This bed is comfortable. It’s a narrow twin in St. Dominic’s Priory near Hampstead Heath in northern London. When I come to this bed I’m always jet-lagged, having arrived from Heathrow not long before and been met in the terminal by Vivian, who is my oldest friend and also a Catholic priest. I dream of this bed on the red-eye over the Atlantic from New York, during the truncated traveler’s night I spend crammed half sideways into a British Airways window seat, trying to stay warm as ice crystals form on the inky window next to my head. So I am stiff-necked, bleary, and longing only for a nap when I am spat off the plane into the high tide of 9 A.M. London life, and there to greet me is Vivian, a silver-haired, handsome Irishman, bright eyed and ready to do something touristy that he’s too cool to do on his own. We stroll through the shrubbery maze at Hampton Court Gardens or ride the London Eye Ferris wheel in the balmy June weather, and as we lift and lower slowly over the Thames, I think of how much I would like to be lying in the bed I caught a glimpse of as I dropped off my green rucksack at the priory. Sometimes Vivian lets me take a brief nap before heading off into the summer fray, and I, vibrating like a struck bell from tiredness, wish only to burrow deeper into its white sheets — so tautly made up by the housekeepers who care for the men of the priory — and lie swaddled, and sleep on.