Nothing Beautiful

My hot water heater is in a closet behind the refrigerator. To get to it, I have to unplug the fridge and drag it, scraping across the kitchen floor. Then I have to bend down, so my head doesn’t hit the row of cabinets that are above the fridge. The door sticks sometimes, so I have to kick the hinges. When it opens, it makes a liquid clicking noise, like pulling the cap off a two liter soda or clapping wet hands. There’s a gap over the water heater big enough for me to crawl through. Once I crawl back there, I can see the tangled wiring for my stove and some pipes that come from my sink, bending and twisting around the enclosed space.

It’s dim, but there’s enough light from the kitchen that I can see him sitting on a row of pipes, sipping tea, not British tea, but rather the Irish stuff.

“Isn’t it the same thing?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. He pours the rest of his tea onto the floor and it splashes around his feet. He stares at me, inviting me to chastise, but I don’t.

As I start to crawl back through the hole above the water heater, he pulls my ankle and asks me to please bring back a few paintings or some other craftwork. Says my aesthetics are awful and wonders how I can live knowing I have this poorly decorated closet-space. Poor lighting and no color. No aromatics. No handmade candles. No symphony music. Nothing swirling and beautiful at all.

I climb back over the hot water heater and close the door, slide the fridge back in place and plug it in.

I roll the kitchen floor mats up and take the candles off the counters. Throw them in a box with the couch pillows, a bottle of lemon air freshener, and the picture frame my best friend made me when I got my tonsils out.

“This is it?” he says when I hand him the box.

It takes me a week to clear everything out of my apartment, box it up, and give it to him. He doesn’t want my toothbrush or my stuffed animals. Tosses them out of the crawl space, back into the kitchen. He unpacks the rest and spreads it out.

“Needs better lighting,” he says.

I take the antique lamps from my parent’s house, hoping they won’t notice. He likes the engraving along their bases and he splits a bottle of wine with me.

The next day I take a quilt from my neighbor’s bedroom while he’s checking his mail and give it to him. He lays the quilt over his legs, runs his hand along the geometric patterns and smiles at me.

Over the next six months I take pictures and vases and mirrors. I take the chandelier from my grandmother’s house. People notice. They come to my apartment, knocking on the door, but I hide behind the water heater. When I don’t return my parents’ calls, they have a locksmith open my front door, but they don’t find me.

One morning I notice the lamps are gone. Then another day it’s the rugs and candles. The room grows bare. I try to stay awake so I can watch him, see where he goes, what he takes, but I never see him leave the room.

Then he’s gone. No explanation. No warning. No chance to change his mind or haggle with him, promising him more and more new stuff.

I crawl over the hot water heater to my kitchen, where my toothbrush sits on the counter alongside a row of stuffed hippos and bears. The rest of the apartment, empty. Walls full of holes, indentions in the carpet where furniture used to be, my front door with the lock hanging loose.