The Charmer's Apartment

Based on a prompt I found in a book about writing in Barnes & Noble Prompt: Choose a male figure from a dysfunctional relationship type and describe his apartment.

The Charmer’s Apartment

Walking into Phillip’s apartment, you couldn’t identify any issue beneath his polished surface. The setup had all been organized very neatly, flat white end tables at every corner topped by small potted plants. The tile on the floors and in the kitchen screamed of cleanliness, the endless necessity to please. The carpet in the living room, a safe, cream color, begged no undivided attention, and sacrificed purpose to the futuristic furniture it housed: stark white egg chairs crafted from thick plastic, a black entertainment system upon which sat a flatscreen television and its DVD player (the DVDs stacked neatly in the cupboards beneath�"classics only, like The Godfather and Forgetting Sarah Marshall), and an asymmetrical, rounded-edge coffee table with carefully-selected magazines, like TIME and the National Geographic, on top of it. He’d never lit the fireplace, but kept it clean to maintain appearances, of course.

The massage chair (which he’d used probably once since he’d bought it) sat uselessly against the far wall beside the fireplace, its cords tangled up in front of the outlet. On the other side sat an umbrella stand, used for the golf clubs he only withdrew when the boss asked him to play, or when the women he dated were into golf.

The walls, which were all painted a very technological, almost doctored white, adorned themselves with random pieces of modern art, canvases with red and blue and yellow paint splatters, lines scrawled almost carelessly over and around any unused area, framed in simple black borders. On the wall in the beginning of the hallway hung a gift from his mother, the only pastel, unframed painting in the whole apartment, a mess of post-impressionism colors and dots, the faintest idea of what was once a farmer’s field at sunset.

His kitchen and bathroom could have been professional, all stainless steel and engineered rock counters, not a soap bar or a spice out of place. The most impressive thing about the bathroom, perhaps, was the automatic flush button, or maybe the motion-detecting sinks. The bath, however, seemed for some reason, cold and unforgiving, for most bachelors elected to use the shower instead.

But the grand spectacle, the piece de resistance, if you will, was, predictably, his bedroom. The hypothetical notches in the bedpost had been collected elsewhere, apparently, as his grand chestnut headboard bore little to no sign of damage. His bed, memory foam with the finest, highest thread count sheets, lay open and welcoming to any guest or visitor, and often found itself occupied by said persons. The closet made itself home to all professional colors of suits, navy and gray and black and white and cream, ties splaying themselves out in a rainbow on an upper rack. The window draped itself with soft red curtains, intricately sewed with black string to fabricate the scene of a dragon descending upon a city. His dress shoes lay tossed aside in a corner, his Converse sneakers and running shoes tucked into the closet. On the wall opposite his bed he’d hung his credentials, certificates from schools who had consistently misspelled his last name. Underneath his bed were the tools of his trade, the exchangable wallets, the Playboys from his teenage years, the shoeboxes bearing notebooks with profiling preferences, his work briefcase, the small, expensive impulse buys that often impressed the girls, the objects to which he liked to refer as shiny badges of courage.

This bedside table, unlike the others, held a standard lamp and alarm clock, and, moreover, a small picture frame containing a yellowed photograph of him, age four, on his mother’s shoulders at the fair, his older sister standing beside them, her wrist against her hip in the awkward air of young adolescence, her drug store sunglasses propped on her head between bristles of unevenly-cut hair. It was this photo that he turned onto its face when he had guests over, the photo that he forgot when the woman in his bed was too lovely to be denied.

It was here that Phillip could be a thousand men, the eligible bachelor and the attentive lover, the middle-class workingman and the obsessive neat freak, the everyday superman and the nervous replacement.

The most lavish charmer and the loneliest pariah.

Author's Note

Please review and let me know how I've done :)