Seven, eight years ago J walked me into an antique shop to view a white velvet camel-back Victorian he'd spotted and begun dreaming into his living room. The sofa--lovely, impractical--was covered in plastic, a vulnerable expensive thing beneath an ugly dusty tarp that made you wonder what kind of existence it could have without its veil. By May or June of the following year, the sofa had moved into J's apartment just as I no longer slept there after evenings spent on the stiff red velvet settee or the gold crushed velvet chairs that lately reformed how we sat together watching The Simpsons or Seinfeld, if we did. Someone with more love for the work might've repaired the springs in the settee's middle cushions and the carved back that threatened to detach itself from the couch if, sitting, we leaned in its direction, we two with the middle broken springs between us, his back straightened--the posture of a man sitting on the edge of his seat--my back curved towards my knees. But it was nearing Christmas, the weeks before we would break for home, he for California, I for Arizona, so J was looking to replace his furniture. "What do you think?" He asked. I walked around it and swallowed the jealousy I already felt for the place this piece had in his imagination. "Well. It's beautiful. It is. But how will people ever sit on it?" He walked towards it, touched the dark wood through the tarp. "People? There will be no 'people.' No one's going to sit on it except me." I let that sting a little before prodding: "and me?" He grinned. "Of course I'd let you sit on it." I moved away to let him work out his longing on the shop owner. In a brown box on a nearby shelf, a small sturdy chain caught my attention, each link soldered (in my imagination) like a wire-framed eyelet, the clasp stamped "Italy 925," the tag on the end of its thread: "Antique bracelet $20."
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