Sarah is an older lady, scatterbrained, though endearingly so, with a wild mane of curly gray hair. A jewelry designer, she’s lived here in the Chelsea since the sixties, provided gems for the Warhol superstars.
Sarah’s large apartment/workshop is filled floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s accumulation of dusty junk: tools, boxes of metal clasps, beads, tiles and fixtures, bolts of cloth, old sewing machines, teetering piles of old magazines, you name it. I’ve offered several times to help her clean out her apartment, which has become so cluttered that there’s not much living space left, but she’s collected all this stuff for a reason, and, who knows, never can tell when it might come in handy.
But one afternoon she called me and said she did have a few things to throw out, so I came down to her place to help her move them out. Mostly, it just looked like her usual trash, but she had a box or two of papers for me to carry out, and there was a metal cabinet, the drawers filled with ticket stubs and receipts and other scraps of paper, that she thought she could live without.
When I had carried all that stuff out, Sarah said, “I’ve been thinking of getting rid of this.”
From somewhere in the bowels of her rooms she had drug out an old drafting table. Of dark wood, the table was worn and beaten but still sturdy and functional, with an ancient, heavy iron mechanism to control it’s slant.
“Wow!” I said. It was a really good looking piece of furniture, must have been seventy or eighty years old. But then I caught myself and said. “Yeah, get rid of it. And how about some of these old magazines too.”
“Those have my designs in them,” Sarah said.
We turned our attention back to the drafting table. “I don’t use it anymore,” Sarah said. “Never have. But it belonged to Charles James, so I’ve kept it all these years.”
Charles James, a great courtier, famous for his lampshade shaped dresses, who used to live at the Chelsea. He has a plaque on the fashion walk of fame on Seventh Ave.
“Oh, did he give it to you? Did you know him?”
“I did know him, but no, he didn’t give it to me. I think Viva gave it to me, but I can’t really remember, it was so long ago.”
I made to seize the old table.
“I just don’t know,” Sarah said. “It seems a shame to throw it away. Maybe I should just keep it.”
“Sarah, you have to get rid of something,” I scolded.
The upshot of this was that, in order to make Sarah feel less guilty, and just so she could get rid of something—since the piles of junk were threatening to fall over on her and bury her like the Collier Brothers--I agreed to take the table. (I must admit too, that I harbored a secret desire to own the table—because of it’s origins, because it looked cool, and also because, like Sarah, I’m a pack rat at heart and can’t bear to throw anything out.)
I thought for sure I was in for trouble. My girlfriend and I had had arguments before about my habit of dragging home junk. But maybe I was kind of hoping she would bitch me out, so that would give me an excuse to get rid of the table.
Instead, she had even more enthusiasm than me for the table, especially because of the Charles James connection. “Oh my God! That’s really cool. But what can we do with it?”
“Well, maybe I can use it for a desk,” I said, thinking of replacing the one I had, but knowing all the while that that wouldn’t work at all. The table was too high, and wasn’t really meant to lay flat. It was for an artist, rather than a writer.
Folded up as far as was possible, the table sat in the middle of our room for a year. Everybody who came to visit thought it was really nice, but nobody actually wanted to own it. Finally, it just got be too much of a hassle to move it whenever we wanted to get into our closet.
Late one night, when I knew Sarah would be in bed, I set the table out by the elevator with a note on it that said: Charles James’ Drafting Table: Free To A Good Home, and it was gone within the hour. I was sad to see it go, but glad in a way also because I felt it had gone to someone who needed it, and maybe, with any luck, someone who could tap into the energy of the old designer in a way I wasn’t quite able to. (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)
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