“Maybe we should get bunk beds,” I said to my girlfriend of seven years.
I meant it as a joke. At least I think so. Either way, two weeks after breaking up, we were walking around downtown San Francisco shopping for bunk beds with my mother.
I was 25, too old for my mother to be taking me shopping and certainly too old for bunk beds. But, as I said, it felt like a joke, and that feeling allowed Emma and me to skate above the cold reality of our breakup on a protective, albeit thin, layer of irony.
We were good at ignoring difficult realities. Maybe that’s why we hadn’t had sex for a year. Maybe that’s why, even after we agreed to go our separate ways, after several nights of crying and yelling and second-guessing, we came to an absurd compromise: We would break up but keep living together. And so we did the next most logical thing: We measured our studio apartment for a bunk.
My mother was not shy about offering her opinion: “Choose one that’s well made. You don’t want to be suffocated if that top bunk comes crashing down on your damned head.”
We picked a cherry oak number. A real beauty. Solid. The Cadillac of bunks. It smelled like summer camp and homesickness.
As a child, I idolized Dick Van Dyke as Rob Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” I loved his noodly gravitas and unpretentious wit. I loved how you never knew if he was going to fall over or step around the ottoman in the opening sequence. I loved that he wrote for a TV show, very much like the one I was watching. And I loved his wife, Laura, played by Mary Tyler Moore. Rob and Laura seemed to me everything an adult couple should be.
But I never understood why they slept in separate beds. How could a couple so in sync with one another sleep apart while every other married couple I knew, whose relationships ranged from hostile to resigned, slept in California Kings?
Emma and I told ourselves the bunk bed was a practical necessity, allowing us to afford rent in a post-dot-com San Francisco while still, technically, breaking up. It quickly became a running joke. At parties, someone would ask, “Who gets the top?” or “What if one of you has a date over?”
The first question was easy. The bunk had a twin on top and a queen on the bottom. A wooden ladder, set at an angle, connected them. Since Emma was smaller, she took the top. Our confused cat would jump from back and forth throughout the night, trying to find his former spot.
The second question was more difficult. While we were officially not together, neither of us felt a compelling urge to date. We were young, but we had been together since sophomore year of college. And we were the kind of couple who isolated ourselves from everyone as soon as we met. A two-person clique. We were Rob and Laura, only with significantly more weed.
And now we had separate beds.
Three months into our “breakup,” I hooked up with a random woman at a bar. This woman took me back to her place and we engaged in awkward sex for about three minutes. I felt the anxiety attack coming on before I could even pull up my jeans.
When I got back to our apartment at 4 a.m., trembling and sick to my stomach, I crawled into the bottom bunk. I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy and so the aberrance felt like I had stepped into another body. The ground below felt suddenly unstable, my edges blurring.
“You OK?” Emma asked from the top bunk.
“Panic attack,” I said.
She understood. She climbed down the ladder and lay beside me. Our cat purred ecstatically between us.
One of the first couples in TV land to be shown sleeping in the same bed was Mike and Carol Brady of “The Brady Bunch.” There was something playfully seductive about their bedroom scenes. Carol would go over the day’s high jinks and Mike would say something somewhat witty. Carol would laugh and turn off her side lamp. Mike would give her a kiss and turn off his side lamp. And in that fade to black, a teenage boy might imagine all kinds of things.
Before long, Emma got a boyfriend. They met at a Chinese fusion restaurant where both waited tables. He was a mellow, not unhandsome skater who had a melon for a head. I don’t recall his name, but I called him Big Head.
“You going out with Big Head tonight?” I would ask as she left.
She wouldn’t answer, but she would laugh. We still had chemistry.
One time Emma had a bad cold and called in sick to work. After his shift, Big Head came by our apartment. Emma was in the shower as I answered the door.
“Hey,” Big Head said, “Emma here?”
“She’s sick,” I said.
He poked his head through the crack in the door. “I brought her some soup,” he said, holding up a plastic to-go bag.
“I’ll let her know.” I grabbed the bag and shut the door.
When Emma came out of the shower, sniffling in a terry cloth robe, she saw the bowl of steaming chicken rice soup on the coffee table and smiled.
“I got you some soup,” I said.
The real trouble, the crack in the ice as it were, came when I met Jess, a friend of a friend, at a dive bar in the Mission. We talked all night. Later, while making out in the back seat of a cab, I grabbed her shoulders and said, “You’re so normal!” She laughed and said, “So are you!” Neither of us were normal, but we felt like that to each other.
When I came home, I told Emma about Jess from the bottom bunk. She was silent for a time.
“Just don’t go falling in love on me,” she said, half joking.
“I won’t,” I said, but even then I thought I was lying.
Despite sharing a bed, Mike and Carol Brady didn’t have the same gravitational pull as Rob and Laura. The Brady’s marriage felt performative, earnest. Their good night kisses and banal banter clumsily scripted whereas Rob and Laura’s interactions were so unassuming as to feel real. From even across their twin beds, one could sense a closeness that spoke of subtextual understandings, a coded intimacy.
After four months of dating, Jess said, “You have to move out.”
“Out of the bunk bed?” I asked.
“Out of the apartment.”
On moving day, I figured out how to take apart the bunk, leaving Emma with the top twin and shoving the queen into the back of a U-Haul.
Emma was working when I moved. I thought about leaving a note, but what do you say to a woman you dated for seven years and lived with for five years, one in a bunk bed? What do you say to the first person you fell in love with, from whom you were still disentangling yourself while falling for someone new?
Emma found a sublet on Haight Street with a young hippie and a creepy older man, and Jessica and I moved to New York to go to graduate school.
I still talked to Emma on the phone. She even visited us once in Brooklyn, but it was stressful and awkward to say the least. She slept on an inflatable mattress while Jess and I spooned on a lumpy futon.
Then Emma moved to Japan to teach English. Jess and I got married, had twins, migrated to Jersey. All the stuff you do as an adult.
TV marriages almost never get it right. You have the sardonic banter of Dan and Roseanne Conner or the uncomfortable, cringe-worthy flirtation of the Huxtables or the seething sweetness of Monica Geller and Chandler Bing. Then there’s Rob and Laura in their separate beds with their unrehearsed kismet, a romantic language made up of pratfalls and apologies, of stumbles and close calls.
Now, after 20 years of marriage, I am sleeping in the sunroom while Jess sleeps in our attic bedroom, two floors apart. The arrangement started because our 120-pound mastiff / lab mix, Huckleberry, had double knee surgery and couldn’t take the stairs, so I cared for him as he convalesced. It’s been a long recovery.
Every now and then, in the middle of the night, Jess will text: “I need you.”
I understand. I walk the two flights of stairs and lie beside her as she struggles to fall back to sleep. Huckleberry eventually hobbles his way up too, wedging himself between us, huffing like an elephant seal.
Jono Mischkot is a clinical professor of expository writing and the director of Writing in the Disciplines at New York University.
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