I need a muse

— I need a muse, said Matteo.

That's where I cheated on my husband. Not in the kiss, not in the bed, not at the Sun Coast motel on the edge of the 41. It was with those four words from the upholsterer in front of the reclining chair left open in the middle of the living room like an animal gutted and abandoned.

Fifteen years writing love. I knew how to hold a desire in three details: rain at the wrong moment, a cup forgotten on a table, a silence held one second too long. And during those fifteen years Joel lived beside me. He knew the brand of my coffee. The hour of my migraines. The order of my pens when a book resisted. He knew when to leave me alone. He knew things without turning them into language.

For a long time I had taken that discretion for a form of love. Today I am no longer sure.

Matteo was on his knees in front of Joel's armchair. A swatch of burgundy velvet across his thighs. He had ruined hands. Workshop-black beneath the nails. A whitened scar on the thumb, fine, old. A dusting of sawdust lodged in the lines of his palm where soap no longer reached. He touched the velvet with care. The way one caresses. The way one tests resistance. It is the same thing, after all.

He lifted his eyes to the wall. My name. The titles. He moved from frame to frame as one reads stones in a cemetery. Then he turned his head toward me.

I had the painful impression of having become visible again inside my own house.

Joel's La-Z-Boy stood between us. The brown leather, split in places. The open maw of a piece of furniture that had devoured my husband for fifteen years and was still hungry. The leather kept the shape of a fatigue I knew by heart. The trace of the shoulders. The sagging of the seat. The stubborn crease left by fifteen years of wear.

Matteo spoke. Four words.

Something shifted inside me with the faint crack one sometimes hears in old houses: nothing falls, nothing breaks, but one knows a line has moved.

— I am not a muse, I said.

I smiled as I said it. The smile slipped out on its own like a dog that seizes an open door.

— I am a married woman with an overdue novel and a kitchen that stinks of frying.

— Maybe that's why, he said.

It was not a beautiful line. It still carried its clumsiness, something poor and true. It touched me more than it should have.

— No one has ever said that to me, I said.

It was true. No one had ever said I need a muse.

— Show me the fabric, I said.

I crouched beside him. The burgundy velvet lay across the seat. I ran my fingers over it. His fingers were a few centimeters from mine. I felt the heat without touching it. My mouth was dry. We were talking about the fabric. We were not talking about the fabric.

— Do you write? I asked.

He hesitated. Scratched the velvet with his thumb.

— Yes. On someone who lives next to her own life.

He said it while looking at the fabric. He laid the sentence down in the middle of the living room the way one lays a mirror face-down and left me to turn it over myself. I turned it over. It was my own face I saw.

I listened to him for an hour. The chicken stayed in the freezer. Light slid across the kitchen, thinned on the tiles.

When Joel came home the house still smelled of midday frying, dinner had not begun. He set down his keys. Opened a beer. Turned on the game. He only asked whether anything needed clearing before he settled in.

His mother had died that spring.

Joel put on his dark suit. Went to church. Shook hands. Came back. Crossed the house without removing his jacket. Sat in the armchair. Snapped the footrest down with a dry kick of the heel.

He kept getting up the next day. He went to work. He took out the trash. The armchair welcomed him each evening, and little by little he left more than his body in it.

The pills were in the bathroom cabinet. His mother's. Neither he nor I had found the courage to throw them away. It was March. A Tuesday evening. I was working on a scene in which a man tells a woman he cannot live without her. I was adjusting dialogue. Cutting an adverb. Moving a comma. And in the next room my husband was trying to find out whether he could die without making a sound.

I found him in the armchair. Not stretched out. Sitting.

He survived. Stomach pump. Two nights in hospital. Then we came home and lived there like two survivors of an accident neither of us could remember who had been driving.

One Saturday he brushed the cracked leather of the armchair and said:

— It could use a freshening up.

He did not say help me. He did not say stay. He spoke of the armchair.

I called an upholsterer because in marriages one repairs the furniture when one no longer knows how to repair the people.

That is how Matteo entered our house.

He came with his tape measure around his neck, a pencil behind his ear. He smelled of outside cold and sawdust. He took the measurements. Came back. I offered him coffee. He accepted after wiping his hands on his trousers, as if afraid of dirtying the cup. Once I caught him reading the back cover of one of my novels with the closed expression of someone accustomed to standing at the edge of things he believes he does not belong to.

A week later he knew where the cups were.

It is a small thing. A man who knows where the cups are. Sometimes that is enough to shift the air inside a house.

The Thursday he brought the armchair back, Joel was at work.

Matteo carried it alone from the van. The armchair took its exact place again. But the burgundy velvet caught the light differently. The new foam restored the shape. The seams straight and clean.

— Sit down, said Matteo.

I remained standing.

He sat himself. The footrest snapped forward. He occupied my husband's place. Without ceremony.

— Stand up first.

His arm brushed my hip. It was hardly anything. But it did not withdraw. His fingers closed around my wrist. Not hard. Just enough that I did not pull my hand away immediately.

He pulled me. My knee struck the armrest, then I found myself sitting sideways across his thighs in a position I could have left at once. I did not leave.

— Wait, I said.

His hand left my wrist and came to my waist. Not gentle. Brutal. Certain.

Then he kissed me.

Beneath me, through the denim, the velvet and the new foam, I felt his desire like a fact. Without language.

We made love in Joel's armchair. In the kitchen the chicken was thawing on the counter.

I remember the velvet warming under my skin. The sound of the mechanism tilting beneath our weight. My hand closed on his nape. The smell of wood, sweat, varnish.

At one point, through the half-open door, I glimpsed the tray. A pinkish water had begun to leak and was tracing a thin thread across the counter toward the sink. A thing taken out too soon. Already changing nature in the open air.

When it was over Matteo smoothed the armrest with the flat of his hand. Adjusted the cushion. He wore the closed face of men who put away their tools. I pulled my dress back down. In the velvet the imprint had already reformed. Blurred. Mixed.

In the kitchen the chicken was still weeping. It could no longer be refrozen.

Joel came home at seven. The chicken tasted flat. After the meal he stood a second in front of the armchair. The burgundy surprised him. Then he sat.

His kidneys searched for the imprint fifteen years had carved. The imprint was no longer there. He shifted. Finally found a place. Not the old one. A new one.

— Something smells, he said.

— New, I said from the kitchen. Glue. Varnish. It will fade.

He looked no further. He never looked further than what he was given. It was one of his kindnesses.

He sank into the armchair and the new foam began its long work of learning him.

The burgundy velvet, for its part, already knew. Joel wanted that armchair to rest in. I wanted it for the opposite reason.

We met at the Sun Coast. Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We fucked first.

Afterward he opened his bag and took out a spiral notebook. Black cover. Squared pages. Dog-eared corners.

I was naked beside him when I read his pages.

There was breath in them. Sometimes a true image. A line of dialogue heard. But the rest drooled. The scenes explained too much.

I corrected in pencil in the margins. I cut. I crossed out. I showed him where the rhythm fell. Where a character spoke like a book instead of like a man.

Little by little his novel entered my hands. Not his name. His book.

The female character resembled me more and more. First from afar. Then with an almost obscene precision.

His novel was not good. I knew it. But it possessed a hunger. And I had begun to love that hunger as if it had been meant for me.

One Tuesday Matteo said:

— I'd like to stop upholstering. Write for real. A year. But a year costs money.

He asked for nothing. He laid the sentence between us. As he had laid the first.

I turned my head toward him.

— Joel has life insurance, I said.

I said it in a simple voice.

— He already tried to die once.

Matteo did not move. There was a very slight withdrawal in his gaze. Then he placed the notebook on the nightstand with excessive care.

— Why are you telling me this?

I shrugged.

— I'm telling you.

Matteo never said kill your husband. He said I need a muse. He said I need a year. He laid down needs. I laid down solutions.

I waited three weeks.

Every evening after dinner there was a moment when it became possible. Then the moment passed. I cleared the table. Hands in lukewarm water. Joel talked about the garage. A tire to change. A neighbor who mowed too early on Sunday. Then he went to sit in his armchair.

The Wednesday I decided Joel was watching The Price Is Right.

He liked to guess before the contestants. When he got it right he laughed and slapped the armrest with the flat of his hand. Always in the same spot. And the broken spring creaked beneath the burgundy velvet. The laugh and the creak. The sound of Joel alive in an armchair that no longer held.

— You could call the upholsterer back, he said. For that damn spring.

The upholsterer. Matteo. The man I fucked on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The man Joel was asking me to call to repair what had been giving way beneath him for months.

— I'll call him tomorrow, I said.

He looked up at me. His tired smile.

— You're an angel.

He turned back to the screen.

— Want a beer?

— Sure.

I opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. His mother's bottle. Strong sleeping pills. I crushed them in a saucer with the back of a spoon. The powder fell into the beer. Rose with the foam. Disappeared.

I brought the beer. Joel took it without looking at me. A contestant had just won a washing machine. Joel laughed. Drank. Set the can down. Then picked it up again. The laugh, the creak, the swallow. The soundtrack of a man dying without knowing it while watching other people win things.

When the show ended Joel did his rounds. Doors. Windows. The porch light. He went upstairs to bed. Said good night.

I did not sleep.

Around three Joel got up. His steps went down the stairs. Slow. Dragging. Then nothing.

At six I reached toward his side. The sheet was cold.

He was in the armchair. Head tilted on his shoulder. Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open. One arm dangling almost to the rug. The empty can on the armrest. But there was something too fixed in the way he sat in the chair.

I picked up the phone.

I called Matteo. Not the police. Matteo.

— Joel is dead, I said.

My voice did not tremble.

— I'm coming, he said.

He was there in twenty minutes.

He entered without ringing. Stopped at the threshold of the living room. Looked at Joel. Approached. Took the wrist. Lifted an eyelid.

— What did you touch?

— Nothing.

He went into the kitchen. Took the bottle. Wrapped it in a dish towel. Slid it into his pocket.

— You wait an hour before calling. You say you found him like that. You mention he had already tried once. You don't embroider.

I watched him speak. The way he took up space. The way he decided for both of us.

— I won't be able to do it, I said.

— You will.

— I can't cry.

— You're already shaking. That will do.

He placed his hands on my shoulders. Then at the base of my neck. His thumbs found the knot and pressed. His hands worked like in the workshop. Without particular gentleness. With the certainty of those who know where to push and where to release. A few meters from Joel slumped in the armchair.

— Come, he said.

He walked around the armchair. Slid an arm under Joel's armpits and pulled. The body slid heavily. The head struck the parquet. Matteo swore under his breath. He drew the sofa blanket over him. Beneath the wool the body made a faceless shape.

The armchair, rid of the body, still kept Joel's imprint.

Matteo came back to me. His mouth touched mine. Two meters away beneath the blanket Joel lay on the rug. Something gave way inside me.

We sat in the armchair.

The spring creaked beneath our weight. Matteo lifted my dress. The rug was only a few feet away. The green blanket made that absurd little bump where I knew my husband's body lay. I looked away. Matteo entered me.

The armchair began to moan with every thrust.

It smelled of glue. Cold tobacco. Sweat that had returned too quickly. The velvet warmed beneath my thighs. With every movement the seat resisted then gave again beneath us with a ferrous creaking that no longer seemed to come from the furniture but from the whole house.

Matteo let out a groan. The spring creaked. Creaked. Then broke. A dry, final snap. The armchair collapsed to the right. I kept screaming. A long high cry that crossed the house like a train through a tunnel.

I did not hear the blanket slide. Nor the steps on the parquet. Nor the hallway cabinet. Nor the pump of the shotgun.

The shot went off.

The entire room exploded in one block. Something enormous. Soft. Devastating. That filled the air and stayed there.

I opened my eyes.

Where Matteo's face had been there was only a red opening. His body remained on me for a fraction of a second. Then slid out of the armchair and fell to the floor with the sound of heavy meat.

The burgundy velvet gorged itself at once. The blood entered the fabric. Reached the seams. The folds. The stain widened almost in silence.

I turned.

Joel stood in the doorway of the living room.

His striped pajamas. Bare feet. Still dazed. As if rinsed from the inside. The pills had not killed him. They had drowned him. Slowed him. Held him somewhere beneath the surface before releasing him back into the world.

He held his father's old pump-action shotgun with an almost tranquil assurance.

He racked the slide.

The metallic clack of the pump crossed the entire house.

I slid out of the armchair. Naked beneath my rucked-up dress. Covered in sweat. In blood. I passed the body of Matteo. Past Joel. Joel did not fire.

The front door had remained open. Matteo never closed it behind him.

I went out.

The morning air struck me like a warm slap. Somewhere far away a sprinkler had just started. I had Matteo's blood on my skin. The smell of gunpowder. And beneath it all still the rancid perfume of the velvet.

At the end of the driveway day was rising over the lawns and the mailboxes. Wide. Indifferent. Almost white.

They told me Joel had killed himself in the armchair.

He had straightened the armchair. Wiped the blood from the armrest. Adjusted the cushion. Sat down. The same order as every evening. First the legs. Then the back. Then what remained of him.

He had a shotgun left.

He had carried his mother. He had carried me. He had carried the armchair. The pills. The poison. The sight of his naked wife with a man in his armchair. He carried nothing anymore. The shotgun carried the rest.

The velvet took the blood. The blood entered the fibers and never came out. The upholsterer was in the fabric. The husband was in the fabric. The sweat, the poison, the semen, the beer, the blood. Everything in the same velvet. The armchair carried everyone now. It was the only place in the house where everyone was gathered.

Except me.

I was outside. Naked. Alive. The only one of the three who remained. The novelist. The one who knew how to finish a book.

Joel had finished this one. Not me.

When they carried the armchair away it took two men.

It had become too heavy for a single man.