A term like ‘go to bed’: to use it as a euphemism for sex is really rather quaint. So innocuous, you could use it on a child (“Go to bed, you’ve got school in the morning”) or yourself at the end of a long and asexual day (“So tired, I’m gonna go to bed”).
It’s an expression of calm and rest, nothing frisky, no moans or clawing or rhythmic headboards. More than shared fluids and pinnacles, it emphasizes a shared space, both the specific dimensions of a piece of furniture and the immeasurable geography of the moorlands of sleep.
“Before, when the clinic was just getting started, there would often be no patient in the first afternoon slot, so the two of us would go to bed after lunch. Those were the loveliest times with him. Everything was hushed, and the soft afternoon sunshine would filter into the room. We were a lot younger then, and happier.”
- Haruki Murakami, Sleep, in The Elephant Vanishes
‘Go to bed’. The past 2 years, I’ve referred to the act as ‘banging’ and ‘fucking’ for maximum stimulation (“we fucked till the sun came up”), and ‘sleeping’ in the most common usage (“we started sleeping together in November”). Phrases like ‘making love’ I uttered in my mind, often over and over with the surprise of finding it where I hadn’t meant to (“Hm, he’s making love to me. Shit we’re making love. We really are making love, this is slow and sweet. I thought it was supposed to be just sex”) and sometimes gratefully, with all the giddiness of borrowed adolescence or the unreal gravitas of early adulthood, but the word never tumbled out my mouth. To me it was an ember tossed in the coals of the inner sanctum. Spitting it out I was afraid to burn the carpet. But ‘to go to bed’? I never thought to use it. Seeing it on the printed page now it’s a renewed taste, elevator music from weekends as a child, a synaesthetic joy… Quite like the act itself.
And so- ‘going to bed’. With a man, a woman, a memory, a comparison (God forbid, but comparisons are inevitable).
Through 2008 into 2009 shared sleep was a frequent thing; I valued it as much with friends as with lovers, and so sharing slumber with a lover wasn’t particularly intimate or rare. But ‘going to bed’ isn’t just the companionship of shared sleep, it’s the longer interaction of sex and sleep and the inscrutable activity that follows when sleep is over.
An illustration: the evening when I lied to my parents about staying over at Melissa’s house, but really I was lying in his narrow bed dying to know if he’d unconsciously hold me in the middle of the night, and of course he didn’t though we’d been making love (not fucking), and the next thing I knew sex and sleep were the domain of yesterday, and he was pulling on his only ironed shirt and saying he’d go first in the bathroom. Then I was still buttoning my dress as we approached the canal, passing a dog doing what looked like yoga (downward dog pose, no less), talking everything about today and nothing about the future, and it was the station too soon and he kissed me perfunctorily, politely, as if only for show to the people around us, then I was a sardine on a bus half-an-hour too early for school, question marks growing like hair from my uncombed head. The illustration for ‘going to bed with someone you love who will never love you’. Some call it sad but I think it’s quite a picturesque memory?
A more optimistic illustration… I could write it, but I fear I’ll jinx it with this person and it won’t come again. Quaint recollections and quaint phrases are so pretty, maybe only because they belong to retrospect, and retrospect is so good at airbrushing things.