Curtains, pal!

We stepped out of a movie theater inside a shopping mall when she suggested that we visit a department store located there.  She needed to buy fabric for new living room curtains.   And so, instead of talking about the movie we just saw like most people do emerging from cinemas, we were about to discuss home furnishings. And to show you how our memories work, I remember much from this long ago episode, but not the name of the film we saw.

We found our way to the section of the department store where long sheets of fabric were hanging from movable overhead rails.  She pushed the rails back and forth trying to decide.  I made one unsolicited suggestion on a light colored fabric, and she immediately shot it down.   She had to have something that went with her antique dark oak furniture.   While there were over two dozen fabric samples available, most were intended for purposes other than window curtains.   I suggested that we move on and come back another day or visit another store,  but she insisted on selecting something there and then.  There was a single chair near the display, probably intended for frustrated husbands and boyfriends, I figured,  and I sat down in it, while she looked through catalogs, carried on a discussion with the saleslady.  She finally decided on some fabric and made arrangements to have it delivered to the shop of her installers near the apartment house where she lived, a young couple I had met briefly, who I thought didn't inspire much confidence.  But it was all her business.

After several delays,  missed appointments, the installer couple replaced her light colored living room curtains which to my taste were adequate,  with the new set,  dark brown, matching the color of her two antique furniture pieces, new curtains that, in her own words, brought "doom and gloom" to her living room which didn't get much direct sunlight in the first place facing as it were West where another apartment block was rising a hundred yards away.  She was unhappy with the installers, unhappy with the effect of the curtains on her living space.   Apparently, she wasn't happy with me either, because shortly thereafter she broke up the relationship.  "It's curtains, pal!" I told myself, like I imagined Jack Nicholson would say, not altogether brokenhearted, for reasons other than living room curtains.

I told my friend Frank about what happened; I called him "my attorney",  but he was more of a psychologist and mind reader.   "Women test men all the time," he said, "even, as apparently in this case, deciding ex post facto that some event had been a test.  She didn't need your advice at the time of selection, but afterwards she blamed you for letting her choose the nightmare she ended up choosing."

My lesson from the affair? Avoid cinemas attached to shopping malls!