Laurel continued to love that bed after she stopped loving Tom. But the mattress failed a year later, exactly when she put the house on the market. She had to empty it of water and fill the frame with pillows to make the bedroom look right for the Open House; then she let her mother pull her to Macy’s for a conventional mattress. Laurel’s mother had never understood the waterbed preference. And Laurel had enough anxiety just then; she didn’t need to be worrying about some water leak. She selected the softest dry mattress she could find. It turned out to be all right for sleep but its edges were too spongy to sit on.

She had to get rid of the beautiful oak frame. It was an odd size and she wasn’t about to pay for a custom mattress and sheets. She gave it to friends and expected them to at least re-use the wood, but they broke it up and burned it in their fireplace. That seemed like a shame to her, but she gave it to them so it was theirs to waste if they wanted.

Eventually she got a better bed anyway.

She put more consideration into the selection of her current bed than she ever did in choosing men. First she noticed magazine ads. Then she test-slept on fancy foam with a shaped pillow and a mattress topper. And last summer she visited a bed boutique. The sales consultant made her tour the display of mattress guts. She insisted that Laurel follow her upstairs and try each style. It turned out that Laurel was neither European enough for full foam nor American enough for extreme springs; she selected a combination version, paid in full, and then waited four weeks for the thing to be fabricated, delivered, and customized for her (it came with no box springs; it floats on a sea of adjustable slats).

She loves not sleeping on it.

Laurel and her friends are now old enough that they don’t sleep very well. Everyone has a recommendation about Tylenol PM or Benadryl or heavier pills, a tale to tell about experiments with melatonin supplements and new pillows. But sleeplessness doesn’t bother Laurel. She had all that early childhood training. Sometimes she gets up for awhile. She sleeps alone; she’s free to do that. Sometimes she just rests in her nice bed. But she also has all that practice with sleep scripts, now as elaborate as porn. Laurel doesn’t need much but when she wants to she can usually put herself under.

Wrapped in furs in a horse-drawn sleigh. On a moving boat. Tucked into a motorcycle sidecar. Sometimes she replays a real memory: camping with Peter in Death Valley when they were surprised by rain – too much to ignore. Normally not ept, Peter became competent when he camped, and he took charge then. He scooped Laurel up and stuffed her and the sleeping bags into the cab of his pickup. He stashed everything else and climbed behind the wheel. Swaddled in down from the wet and all bumps, soothed by the thrum of big raindrops on metal, melting into half dreams, Laurel was moved like a baby in comfort and safety. Cozy like a papoose. On a bough that never breaks.

She almost has that. A slat-built bed in a second story bedroom in an old cottage in a yard full of very big trees.

The only way she’d mate again, the only bed she trade for, would have to be like the one Odysseus made. He built his house around a huge olive tree, and its trunk became one of the bedposts. So he and Penelope had a rooted bed: the heart of their home, their marital secret, their permanence.

This time, if time there be, Laurel hopes for a bed like that.