Margaret Atwood – In Love with Raymond Chandler

An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because of the mangled bodies and

the marinated cops and hints of eccentric sex, but because of his interest in furniture. He

knew that furniture could breathe, could feel, not as we do but in a way more muffled,

like the word upholstery, with its overtones of mustiness and dust, its bouquet of

sunlight on aging cloth or of scuffed leather on the backs and seats of sleazy office

chairs. I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his

cold blond unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of

hibernating crocodiles; of his chaises longues, with their malicious pillows. He knew

about front lawns too, and greenhouses, and the interiors of cars.

        This is how our love affair would go. We would meet at a hotel, or a motel,

whether expensive or cheap it wouldn’t matter. We would enter the room, lock the door,

and begin to explore the furniture, fingering the curtains, running our hands along the

spurious gilt frames of the pictures, over the real marble or the chipped enamel of the

luxurious or tacky washroom sink, inhaling the odor of the carpets, old cigarette smoke

and spilled gin and fast meaningless sex or else the rich abstract scent of the oval

transparent soaps imported from England, it wouldn’t matter to us; what would matter

would be our response to the furniture, and the furniture’s response to us. Only after we

had sniffed, fingered, rubbed, rolled on, and absorbed the furniture of the room would

we fall into each other’s arms, and onto the bed (king-size? peach-colored? creaky?

narrow? four-posted? pioneer-quilted? lime-green chenille-covered?), ready at last to do

the same things to each other.