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My husband's room is at the back of our apartment next to the kitchen. How
many times have I walked by and wanted to haul out his clutter and hurl it
into the trash? Sometimes I kicked a box out of my way en route to his desk
or threw a stack of papers on the bed because I couldn't find the latest PTA
notice. But I controlled the impulse to clean up. If he wanted to spend the
better part of his days in clutter, so be it.
Back in Harry's bachelor place, it took many arguments to convince him that
a coat rack did not belong in front of a bay window. Now cardboard boxes are
stacked higher than the windowsill. The guest bed and Harry's desk occupy
most of the 9 x 9 feet; what's left is a three foot wide corridor
where he swivels around on his office chair. He spends hours in front of the
computer, his back to the door, slumped from bad posture. When he talks to
friends on the phone, he rests his calves on the desk. Then his laughter
rings over into the kitchen. For more serious conversations he slams his
door shut, especially when our toddler decides that Daddy's threshold is the
best place to toot his fire engine.
The walls are unadorned; there's not even a bulletin board. Whatever artwork
the kids bestow on Daddy is scattered on the desk, curling from the humidity
that seeps in from the kitchen, or yellowing from sunlight. The kids' paper
frogs with glued-on buttons share desk space with unopened charity
solicitations, the Paul Fredrick shirt catalog, pink car repair receipts,
doctors' business cards, and post-it notes from me. A Plexiglas bin
overflows with coins. Cardboard cartons, a shredder, and filing boxes crowd
the space under the desk.
Once in a while Harry surveys the scene, leans back in his chair, hands
crossed behind his head, looks at me and moans: "What am I supposed to do
with this mess?"
"Clean it up," I'll say, leaning in the doorway, hand on
hip.
"Yes, but how?"
"You take a pile, go through it piece by piece, throw
out what you don't need and file the rest."
"Yes, but I can't do that without you. I need you to help me." So far we have left it at that, both of us unwilling to commit what little time we have as a twosome to cleaning up
his room. We'd rather hang out and talk.
I tease him that, here in our Chicago apartment, he has recreated the
disarray of his father's wholesale shop where out-of-fashion sweaters,
skirts and scarves were never weeded out but wandered up another level on
the shelves that reached to the 15-foot high ceiling. Harry grew up in the
backroom of that store in Munich, Germany. A cardboard box was his playpen.
The room smelled of dust that had absorbed years of cigarette smoke, textile
dye and polyurethane bag odor. Of the secretaire desk, only the hutch door
with its stained glass tulip window was visible under heaps of order forms,
customs declarations and shipping documents. Oil-heater grime had blackened
the walls. Maybe because of that, Harry insisted the walls in our condo be
painted white, and he is reluctant to hang anything on the walls. His room
now does not have a particular smell, but when I snuggle into one of the
sweatshirts cast off on the bed, I breathe in traces of his Paco Rabanne Eau
de Toilette.
Sometimes we push the PC World, Popular Mechanics, Car & Driver, and Men's
Health magazines on the bed against the wall, lie down and watch a DVD movie
on his computer. One night I rested there, icing a bruised shin. "Would you
like a cookie with your coffee?" Harry asked from the kitchen. While I
waited for him, my gaze drifted over the flickering screen, the desk lamp
that bends down too low, the picture of his father half hidden behind a cup
stuffed with ball-point pens, the box that covers part of the window. And I
felt transported to a time when we were still girlfriend and boyfriend, when
I woke up early and lay next to him, contemplating his bedroom: the naked
floor-to-ceiling windows, the sleeves of his suit jackets queued up on the
coat rack, the bare walls, the king-size mattress on the floor.
It dawned on me that, in the little room next to the kitchen, Harry had
preserved his "this-is-how-I-live" identity, not hindered by my decorating
efforts or the family that has grown up around him. I recoiled at how often
I had been tempted to reach in, pluck paper after paper and drop it in a
plastic bag. I was grateful I had never torn this room apart in a frenzy of
homemaking; had not destroyed the habitat of the 25-year-old I fell in love
with. He still lives among all those boxes. It is his room.
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