Amidst the Misery

Chapter 2: There's Standard, and Then There's You

“You have been in every line I have ever read.”

Philip Pirrip

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It’s part library, part café.

Bookshelves line one side of the wall, and a coffee bar on the opposite. In the centre, rows of square tables anchor a mostly white setting, whose neutral palette is enlivened by colours coming from the paperback spines and the Paul Smith edition Anglepoise desk lamps.

Polite servers dressed in all black round out the minimalist effect. They bustle about discreetly pouring drinks, setting plates, and taking orders to keep up with the brunch rush hour. Smiles and happy chatter exchange between couples while parents try valiantly to keep their young in tow. New Yorkers and the visiting weekend crowds blend together in the busy scene.

The Standard is unassuming and would escape most people’s attention, were it not for the monochrome Albers prints on the walls, the Eames shell chair Jennie is currently sitting on, the Wegner loungers a few feet away, and the Stelton ceramic coffee pot and creamer set on her table.

Jennie only knows this, and can identify the brands, as a by-product of years of living with an architect, conditioning her awareness of her environment and attuning her to the material goods that proliferated their everyday.

Observation skills she had picked up from Lisa’s habit of looking up and around whenever she stepped foot in a new space. Their late-night conversations would then revisit the things they saw during the day, the surfaces and textures and colours that she knows Lisa was meticulously cataloguing away in that immense visual library in her head.

She was always surprised, but not, when Lisa referenced something much later on that had only been a passing image seen in one of the many design publications they perused together during coffee breaks.

(Lisa never said but Jennie is fairly certain she was world building an entire metropolis—a better built future for humankind—with all the tabulating and indexing and bookmarking and clipping that was happening on her side of their shared workspace in the den. She received a withering glare once for joking about Lisa’s fancy degree going towards becoming a professional scrapbooker.)

As Jennie looks around, and takes note of how the wood grain of the floor subtly picks up on the lines of the wall art, she realises the depth of Lisa’s influence in how she sees the world, how it became another filter that her appreciation of beauty passed through.

Somewhere along the way, Lisa had taught her to pay closer attention to her surroundings, to have a closer connection to the ground, when Jennie’s artistic tendency was to look skywards.

She wonders what old Jennie and Lisa would have to jointly say about The Standard, if they would zone in on the same details or come to similar conclusions about the aesthetic choices.

Generally, it’s a bit more upscale than what she’s accustomed to from their past Sunday routines. Maybe this was grown-up working girl Lisa versus stressed-out postgrad intern Lisa. Or perhaps Lisa had picked it subconsciously for its reminder of her adopted continent.

Regardless, she’s glad the slight air of pretension falls short of crossing over onto the douche side of things, that the marked European influence hasn’t tipped the scale towards asshole territory—always a risk in lower Manhattan.

Instead, The Standard is attentive to detail, well-appointed but understated, reflecting what Jennie can only assume is Lisa’s matured discerning taste.

(She remembers an afternoon spent watching a bottom lip worrying under teeth as Lisa self-debated herringbone or houndstooth as the better textile pattern for the cushion cover of their new sofa.)