The Grip of the Gilded Hour

The divorce was final in April. I was thirty-one, and I had a stack of boxes and a cat and a weird empty feeling in my chest that no amount of boxed wine was fixing. So when a loft in an old mill building came up for rent two towns over, I took it. New town, no memories in the walls. That was the idea, anyway.

My name is Trina. I do conservation work at the university library, which means I spend my days gluing pages back onto old books. Very quiet job. Very quiet life. My ex used to say I was allergic to fun. He was probably right, honestly. Eleven years of marriage will do that to you.

By August I was bored out of my skull. The loft was great, all brick and tall windows, but the town itself was nothing. One stoplight. A diner that closed at three. Then one Saturday I took a wrong turn down a side street and saw the junk shop.

It wasn't even supposed to be open. Hand painted sign, no hours posted, door propped open anyway. I went in because I had nothing else to do.

* * *

The place smelled like dust and lemon oil, and it was packed. Furniture stacked on furniture. Lamps everywhere. A taxidermy pheasant staring at me from a shelf like it had questions. I was winding through the back rooms when I saw it.

The chair.

It was against the far wall, and I honestly thought at first it was some kind of bench. Bronze frame, dark leather, low to the ground. Curved. The leather was worn soft in places, shiny in others, like something had been leaning against it for years and years. It was ugly, kind of. And beautiful. Both at once, which made no sense.

"You found the Marenthrope."

I turned around. The shopkeeper was older, silver hair pinned up, wearing a man's cardigan with what looked like fishing lures pinned to it. Her name tag said Ruth, hand lettered, no last name.

"The what?" I asked.

"Marenthrope Chair. Mail order company. Went under in the seventies." She came closer, arms crossed. "Fifty, sixty years ago you could order one from a catalog. Very few sold. Very few survive."

"Why not?"

"Most got thrown out. People didn't understand them." She smiled, and to be truthful, that smile made me feel like I was missing a joke everyone else had heard. "You're an archivist, aren't you. You have the hands for it."

"How did you know that?"

"You touch everything like it might break. You've been doing it since you walked in." She ran her palm along the bronze arm. "Take it home. Two hundred dollars. See what it tells you."

Two hundred dollars was more than I should have spent that month. I bought it anyway.

* * *

Getting it home was a whole thing. It weighed a ton, solid bronze under that leather, and the guy Ruth called to help load it kept giving me looks. "You sure about this?" he asked. Twice. It barely fit in my Subaru and I drove the whole way at twenty miles an hour with my hazards on, checking the mirror every block.

It took me and my neighbor Barry forty minutes to get it up to the loft. Barry is thirty, works from home doing something with computers, and had been quietly bringing my packages up since I moved in. He's dry. The kind of guy who says funny things without changing his expression.

"What is it?" he asked, hands on his knees, catching his breath on my landing.

"I have no idea. The lady said it's an antique."

"It looks like a dentist chair that lost a fight." He wiped his forehead. "You want it facing the window? It kind of suits the window."

We got it placed. He left. I sat on the floor with a beer and looked at it for a long time.

* * *

That first week I used it as an actual chair. That sounds dumb, but I didn't know what else to do with the thing. I'd sit in it with my coffee in the mornings. And here's where it gets strange, so stay with me.

It didn't sit right. Not like a normal chair. The leather dips in places a chair has no reason to dip. There's a curve under the thighs, a rise in the middle of the seat, and the backrest tilts you backward in a way that made me feel almost presented. I kept shifting around, trying to find a position that felt normal, and there wasn't one. Every way I sat, the chair seemed to hold me open, somehow. That's the only word I've got.

The third morning I caught myself sitting in it with my knees apart, feet hooked over the front edge, feeling warm for no reason. I got up and did dishes. Took a cold shower even. I'm thirty-one years old, not a hysterical person, but something about that chair was getting under my skin.

That night I gave in and really looked at it.

I got down on the floor with a lamp and ran my hands along the frame. The bronze work was incredible, seamless, no rivets anywhere. The leather was stamped with a maker's mark I couldn't read. Then my fingers found the seam under the right armrest. A hairline gap.

I pressed it.

Something inside the chair moved. A soft click, then a whisper of metal, and the whole seat tilted back maybe ten degrees. I yelped and almost fell. My beer went over on the rug. Very dignified.

"Okay," I said out loud, to nobody. "Okay, what else are you hiding?"

Quite a lot, as it turned out. There was a second lever under the left arm. That one drew the leg supports out and up, so the whole thing became a kind of reclined cradle, knees higher than hips. The backrest had a hidden fitting that adjusted for height. And along both inner edges of the seat, under the leather, there were these narrow bronze rails. Sliding