ORANGE MOSAIC TABLE

JC and I were fighting. It was serious. We couldn't get rid of the problem. After we'd talked about it for a week, nothing was solved.

He'd been doing "Hamlet" while I was finishing a tour of England with my dance company. The girl who played Ophelia kept phoning him. I wanted him to tell her "'Don't call me anymore." He knew she was seriously depressive, suicidal, and didn't want to hurt her.

We sat at a coffee table we'd inherited from B. (My friend B had just gotten married, and was building a new life with an architect who designed rectangular furniture, modules that contained your bed, desk, closet, shelves -- you name it, it was in the module.) So, we were sitting across from one another on B's Danish chairs, foam rubber covered with a pleasant brownish-orange tweed.

Before JC had gone out of town for "Hamlet," before I'd gone to England, we'd bought orange mosaics, sheets of one-inch squares -- a ten pound box, enough to re-do the bathroom floor.

"JC, you said --- "
"No, Em, that's what you said, and I said ---".

Back and forth, we argued and fitted mosaics in a circle in the center of the coffee table. What do you discuss, if there's a needy neurotic girl interfering with the balance of husband and wife? Husband's audition for a new project, as you lay an orange square next to the previous one in the ever-enlarging circle? Wife's new choreography idea, as you position another orange square, passing a box-cutter back and forth, chopping off corners that have to be excised, so the mosaics can lay in a circular shape?

With interruptions for normal things, in between circles of mosaics, we exhausted his Hamlet, Ophelia, auditions, and Em's choreography ideas --iff'ed, maybe'ed, and planned a trip to L.A. where there might be new opportunities for us both, and created a beautiful coffee table with an orange mosaic top.

It sat in the center of our living room while other trips, choreographies, plays came and went, and successes earned us money for renovations, and everything orange and brown and worn in that living room, became spring green and fresh white wicker.