Our Furniture

2092 Oak Hills Court was developed in 1953 by a businessman copying the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s recent work in the neighborhood. Though rumors circulated that 2092 Oak Hills Court was itself an original Wright, and the property’s owners entertained these rumors (especially when from the eager mouths of their students), the house was one of many imitations.

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The mid-century modern home enjoyed a long first life sheltering a young family. The father, John Rucker, worked as a math professor at the university in town, and his wife (a graduate of the university’s music school) cared for their two sons. When Professor Rucker suffered a fatal heart attack in 1978, the couple’s adult children (ungrateful, apparently, for their comfortable upbringing) wanted to cash in on the seller’s market of the late ‘70s, but their mother wanted to stay put. Mrs. Rucker wanted more house, not less, and she added a sunroom facing the private wood behind the property. Her sons considered the addition an eyesore: their mother insisted on a Victorian-style sunroom with elaborate ironwork that interrupted the house’s otherwise stark lines, and, more to the point, their mother was spending money that they already considered their inheritance. So the Rucker boys sued their mother. 

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Justice was swift: the courts ruled against them, and, as if by fate, the market crashed the next year anyway. Mrs. Rucker spent the ‘80s alone in her beloved sunroom until her own heart gave out in 1990, at which time another family, Dr. and Mrs. David and Linda Friedman and their three children, purchased the home. 

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Dr. David Friedman was an academic cardiologist who had accepted a position at the university hospital. Linda had trained as a psychoanalyst, but she left the profession to stay home with her family. Early in her career, Linda published a pair of frankly brilliant papers examining how mothers resist or encourage change in their children. She was expected to make tenure easily, but she became pregnant for a third time just as she came up for review. The department chair refused to pause the clock at this critical moment, which forced Linda to choose between finishing her book on motherhood or breastfeeding her infant daughter. 

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So Linda spent the next fifteen years at home. Happily, she was, like any good mother, fascinated by her children. She used to say that staying at home with children is the best clinical experience that you can have. She watched her children develop object permanence, empathy, a sense of identity. She didn’t care for ironing clothes or mopping floors, but she willingly exchanged these chores for a window into her children’s everyday development.

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But soon Linda found that window painted shut. When puberty dawned, Linda’s daughter locked away her inner life as many teenage children of psychoanalysts do. At dinner, Linda would assure Rachel that she could tell her mother anything, and Rachel would smile and wordlessly dump the remains of her spaghetti in the sink. Or Linda would ask Rachel if she was interested in anyone at school, and the girl would act as though her mother spoke a different language, crinkling her brow and staring at her mother’s mouth as though trying to read her lips. 

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Since her own girlhood, Linda nurtured an intensity within herself. At school, she could be found in the library whispering secrets into another girl’s ear, and only rarely did she find the energy to climb on her school’s swing set or the imagination to play dress up. Reality was what concerned her. 

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At home, Linda listened intently to the adults at her parents’ dinner table, trying to understand what moved them to do the things that they did, whom they chose to marry, what vocations they entered, and whether they upheld these commitments or betrayed them. Why had her father’s brother chosen such an uptight wife when he was so loose and gregarious? And how had Uncle Ben developed this personality in the first place, when her father was so ineffectual — hardly brave enough to refill his own wine glass at his own dinner table? After Uncle Ben and Aunt Marjorie left, Linda’s father grew red-faced ranting to her mother about Ben’s inconsiderateness and how his wife deserved a better man, yet he invited the couple over Friday after Friday for family dinner. Adults are locked into the rhythms of their personalities, Linda concluded.

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As a young woman, Linda tried to train her seriousness on political pursuits. She met David Friedman through a student antiwar group at Swarthmore. He was perhaps the only student at their liberal arts college who felt optimistic that their actions would intervene successfully in the conflict, that Johnson would stop sending young men to their deaths. David cheerfully distributed picket signs, fluidly evaded the police, and played his guitar with a joint hanging openly from his mouth. The way David was, you wouldn’t think that a war had even been going on.

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Behind his bedroom’s beaded curtain, David would fix his eyes on Linda’s small hands as she described the furniture of her inner life – her sadness about the war, her fury that segregation had gone on for so long and that liberals had allowed it, her fear that sexual liberation would displace love. David’s mind had no such furniture. David waved away the possibility that their efforts would fail, or that the past would repeat itself. Whereas her mind was a cigar room filled with smoke and plush red booths, David’s inner world was an austere, white-walled room flush with sunlight. 

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The couple married in the summer after their senior year of college. Linda (for once, lighthearted) carried daisies down the aisle. 

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For much of her marriage, her children supplied the deep emotional connection that Linda craved. When her youngest child became old enough to refuse, Linda had to look elsewhere. She might have had an affair, but she didn’t care for any of the neighbors’ husbands, and really she wasn’t so interested in sex. Nor did she feel that she could turn to the other mothers who were more interested in baked brie and espresso martinis — or, worse, Atkins and Weight Watchers — than the life of the mind.

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For months Linda was trapped in a long boredom. She paced around the upper floor of the house, bothering her family with heavy footsteps and the faint scratching of her silk robe trailing along the carpet, until finally her husband stood at the bottom of the stairs and suggested that maybe Linda should talk to someone. 

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Linda stood still in the hallway and met her husband’s eyes. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked.

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“No, not talk to me,” David clarified, “talk to someone.” 

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And so Linda arranged for an analysis at the psychoanalytic clinic in the city nearby. She hadn’t been on the couch since her own training analysis decades before, and returning to it made her feel (oddly) young and vulnerable again. Her analyst, Dr. George Collins, reminded Linda of an early ‘70s John Wayne without the big hat – puffy, sunbaked, still handsome. Like her husband, Linda’s analyst spoke few words, but unlike David, Dr. Collins seemed to withhold some hidden interior from her. In fact, her relationship with her analyst reminded Linda of her early courtship with David, during which she guessed that David’s apparent simplicity concealed something else. After long marriage, she had to accept that she’d been wrong. She would have found that secret room if one existed.

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Yes, Dr. Collins seemed to have an inner life. He would sigh in recognition when Linda described her childhood fear that her mother would throw her from their brownstone’s fourth floor window and that her father would do nothing about it, or her jealousy that her parents had become closer after she’d left the house for college. But Dr. Collins wouldn’t allow Linda to pull open the door to his interior. 

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“You must feel the way that I do,” Linda once said to him. “Are you afraid to let me in?” 

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Dr. Collins wouldn’t relent. “You want to replay with me the relationship you had with your father, Mrs. Friedman. This drama of refusal.”

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Linda laughed and interrupted him. “Of course! That’s in the textbook, George, that’s not news to me.”

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“Yes, and,” Dr. Collins continued, “Here’s the mystery: why isn’t it enough to replay it with your husband?”

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Linda wrestled with Dr. Collins for forty-five minutes per day, four days per week, for nearly a year. One afternoon, Linda’s lips were chapped from that summer’s dry heat. There was a jar of Carmex on the table beside Dr. Collins’s lounge chair. Linda asked to use the jar, and Dr. Collins refused. 

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Of course, this unfolded into a weeks-long ordeal. 

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After Linda initially withheld her hurt, she turned to sadness then to rage and, finally, to theory. She recruited everyone from Kernberg and Kohut to Klein, combing through the latest issues of American Psychoanalytic Quarterly at the academic library to prove to Dr. Collins that he ought to have let her use the Carmex and that, in fact, his denial of Carmex delivered a fatal blow to their empathic attunement.

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“Mrs. Friedman,” Dr. Collins said after several sessions of such talk, “why do you want to analyze me?”

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“I don’t know,” Linda said, turning around to look at him from the couch. “What’s your interpretation? You’re the analyst.” 

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A long pause. Dr. Collins suggested that she might miss her professional life. “Your devotion to motherhood,” he said, “is admirable, but could it have been a way to avoid something?”

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“Avoid what?”

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“Maybe your fear that you might not make tenure.”

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Linda rolled her eyes and nearly leapt off the couch. “If you won’t call me Linda, you could at least call me Dr. Friedman.” 

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The next week was the first of August, during which Dr. Collins took his yearly vacation. Meanwhile Linda, furious at his last interpretation, applied to work at a small psychoanalytic clinic in town, which agreed to give her a couple patients per week under supervision. 

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Soon September came around, and Linda still hadn’t heard from Dr. Collins to schedule her fall appointments. The Drs. Friedman sat together at their kitchen table one Sunday afternoon. Linda petted the cat in her lap, enjoying an early autumn sunbeam falling in from the window. David sat on the other side of the table, reading the Sunday Times when he suddenly put it down.

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“Linda,” David pointed to a black and white photo, “is this him?” 

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It was Dr. Collins’s photo on a page titled IN MEMORIAM. 

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“His wife said he had heart problems,” David read. David took his wife’s hand and looked into her eyes, waiting. Linda felt a confession choking in the back of her throat. It was as if a lover had died, and Linda had to play it cool for her innocent spouse.

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“You loved him,” David said. Linda wept. When she could speak, Linda told him about her irresolvable loneliness, her boredom, her professional regret, and as he had done since they met, David gently dismissed these fears. It was like opening the curtains after sleeping late into the afternoon. After so many years, she once again appreciated the warmth of her husband’s simplicity — his room with white walls. She understood, for the first time, the implicit condition of their marriage: he is empty so that she can fill him up. Their marriage required some breach to enforce this condition. A real affair would have done the trick but it was better not to have transversed the realm of fantasy. (Less of a risk for disease.)

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After Dr. Collins’s death, the years Linda spent as a stay-at-home mother felt unreal, like some kind of strange episode that she spent as someone other than herself. Linda threw herself into her analytic work. Her services became so sought-after within a few years that she was able to withdraw back into her home and turn that strange, large sunroom into her private practice. 

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The sunroom had floor to ceiling windows facing the south for plenty of light at all hours of the day. The white-painted room was so bright, except the floor which was covered in quatrefoil terracotta tiles, and on the tiles lay a thick, red Persian rug, and on the rug, a few articles of furniture: a little wooden desk and chair, an upholstered wingback chair, and a supple leather chaise lounge. 

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One spring a couple of decades into Linda’s practice, she was seeing a young man who was a PhD candidate in philosophy at the university. In his words, he needed help “with intimacy and with finishing a dissertation.”  The young man was bright enough and outwardly neat in his appearance, especially his dress, always wearing a sweater vest over a button down shirt even in that year’s too-hot spring. But he complained daily that Linda did not really listen to him. 

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On this particular afternoon, he complained that Linda often appeared to fall asleep during their sessions. The young man twisted a lock of his long golden curly hair as he lay on the couch.

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“Do I bore you?” the young man asked.

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“Boredom. An old feeling,” Linda said through squinted eyes. “When you were a little boy, you feared that your father abandoned you and your mother because you weren’t good enough. Now you feel that I am not interested either.”

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“My father didn’t abandon us,” the young man said. But a memory broke Linda’s attention in a yellowish haze: once, her father took her to the Central Park Zoo. Father and daughter enjoyed a rare afternoon all alone looking at the animals, but then, just as they were about to leave, he forgot her in the bathroom.

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“Collin,” Linda announced. “We’re out of time.” 

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Collin, which was not his name, did not meet Linda’s eyes as he rose and left the sunroom. The silence in her consulting room washed Linda in another fantasy. When Linda’s parents argued, her mother would desert her and her father for days on end. Meanwhile, Linda mutely took up her mother’s chores as though she were her mother’s understudy. She made their beds and neat little sandwiches, putting mustard on both slices of bread as her mother did. Later, as a trainee, it was easy for Linda to understand family life as a drama — everything created in ensemble. 

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Linda brought pen to legal pad to record the session’s notes, including the fragment of countertransference, but she began to have what she privately called a “very strange experience.” Words didn’t fit into one another as they once had. Once fluid, words seemed hard, contained, discrete. It was as if someone had broken into her mind and stolen all verbs, adjectives, prepositions and left Linda with only nouns. 

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Sweating now, Linda retreated to the upstairs bathroom to splash her face with cold water before her next appointment. Out of the window, she saw her husband speaking to a man with long golden curly hair on the front lawn. David must have hired a gardener, she thought, as the heat had summoned their spring garden earlier than usual. David’s face looked grave, ashen, the corners of his mouth sinking into his jawline. Their previous gardener had tried to rid the garden of the white daisies, thinking them weeds. Maybe this gardener was giving him more trouble?

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Linda looked at her wrist for the time but found only freckled skin, no watch. She looked around the room for clues as to why she had come upstairs, and, finding two towels stacked neatly on the bathtub rim, she concluded that she meant to take a bath. She drew the water and undressed.

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April was hot, not wet. It was the kind of low-skied afternoon that made the university town feel like a terrarium. The young man usually left Linda’s house through a path winding through the woods to the street, in such a way that secluded Linda’s patients from the front yard of 2092 Oak Hills Court, but the gray heat urged the young man to cut through the front yard.

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Had Linda really forgotten such basic facts about his life, or was the young man replaying with her some family drama, the lines to which he’d learned so many years ago that he could no longer see them as a script? The young man felt the hot tug of rage pull at his face. Then, as quickly as that feeling came, it disappeared and left guilt in its wake. 

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Ragged with feeling, the young man searched for somewhere to sit and rest his head in Linda’s garden, when he came upon a tall older man pruning lilacs. 

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“Are you Mr. Friedman?” the young man asked. The tall old man nodded cautiously and set down his pruning shears. 

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The young man stuttered to explain that he was worried about Linda’s forgetfulness. 

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“You ought to keep to the path behind the house,” the tall old man said.

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Seeing tears flock to the roots of the young man’s eyelashes, the tall old man added, “My wife can help you a lot if you follow the rules.” The young man rubbed his blonde brow, its wetness retreating to his lacrimal gland. 

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David saw the young man through the front gate and watched him drive away in his red 2005 Volkswagen Jetta. It was 3:52 p.m., which meant that David had only eight minutes before Linda’s 4 p.m. appointment. He saw her little white face appear in the glass upstairs, and after entering the house through the front door, David heard his wife running the bath.

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David noticed that Linda's “strange experiences” accumulated over the past few years. During the pandemic, she became prone to nostalgic reverie, reciting stories of her childhood to David. David was initially charmed by his wife’s memories, but he began to notice that the more that she remembered, the flatter her personality became. It was as if evacuating these memories from her mind meant that she was moving out too. She no longer cared that her sons failed to call on Saturdays, she tried to give miscellaneous heirlooms to neighborhood children who trespassed into their yard to pet the family cats, she let the hair that she had dyed brown for decades go completely gray. Her emptiness frightened him just as it had decades before. David even tried to seduce his wife into arguments, lobbing the usually effective ammo of the kids at her, but Linda was simply too far away from him, watching YouTube travel documentaries on their Apple TV. 

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On Passover that year, Linda set the table with their wedding china, as always, but served cold McDonald’s cheeseburgers, fries, and apple pies buffet-style. The next day, David drove to a Bass Pro Shops in a shopping plaza in the next town over. He bought a Glock 19 9mm handgun from a woman in a Kelly green fishing shirt. 

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David passed the bathroom and entered their bedroom, where he had stowed the revolver and had kept Linda warm at night for thirty-four years. He held the heavy metal thing and thought of his children. 

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What did they know of love’s austere and lonely offices? 

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When Rachel Friedman-White arrived at 2092 Oak Hills Court, two police officers first asked her if she had any health problems. The officers told her that both of her parents — yes, David and Linda Friedman — had been found dead in the home. Linda’s 4 p.m. analysand called 911 when he heard gunshots upstairs. Linda was naked in the bathtub with a bullet between her eyes, one officer said. The officer looked about 25. This offended Rachel, who in middle age still thought of an authority as someone older than her. Officers also found David in his recliner with a revolver in his lap and a gunshot wound to the head. 

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Rachel hated her father for forgetting to turn off the bathtub faucet. She had to replace the flooded baseboards in the bathroom before the house could be sold. Her brothers, both lawyers in cities on opposite coasts, did not help Rachel prepare the house for the estate sale. They wouldn’t even send their wives, indisposed as these women were with tending to their husbands and children.

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Rachel found the little red box in which her mother kept the best jewelry (a benefit of being the only daughter). Rachel’s sisters-in-law suspected that she did not declare every object in the estate. Amy in particular complained of an unaccounted-for diamond tennis bracelet, but Jennifer reassured her that any family jewelry would reunite with their children eventually — Rachel never bothered to have any. 

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The siblings’ fears that the story of the murder would depress the sale price of the house did not come true. This housing market had no room for superstition. The house was purchased by an investment management company that converted the home to a short-term rental for college football game days. Their main clients were consulting companies offering an incentive to their employees, who lived all their lives with greed and envy and never once thought to change.