The Cohabitants 22

When the man slept in a chair or on a bed, he breathed in loud ruffles and snorts, sometimes growling and snarling. She heard it the first night they slept together as she floated in her girly dream state beside the guy she had been chasing for months. Listening to his lungs pump noise into the pillow beside her head, she realized he was affectionate, kind, and an excellent kisser, but in his sleep, he exhaled old tires. The thing is she wasn’t a child on an idealistic journey seeking a romance that would give her life meaning. She was a sixty-six-year-old widow looking for a steady supply of endorphins wherever she could get them because she wanted to spend the rest of her life in a good mood, not wrestling her dissatisfactions like some barroom coke witch. This was Robert Frost’s fork in the road, and she took the path that made all the difference.

She decided not to hear his snoring. She would not hear it the way she did not hear the ear-piercing screech of bus brakes, the roar and honk of firetrucks, or the oscillating sirens of police cars in New York City. She had lived in New York City, and she slept there with no problem. She would not wake to the sudden rasp of his tongue shuddering in his throat the way she did not wake to the sudden shriek of her rooster at dawn on the farm. She slept well on the farm. She would sleep through the man’s vibration of her eardrums the way she slept through the subsonic vibration of the bass cabinet in the band’s speaker system as she napped backstage during their show. She slept well on the road with the band. She slept well pretty much wherever she went. When she traveled with friends and they shared a hotel room, they told her she slept like a corpse. Sleeping like a corpse was her special gift. 

In bed with the man on their first night together, Robert Frost flipped a switch in her brain. She decided her lover’s snoring was a sound that would not exist for her. She chose to erase that damp audio frequency from her mind. No thought of that sound was allowed to enter. Not one word. Not a complaint like, damn that’s loud. Not a lament like, how does anybody sleep through that. Not a statement like, I hate this. Not a threat like, his snoring is going to ruin my day. Not an accusation like, this is insane. None of that. Those words were the brain chemistry of dissatisfaction. The cortisol of irritation. Fight or flight. One microscopic drip of that resistance and she would be awake.

The key to sleeping like a corpse was managing her brain chemistry, and that meant controlling her thoughts. She didn’t want to even think about thinking. Instead, she thought her mantra: that sound does not exist for me, that sound does not exist, I hear nothing. And with the repetition of that phrase, her brain learned to erase the sound of the man shoveling gravel through his nostrils. She was blocking his junk mail. The message did not arrive because she put her brain in airplane mode. Problem solved.

Not everyone agreed with this approach. There were friends and family who thought she should muscle her way into his sleep the way she had muscled her way into his refrigerator. They thought she should interfere with his sleeping habits the way she tried to commandeer his eating habits. Folks who cared about him encouraged her to push him into healthcare appointments and breathing machines. But she had learned from her futile attempts at changing him that his diminishing lifespan was beyond her purview. Sugar in his coffee, a Friday night cheeseburger, occasionally quacking like a duck while he slept in his chair—these were his choices. It had taken some time for her to accept them. But now that she understood her predicament, she had made her own choice. She would not be awake fretting over his destiny while he slept. She would be in sweet repose right beside him enjoying her special gift.