"His apartment is, as always, dim and close, overheated, full of the sage and juniper incense Richard burns to cover the smell of illness. It is unbearably cluttered, inhabited here and there by a wane circle of pulverized non-dark emanating from the brown-shaded lamps in which Richard will tolerate no bulb more powerful than fifteen watts" (56). The squalid tenement apartment, the decaying chair, and even the neighborhood where Richard lives represents the physical and mental deterioration that Richard is undergoing. His apartment is cluttered and stuffy, which is a symbol that he has given up on day-to-day living. It is also in sharp contrast to the spacious lovely environment that Clarissa lives in. When she visits Richard, she is bothered by the rotting essence of the chair. It is almost like it is a corpse. Cunningham beautifully describes its decay in the following words: "The chair smells fetid and deeply damp, unclean; its smells of irreversible rot" (59). Clarissa thinks that Richard should get rid of the chair, but he refuses to. As long as he has the chair, Richard will hope that he can get better.
Later in the novel, Richard does not want to attend Clarissa's party. He feels that his experimental novels have only been marginally successful, so he believes that people only want to honor him out of pity. He knows that he is not getting any better and knows that his impending death will keep him from writing. He feels cheated because he has not accomplished what he wanted to. Clarissa pities him because she knows if he had gotten the proper anti-viral medicine, the HIV virus would not have spread to his central nervous system and not caused dementia. She thinks about their friend Walter Hardy whose lover, Evan, has responded well to the anti-viral medications.
Richard's despair keeps him from enjoying simple pleasures like the coffee machine Clarissa once gave him. "Here is the Italian coffee maker she bought for him, all chrome and black steel, beginning to join the general aspect of dusty disuse" (57). Clarissa tries to change his attitude by opening up the shade where he is sitting, but the sight out the window is pretty grim and when she turns around and looks at his face she feels that he is close to death and he has given up all hope.
When Clarissa goes to get Richard ready for the party, she finds him sitting on the edge of the windowsill. Richard's emanciated body looks like a scarecrow and tells her that he cannot face the party or life anymore. Inside, the chair sits empty and exposed. She tries to convince him that he still has a lot to live for, but he tells her that he is so sick and has felt death for a long time. Richard says: "I have felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower" (198). He then tells her that he has failed in his work by never creating anything beautiful. This is similar to what Virginia Woolf thinks earlier in prologue of the novel: "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" (4). After Richard tells Clarissa that he loves her, he commits suicide.
After Richard's suicide, Clarissa feels guilty that she pressured him for trying to be part of her ordinary life. She feels that she should never have asked him to come to her party and speak to her guests. She wishes she could tell him how courageous he has been for loving her as long as he has. She also realizes that she is lucky because she did not have to face the demons of Richard's illness. I have always found it interesting that gifted people often have to suffer so much and die before they should, such as Mozart, Van Gogh, Keats, and Woolf.
