We couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. We repeatedly inspected this alleged misfit and found it to be normal by our standards. We wanted it as our own. Oh the excitement that soon we would have a real grown-up couch. My mind raced to the glow of movie nights, to spontaneous naps and flopping down on it in the evening, to somersaults over its arms and dear friends visiting. We would be a little more normal, even if it wasnt quite. It was coverless, stripped to its vulnerable white batting. But with our ebullient enthusiasm, we decided we could make a couch cover. piece. of. cake. Lets buy it. As is. The man at IKEA who sold it to us didn’t realize it was a fold-out, so he gave us the regular oddball couch price. But when his guys lifted it for us, the secret of its heavy metal under-architecture was revealed. Graciously, he didn’t raise the price. We had scored.
We went to a fabric store in the west 20s and fell impossibly in love with an orange and magenta cross-silk. This was the fabric for our naked couch, and we bought a ton of it just in case. We were amateurs at this furniture buying and decorating game, but the fun was directly proportional to our cluelessness. The couch sat with this sari-appropriate fabric draped and pinned all over it for several months as a “test”. It did not look neat, or really normal, but we adored it and our life together on it.
to be continued...
