The bedroom he and Russell shared was too small for the king-sized bed Russell had insisted upon, and as he went from closet to suitcase, Desmond had to squeeze between the footboard and the bureau. Why were beds getting so big these days? Everyone he knew had enormous beds—no matter how small their apartment—with mattresses thicker than their walls. Everyone had such immense box springs under their mattresses and such deep sheepskin cushions on top of them, they practically ended up sleeping pressed against their ceiling. Everyone was saving to expand their bathrooms, install Jacuzzis, buy bath towels the size of blankets. Everyone wanted urinals, bidets, heat lamps over their sinks, and bathroom scales that carried on conversations. And then there were the cathedral-sized kitchens, even though no one cooked. It was all so primordial, in a sordid, indulgent way, this attempt to reconnect with the basic needs of the body through home improvement. The economic prosperity of the past decade had led to Welfare cuts and bigger bathtubs. It said something about the cultural moment, but he was too exhausted to articulate it clearly. He ought to write an op ed piece about it: The Flush Years.

But perhaps it wasn’t the politics of the bed that bothered Desmond as much as it was the way it represented Russell’s tendency to fill up space in the apartment. Like everything else in their relationship, Desmond had at first welcomed it. He’d never trusted his own taste in furniture and had equipped the apartment with functional chairs and tables and bookshelves. Russell brought color to the place and a cluttered style that made it look as if it had been decorated by some whacked-out grandmother addicted equally to overstuffed comfort, modernism, and irony. The Heywood Wakefield desk with a primitive, hand-embroidered portrait of Ike and Mamie hanging above it. The heads from three French dressmaker’s dolls lined up on top of a glass-fronted bookcase.

Desmond had loved all of it, so much so that it wasn’t until too late that he noticed almost everything he’d bought over the half dozen years he’d lived in the apartment alone had been moved into storage or exiled to the back of a closet door. It wasn’t a stretch, not a great leap of faith, to recognize that his own thoughts and perceptions, his own solo identity, had probably been put on mothballs as well, and in a similarly insidious manner. His only real hope of finishing the Pauline Anderton book was to get away from it all, the books and the pottery, dolls’ heads and doilies.

He closed up the suitcase and slid it under the bed with the other boxes and cases he’d already packed, not entirely sure if the undershirts and socks he’d packed had been his or Russell’s.

3.