Chiara is in love with a vacuum cleaner.
She’ll deny it, but mention the name of our new household cleaning appliance (or speak about its specifications in a pleasant English accent) and watch her pupils dilate and her lips part.
The pathos isn’t lost on her. Here she is, an educated, liberal, feminist woman, but she’s totally enamored of the most potent symbol of domesticity anyone can think of and its associated attachments.
“One is especially for curtains!” she gushed at me.
Many of you already know the iron fist with which Chiara rules our home when it comes to the forever war against entropy. I am - at best - a sort of tolerated condition of this war and I am forever being lintrolled or washed or dusted.
But the day after our (exorbitant) vacuum purchase, I found myself on the sofa pulling at a stray thread from my shirt. I wound it into a little ball and got up to throw it into the trash when Chiara grabbed me by the forearm and - with a gleam in her eye and a toothily sexual rictus - invited me to simply toss the ball of thread onto the floor. I gaped, slack-jawed.
She rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other and explained:
“I can vacuum eet!”
That was more or less when I knew I had been replaced.
I had it coming, I suppose. I don’t pull my weight around here with the cleaning, and I’ve been so busy with lawyerly pursuits that I haven’t properly been attending to Chiara’s needs.
I had some measure of the depravity to which she’d sunk when I walked into the bedroom the other day to find her engaged in a truly unnatural act of cleaning:
She was vacuuming the old vacuum with the new vacuum. She looked flushed.
It was like some kind of unholy threeway. In fact, I was curiously aroused by the whole scene.
Later that same evening, Chiara squealed (in either glee or horror) as she accidentally inhaled the Swiffer into the vacuum’s see-through dust chamber. This is what I called the “Richard Gere Moment” for our new machine and I advised Chiara that now was the time for some damage control.
We both agreed that the vacuum ought to be left alone for a few days.
Nevertheless, This afternoon her friend dropped by for some risotto and gossip, and the two of them spent several minutes admiring the sleek lines and meticulously designed ergonomics of the new vacuum in much the way I might have liked to be regarded.
I don't really expect anything of the kind, of course, but I hope I don't soon find a photo of James Dyson taped to our headboard.
I certainly don’t have the attachments to compete.
