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The young man waiting the window tables at Le Boulevard Vert is dark and slim-wristed, with a trace of some obscure accent that he chases around the French names of the dishes.
He is exceedingly polite, and quietly but firmly opinionated about the wine list, and before placing the water glasses has already identified which members of the party are left-handed.
Someone is guerilla furnishing his apartment.
He normally wouldn’t jump to this immediately, but there aren’t a lot of options.
did you send me furniture?
In the meantime, he will ask if there happens to be another couch coming in.
As soon as these expletive carpet guys are done with their expletive carpet.
More people want him to sign for things.
You know what? This is all fine. This all might as well happen.
He signs things as they are presented to him, and (after carefully herding his actually important possessions into kitchen cabinets) requests to see the new couch before he lets them cart off his one piece of functional furniture.
There is a new couch! It is slightly embedded in padding and cardboard, but it definitely exists.
Someone is unscrewing light fixtures. Someone else is taking the glass out of the window. No one is touching the kitchen.
He’s going to let this happen.
He returns to his kitchen and sits there with his pots and pans and watches videos about rare fruits until someone tells him to move.
Carpet comes out and carpet goes in and fixtures get replaced and no one bothers him except one of the movers who wants to know if he has any diet Dr. Pepper.
Jean Dulac texts him back.
Okay.
(He has no diet Dr. Pepper, but the corner store does, and he has nothing to do anyway. He goes and buys some soda for the men invading his home.)
By the time he's back the new carpet is being tacked down. It's unreasonably lush, and a pale cream color that only someone who had never cleaned a carpet in his life would choose.
The new windows look much like the old windows. The new furniture being moved in ... doesn't look much like the old furniture. It's all oil-rubbed bronzes and artistic lines and a delicately balanced lamp shaped like a squiggle freehanded in midair.
His kitchen remains untouched. There's several men working to hang a small lithograph in an alarmingly serious-looking frame, and install lighting above it.
He’s not sure whether he’s relieved they’re not trying to take his pots and pans or disappointed that the dingy old electric stove is staying where it is.
While they turn his apartment into a page from an interior design magazine, he tries to get a look at the lithograph over the concerningly large number of men involved in hanging it.
It's right there, atop the archival acid-free matting, under the UV-resistant glass, being pinned like a butterfly to the wall.
Well.
It's possible that what he has is a reproduction of Buste l'homme, from La suite des saltimbanques, drypoint print by "Picasso, Pablo"?
How should he be reacting to all this?
Should he be…grateful, for the amount of money that presumably went into this? Alarmed, by the same, and by the fact that he was never actually consulted? Afraid of what else might happen without his input? Should he feel appreciated? Objectified? Eager? Trapped?
He doesn’t know what to do with any of that. But he is always curious — always hungry — and this remains, and this he understands.
Why?
Reproductions simply don't have the same quality, especially viewed close up. It's worth appreciating in the original.
Jean Dulac sends him a gif of a man getting hit in the crotch by a rake.
He turns his phone off and watches the bizarre proceedings in his apartment.
Eventually one of the movers will ask him, with at most a medium amount of politeness, whether he really needs to be there while they maneuver furniture into the tiny apartment.
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