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This Room and Everything In It by Kathryn Flynn Galán The week our room was finally finished, we married in the courtyard right outside. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

This Room and Everything In It
We built the bedroom together. "With our hands," you promised me. I loved your hands, olive and square, that held me tight when you proposed that we marry. I loved how they traced that balsawood model of the room you envisaged. I knew then that they could build this place for us. You chose a curving pine-barrel roof. I added cupboards, a shy window, and planters for columbine.

You held the throbbing concrete hose to pour the floor. On hands and knees I spread sealer on the slab, then buffed it to a liquid shine. You came to me with a rust splinter in your eye from sanding the steel beams. I kissed the lid and found you a doctor. I worked on ten-foot ladders to sand and coat and sand the doors and window frames like a boatswain tending his beloved teak hull.

We moved in before the work was done and slept those first nights on the floor. Glass windows stretched up from our feet to let in starlight and a draft of jasmine. We heard the ocean. And we were awakened each morning by Spanish stucco masons who peered in at us as we lay naked on our mattress. We hoped that some day soon they would all be through.

The week our room was finally finished, we married in the courtyard right outside. Guests piled gifts and hats on the bed. Friends stood in the French doors and watched us say our vows. The party flowed under the barrel and beams, around perfect block pillars and warm wood. You drew me to you, beautiful hands on my bare back, and we danced close on the concrete floor. A magician lofted a playing card twenty feet to the ceiling where it stuck. And then you slept. "A year," you said. You needed a year to recover from building that room.

"No," I tried to say, but never found words that you believed. "It’s not just glass and steel and concrete, this room. It’s where we began our public life together. It’s where our marriage dwells." To me, it was a garden that needed to be watered and trussed and fed. It was not a project completed, but something just begun.

You insisted that what you needed was to rest from your labors, after all the weekends of building and the stress of construction. But nevertheless, something did begin to grow. Not just Fairy Lantern lilies on the patio or the primrose-pink peach tree along the block wall. Something else grew—a local lichen, fuzzy and dark. It dusted the soles of our shoes and invaded the ash cupboards you had built. It tickled the books on our nailless shelves. We became congested, too stuffy to kiss. The dogs fought. And still you slept.

I wanted your help but you offered no ideas. I tried an air purifier from Switzerland. A dehumidifier from Sears. I did a Lysol wash every week. Finally the architect proposed a cure: a heat lamp perhaps would kill the lichen.

So I left on an infrared bulb, night and day, to dry the bedroom’s concrete pores. I thought it was helping. I dry-cleaned the mildew smell from the clothes. But then one day the lamp conspired with dust mites, and maybe the errant corner of a sheet. The room burned down. The room that we had built and everything in it.

The fire burned the bed and the books, the inky Orientals and the butter leather chair. The big Sony television melted like a Dali clock. The barrel ceiling blistered twenty feet up. The playing card finally fell onto the flames.

Our friend Dara came over that night, after she heard the bad news, and brought the architect Mark. They studied the room’s black bones and made us Stoli martinis. Dara noticed that my altar of Tibetan bells and I Ching coins, sacred sage and abalone shells was unscathed in the embers. Mark shut the door and assured us that the room would be built back completely by insurance contractors. Maybe better. Certainly faster.

And they were right. Soon the floor was clean again and more highly polished. The bookshelves were wider. The ceiling was varnished like new. You and I bought a new bed and plush cotton mattress. My sister embroidered our wedding date into a sampler for the fresh white wall. My mother trekked to Laddak to replace the rug. A Picasso drawing from Mark fit into a nook in the bookcases. Dara sent a wheeled stand so the new TV would be easier to move.

But on the first night back in our room, we didn’t lie under starlight and count waves. We weren’t naked on the cotton mattress. We were just back.

Our life resumed. You rose early. I worked late. The peach tree stretched. The lichen stayed away. The roof didn’t leak much anymore. But we spent very little time in our room.

I was sent out of town for five months on business. You wanted to consider it a separation. I came back once to talk to you but the room was no longer mine. You had stored away our wedding album and my antique porcelain dolls. The icons from my altar were hidden out of sight, along with all of my clothes and the raw rubies that you gave me one Christmas for love.

The bed, the lamps, the books—they were there. The Rug. The Picasso. The Sony. But no hint of you. No diary. Nothing in your hand. None of my letters. Maybe a strand of her hair.

I found a new house for myself. When I moved out and left the room to you and your new lover, you begged me to leave the bed. And a sheet. And two feather pillows.

I left just that. As well as the wave sounds at night. And my wedding ring, buried under the peach tree against the block wall of our room.

Profile
I met Kathryn Flynn Galán in a writing workshop I taught at a private home in Brentwood with Zen poet Peter Levitt. Later, Kathryn and I met for tea at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. The sitting area is a sumptuous antique green, gold, and white. Here we sat among international businesspeople, movie stars like John Travolta and Uma Thurman, wealthy suburbanites, and sybarites of all professions. Over watercress and tomato sandwiches, Darjeeling tea, dry champagne, and ripe strawberries, we talked about writing and our lives.

I discovered that Kathryn had been a child prodigy with a genius IQ who became a concert pianist and a professional violinist at fourteen. She has trekked in the Himalayas, speaks fluent French and Spanish (she is of Spanish descent), and is also a first-rate cook.

She had a high-powered job as a film producer (e.g., French Kiss with Meg Ryan). On location in Nova Scotia shooting a movie for Disney called Squanto, she still managed to FedEx thirty-page stories to our workshop every week. Kathryn’s father worked for NASA. I think she’s powered by rocket fuel.

—Cathy A. Colman

Bio
Katherine Flynn Galán
Place of residence: Los Angeles.
Birthplace: Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Day job: Movie producer.
Education: Amherst College. University of California at Los Angeles.
Anthology: Sexual Secrets.
Serial publications: Alaska Quarterly.
Current project: Movie on the life of Art Pepper.
Favorite book: Postcards by E. Annie Proulx.
Beliefs: Buddhism, the Dali Lama.
Craving: To go everywhere at least once.

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