Bedrooms

3/28/08


It’s about 2 am on a Friday night, and I’m sleeping in a bed that isn’t mine. Well, at the moment I’m on a beige loveseat in a fairly beige living room, in the sparklingly beige Chelsea. It’s Gay Lite around here, Tasti G Lite (when did that happen?). It’s my brother’s crib and his laptop, a white Ibook, 12 inch, with the most pleasingly raised keys that coo and click. I’m crashing here before a bar mitzvah we have to travel to Flushing for, and then to the Crest Hollow Country Club where I ’ll wear a modest dress and feel alienated and defensive. We’re seeing our cousin’s kid become a man at 9 am and I can’t sleep. Not unpleasantly- again, the sound of the keys is comforting, the loveseat is precisely long enough that I can prop my feet AND my head up, and the glow from the screen feels so singularly Manhattan. I feel glamorous and secret. While Brooklyn feels like home, Chelsea, it appears, feels like a movie set, albeit in boring miniature. But I like it.

I like the living room here, I like his bedroom. Bret’s crashing in his roommate’s bed while I took his, but everyone who knows me knows I can’t sleep in any bed but mine. At least, not without over the counter sleep aids. So I’m on the loveseat and thinking about rooms, space, this private moment in a space that isn’t mine.

His bedroom is small but elegant- he fucked with the lighting so it’s a dimmer now, I think someone gay did that. I think the walls are beige or brown- I’ll check in the morning. I know the color was chosen to complement the other rooms in the apartment. It looks like Starbucks, which when you think about it, is actually quite a lovely color scheme. I mean this.

god i LOVE this clicking sound

the colors in my current pad are also, i think, soothing and congruent but bright, carefully considered this time, unlike the last one, which was plastered in color, every room different, a lunatic day care center, done by a different me. although ’winter cocoa’ certainly united the rooms in a way, yes?

This time, the colors are similar but the application was different, calmer, more spare. it’s just mine. It’s a place I love to look at, get into bed, surrounded by molding enclosing confident green squares. I love that bedroom. I love the company it’s welcomed and the conversations it’s overheard.

I think about all the bedrooms I know or knew- Bret’s new one, signifying his own growth, and the polar but always loving directions we go in; i think of marsha’s, which starts to resemble her more and more everyday; randi’s grown up conference phone and the defiantly punk footwear strewn by it. the lovely friends with whom i can always crash with, the lovely boys’ with whom i shared moments that, thankfully, all make me smile; i think of the one i grew up in, where i heard birds and my dad’s voice ordering me to get up at 9 on saturdays because ’i’d never sleep tonight’ (seriously, what the fuck?); i think of his voice breaking that night when i walked into their bedroom, right next to mine. he sat at the edge crying, unable to speak, as my mother told me she was sick. i was 8 and so sad, scared to see him cry. i don’t remember another time i saw that. but even now i equate a parents’ bedroom with the sanctity of that moment, of fear and love and pain for the person you chose for forever, and felt like i interrupted something none of us wanted me to see.

i don’t know my future with bedrooms. That’s cool. because the bed itself is fabulous. i got it on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. I got a massive discount because I listened to the sales woman (who bore a sadly striking resemblance to Calamity Jane) rant about her husband cheating on her in chat rooms in the early ’90’s, "on the computer I bought him! Can you fucking believe it, Nadine?". No, Laura, I could not. But I would like free delivery and a mattress pad.

I’m terrible with math, but I think the price of the bed went down $50 with every 5 minutes I nodded sympathetically and robotically exclaimed, "That sounds traumatizing" or the more succinct "Fuck yeah, bitch!"

She eventually got a new boyfriend who bought her a house. I assume that bedroom saw better times. I hope so.