up, and then she came around the corner holding our throw pillow.

Not a fancy pillow. The throw pillow. The beige one, the plain one that came with the original sofa, the one she had tried to donate three separate times and I had rescued from the donation bag three separate times. She was holding it in both hands like evidence at a trial.

"Explain this," she said.

"It's a pillow, Paula."

"Explain to me why this pillow matters more to you than any of the eleven color palettes I put together. Explain the beige tyranny to me, Ben, because I genuinely want to know."

"It's a comfortable pillow."

"It is not comfortable. It is flat. It is the texture of an envelope. You have defended this pillow like it's a family heirloom and it came from a clearance bin in 2019."

"Okay, first of all, it came with the couch, so it's structurally important in a decorative sense," I said, and I want to note here that I did not actually say "structurally important," I said something normal, but my memory of arguments is unreliable and the point is I was being defensive about a pillow. "Second, it's not about the pillow."

"What is it about, then?" She threw the pillow onto the yellow couch. It landed with a sad little sound. "Because from where I'm sitting it looks exactly like the pillow."

I stood up. This was going to get real and we both knew it.

"It's about you deciding things," I said. "It's about coming home and the apartment being different and not one word of it discussed. The couch today. Last week you moved my desk lamp. Before that it was the rug. I live here too, Paula."

"You do not live here like you live here." Her voice went up. "You come home, you eat, you sit. I look at these walls all day, every day, when I'm working from home. I see what this room could be and then I see that pillow and that sad navy sofa and it's like my brain itches."

"So scratch your brain somewhere I get a vote."

"I invited you to vote! Eleven swatches, Ben. I taped them to the fridge. You said, and I quote, 'they're fine, whatever you like.'"

"Because you'd already fallen in love with the green one and saying anything else was just going to start a fight!"

"So you lied to keep the peace and now you're mad at me for picking what you told me to pick?"