Marital Rule No. 1: You Wreck the Murphy Bed, You Fix It

Every marriage has one looming cloud, one irreconcilable difference that either drives spouses to divorce or teaches them the saintly virtue of compromise. In our house, that role is played by a piece of furniture: a 125-year-old free-standing Murphy bed.

It is far more than a bed. It’s become a symbol of the difficulties of merging households after a rash act such as marriage. Some objects, no matter how highly valued, should be thrown away in the interest of domestic harmony. That was my argument, at any rate.

The Murphy bed is a tall piece of furniture, seven feet at least, and four feet wide. It looks like an armoire--with fancy Victorian knobs and flourishes at the top--except that the mirrored front is hinged at the bottom and pulls down from the top, becoming a box spring and headboard. It doesn’t have a mattress, but even if it did, we couldn’t possibly allow anyone to sleep in it. “Are you crazy?” someone I’m married to would say. “It’s far too valuable for that!”

To what use, then, might it be put?

Excellent question, and one I posed from the moment I walked into our living room one day in 1983 and discovered that my husband had brought the bed out of storage to grace our tiny home. For months, he had talked of this valuable, rare, exceptionally lovely piece of furniture. Naturally, I was eager to see it.

Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the shock of having my living room and everything in it dwarfed by this monstrous cherrywood . . . thing. I responded the only way that seemed appropriate: I burst into tears.

“I thought you told me it was beautiful,” I wailed. “This is awful. I hate it!”

But we had nowhere else to put it--the storage space was no longer available--so it ruined the living room for six years.

When we bought the new house, I insisted that we get rid of the white elephant. My husband, who becomes so attached to his possessions that he still drives a car bought 22 years ago, would have none of it.

“Well,” said I, “it’s going into that house over my dead body.”

A tempting offer, I’m sure, but he declined.

We compromised on the garage, which is, to be fair to me and what happened later, barely wide enough for a single car.

The garage also became the final resting place for many other “priceless” objects he had brought to the marriage. Besides the Murphy bed--which jutted two feet from the wall into my parking space--there were assorted antique lamps, porcelain beer steins, one very old and broken radio, a Chinese rug and a now-rusty childhood train set.

I will eat the Chinese rug if he ever puts that train set together again. But can it be given to the Goodwill? “Are you crazy? It’s far too valuable for that!”

I never meant any harm.

Who could have known that as I swung my car into the incredibly narrow--probably sub-code--garage one evening, I would be going just a tad too fast, that I would neglect to cut the wheel quite as sharply as usual?

I didn’t even feel the impact. Nor did I hear it because I had the radio cranked up pretty high.

The neighbors did. Several came running toward the garage just as I looked up to see the Murphy bed tilting slowly away from the wall toward my car. It hit with a dull thud.

One neighbor, snickering, helped me push it off the car and back against the wall. But the base was in pieces.

Now a good prosecutor could make it look premeditated: “Ladies and gentlemen, are we really expected to believe that this was an accident? Defendant has a long history of threats against this priceless and defenseless piece of furniture.”

I knew how it would seem to my husband, so I practiced looking incredibly remorseful. When he arrived an hour later, I may have even mustered a tear or two.

It worked. He was wonderfully understanding, kind to a fault, even nicer than the time I accidentally shattered his mother’s Baccarat crystal bowl. But as he hugged me, I felt the icy breath of imminent pay-back at my neck.

Revenge came a week later. In a ridiculously reasonable tone, he asked if I’d mind “taking responsibility” for the Murphy bed. He assured me that until it was fixed, there was no way to get rid of it.

Get rid of it? This was a breakthrough.

I’d broken him down, but not to the point where he’d agree to chop it into kindling. Still, I thanked him profusely and complimented his maturity.

So I took responsibility for repairing the Murphy bed . . . had it for about a year and a half now . . . haven’t lifted a finger.

I plan to have it fixed. I really do. Can’t get a car into the garage until the bed is out of the way.

But I don’t think we’ll ever be rid of it.

There’s only one person on Earth who’d want the thing.

And it’s already sitting in his garage.