ROOM IN NEW YORK

As John Miller reads the Sunday paper, his wife Daisy has finished dressing. But it’s still early. They had an appointment with their friends, the Murray couple, to go out for lunch. They have booked a table at Cooper’s Tavern, and later they will have an ice cream, taking a long walk in Central Park, like other Sunday afternoons. This morning Daisy is wearing violet shoes and red dress, and John black tie. He always uses them of that color.

More than one hour is left. The wait is long. The apartment that they occupy from the move of John to New York is very small, and Daisy doesn’t have anything to do. She corrects the inclination of a picture, flips books from the bookshelf, looks out the window to observe the street, and bored, she sits at the piano. Then she rests his left arm on it, leaving her hand dead, and with one finger of the other she slightly sinks some keys, without producing any sound. Meanwhile, her husband, lying in the armchair, remains immersed in a sea of headlines and economic data, behind a curtain of paper. A prolonged silence between two pages, prompting Daisy’s thoughts to travel a few months back, when the young man on the twenty-fourth floor, who had been smiling her for months, sent her that note. Then came that ice cream, then that lunch, and those meetings as they left the office. The song they heard so many times drinking coffee, whose notes she now tries to remember, goes around her arm, and, barely noticing it, reaches her fingers. When the sad melody is strung on the piano and the chords flood the room, the memory becomes so real, that Daisy feels she has undressed her secret. She turns her head to look at her husband, frightened. He already has his eyes on her, scared too.

This story is based on the Edward Hopper picture: “Room in New York”. To see the picture click here: Edward Hopper