beds

Whisper of pencil lead against paper, emanating from a shady corner of a public library, where our hero sits quietly at a partitioned desk, industriously compiling a descriptive list of beds: the most intimate detail-- the lathe of the legs, and in some cases, the feel of the mattress-- remembered and recorded; an inventory of the beds of his friends, lovers, relatives, and all those beds he has been able to call his own, including his crib. With this inventory complete, he, our silent hero, who must feed these hungry sheets of blank paper, which were swans before they metamorphosed into white lions, begins inventing beds, then characters to sleep, dream and love in those beds. And you and I, reader and writer, stand smiling behind, proud as parents, peering over our hero’s two bony shoulders. . . . Indeed, the conception of a bed or series of beds, however firm or flexible, wide or narrow, would provide a fine foundation on which to build a character or characters to populate a work of fiction; the bed as object or concept figures profoundly not only in our daily lives but also in our deaths as we conceive of them.

Mass produced beds-- white-enameled, metal beds constructed for one-- leaving the factory as fast as lemmings and headed for the universities and insane asylums. . . . One for the aspiring philosopher, and one for the madman who believes he has inseminated the mattress. With the palm of his hand flat on its center, he feels for the gradual rise of breath and birth as from a woman’s belly, sees the curvature of a world coming from that flatness, from his bed sheet rippled like a desert. The madman feels that the bed is warm, though he sleeps in a foetal position at its foot.

Twin bed vacant but for the rhomboids of sunlight cast in through the bed room window and the pillow with the hollow left by the head, the fitted white sheet a rippled desert seen from the basket of a passing hot-air balloon, white bed sheet rippled by the body risen like a sudden gust of wind across an expanse of sand. . . .

The woman who always rose before dawn, before second-story man Sunlight climbed in through her bed room window, was the woman who always fell after dusk, naked but never alone against the fresh black bed sheet spread across her queen-size water bed. Both knew the nightly frenzied feast of primitive fish, which submerged to loll by day in the colder, lower depths.

We embrace in bed. The room is dark. And her eyes are most likely closed.

He lay on his back and looks up at the light blue sky; like the man who groped for and tore the rip cord from his heart, he had hoped to unfurl his mind like a desperately needed parachute.

A made bed-- pillows fluffed, quilt folded, spread tucked-- looks vacant, unoccupied; this is why I leave mine unmade, occupied by the twisted heap of quilt, the tormented animal finally left to rest.

Terrifying resemblance between one’s big toe and the television set at the foot of one’s bed.

Insomnia. Instead of counting sheep, synthesize disciplines-- art, literature, philosophy, politics, science-- century by century, in reverse order-- 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, etc.-- all the way back, to when disciplines were already synthesized, back beyond the Greeks, to the Mesopotamians of approximately 9,000 BC, perhaps even beyond . . . , until one loses, quite rightly, consciousness.

The bed she has grown into ever since her crib. Elisabeth. Elisabeth with the "s" of daydreams in place of the harsh "z" of reality; not the Elizabeth of reality, who somewhere must exist, but Elisabeth of the imaginary ideal. Four ornately lathed oak legs rising majestically from the plush, sky-blue carpet of her bed room, rising well above the box spring and mattress to support the arched and tassel-trimmed canopy above. Elisabeth lifted from her crib and set into this bed the day she was three, a baby wallaby clinging in half-sleep to the mattress as to a mother’s breast; all this beneath the vaulted canopy. Thirteen years later, Elisabeth on her back, in bed, staring up into the canopy which has always eclipsed the flat and cracked white ceiling beyond. To Elisabeth, looking into this canopy is like looking ahead to Heaven, like looking up into the welcoming ceilings of the cathedrals she’s seen pictured in the biggest books.
***
Elisabeth asleep beneath her vaulting canopy. She is dreaming of her wedding day, of the measured steps she will take down the church aisle with her father. She is dreaming of the boy who had lived down the street when they were children, of how he told her with tears that his family was moving away, of how she had listened with tears. They had gone to school together, had attended the same church. She is dreaming of the time he had told her that the canopy of her bed looked like the rib-cage of a dinosaur, and of the time he let her lay in his bed, which was custom made to look like a fire truck. He had wanted to become a fireman, and confessed to her that he daydreamed the church into flames to pass the time during the boring morning mass. The boy had blazed through his nights, sirens blaring. Elisabeth’s dreams still accumulate in the canopy of her bed.
***
Elisabeth’s blue suitcase, the robin’s-egg blue sky of twilight. The suitcase she keeps beneath her bed. Blue suitcase she easily slides out and pops open to deposit the latest love letter she has written to her future husband, the man she one day hopes to meet.
***
She writes him frequently, always late at night, forsaking her writing desk for the sill of her bed room window, the window which never stops looking out and down on the large display window of Wanda’s Wedding Apparel across the street. For all Elisabeth’s life, every daydreamy gaze out her bed room window has become manifest in the old wooden torso supported by one steel upright standing in Wanda’s window. The torso, always clothed in the most lavish dress Wanda had to offer. The torso which by night is lit up with spotlights and looks to Elisabeth like some kind of angel or divine vision, perhaps prophetic, to which she easily attaches her own arms, legs and head with her imagination.
***
Her parents’ king-size cherry-wood bed with sunset headboard, crawled into between father and mother on a night of lightening and thunder. Elisabeth witnessed this bed painfully divide, overnight, into the two twin beds now against opposite walls of her parents’ bed room.
***
She is awake, washed, and dressed in her Sunday best. If dresses could give birth, the dress Elisabeth is wearing might be thought the daughter of the wedding dress hanging in Wanda’s window. And in this petite Sunday dress, Elisabeth makes her bed for the day: fluffing up her pillow, tucking and smoothing her sheets and quilt with the tenderness of a mother tucking her own child in for a long, dark night.
***
Father and mother driving with daughter to church for Sunday morning mass. Elisabeth in the back seat, dreaming. About how it will feel to be driven this route to church for her wedding. About how much smaller the back seat will feel after growing up enough to wear the gown she’s already picked out-- the one with all the ruffles. About how she will feel in the back seat, in that gown . . . like a porcelain statuette wrapped in white tissue paper and packed in a little gift box.
***
Elisabeth inside the little white church, its steeple topped with a cross. She is trying with little success to walk down the crowded aisle with measured steps, steps taken in accordance with the Wedding March played in her mind by the organist who is smoking a cigarette just outside the rear entrance. She holds her father’s arm as they walk all the way down to the pew nearest the pulpit. She imagines her mother, who follows close behind, her bridesmaid.

By the time he arrives at the fenced-in cemetery the iron gates are open and last night is disguised in morning light. He lay the bundled dozen of long-stemmed red roses on the low stone wall before the fence, smoothes his uncombed gray hair, and adjusts the lapels of his woolen overcoat; then, taking up the roses, he starts down the broad, shoveled asphalt path branching into rivulets predestined to flow back together and form an equally wide path through the gate identical to the first located at the opposite end of the snowy cemetery grounds.
***
He walks slowly, and as though looking for someone from whom he has become separated in a crowd; not having been to the cemetery since her spring burial, he is unsure of the precise location of his wife's plot. He is looking for anything familiar among the surrounding white when he recognizes her modest stone.
***
Roses braced behind his back, he stands at the foot of her grave: just as he stood at the bolted door of their house years ago, mornings after his tireless nights of drink. He clears his throat, as though to say something, to get her attention, but quickly and timidly lays the flowers on her grave and regains his posture. There he stands, hoping she will take it from there, curse him as she had done after accepting the roses of those lost mornings.
***
Only silence. He feels she is patiently awaiting an explanation for his absence; but it was never easy for him to put words to his feelings. He is looking around, searching for words as if they are somewhere outside him but within the fence surrounding the cemetery, when he notices a snowman standing beside a tree in the distance.
***
"Damned kids must've hopped the fence," he mutters. It is pointless for him to try his feelings now, with this distraction, the snowman which seems to mock him, standing as he does among the stones. . . .