The One Bed That Every Woman Over 21 Needs To Own
When I saw my step-husband’s truck back up in the driveway, I knew it was no ordinary antique bed. It was grand and heavy as concrete; massive swirls and swags rose up and mingled to form a punctual peak; this bed, you knew at first glance, had seen some heavy action.
But certainly first you want to know: What is a step-husband? He’s a guy who fetches things that you’ve purchased on Facebook Marketplace and have no way to retrieve and that your official husband refuses to help with. In other words, a step-husband fills the roles a typical husband won’t. IMO every woman needs at least three. Are they paid? Of course they are. What respectable young man would do things for a 50-something woman sans cash? That is a ridiculous question.
There was no way it was going to end up as a sweet pea trellis in my garden the way that the other antique cast-iron head and footboards I had my step-husband, Jeremiah, collect for me from around Oregon, in this case from a mountain town near Sisters. The object in question was stately, profound in its gaudiness and proud to be the bed of what I was sure was a working girl eventually turned madam in her mature years.
“It is marvelous,” I breathed as my step-husband and real husband together struggled to lift my new acquisition out of the truck and into the backyard with all my other treasures. Once it was unloaded, I walked around the bed, gazing at it like it was an exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was no trellis: Oh no, sweet peas, however charming, you have no business climbing and blooming all over my piece of high Victorian mastery with intricate scrollwork cast in molten iron, a symbol of vice and industry; no, it was no trellis.
It was a bordello bed.
If every woman needs a room of their own, they also need a bordello bed, dressed in velvets, silks, tulle, satin, or whatever strikes a fancy of personal decadence. Mine was a bed where dreams were realized and gold had exchanged hands. It deserved more respect than to end up a garden feature. It needed to revive its past as a refuge on which I could lounge lazily; escape passwords, user names, PIN numbers, emails, and notifications; and retreat to an Instagram-worthy bed, complete with a tulle canopy, to dive deep away from the world. It was the bed of my dreams, but not of my husband’s. While I have seven feather pillows on my side of the sleeping bed, he has one flat, dead pillow that he brought into the marriage in 1996. It is appalling.
In my bordello bed, there are no flat, suffering pillows. In that bed, nothing could infiltrate the world I had created with an excess of pillows, surrounded by a garden overflowing with twirling morning glories, bursting pincushion flowers, climbing roses, glorious peonies, and sweeping ferns.
I placed my bordello bed in a corner of my garden in which none of my neighbors could see me. I wanted a truly private space. I share a bed in the house; my outside bed belonged to me.
My bordello bed is a place where I am protected from the world by a slim cocoon of tulle. It is a question-free zone (what time are you going to start dinner? there’s a rumbly in my tumbly!), a work-free zone (this is not quiet quitting—it is a place where I cannot hear five notifications going off from a coworker in case I didn’t see the one, two, three, four emails that have been ringing for the same amount of minutes a half an hour before I am due to clock in at work). It is a world I don’t need to have a PIN number to enter, a text code I need to supply, a password to gain access to. My iPhone is not allowed on my bordello bed. There were no iPhones in the bordello age. It is strictly analog; only things that honestly exist in a 3D world are allowed to enter. Books, paper, pencils. My dog. Yarn, knitting needles. Needle, thread, fabric. Magazines. Naps.
Ideas happen there, just like they used to before I needed a PIN number to gain entry into a digital world. In my bordello bed, it is 1880. Nothing that didn’t exist 140 years ago does not exist in it now. Mornings are dewy, sometimes damp, but they are quiet and perfect for a very large mug of coffee with a touch of cocoa. I can watch the bees gather around flowers, but they can’t touch me; I am 140 years away from them (and I have help from my mosquito net).
There is a rule in my house: If I’m on the bed, I am no longer present in 2022. I have gone far away to another plane where I can think. Contemplate. Be alone. Alone. Alone. And it’s true that sometimes when I’m feeling particularly needy, I’ll dress up a little bit; a middle-aged woman on a bordello bed dressed in sweats and a dirty T-shirt doesn’t quite make it real, but if I put on a new dress or something, that makes me feel good. There are no shoes on the bed; shoes are for the ground. On the bordello bed, I float in time, in an undisturbed space that I have, like an escape pod, for when the world gets a bit too noisy and I really do need to disconnect.
And I’m not done. Next year, I’m building a small cedar cabin where a sandbox used to be so my bordello bed is not just available in hospitable months. It’s there whenever I need it, where I get to be selfish, by myself, and don’t have to think about anything if I don’t want to. My own little whorehouse.
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