Companion to an Untold Story

Harbor

109 Harbor. In the following years, many women slept on the bed of metamorphosis. The bodies piled up. It moved to San Francisco, then from one apartment to another within the city. In that place of mists the blue plastic mattress, with its unearthly sheen, was cold even in summer, and Richard switched to a foam mattress—the mattress I would later sleep on. He added bricks at the corners to raise the frame off the ground. Over time the red ink on the plywood stained the foam, its misspelling preserved. By then Richard and the bed had moved to Seattle, where we—Richard, the bed, and I—all met. When I visited him in his studio apartment for the first time, our relationship was conducted across the bed’s broad expanse. You couldn’t ignore it: when you walked through the front door, there it was, two feet to your right, with a narrow passage between frame and wall. On the opposite side ran another narrow passage between bed and the bank of windows looking out to the street. On my first visit, I perched on a radiator by the window, sipping a cup of tea, while Richard reclined on the bed. The next time I visited, he was folding laundry from a basket on the bed. We sprawled our bodies across the clean-smelling towels, socks, and folded white undershirts. 110 When Richard moved into my apartment, the bed came too, replacing the narrow one I had been sleeping on. My apartment had a large, proper bedroom, yet the bed, California king in dimensions, filled it. The bricks at the corners were unmoored and often shifted out from under the frame, jutting into my path so I could stub my toe while changing the sheets. Even with the bolster of bricks, the bed lay low to the ground. Its history bothered me. Passed from man to man, the bed had given itself to a series of lovers who reclined in my imagination like empresses. At night I lay in the middle of something ; relationships, failed or ephemeral, cast their shadows across the sheets. When I lay down on the bed, I lay down with others. When I was loving Richard, I was loving all the others who had lain on the bed. I was loving Joel, who was loving Richard; I was loving Gale, who was loving Joel, who was loving Richard. When I leaned back on the pillows, all those we had intimately known came to lie down beside me. When Richard joined me there and swept the hair from my forehead, he was sweeping the hair of every woman he’d known. The bed groaned, and I thought surely it would break. I did not want to lie down upon a bed so many had lain upon before me, but I did, for it could hold multitudes. It was a good bed, the foam firm and wonderfully comfortable , ample enough to accommodate the children that issued from it, to hide cats in its folds, to sleep dogs peacefully at its foot. We had picnics and holidays on it, sailed ships across it. Life began on that bed, and the end of life was mourned there. Heavily pregnant, I would roll over the side to set my feet on the floor and pull myself up using a chair. The bed had nothing to grab hold of, nothing to hold onto, a massive raft afloat on the world’s soul. We slept on the bed of metamorphosis for sixteen years. 111 Both of our children were conceived on it, I nursed them there, they slept with us in it. It moved many times, from apartment to apartment, from house to house, and state to state. I threw myself in anger and despair upon it, I was colder than cold in it and hotter than hot, frosts covered me and fans blew over me naked on muggy summer nights. I heard the death throes of animals and the cries of newborn babies. From my pillows I saw a hawk perched at the window in December. I slept hugging its sides, and I knew its middle. ...