The Kitchen Table: An Honest Orgy

Food was just a pretext.

— Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “The Table”

My estranged husband calls from Paris to tell me that if I were there beside him, I’d be proud of his outfit. Bill actually uses the word outfit, and for some reason, although he doesn’t fish, I picture him in fly-fishing gear. I imagine him casting lures as exquisite as exotic earrings into a cold stream and tell him this.

“No. I look like a Frenchman,” he says.

“I’m glad, honey.”

That “honey” slips out, skitters off my tongue. Although we’ve been separated for more than a year, we keep forgetting not to use such endearments. Bill reports on the weather, sounding as close as the next room. “People are in love all over the place here,” he says before he explains the real reason for his call, which is to tell me my copy of our divorce complaint is on its way to me.

I’m in Philadelphia, and except for this vacation to Paris, he’s still living in our house in New Jersey, which has sold. We’re waiting for the settlement in mid-June before he also moves back into the city. Then, for the first time since we began dating, we will live eight blocks apart from each other, just as we used to, except now we have a history. Whenever we speak we are alternately stunned and sad that what remains — a kind of untarnished affection one reserves for an old friend — is both more and less than we expected after fourteen years. His copy of our divorce complaint arrived without warning just before he left for vacation. “I cried, seeing our names,” he says. “Plaintiff. Defendant.”

My own tears shock me. I know where he was sitting when he read those words, in his usual place at the kitchen table. He always sat in the middle. My daughter always chose to sit at the end near the long window that faced the garden. I sat at the other end, close to the stove and the wall phone.

I have neither the table nor the six unmatched antique Hitchcock chairs I purchased one at a time whenever I found one in fairly decent shape. Little in this current apartment recalls that kitchen, except the black-and-white tile floor. When Bill says the table holds “so many memories,” I’m surprised. Despite the plans we had for communion at that table, in reality he spent very little time in the kitchen, except in the mornings. We did maintain that ritual: cereal and coffee while he read the gossip page of the newspaper aloud to me and my daughter. Sometimes we’d ask to hear our horoscopes; invariably, his and mine would be off by a mile. “Figures,” my daughter would say. “Water and fire.” Then she’d arch one eyebrow, a gesture I envied. He is fire; we, mother and daughter, are moody, mutable water.

After I hang up the phone, I hunt down a poem I’ve recently read again after some years. The poem is called “The Table,” written by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade and translated by Elizabeth Bishop. My copy is underlined. When had I inked up the pages, taking note of this line: “Around the wide table . . . It was an honest orgy / ending in revelations”? No words I might struggle to string together this morning will resonate more, and no other object we own tells a story quite the way that kitchen table does.

We found the table at an antiques show in a remote south Jersey town whose name I no longer recall, but I do recall my husband wanting something much less primitive, surely less scarred. Nevertheless, when I spotted the nineteenth-century farmhouse table with hand-carved barn-red legs and a modest pine-plank surface, I fell in love. Maybe the writer in me is attracted to damage and flaws, to the paradoxical beauty of ruin, but in less than a minute my desire transformed the battered farmhouse table into a monument of perfect imperfection.

I must have gasped, because Bill touched my elbow with his forefinger. This was our predetermined antique-hunting “caution” signal. I felt his hot breath in my ear. “He’s seen.” He meant the dealer had noticed us. I was then, and still am, quite incapable of concealing strong emotion — favorable or unfavorable. The dealer now knew that I loved the table, which would make bargaining difficult.

“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” my husband said insistently. Slipping off for coffee was a move that I had taught him: you have to be willing to walk away from what you love. Yet I never seemed able to take my own advice. As we edged away from the booth, the dealer began telling us that the table had also served as a barn work table; then, having heard me mention writing, he shifted his voice to a low confidential tone and said,

“If I remember correctly, the owner before the man I bought it from was a writer himself.”

“He wrote what?” my husband asked.

The dealer scratched his chin. “Cookbooks, I believe.”

We headed for the coffee concession. Over weak coffee served in styrofoam cups, my husband said, “I thought you wanted a round table.” He had me there. The kitchen in our newly acquired eighteenth-century house was narrow and long, aesthetically better suited to a round table. But I had also learned, through trial and a few costly errors in furnishing our previous two houses, that there is no such thing as too big or too small or “wrong” when an object is cherished. I ticked off the list of our beloved pieces of furniture: Hadn’t his grandmother’s rosewood desk fit into the most unlikely spaces? And the club chair that I’d dragged with me from my first marriage — hadn’t that always found its place?

He didn’t argue. Either he was tired that day or — now that I think about it from this distance of the estranged wife — he was already settling into some private resignation, one as insidious as my private disenchantment. So we would buy the table. We finished drinking our coffee, decided on an acceptable price, and made our way back through the crowds. As we neared the corner booth, the dealer was enthusiastically talking up the table to another couple. I was relieved when I heard the woman proclaim with conviction, “It’s too long,” before she tugged her husband away.

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