Companion to an Untold Story

Reassembly

185 Reassembly. The day before Joel’s departure we dismantled the bed of metamorphosis for new carpet to be installed, moving the parts down to the basement. That evening Richard had a meeting to attend, and I raked leaves in the backyard while Joel vacuumed the new carpet. I had not asked him to do so—he volunteered . His neuropathy seemed to leave him weak and short of breath, and he worked at the carpet a long time. Through the bedroom window I could see his stooped figure as he pondered during pauses. I wondered whether he had become lost in his vacuuming, in domestic reverie. Maybe he was thinking about the history of the thing for which he was preparing a place. Eventually he put the vacuum away and took it upon himself to carry the disassembled bed upstairs from the basement. He could carry only a single component at a time—side piece, headboard, footboard—resting in the bedroom between trips. I was surprised by his endeavor; it was more physical activity than I had seen from him during the visit. He was determined to vacuum the carpet for me and carry up the pieces of the bed, and he performed both tasks ritualistically. His thin flannel shirt grew wet; he panted heavily from his labors. He did not reassemble the bed but stacked the parts neatly against the wall. He’s run out of steam, I thought. 186 His methodical procedure was, I realized later, a way of saying good-bye through gestures and objects. Perhaps he intended to prepare the bed for us fully, the bed on which he had best realized his romantic hopes, the bed he had given Richard twenty years before. But some barrier that was not fatigue or weakness or shortness of breath prevented him from fulfilling his intent. Perhaps he had underestimated the sorrows of the task, of fitting together his history and seeing it in complete form. Or he felt it best to leave the bed in parts, as befitting the future soon to unfold. His death would break the circle of our friendship, and making the bed whole must have struck him as fraudulent or impossible. So he stopped short and set the pieces against the wall, like a puzzle for us to sort out. But we saw nothing in the disassembled parts. The next day Richard put the bed together, and we resumed our life on it. In late October Joel sent a letter in which he apologized for leaving the frame in pieces, fearing his neglect had provoked Richard. After his death, I understood. He had spoken his love and guilt in the language, splintered and stained, of the bed of metamorphosis. ...