The art of getting off the couch
“Elfride’s emotion was cumulative, and after a while would assert itself on a sudden. A slight touch was enough to set it free — a poem, a sunset, a cunningly contrived chord of music, a vague imagining being the usual accidents of its exhibition.” — Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. “And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours…” — Genesis 37:23
One evening in Paris, a woman came home and yelled at her old couch.
“I have found your future on the back of an elderly gentleman. All this time I’ve been searching for a way to renew you by my own ingenuity, the answer has been waiting for me in the people I pass. This morning as I left the Montparnasse cemetery where I go to walk and ponder, I must have finally reached a point of perception such that I was ready to see the solution arriving right before my eyes.”
The wearied couch cringed at the wordiness it had come to dread. Each day, the woman came home spouting longer sentences. Still, the old seat, like some seasoned psychoanalyst, remained silent. The woman stretched out into the position she so often assumed after she had been up and about in Paris’s atmosphere. She lay her head on the armrest.
“Imagine coming out of a graveyard to encounter the answer.” the woman chuckled. As shifted her weight, the couch creaked — ever so slightly. “There he was, an old gentleman labouring along next to a rather fat old dame. She was wearing a grey suit far too small for her. The ragged purple scarf around her neck resembled a dishtowel... accessories seldom improve a soul. Indeed, the aged gent was not improved by the handsome jacket he was wearing either. However, its rich hue and texture ignited my imagination. Thereby I envisioned your restoration my dear, long-suffering, friend.” The woman caressed the chesterfield’s faded cushions. “Just as a new dress is supposed to revive a beaten-up girl, you will, I am sure, be quite uplifted. Then you’ll find enduring happiness — and I’ll feel better leaning on you!”
The sofa knew the girl was succumbing to the advertising that was spreading all over the French capital, but it wasn’t going to deny her proclaiming her recipe for resurrection. Its embrace emboldened her.
“I will go out and find the best crimson velvet to replace the sorry, tattered material that your being has worn out. After all, a new coat of anything has often saved many souls… Wasn’t there a fellow named Joseph who wore a kind of patchwork quilt?” The couch flinched gently at her confused contradictions while the memory of her answer arriving filled the woman’s mind. “Why that old guy is wearing the very item I have coveted forever,” she had observed as the gentleman shuffled by with the old lady.
What struck her was that the jacket she had so yearned for was not improving the man at all.
“I was not admiring a person — as I might someone doing good deeds,” she confided. “I was just adoring a plush, seductive finish. He wasn’t any different than he had been before he donned the red velvet jacket — that probably replaced some old grey one now lying on top of other used clothes in a recycling bin. The blood red blazer hadn’t transformed his being… he’d just painted over the wallpaper — so to speak. I was fooled by the allure of a cosmetic alteration.”
A rusty spring popped up through the sofa’s seat, almost piercing the woman’s chest.
“I never really needed a red velvet jacket.”
“Pardon my interruption,” squeaked the sofa. “But if it won’t help you, how will the addition of some exotic textile make any difference in me?”
“Exactly.” exclaimed the woman. “Not in you but about you. For a canapé, that is all that is required. An about-face!” The couch trembled.
“But won’t my antique springs keep poking through some new covering just as they are tearing this old one?”
This gave the woman pause. From there on in she came home quietly to rest on a rug made from recycled dishtowels.
The couch was banished to the Boulevard Raspail where homeless men wrapped in cast-off grey suit coats often slumbered on it. In the bewitching hours of a Paris night, their snoring was a comforting velvety tone, contrasting the shrill chatter of girls wearing scarlet silk dresses as they promenaded.
Magdalena Randal is a Nova Scotia artist and filmmaker currently studying in Paris.