The Living Rooms
Agnès Madrigal
Agnès Madrigal writes works of fiction. This vignette, from her archive, was originally titled “Aurélie” and then “White Rabbits” before it was given the title here: “The Living Rooms.” It is a story about falling in love—about falling in love in rooms, in space, and in a universe, a universe that offers forth its many unfolding images, mysteries, and graces.
A narrator explores an old loss and a new love within two living rooms. “The Living Rooms” is a story by Agnès Madrigal. Photograph by Hemul75
After Aurélie died, it was Kate’s favorite pastime to sit on the sofa with a friend and drink wine together as she had done so often with Aurélie. It was as though the continuing repetition of such moments kept her connected to Aurélie, like links in a necklace that circled to a clasp and possibly, along the circumference of the chain, there would be a pretty jewel. She believed that something of Aurélie lived on in the new friends, in the new wine—usually red, a Margaux on a special occasion. In the red wine she imagined Aurélie’s face, the face that Aurélie saw when she looked into the blood-colored liquid to take a sip. But Aurélie was not of blood any longer and even when she was, it was merely an extraneous condition to another one, a greater one. At least Kate and Aurélie believed this to be the way of such things—an infinity of sorts—and nothing, neither human nor god, had ever stepped in to disprove it.
The new friends filled the vacancy with their physical hearts beating, with their mouths full of words that spilled out in the air between them. In these new spaces Kate could forget, at times, the sorrowful one left by Aurélie—not that Aurélie would have meant for it to be sorrowful. In fact, she would have meant for it to be anything but that, and that was what made it all the more sorrowful. Luke was one of these friends. He had become familiar with the ritual although for many months she did not tell him what it meant to her, did not tell him about Aurélie, about loss, about the deep lake that cut through her figure, a lake that was exponentially deeper and wider than her corporal size. It marked her, this lake, it made her different from what she had been, though no one noticed, no one identified the body of water, the silvery threads of light upon its surface, the disease.
“He had become familiar with the ritual although for many months she did not tell him what it meant to her, did not tell him about Aurélie, about loss, about the deep lake that cut through her figure, a lake that was exponentially deeper and wider than her corporal size. It marked her, this lake, it made her different from what she had been, though no one noticed, no one identified the body of water, the silvery threads of light upon its surface, the disease.”
—Agnès Madrigal, “The Living Rooms”
Nights together, they shared a bottle of wine and talked in the disquieting hours after midnight and amid the stars that emerged above them and around them. Sometimes this happened in her studio apartment, which was small and compact as her modest publishing salary allowed. It was decorated with a few framed drawings, with an old vase on the table that had belonged to Aurélie. In the contours of the vase, Kate imagined Aurélie’s old living room reflected there, as it would have been during all of those years that the vase sat on the bookshelf beside the mantel, adjacent to the sofa, viewable from the window. Was it not still there, the room, recorded? Could she not still see it in the shining and convex glass surface if she looked? Other times they drank the wine and talked in his living room, which was tall and minimally furnished with one wall of great windows that overlooked the glimmering city.
It did not snow in their city, but at night, with the fog and the scattered dots of white lights strewn out below them, the city appeared sheathed in a fine veil of fleece. The white and muted colors there contrasted with the hard-edged brightnesses and brazen chromes so common to the light in the rest of the area and state farther inland, away from the beast of the sea that breathed this opalescence that on some nights did look like snow and blanketed the city as such. In Luke’s apartment, she could feel herself adrift over it, beyond it, looking out upon it as though it could not touch her, though she could of course be touched—she was touched, she thought, impressed upon and into, dented, scarred, whatever it was that happened to a person.
Aurélie’s house—it was square and simple, containing six rooms, placed on a flat rectangle of lawn perfectly outlined with a painted and repainted wood fence. In the summer the yard was viridian green with tufts of the peonies Aurélie had planted and a wonderful vine of hyacinth that spilled over the pickets. In the winter the white lawn was as clean as a piece of paper, as a stretched canvas ready for a picture. The little protecting house was insulated from this weather, which was particularly harsh in the middle part of the land, the land that Aurélie came from, that she came from too. The winter made the icy daggers that hung from the eaves and later fell in the thaw and stabbed the earth below. At times a wind whistled and shook the window panes. As they sat talking, the room temperature would silently drop and the electrical heat would rush through the vents in response. It clicked on automatically, growling from the furnace below. It was tempting to imagine a magical force that came forth solely in order to keep them warm, but of course it was simply Aurélie who had set the thermostat dial.
“The room was decorated with a few framed drawings, with an old vase on the table that had belonged to Aurélie. In the contours of the vase, she imagined Aurélie’s old living room reflected there, as it would have been during all of those years that the vase sat on the bookshelf beside the mantel, adjacent to the sofa, viewable from the window. Was it not still there, the room, recorded? Could she not still see it in the shining and convex glass surface if she looked?”
—Agnès Madrigal, “The Living Rooms”
Outside the glass windows of Aurélie’s living room, the lawn filled with snow. In contrast to the false snow of the new city, this snow was fat and opaque and against it sat the lacquered trunks of the oak trees and the dark asphalt-shingled rooftops that formed a stark chiaroscuro with the bright and almost blinding winter light. At times, looking out upon the scene, it appeared a black-and-white photograph, a world depleted of color. How strange that the thought of this snow gave such comfort to her now, this snow that molded itself around the bird’s bath and the trellis, around the domed covers that protected the roses, around the small pieces of wrought-iron furniture that sat on the perimeter of the garden, and around the stone foundation of Aurélie’s house. It muffled all the sound outside, the snow, it created an extraordinary silence, the silence she believed Aurélie had gone into alongside all the other mute ghosts who refused even the slightest murmur to clue others to their whereabouts, their afterlives as they drifted about in the snow, in the reflections, in the light, in the stars.
Inside there were the intermittent sounds of the heater, the low steady trickle of the radio with its local news reports interspersed between the jazz numbers that Aurélie liked to listen to, the trill of the kettle on the stovetop when she was making them tea. Inside there were the green splashes of Aurélie’s cared-for plants, the crimson flocked wallpaper in the dining room, and Aurélie’s pink and blue pretty dresses that she sewed in the back room and always liked to wear, even without occasion—often she wore them right there, on the couch, with big chunks of jewelry fastened to her, with nowhere else to go. Perhaps it was in these colorful details that Kate derived her comfort and the snow only existed to remind her of the opposite, of what could be lost. In the afternoons the snow glowed behind the foggy window pane. In the evenings the snow and the outside disappeared entirely. It was replaced in the glass by the reflection of the room with Aurélie and she in it, with glints of their wine glasses and sometimes flickers of candle flames, pulses of holiday lights, and, on occasion, the motions of other persons who came to visit and sat with them there.
Now there was Luke, and together they were encapsulated in his living room. In the night their images in the glass coalesced with the city outside. The view looked fantastical as a galaxy with seemingly countless little lights—some blinking, some red, some pale blue—gathered up in a swirl of dust, or what appeared as dust, the dust of stars. With their two bodies superimposed over the landscape, they looked like semi-lucid giants or gods or just the persons that they were. When they made love at last, it was as though they moved for the first time to a space beneath a dark exterminating flap and there discovered the lovely animals within themselves. What would come of it all? One could never say for sure of such things. Even if it came to nothing, nothing at all, ultimately the moments—some of them grandiose—tumbled along into time as they were. They tumbled and skipped, sometimes they ran, sometimes they crawled carefully, tentatively, and sometimes they hopped, like rabbits, beautiful white rabbits. They disappeared in the unreal snow.