"The Table"

"Do you want a table?" the man asked me again. I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. I'd been walking home, winding my way through the small streets in this part of the Village when someone had said something to me. I stopped and turned to the man. "Excuse me?" He repeated what he'd said in his heavy Italian-American accent.

Next to him, I could see, there stood a table. This man and I were the only ones on the street. I looked around, momentarily disconcerted.

It's a good table," the man affirmed. He was standing in front of the building where he lived. He was maybe in his fifties and looked to be a working man. This used to be a neighborhood of working class Italians. Now it was mostly taken over by Village types. The only Italians left were older, the vestiges of a neighborhood that didn't exist here anymore.

This didn't seem to be the way to sell a table — to stand on an empty street waiting for someone to come by. "You're selling it?" I inquired.

"I give it to you…" the man said. And now I saw, in the way his hand lay on the table as he addressed me, that he cared for this table. He had a relationship with it. I looked at him closely. He was a good man, a kind man. I didn't want to hurt his feelings.

"You don't want it?" I asked — because I didn't want it either. I had another table already in my small studio apartment on Cornelia street just a few blocks away. I just didn't want to be too abrupt in letting him know that I didn't need his table.

"My wife, she bought another one," he replied.

"Women," I said, "they always want to buy something new. The old thing isn't good enough for them."

"I raised five children with this table," the man stated proudly and with feeling. It occurred to me only now that he had been standing here since daylight waiting for someone to come by who would take the table. I was touched that a person would care so much for something like a simple table.

"It is a good table," I agreed, examining it. It was just a simple wooden table, the size of a card table, very old fashion looking. Obviously a moderately priced piece of furniture in its time, it now looked stylish, even a little bit ornate compared, for instance, to the factory-produced look of the table I had in my kitchen nook. I liked the table but I had no intention of taking it. I was searching for a nice way to convey to this man that I appreciated his table but didn't need it.

"Your children are all grown up and gone now," I surmised.

"Just me and my wife now," he replied.

"And she didn't want to keep this nice table?" I repeated, replaying the conversation to be polite.

"She gotta have a new one," he replied, resigned.

"It folds up?" I asked, trying to extend the conversation so I wouldn't have to turn him down so flat.

In a snap the man folded the legs right under the table and handed it to me. "It's yours!" he said with such obvious satisfaction at having found a new owner for it and not having to throw it out that I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't want it.

"Well, thank you very much" I said.

And he said something and I said something and then he turned and finally went inside after what must have been a long vigil out there with his beloved table.

So I was left walking home, lugging this table I didn't want or need. When I got up to my third floor walkup on Cornelia Street, I set the folded table right outside the door to my apartment. I had a table, after all and thought I'd keep it there until I figured out what to do with it.

I don't know exactly when it was the table vanished. One day I just noticed it wasn't there any more. It was gone. I didn't have the faintest idea what had happened to it. Maybe the super had thought it was trash and had thrown it out. Maybe someone had stolen it. This neighborhood had gone through changes over the years...Wave after wave of different types had come through. They were layered in the rent control apartments of this small building. Across the hall lived an old Irishman who seemed to have been there from the beginning of time. He had been a laborer of some sort back when he worked. Now he just drank and stayed home. The walls of his studio apartment were all yellowed and ancient-looking. Everything in there was unchanged for a long time. The man was always a little out of it. Sometimes he'd appear standing in his doorway as you walked by and grunt something incoherent at you. His zipper was always wide open and his privates hung in full view. He wasn't aware. Immediately next door to him was a shy young woman who held down a job and did water colors. She was in the newest wave — upscale young people who wanted to live in the famous and trendy Greenwich Village of the 1970s. She was always kind to the old man next door and politely ignored his frontal nudity. Immediately upstairs from me lived a hippie holdover from the 60s. Bearded and lanky and still wearing bellbottoms. There had been a time when the whole neighborhood was overrun with the likes of him. Now the wave of hippies had receded and vanished and he was stranded here with us — the last of his kind. Next door to me — a diminutive Colombian cocaine dealer who never had trouble finding pretty women. In the end he was beaten up by the gang of blacks who own the drug trade in this neighborhood.

There was no telling where the table went. I didn't really care — even when I broke my own table beyond repair by standing on it to kill a roach on the ceiling. I just sat on the floor and ate out of a bowl I held on my lap. My life was getting simpler and simpler. I'd also tossed out my bed/couch. I just kept the thin foam mattress and slept on the floor. The only furniture I had was my desk and chair and two bookshelves. I had come to live completely on the floor, Japanese style, when, maybe a year or two later there was a hand-printed sign on the front door when I came home from work one afternoon. I stopped for a second to read it. Someone was moving out and selling all their stuff. The hippie came in right behind me. "That's me, man" he said of the sign I was reading.

"Oh, you're leaving?" I asked.

"Yeah, man," he replied. "I'm going out to Oregon. Things are still happening out there. It's like the 60s all over again."

"Come on up, man," he urged me, "I'm letting go of everything real cheap."

I didn't want to buy anything but came up just to be polite and as a way of bidding him farewell. I knew I'd probably never see the guy again.

I'd never been in his apartment before. It was right above mine. No sooner did I walk in, than I saw my table there. He'd sawed the legs off so that it was short now, perfect for my Japanese way of living on the floor.

"How much is that table?" I inquired, after looking around.

"$15, man." he said.

I considered it.

"That's the same table you threw out," he added quickly, sounding a little guilty.

"I'll take it," I said, to let him off the hook, and pulled out a ten and a five.

I bought my own table.

I folded the short legs up like the Italian man had shown me, bade the hippie good luck in Oregon, and carried my prize downstairs. It fit right in front of my mat on the floor next to the fireplace.

That was twenty-five years ago. Women have come and gone, I've gotten married and divorced, made friends and lost them. I still have the table.