Our story is a quilt made from the covers of all the beds that have held us.  The green and rose chintz in the reproduction Federalist bedroom in Philadelphia.  The nubbed, heavy wool of a hand-woven Mexican blanket thrown over the couch in New Jersey.  The vine-and-flower print in the attic guest room in Vienna.  The navy blue stripe in the cramped London hotel room overlooking a sculpture garden.  The subtle, refined 300-thread Egyptian cotton in the former Federal Reserve Bank transformed into a Boston hotel.  The fragments are bound together, a composite of texture, color, size.  Some pieces of fabric are flecked with semen or milk or tears.  Some still bear the wrinkles of cloth that has been twisted around sleeping limbs or clutched in a hand tense with impending orgasm.  Spread flat, the quilt is a chronicle, a journey of thirty hidden years.  From the anonymity of hotel linens to the achingly familiar sheets of my own bed at home, I can trace the patterns and imprints of our lovemaking.  I can remember the curve of my belly, pregnant.  I can feel the dampness, see the bloodstains, smell the sweat.  There is no chronology to this quilt.  It is thrown together in a frenzy of abandon and forgetfulness.  I cannot start at one corner and work my way around a neat story.  I keep losing the thread.  There are whole sections that are empty, waiting to be filled.