Craigslist romance: How I met my wife with a sofabed

Tag : Rug Mat

It's astonishing how many things you can find to sell onCraigslist, even in a zero-capital home such as my own. So far I'vemanaged to get rid of an old wall mirror (not strictly mine), acouple of foldup chairs, an outdoor barbecue, a coffee table, arug, a mat, a stool, two other lamps, an office chair and, mostimpressively, a plastic wine rack from the dumpster in the carpark. Oh yes, and the dining-room table.
As for meeting women...I've thought about trying to fob off myprospective male customers, but it's impossible to determine theirsex until it's too late. And, of course, I need the money. I needmore money, but I'm running out of things to sell.
I look around the room and all I see are bare floors and the antson the skirting boards. One thing remains: the beige carbuncle inthe middle of the room - a sofa the weight of a small battleship,spiked with nails, stuffed with the feathers of a mechanical duck,catastrophically uncomfortable and wrapped in a fabric of the mostoffensively poor taste. If only it hadn't been a gift from mygrandmother. To sell this sofa would be to turn my back oneverything I was taught as a child: waste not, want not. I have nochoice. The sofa must go.
In the first response to my sofa advertisement the prospectivebuyer requested photographs, and signed off with an intriguing“L.”. There was something playful, I decided, in thatsingle, full-stopped initial. It suggested an appreciation of thetease, a mastery of suggestion. Yes, it was oddly romantic, that L.It made me think about a long, explicit sofabed demonstration. ThisL., I bet she would be a decadent creature. A wayward, foreign-bornbeauty, she would lie around in expensive black underwear, smokingFrench cigarettes and discussing Milan Kundera novels.
I looked again at my photographs of the sofa. In vain, I had triedmy best to prepare it for the camera. With kitchen tongs, I hadremoved a pair of boxer shorts, wedged into the far northwestquadrant by the armrest. As for the dusty sock between the centrecushions - it was mysteriously heavy, as though a small farm animalhad died inside it - I pushed it out of sight into the blackhole ofthe bed frame.
Fortunately, the objectionable colour of the sofa had rendered moststains invisible, aside from some remaining evidence of a recentnosebleed, which I had covered for the photograph with a copy ofVogue, carefully selected for my target demographic. There was alot of work ahead of me. Between opening the front door and showingL. my grandmother's sofa, I had, at the very most, 30 seconds.Thirty seconds to work the Ayres magic. There was one problem, ofcourse, with the Ayres magic: it didn't exist. So I would have torely instead on hard work and preparation, or, failing that,outright deception.
I changed into boxer shorts and rubber gloves and cleaned with theenthusiasm of a murderer at a crime scene. Then it was time foranother outing for house plants. I emerged from the Boyz Townflorist's with a selection of defiantly heterosexual blooms: bloodyreds, military greens, police-car blues.
My final assignment was a visit to a photo lab down on Hollywoodand La Brea, to pick up a blown-up copy of a newspaper clippingfrom my war-reporting days. The article recorded my one and onlymoment of glory on the battlefield: a front-page account, infirst-person detail, of how my unit had survived an ambush usingonly its wits, honour and three-hundred-billion dollars-worth ofstate-of-the-art military hardware. I was photographed wearing anexpression that suggested gentle amusement rather than theprofound, bowel-imploding terror from which I was actuallysuffering. The enlarged clipping would be hung above my desk.
And then home again, where I positioned a copy of Being andNothingness, humorously annotated, next to my collection ofNational Enquirers on top of the toilet cistern. Elsewhere in theapartment I scattered Larkin, Hemingway, The Day of the Locust andsome romantic poetry. Was there a danger of coming across as toosensitive, too insular? Girls want the poet and the fighter, afterall. I fought my way into the closet by the front door and emergedwith a tennis racquet, which I leaned against the wall.
One detail remained: music, they say, is the key to seduction. Isettled on Miles Davis. The jazz would hang there in the air,twirling and glistening, like smoke from a cigar glimpsed through ahalf-open blind.
“That it?” said Lucie. “It's cute. Do youmind...?” With that, Lucie powered through the front door,put down her expensively buckled pocketbook, took out a camera, andstarted to photograph the sofa bed from every angle. I joined herin the living room, while trying not to notice justhow...how...God, those jeans looked good on her. So did those lowheels, with their V-shaped toes, and that neat, businesslikeponytail and that tight sweater.
“Could use new covers.”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“They're removable, right?”
I began to reply, but quickly realised that no sound was coming outof my mouth. I badly needed a drink of water - something to help meto talk, to help me to swallow. I looked at her and thought,‘You can have the bloody sofa, I don't need the money. Youcan take anything you want'.
“I'll take it,” said Lucie. “Cash orcheque?”
“Oh, cash,” I said, coughing again. “I need cash.I mean, cash would be great. Preferable. To a cheque. Thankyou.”
Lucie laughed unexpectedly. “I'm a Czech, actually.”
“Cheque, bank draft, IOU, whatever.”
“No, I'm Czech. Born in Prague. Moved to New York when I was5. Well, escaped to New York, technically. The communists didn'texactly know we were leaving.”
“Bloody hell. You're a Bond girl,” I said.
“Not quite.” She winked as she said this.
I had to see this girl again. I began to recite a silent prayer toCraig (was there a Craig?) thanking him for bringing this funny,beautiful, hugely overconfident and yet strangely anxious youngwoman into my apartment, so that she could give me cash. Ah, yes,the cash. Could I seriously take this girl's money?
“Is that you?” asked Lucie suddenly.
I tracked her gaze and found myself staring at my blown-up warclipping.
“Oh, that?” I said, “Oh, that's nothing,really...”
“You're a war reporter?”
“Used to be. Sort of.”
“So - what? - you put that up there on the wall so the girlsask you about it?” Lucie started to laugh. “Prettyslick.”
“Actually, I was a pretty terrible war correspondent,”I blurted, trying to stop the exodus of blood to the vessels in myface. “I kept running away.”
“Isn't it normal to run away from bullets? The specieswouldn't get very far if we kept running towards them, wouldit?”
And that was when I did it: something inexplicable, somethingstupid, something I had no business doing whatsoever.
“We should go out for a drink sometime,” I announced.“To celebrate the sofa purchase.”
A long pause. We looked at each other. In her eyes I saw greens andbrowns, and a million unknowable shades in between.
“I need to go find an ATM,” she announced. “I'llbe back.”
Yeah, right, I thought. Back in ten thousand years.
It took her 48 hours to return. Within those 48 hours we must havesent each other a dozen silly banterish e-mails. The second viewingwent on for about an hour - I ended up telling her about a magazinepiece I was working on about babies swapped at birth - after whichshe promised to come back with a truck. Which is exactly what shedid. When the U-Haul's tailgate was closed, Lucie counted out theasking price of the sofa in cash.
“Aren't you supposed to negotiate?” I said.
“OK,” said Lucie, slowly. “Will you take fivehundred?”
“Yes.”
I took the money. I didn't feel so bad about it. Because I knewthen that if Lucie gave me half a chance - a quarter of a chance; amillionth of a chance - I would give her everything I ever owned,ever earned, ever wanted. And then I would try to give her more.
Chris Ayres is now married to Lucie and they have a son, Milos
©Chris Ayres 2008
Extracted from Death by Leisure , to be published by John Murray on July 10 at £12.99.Available from Times BooksFirst
at £11.69, free p&p. 0870 1608080,timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst