S l e e p e r

The Best Sleeps in Film, Cont'd.

Speaking of the Peabody Hotel, and Memphis, Sleeper just re-viewed one of her favorite films, Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train. In "Far From Yokahama," the first of the three episodes, Jun makes a beautiful little series of gestures to get Mitsuko to open her eyes in the morning. She murmurs, "sleep is so wonderful..."

When I was very young I used to be afraid that one day I would never wake up. Now the idea that you don't get to sleep, or, really, that you don't get to fall asleep anymore after you die, seems much sadder.

The seedy hotel is the true star of this movie. The rooms with their perfectly distressed gorgeous rotting wallpaper in stripes and whorls and the yellow-and-green coverlets that clash with them so perfectly make me want to swap out my white sheets. That blue bedside radio...

Spalding Gray's (First) Perfect Sleep

In Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray talks a lot about his search for the Perfect Moment. It turns out to happen one afternoon swimming off the coast of Phuket, in Thailand, after he wrapped up his shoot for The Killing Fields.

No peaceful moment, this. While the crew is busy eating something with chopsticks (chopsticks? in Thailand?) for lunch, Spalding, a spitting dog-paddler, in dread of sharks, rip currents, the deep, the unseen, the big terrors that pull, swims farther and farther out, losing himself in the sea, losing his self-awareness, the awareness that his 500 bhat are sitting on the sand for anyone to steal: Spalding, belongingless, becoming a part of the organism that is, oh glory, the same temperature as his body...

Becoming happy; losing his terror, it may comfort us to recall, in the water...

Beginning a rapturous drown in the experience...

SPALDING! STOP, MAN!

A friend, whose Perfect Experience, Spalding later notes, would be death, and who has just casually ridden a riptide out to sea and back ("I'm South African!"), jolts him back to awareness, yelling that those waters haven't been tested. Panic! Flailing! Spalding's atavistic grace — that almost prelingual grace — harpooned.

The Moment in question wasn't the swimming, the state of grace, or the risk. It was the making it back to shore and the telling of the tale. That was elation. That was perfect.

"SPALDING. You are lucky to be alive," says Athol Fugard severely, drinking coffee at the bar.

That night Spalding Gray slept a deep and beautiful sleep, dreaming of sand dunes.

Which makes me wonder: Are the sleeps of hikers in Nepal, of rescuers of old women from burning buildings, of those who have come, whether by choice or by accident, close to the Edge and back, the most perfect sleeps?

What, I want to know, were Emily Dickinson's sleeps like? After days spent writing out those poems in her tiny, perfect hand.

What is my Perfect Moment?

Sexy Couples. Separate Beds.

It's time to scrap the idea that, if two people sleep apart under one roof, it's some kind of shorthand for the beginning of the end of a relationship.

Couples didn't routinely sleep together in the same bed in this country until after World War II, near as Sleeper can determine. There's lots of debate about the first  television couple to share a bed: Some say Bob and Carol Brady, some say Herman and Lily Munster. No matter the sleepers, those side-by-side twinnies weren't just a sop to broadcast morality codes: generations of couples slept with inches, feet, or whole hallways between them.

Let's get straight to the point. Sleeper posits there's pleasure in sleeping apart. If you're part of a couple, you know — admit it — that when the co-sleeper is out of town, or you're in a strange city on a business trip, it can be nice to have the whole bed to yourself. Even more exotic: there are advantages to having a separate bedroom, or dressing room.

Think about the final scene in The Thin Man: Nick and Nora in their couchette on the train en route to San Francisco. "It's a wonder a woman has any mystery left in a place like this," Myrna Loy says, stuffing her Edith Head peignoir into her valise while trying not to skewer William Powell in the ribs.

A separate dressing room is only a dream for Gothamite sleepers like Sleeper. But what's wrong with mystery? It's nice to meet up with your mate for a cocktail having not gotten ready for the date together in the same room. It's alluring. It's not that you shouldn't know each other's bodies, or that there's something to hide. It's that appearing and disappearing, coming in from the cold or from another room, is... well, enough said.

Nick and Nora, the sexiest couple in film, had separate beds at home, too. A few benefits of this arrangement: Acoustics. (Sound carries through mattresses, but not the empty space between them.) Light sleepers lie sleeping while tossers and turners do their thing. Blankets heaped on one bed, light sheet on the other. You get the idea. Sleeper does not propose an end to co-sleeping, only an enlargment of options. Could there be a single bed to slip into, in an alcove, when one has the flu? Furniture makers and interior designers, take note.

Remember, too, Asta got the top bunk to himself on that train. Although he didn't seem too happy about it.