After painting the bathroom all day, or to be perfectly accurate, painting the bathroom trim and corners all day, Mr. Henry is not about to stand up at the stove.
Mr. Henry adores his stove, mind you, his new Dacor hot-air convection oven (the 30” all-gas EGR 30 range with the ceramic radiation broiler – pure heaven on earth), without which the newly renovated chef’s kitchen would have no center, no bottom, no focus loci. But he just cannot face the idea of thinking about, of conceptualizing, of planning a meal.
Cutting a line between Decorator White semi-gloss on the ceiling and Vanilla Milkshake eggshell on the walls made significant demands on his hand-eye coordination abilities and as for his planning capabilities, well, these are never at their best when his hands are paint-flecked and aching. Mr. Henry is beat, and worse, so is She, his loving wife whose energies are without measure.
When Mr. Henry refers to his new Dacor convection oven, by the way, a remarkable home resource, he is stretching the possessive just a smidge. The Dacor, like the other appliances and indeed like the whole apartment, belongs to Her. (The Turkoman carpet, however, is Mr. Henry’s by right of its masculine design and because he bought it for his back office back when he had a back office as well as a secretary, a front office man, a bookkeeper, and the like. Let’s not even get into it, shall we?)