bed

Emily Greene-with-an-e-at-the-end was a gym-class junkie. Five times a week — sometimes more — she cycled between yoga, kickboxing, spin, Pilates, rowing, ballet, jiu jitsu. She had a roster of familiar instructors at Totum, Equinox, Vertigo, the Adelaide Club, Dunfield, Mayfair Lakeshore. One might’ve thought she was training for something — a triathlon, a spot on American Gladiator — but she’d have dismissed the idea with a laugh: no, she classed for the pure class of it. She didn’t need external goals, competition-based incentives to sweat it out in pungent, mirror-walled studios across the city. The journey was its own reward.

Besides, it’s not like she lacked for accomplishment in the hours that made up the rest of her life. She was a partner in a busy speech-language pathology practice on Elizabeth Street, guest-lectured once a week to students in the masters of health sciences program at U of T, served on several fundraising and professional committees, visited her bubbie at Baycrest, dated irregularly but actively (no one serious in almost three years), and she connected with a close circle of friends over weekend brunches and glasses of after-work wine.

And yet, though she didn’t know it at the time, with hindsight it’s clear that she was, in fact, training. Training for close-quartered combat, for late-night tussles with her future husband. A certain Michael Lustig, whom she met for the first time one evening in September. A blind-ish date (she’d scoped him out first on online — he seemed tolerably attractive) arranged by a friend who knew them both. He’s great, the friend said. Emily said what’s he do and grimaced when told he’s a lawyer. Seemed she only dated lawyers of late and was quickly tiring of the breed.

When at last they connected for drinks at the Harbord Room’s civilized back-patio, Lustig turned out to be charmingly, disarmingly dismissive of his own cliché, and Emily was delighted to learn that, while he played de rigeur hockey in a Wednesday-night league of lawyers and junior bankers, he was also a bit of an amateur carpenter. He’d taken a number of woodworking and joinery courses over the past few years, and he rented space at a workshop in Parkdale where he was in the midst of building himself a bed.

And over the next few months, as they grew closer, the bed went from cool weekend project to genuine labour love. He proposed in January during a walk through Cedarvale Ravine, a bright Sunday afternoon following the previous night’s ice storm that had candy-coated all of the trees. The wedding was in June. A small affair, and pretty. They rented out the Harbord Room. And before the assembled guests, under the chuppah outside on the back-patio, the rabbi gave them counsel. Genesis 2:24. A man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cling to his wife, and they shall be as one. Cling to each other, the rabbi advised. Whatever happens, cling! It won’t always come as easy as it does now. If it did, it wouldn’t have to be commanded.

Around one in the morning, after saying goodbye to the last of the stragglers, they repaired to their honeymoon suite: their new apartment, and their first place together — a recently reno’d third-floor walk-up in a handsome old building on Brunswick. It hadn’t been easy — what with planning a wedding — but they’d coordinated the ends of their own respective leases so that this would be their first night under its roof. And their first night in the bed that Lustig built.

It was a low cherrywood frame with a high backboard and wide side slats with beveled edges that made the mattress feel like a floating island. Em knew about the bed, of course, but hadn’t seen its progress for months now (he wouldn’t let her). He’d carved the scenes of their romance into the head-board — small tableaus you had to really get up close to notice. The picnic on the roof of his car, by the fence bordering the runway at Pearson, watching jumbos roar in overhead. Inner-tubing down the Elora Gorge. Chinese lanterns at night at the Scarborough Bluffs. This is amazing, she said. I love you so much.

For bedding, they’d splurged on the downiest duvet, a litter of Windsor Arms pillows, and linens from J. Argent, the ancient millinery whose sheets purportedly swaddled petro-state royals and be-knighted rock-and-rollers. And that night, on that island, they clung to each other and felt like they were the centre of creation. The bed was built for a queen but their bodies were so closely aligned they would’ve fit a mattress half as wide. And for the next year or so their bed was the place to which they couldn’t wait to return, an oasis of love and ice-cream and Netflix marathons.

Toward the end of that year, Lustig didn’t cling quite so tight as he had at the beginning. Before, Em fell asleep in his arms. Now, increasingly, he fell asleep with his back to her. Not always, but she registered the shift. It didn’t bother her, not really, because she knew he still loved her, so she never mentioned it. Besides, his arms, while always welcome, were heavy and, if she were being honest with herself, a bit restrictive, at least when it came to falling asleep. Not so easy to turn, to stretch, when enwrapped in the limbs of your love. And so, toward the end of that year, when he began to relax his grip, to turn his back as he fell asleep, Emily appreciated the extra space. She still loved him and he still clung to her, just not all the time or with the same fever as before.

When the baby came — they named her Leah after Em’s bubbie who’d passed soon after the wedding — she was colicky for the first few months and barely slept, which meant that for the most part neither did they. Eventually they discovered that the only way to silence the kid was to let her sleep in their bed. But with the Leah in the middle at all hours and angles — a fist in the eye, foot to the throat — sleep seemed to escape them completely. One evening Lustig dozed off during the hockey game. Acceptable under some circumstances; not when you’re playing in it — and gliding across the ice at the time. He was rudely awakened by Pasternak with a cross-check at the blue line.

But even after the kid mercifully, and not a moment too soon, transitioned back to sleeping — hallelujah! — in her crib, even then Emily continued to crave a bigger bed. In the course of a night Lustig routinely crossed over into her territory, claiming entire swaths with a leg flung here, an arm there, landing like occupying forces on her side of the bed. And, at a sleeping dead-weight, the brute was no picnic to move. She came to relish Wednesday nights, when his weekly game kept him out til late, til after she’d already fallen asleep, having drifted off unencumbered, the bed — every blessed inch of it — hers and hers alone. (Of course at some point later her slumber would be interrupted by his own snoring contortions, but she tried not to think about that now, in these blissful solitudes.)

And then in the locker room one night after a game, reaching to pull on a sock, Lustig pulled his back instead. He went into spasms. Blumberg drove him to Emerg at Mount Sinai. The doctor prescribed ibuprofen, some Tylenol 3s and an intensive course of physio, and the physiotherapist recommended a bamboo mat and a month of sleeping on the floor. Emily was ecstatic. “That sucks,” she said sweetly, brushing her fingers across the back of his hand. “But I guess whatever works, right?” She loved him, make no mistake, and the feeling was more than mutual: he still clung to her and she to him. It’s just when it came to falling asleep that she couldn’t stand him. Once she dreamed that she’d bludgeoned him to death with her bedside lamp and, upon waking, was only mostly relieved to see it had just been a dream.

And so for the first half of that month she’d look down over the edge of the bed and say miss you to her husband, flat on his back on the floor. Miss you too, he’d say back. Feels so empty without you, she said and he said aw, but the truth was she’d never slept better. She was a better wife, a cheerier mom. At the clinic, one of her colleagues asked in a round about way if she was pregnant. “I don’t know,” she was told. “You just have a certain glow.” But at the two week mark, as the countdown began for Lustig’s return to the marital bed, the glow vanished and Emily — who loved her husband! — became filled with an almost paralyzing dread. She began to wish, semi-seriously, that he’d take a mistress for late-night assignations, if only so that his side would be vacant more often. Oh what she’d have given for more mattress. A king! Do they make ’em larger, she wondered? A tyrant, perhaps? She’d have loved a bloody tyrant. All that acreage. But she couldn’t bring herself to say so. All the work Lustig had put into this bed. Their bed, she reminded herself. The love etcetera. Lustig sensed something was off. He asked her if she was ok, things good at work? and she said no everything’s great, just a little distracted I guess, and he didn’t completely buy it but knew enough not to push. Her colleague wondered if the poor girl had miscarried.

The first night with Lustig back was oddly awkward for both of them, but in an altogether lovely kind of way. And Em, despite her trepidation, had to admit she’d kind of missed the beast, but for real. He was warm. He smelled good. Plus she liked the look of his dumb face. And yet. After he’d released her, the both of them now lying alone together in the dark, she became increasingly aware that her territory had just shrunk by half. They rustled, tossed and turned, engaged sporadically in fitful, wordless negotiations for a larger share of the duvet. And around two a.m. Lustig began to miss the floor.

The following week they were at the Brodskys for dinner when, midway through a second bottle of wine, the subject turned to pillowfights on piggyback and why isn’t that an Olympic sport and Em said we should do one now and Chloe clapped her hands and said yes! let’s move the coffee-table out of the way, watch the lamp — and Em said, oh no, we shouldn’t, Mike hurt his back, right honey? and Lustig felt compelled to say no my back’s fine and she said you sure and he said sure and so — and without, he noted, any further expression of concern or caution — she jumped on his back and worked her way up onto his shoulders and Brodksy hoisted Chloe and they had a brief but heated pillowfight in the livingroom until Brodsky brought the proceedings to halt when he charlie-horsed himself on the corner of a credenza. Later, Lustig began to wonder — and then berate himself for wondering, and then wonder again — if his wife was trying to get him to re-injure his back, just to get him off the bed once more. Now that he thought about it, she’d been awfully quick to encourage him to resume Wednesday night hockey. He was being crazy, he told himself. But in fact he wasn’t crazy at all. Emily tried not to be horrible about it — she still loved him — but she was too tired always to be her best and yes, sometimes she wished she had the bed to herself again, even if that came at the expense of her husband’s well-being.

Which is why, a few nights later, after they’d put the kid down, she was beyond relieved to hear Lustig finally say, “Em, honey, I think we need a bigger bed.” Not wanting to hurt his feelings, she muted her joy and said but you put so much work into our bed, so much love, and it’s so beautiful and I love it. Lustig said I know but we gotta face facts, don’t we? And she said — and she said it just for argument’s sake, never in a million years expecting the argument to win the day — maybe if our bed isn’t big enough maybe the bed’s not the issue. She said maybe a king’s just, like, the first step or something on the journey away from each other. I dunno, I know it sounds corny. But after that? Separate beds, like my great-grandparents? Separate rooms? Separate hearts?

She surprised herself with how easily she’d slipped into the role of the doe-eyed romantic, but she fully expected him, in his eminently practical way, to say baby it’s just a bed, just a slightly bigger bed. To which she’d have laughed and said you’re right, I’m being silly. And — like that — she’d have had her king. In fact those very words — baby, it’s just a bed — were about to leave Lustig’s lips. But he could see how much it meant to her, the bed that he’d crafted with his hands, and he was touched by her sentimentality and didn’t want to be cavalier with her heart. He thought about what the rabbi had said under the chuppah. And so, and to his surprise, he found himself coming round to her point of view — or at least trying to convince himself that he had. You’re right, he told her, suddenly. She sat up straight: I am? Hundred percent, he said, with an alarming smile. We’ll keep our bed, our beautiful bed. No kings — who needs ‘em? He gripped her arms and said of course we’ll stay loyal to our queen, and he gave her a hug and a kiss to seal the deal.

Fuck, she thought, as they embraced. And so, for the sake of love, because neither wanted to hurt the other, they elected the path neither desired and kept the queen — their beautiful, shrinking queen — that they’d have sooner overthrown. But even love starts to whither without sleep. And by the end of a fortnight, love had reached its limit.

It was a Tuesday in early October. Lustig had managed to leave the office around 5:30 to pick up Leah from daycare near Trinity Square. He and Emily both worked nearby and when possible they’d go together, but today Em’s krav magra class at Hart House didn’t end til six so Lustig was the designated picker-upper. He spied Leah first, out on the playground, on a tricycle wagon transporting two of her classmates. The little boy called out his stop and Leah proceeded there directly, slowing enough for the boy to hop off, and then — and to the chagrin of her remaining passenger — spotted her daddy and leapt from the driver’s seat, charged him like a delirious rhino, like she hadn’t seen him in a year. He caught her and swept her up into the sky and felt a sharp, sciatic twinge. Not good, he thought, as he brought her back down and smothered her in kisses. He’d had an awkward fall on the ice the previous week, but he’d been careful since, and he didn’t like the fact that lifting Leah made him wince.

He got her settled into the stroller and they crossed Bay, then up University, cutting through King’s College Circle to watch intramural lacrosse on the field outside Hart House while they waited for Emily to emerge. When she did, she snuck up and surprised them and Leah flew into her arms. They wound their way along Philosopher’s Walk to Bloor, then over to Bedford, to St. George Station where they boarded the northbound train. Lustig sent up a silent prayer of thanks when a raving lunatic passed through their car without incident. Leah’s nubbin of a nose was pressed against the window the whole time, watching streaks of mostly dark tunnel stream by. Emily rested her head on her husband’s shoulder and closed her eyes. “Hey,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Day okay?” He squeezed back. “It is now.” Her eyes still closed, she lifted his hand and gave it a small, sincere kiss. “You?” he said. And she said mmm. And they remained like that all the way to St. Clair West.

They grabbed a few things from Loblaws before heading up to their fifth-floor condo in a tall brown Soviet-era looking behemoth on Walmer Road. The building was big but their unit was tight and they knew that when the next kid came they’d have to move for sure. As it was, they were practically tripping over each other. They had friends in happily dilapidated semis west of Christie, and they just hoped they wouldn’t be priced out of the market when the time finally came. They perused real estate websites and occasionally saw open houses, but they loved condo living (Leah especially the lukewarm, toxically chlorinated indoor pool), and neither could fathom the energy for another move, so soon — or so it seemed — after Brunswick. And on so little sleep.

Lustig made chicken and broccoli and threw some noodles in a pot for the kid. He used the in-between moments to set the dining-room table, which he adorned with a bottle of red and the Ace baguette they’d just collected. Emily meanwhile played grocery store with Leah, who priced her wares unreasonably but who, on the flip side, was a terrible haggler. A thousand dollars to her was as good as a dime. After dinner, Em washed up and made sandwiches for tomorrow׳s lunch as Lustig gave Leah a bath and got her into her pajamas. Then, as Lustig responded to a couple emails from work, Em took Leah to her room and read her stories before engaging in the delicate business of convincing her to lie down in her crib. The practice lately involved Em — or Lustig, if he was the designated putter-downer — sitting in the doorway, mobile-Facebooking until the kid fell asleep. Or she did. Whoever came first. And tonight — as was often the case — Em awoke with a start as her head tipped forward. She wiped the drool from her mouth and — trying not to disturb the floorboards — got up slowly, like an arthritic thief.

On the couch, between checking their phones, they watched most of an episode of Double Entry (about a telepathic accountant) before Lustig realized he’d been unconscious for the last fifteen minutes. Em said we can go back but Lustig said no I think I’m done and she said yeah me too and they shut it off. They navigated around one another in the bathroom, cleaning teeth, inspecting pores. Em said something unintelligible and Lustig said what? so Em spit out a volume of toothpaste and saliva and said I think we need a new bathmat and Lustig said mm as he contemplated a prodigious white hair that had sprouted from the tip of his nose. How long’s it been there? he wondered. And which is worse: that Em saw it and didn’t tell me, or that she never even noticed? He got the tweezers from the cabinet and extracted it. Em — still tooth-brushing — made a face. Lustig kissed her cheek, smacked her bum and trundled off to the bedroom. She cleared her mouth with a spit and said hey! with a smile that, to his ears at least, was practically audible.

In bed at last, he fussed with the pillows that propped up his head as he read his iPad, in this case a DrudgeReport item about the discovery of death on Mars. He struggled to complete paragraphs, to keep the thread; his eyes began to close despite his best efforts. Beside him, Em inched her way through Sir Oliver Delmonte’s An Unkosher Knish: the true story of the recipe that changed the course of the Second World War (Farrar Strauss, 2011; 237 pages). Within minutes they’d both gone as far as their waking brains could manage. Somewhat unsteadily (and not quite synchronously: he succumbed first; she, soon after) they put down their reading, turned out their respective lights and fell into the cool, embalming embrace of the dark.

If not for his wife’s knee at the small of his back, Lustig would’ve been out for the count. So he pushed her leg away, gently but making no mistake about it. Emily adjusted, straightening herself out and then curling into a cramped clump with her rump almost over the edge. And she was soon on the verge of her own comatose when her husband spun round, his hand crashing down on her pillow, landing like an explosion, his fingers grazing the tip of her nose. She came to with a start and then, seeing that the planet wasn’t under attack, shoved his hand away; she tried to wedge it under his belly, where it sat for a minute before crawling back like a fat-legged spider. And maybe that was the breaking point — hers, at least — but in any case that was when she decided no more mister nice guy. She shoved Lustig’s torso all the way to the precipice of his side of the bed. And then used her legs to shove his legs there too. Quickly realizing this wasn’t a dream he said hey! what gives?, but she just shimmied to the centre of the mattress and said, just trying to make some room. He said ok, but that’s too much, and shimmied back himself. Only this time, Emily didn’t budge, didn’t grudgingly retreat to her zone. She held the middle ground. And Lustig could see that she meant business.

He was seventy, eighty pounds, heavier, so he should have been able to throw that weight around, muscle her off her spot. He tried, deploying his mass like a tank, threatening to roll over and demolish her. Only instead of backing off she sprung up and over to the other side of him like a grasshopper, giving his back a helpful push as she flew, contributing a momentum he hadn’t intended, so that he rolled right off the edge and landed with a thunk on the floor. He looked up to see her peering down, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, laughing. “Really, I am. I don’t know what got into me.” He stared at her for a second, trying to make out her face in the moonlight that had leaked through the blinds. Then he broke into a laugh of his own and said I guess you won this round. He unfurled the bamboo mattress and they said their I love yous from their respective altitudes and slept better than they had in ages.

The next night he came prepared.

Some nights he won. Some, she did. He tried to be gallant but she was the better fighter, at least technically. She was scrappier too. Once her nail cut him just below the eye. Another time a stray elbow knocked loose a tooth. There were hits and plenty of misses. Of course there were nights they were both too tired to fight, nights without shoving or kicking. But they looked forward to their bedtime brawls. And there were nights when kicks turned to kisses.