Chapter Forty-Four
Forty-Four
Drapes
I think of my room back in London, the curtains of my bedroom. White, crisp, faux silk. Like something from Interiors Magazine, beautiful but totally useless for blocking out sunlight when I wanted to nap on a summer’s afternoon instead of going outside and making memories with the carpe diem people.
I’d brought my childhood curtains to the flat when I moved in. Thick damask in darkest burgundy. They’d hung in my father’s study, a window with the exact same dimensions as my bedroom window in London. When I looked at their dark swirls, I saw home and felt safe enough to sleep. Max couldn’t stand them. ‘Grannyish’, he’d called them. ‘Ugly’. He’d argued with me to change them, bin them, give them to charity if I thought anyone would actually want to buy them. I refused.
They didn’t fit the aesthetic of the flat, he’d said. Everything else was inoffensive and neutral. Sort of like our relationship, I’d thought at the time, and immediately berated myself.
But I wasn’t wrong; it was a beige relationship – not even vanilla. Vanilla has a bit of pep, at least: seed specks and some texture. Our relationship was the blah-est of blah.
I kept on refusing to change my burgundy curtains, every time Max brought up the subject – which was often – until one day I came home from work, and they just weren’t hanging in the window anymore.
‘Doesn’t that look better?’ he’d said.
‘What the hell, Max? You had no right. Where are they?’ I said, looking around, as if he might have left them casually draped over my bedside cabinet.
‘You’re not going to like this, but I handed them to the bin men, because I knew if I put them in the cupboard, you’d just get them out again.’
I felt my jaw drop and he smiled at me sheepishly.
‘This is tough love,’ he said, engulfing me in a sweaty hug. ‘You had an unhealthy attachment to those curtains. You needed to go cold turkey.’
Who was he to decide that? Was Max my keeper? Had I employed him to give my bedroom a makeover? No, he was just my boyfriend.
That night, I’d lain awake for hours, an inch away from resolving to break up with him the next day, but how over-the-top would that be? What sort of woman would break up with a pleasant man, who worked hard every day and didn’t drink too much or scare her, over some old curtains that had been hanging since the nineties? It was ridiculous, it was Generation Z gone mad. Max wasn’t one of those gaslighting, controlling men. He just had a strong aesthetic and couldn’t bear to look at anything he considered unsightly.
He wanted things his way, because he was confident his way was better, and maybe he was right about that.