Gotham Diary
Old or New?
New slipcovers arrived today, and were fitted on the pair of love seats that belonged to Kathleen’s grandmother. I had the idea, which Kathleen (and Quatorze) went right along with, of not covering the love seats as a pair. So the sofa under the window is covered in the Elsie de Wolfe fern-patterned linen that The Aesthete wrote up several months ago, while the love seat with its back to the door is covered in a thick, almost quilted mint green cotton, with pink piping. The linen slipcover fits its love seat like a glove, but the chintzy cotton is bulky and non-conforming, too tight here and too loose there — obviously a slipcover. As Quatorze put it, we’ve got a Newport/Palm Beach situation going.
When the man from the upholsterer was through, Quatorze and I went out for lunch, and then I went to the barbershop for a trim. I had planned to walk over to Agata & Valentina afterward, but it was so hot and humid when I stepped out of the barber shop that the next stop had to be home. In the evening, after a Chinese dinner from Wa Jeal (Wu Liang Ye that was), Ms NOLA and I walked over to Carl Shurz Park, where The New Yorker and Penguin Books were showing Little Miss Sunshine. There was a strong breeze by the river, and it didn’t seem particularly hot or humid, but the three-block walk home left me near to soaking. We watched about half an hour of the wonderful film; tumblers of white wine on the rocks at dinner meant that I couldn’t do without plumbing for very long.
In the Times this morning, I read that Apple has sold more than three million iPads. The figure is strangely weightless, like how old Will is, or, for the matter of that, how old the iPad is. Will is nearly seven months old, which seems like a lot most of the time but which often seems ridiculously too-short, as if life only seven months ago, without Will, were reclaimable. Life without Will is as departed and gone as it would be if he were my age. Similarly: life without the iPad. I can think of nothing that has ever changed my every day life with anything like the speed of the iPad. So, the fact that 3.3 million iPads are out there seems like a lot, for about a nanosecond. 3.3 million is about 1% of this country’s population; it’s vanishingly small in terms of the world’s. The main thing is, though, that I’m ready. Ready for there to be thirty or three hundred million iPads.
Or so I tell myself.
The funny thing about the new slipcovers is that they make the living room look the way it used to look, long ago — long long ago, before we actually lived here, it must be: the for the living room has never like this during our tenancy. But it looks like it has looked like this before. It most certainly does not look new.
Which may explain why it no longer seems quite so desperately important to repaint the room, or to replace the draperies. The usual consequence of putting something new in a room is to make the stuff that was already there look worn and dowdy. Not so this time. It’s as though the new slipcovers arrived in some prewashed, well-worn condition.
I don’t think that we had any conscious of plan of reviving a room that we remembered from the past. But that is the effect, at least for me. I feel, sitting in here this evening, that something has been restored.