eggshell-white, and there are two vertical picture windows in the east wall that look out onto South Ellis Avenue, which, if privacy is desired, may be shrouded with red drapes that approximately match the rug. The furniture is homey but somewhat jumbled and mismatched. The smallness of the apartment has required Lydia to cram most of her furniture into this main living area, resulting in mildly unnerving crosscurrents of spatial flow. The tan leather couch pushed against the east wall beneath the street-facing windows (6) matches the nearby armchair and ottoman (7), the two circular side tables beside the couch and armchair (8, 9) are of pine, and the ovular cherrywood coffee table (10) matches the ovular cherrywood dining table and chairs (11) in the far corner of the room, but these three different sets of furniture do not visually harmonize with each other. A floor lamp stands behind the couch in the southeast corner of the living room (12). A long and fully stocked bookcase (13) lines the south wall. On a small console a TV (14) perches awkwardly in the middle of the room, and a personal computer (15), along with a desk lamp and a tumultuous litter of papers, pens, and pencils, rests atop an architect’s drafting table (16). Various objets d’art personalize the room: a framed print of Marc Chagall’s I and the Village hangs on the north wall near the dining table, a dark and atmospheric Edward Weston nude above the worktable, and on the south wall above the bookshelf hangs a large rectangular painting depicting what looks like a writhing nest of eels slithering out of the green half of the picture and into the yellow; candles and primitive wooden effigies march across the top surface of the bookcase and across the fireplace mantel. Moving to the back of the room, we observe more closely the ovular cherrywood dining table and the four matching chairs. Beside the table is a waist-high oblong block of furniture (17) with three deep shelves locked behind glass doors; the bottom two shelves contain a miscellany of various knickknacks and oversize books, and the top shelf holds Lydia’s collection of tapes and CDs, its constituency reflecting her eclectic and generally excellent musical taste, combining elements of high culture (Dvo rák’s Cello Concerto in B minor), coffee-shop cool (John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme) and an American girlhood that blossomed in the early 1980s (Elvis Costello, Blondie, Prince, Talking Heads). On top of this is a stereo (18), with an LCD display of digital numbers, flashing, in a verdant undersea glow, an impossibly incorrect time. To the left of the stereo rests a shallow burnished mother-of-pearl dish (19) into which Lydia, when returning home from work, empties the contents of her purse or coat pockets: keys, loose change accrued over the course of the day’s small financial transactions, etc.—joining pens, paper clips, and other coins already in the dish.
To the right of the stereo, angled in such a way as to be optimally viewed from the position of one seated at the work desk beside it, is an eight-by-ten-inch photograph (20) in an unadorned black wooden frame of the readymade, commercially available sort with metal clips in the back and a triangular stand that folds out to prop it up for display at a steep, slightly obtuse angle. Inside the frame, behind the glass, a group of people are gathered together in what appears to be a hermetically sealed vacuum chamber, all staring straight ahead with smiles slathered like butter across the white bread of their faces, the very young and the very old sitting in front and everyone else standing behind them. In the bottom center of the photograph sit two elderly people: a man with a gawkily grinning pink bald head bobbing atop a sinewy neck that pokes out of the collar of his corduroy suit like a baby bird breaking out of its eggshell, his teeth like the yellowing white keys of an old piano and his murky gray-green eyes floating like jellyfish in the thick aquariums of his eyeglasses; his skinny arm is wrapped around the woman sitting beside him dressed