The Champagne Chair in the New York Times

The Champagne Chair
by: M. Garcia Teutsch
An abridged version of this essay is featured in the New York Times’ Valentine’s Day Issue
14 February 2026

My love item is from one of the first dates with my husband of now 20 years. It is a chair fashioned from the wire cage, metal wrapping and label affixed to the top of a champagne cork. I used to have the cork too, but after 21 years together, and having lived in three countries, it has disappeared.

The significance of the chair is manifold: I was a recently divorced mother of a wunderkind eight-year-old boy. I was enjoying my life of freedom and had plunged headlong into being the best mother I could be. I was the den mother of my son’s cub troupe. I volunteered monthly as an art teacher for my son’s class. I’d basically erased that part of myself that did not serve this perfect ideal I had as mother. The weight of guilt I felt over the divorce helped to dictate my behavior.

This little chair reminds me of when I fist saw myself as an object of desire, as if, possibly, I might even be beautiful, at least to this one person, which, as it turns out, is enough for me.

My chair was fashioned for me the first the time I spent the night at my boyfriend’s house. He is a German physicist, and I a poet, so our conversations were always a place of marvel at the intersections of commonality, which sparked a fervor in wanting to know more and more about each other. When I arrived he had a fire going and lots of fancy finger foods set out as a picnic, with a bottle of champagne sweating atop a silver wine bucket, like a trophy yet to be won. I marveled at his effort. I felt cherished, and also sexy. After we’d finished the bottle, a-hem, and were laying in front of the fire, I told him I’d once seen a chair fashioned from the cage of the cork. He took this as a challenge and created what you now see before you.

I held onto it to remind me of that part of me that is cherished. That sexy woman that I was then, and still am to this special man.

I keep this little chair on my vanity. Its ubiquitousness such that I hardly notice it’s there.  When I do notice it I always smile. I received it at a time I believed I’d never give myself to another again. I didn’t want to. I liked being alone, I’m a poet, we can fall in love all by ourselves. But it feels good to be loved and desired by someone worthier of your time. And I was an even better mother because I was a happier person, in love with love.