-2 BR APT, 2ND FL; HEAT, GAS, WATER, SYMMETRY-FREE-

Perfect lodgings for a minor hero.

My argument with my wife started last night in bed. Nothing smutty, everything was Hayes code happy in our house; me in flannel pajamas, she perched at the end of the bed with one foot on the floor.

Unknotted
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

Her job was the catalyst for the fight. For ten years, she has taught art to third graders in lieu of the gallery life she once promised was her destiny. Over the past decade, the free-spirited woman I had married struggled to teach something, anything, to the elementary artists. And every year, she held their attention only long enough to teach symmetry.

This affected her deeply. Drained her creative juices so much so that she sought solace in routine, rigidity, and more symmetry. Fatal for an artist, and our marriage, which fed on the asymmetry of our temperaments. When we'd met, she was the wild one, unpredictable and irrational. Consequently, she was irresistible to a staid mathematician like me.

But now she was more me than I had ever been, and took unkindly to my barrage of unhelpful suggestions. Relax Chill out Don't worry about it Let it go.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when I woke the next morning tethered to the bed in a symmetrical spreadeagle. The ties connecting my wrists to the bed posts would be familiar to any dom. But we don't have posts at the foot of the bed. In the first display of ingenuity in years, my artist wife had lashed each ankle to a stout chain that ran between mattress and the frame, and under the boxspring. To keep the chains from sliding out, she had attached a heavy lamp (minus the shade) to one length and a statuette to the other.

What a fascinating puzzle, I thought. The wrist chains won't move. The leg chains, however, could move back and forth, even cross each other, but risk entanglement.

My predicament resembled one of those 3-D iron and wood puzzles that ask the user to remove the shuttle, or free the wine bottle. Any one of them could be solved with the proper equation.

It is the symmetry of the trap that keeps me here. If I make my ankle-bonds asymmetrical in just the right way, I should be able to pull them free and then loosen the wrist bonds. But if I do it wrong even once, I may not be able to untangle the leg restraints.

So I lay there for several minutes before my mathematical brain came up with a viable sequence. A few twists later, the lamp and statuette were on the right side of the bed, and I was in the fetal position. As I easily lifted my wrist nooses from the headboard, I realized we would make it after all. We had simply changed places: she was now the solid one, and I was the freethinking artist. I just couldn't decide whether our relationship worked because we were symmetrical, or asymmetrical.