How I started Part 3

My sleeping arrangement quickly moved from the peaty bog sofa to Tim's obsessively tidy bed. If the house was chaos, the bed was strict order. Tim was a bedding afficianado. He spoke of thread count like an alchemist. He valued it more highly than pattern or color. I don't believe he ever fixed on an optimal number. Who's going to say how many angels should be allowed on a pin's head? There could not be too many threads in a sheet. After a long day of being tortured by by demonic furnishings we would kick free and convene at the bed. There Tim would tuck and smooth each layer of the bedding, the corners perfectly folded, the head turned back neatly. I would just stand and watch as each immaculate layer was made to be perfectly flat and I always looked forward to collating myself in. Nothing felt quite so good as a receptive bed, an unwrinkled, undefiant, uncomplicated bed. In my own bed I'd be forced to disentangle a knot of blankets with my feet every night, unsure whether the blankets were on lengthwise or had gotten turned to cross perpendicularly. If more than half the bedclothes had been tugged to favor one quadrant, I would always seem to sense it, subconsciously and only at an inconvenient level of awareness. There's something about an unbalanced bed that troubles sleep. My bed would always be a tangle of its elements, only 75% or less of which fit- if 3 fitted corners gripped the mattress, the 4th would always pop free. During the night my bed boils and heaves like the primeval earth. I have no idea what can be happening but the next day it looks like it was ransacked by foul-tempered dwarves.
Watching Tim make his bed was like watching a impeccable kind of origami being made by someone in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.
Though they lived just across the street, Tim's family never visited Hulga's house. Hulga only came by once. She was dressed in a heavily embellished sweater, greens and purples, a satin jacket, her voluminous wig and a sort of Peter Pan hat on top. She was cheery and seemed to be untroubled by the incomprehensible number of unusable pieces of furniture piled everywhere. She was something of a pack-rat herself, though it was hard to imagine her in the clothes that she stored in the house- the high-heeled go-go boots and mod print mini-skirts. It was easier to reconcile the gemutlich little woman with all the beer garden paraphrenaila that lay festooning the cartons of clothing, including two sets of plastic Clydesdales pulling a beer van.
When I visited Tim in Sedro we would work on several projects simultaneously- some in the enormous garage, some on the back porch, some in the driveway and many in the house. Tim tried to guide me as I refinished wood furniture but it was hopeless. I was afraid of acetone which he used liberally and my pieces were always clogged with the residues of the original finish or were freckled with numerous spots of paint in minute divots. The finishes I applied were never as well-done as his. When Tim did not like the way a piece was turning out, he would strip the piece again and start over. I could never bring myself to do that. If they weren't turning perfectly, I would just begin to resent the hypothetical shopper who would expect perfection.
Despite my own misgivings I would, nevertheless, take on things far beyond my competence. I refinished an entire Heywood-Wakefield dining set with 6 chairs. Hey-Wake was a brand notorious for the difficulty of reproducing its amber blond finish. Every mark, every misstep showed in blond furniture. I was much more comfortable with metals and metals were slightly more forgiving. I would blithely begin projects that would require days of power sanding and days of hand sanding, vented lockers being a particularly odious example. We would also reupholster chairs or padded benches with a staple gun. And when it was very sunny and dry we would steam clean sofas and upholstered chairs. What was key was drying time. If one contiguous surface dried unevenly the poor result was instantly apparent.
For the most part we enjoyed working on things together. Tim could make me laugh nearly constantly, though the hilarity soon was broken up by more and more bickering. I think our nerves would start to fray earlier and earlier each trip. Our sleep was disarranged which was certainly responsible for part of it. I found, as soon as I had moved into the big bed that as soon as he drifted off Tim began to babble in the night like a mountain stream or a decorative fountain. It gathered volume from an initial split-splat, becoming eventually a sort of moist Flight of the Bumblebee. This gave it the effect of always approaching, like a furtive waterfall. I would push him as far as I could to his edge of the bed.
I think his self-awareness kept him awake nights which allowed him to discover -with what seemed like no small amount of glee- that I sobbed disconsolately in my sleep. It was not working out. I couldn't sleep because it sounded like kittens lapping up a spill behind me; he couldn't sleep because of the hysterical weeping. It eventually occurred to me in the middle of one sleepless night to switch my direction. When Tim woke up and saw feet on the pillow next to him, he was badly startled.