Linda Williams Facebook ad: “Sale Ends Tonight”

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Home & Garden

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I stole a mattress topper from a hotel in Maui last summer. I'm not proud of it. The general manager wrote me a letter three weeks later. It was the third night. We had been at the resort for three nights and I had been sleeping like a person in a mattress ad. You know what I mean. Curled up. Smiling slightly. Hair somehow perfectly arranged on the pillow. The kind of sleep that happens to women in soft-focus shots on travel-magazine covers and never to me, in my actual life, at home, where I am 51 and I sleep on my side and I usually wake up at 3:47am with an aching hip and a headache and the unshakeable sense that I will not be a productive person tomorrow. On the first night I had assumed it was the mattress. On the second night I had assumed it was the wine. On the third night, I lay there at 6:30am, having slept eight hours uninterrupted, having not turned over once, and I pulled the sheet back and looked at what was actually under me, and I thought: it's not the mattress. It's the layer on the mattress. I need this. It was unbranded. I checked. There was no tag on the outside. There was nothing on the bedside table about bedding. I picked up the in-room compendium and there was no section on the bedroom or where to buy any of it. I rang housekeeping. "Hello, I'm in room 614. I just wanted to ask about the bedding on the bed. There's a quilted layer under the sheet. What brand is it?" There was a pause. "I'm so sorry ma'am, I'm not able to share that information." "Sorry?" "It is one of our hotel's signature amenities and our supplier relationship is private." I asked if I could speak to a manager. I was transferred to a very polite woman who said the same thing in slightly longer sentences. I asked if they had a hotel shop where I could buy one. They didn't. I asked if there was a mailing list I could join to be told when they did. There was not. I hung up. My husband was reading on the balcony. "I'm taking it home." He looked up. "You are not taking it home." "I am taking it home. I want it on record that I am about to commit a crime, and you cannot say I did not warn you." That night, after dinner, I stripped my side of the bed, folded it in half and then in half again, wrapped it in one of the resort's white spa towels, and pressed it into the bottom of my suitcase under a folded sundress and a pair of swim shoes. I closed the suitcase. I sat down on it. I felt my own heartbeat in my ears. The next morning, the housekeeper came in while we were at breakfast and remade the bed. She would never know. The hotel had hundreds of rooms. I had taken one. We checked out at 11. We flew home overnight. I unpacked at 2pm the next afternoon. I put it on my own nine year old mattress, made the bed back up over the top of it, and got in. I slept perfectly for three weeks. Then, on a Friday, the letter arrived. It was hand-written. Cream cardstock. The hotel's logo embossed at the top. Posted from Hawaii three weeks before. It was from the general manager. "Dear Ms ——, We were saddened to note, at housekeeping turnover on the morning of your departure, that the mattress protection layer from suite 614 was no longer present in the room. We do not assume the worst. Items can be misplaced during stays, and we know our guests do not always take inventory. However, I write because if it is the case that you wished to take a piece of our bedding home with you, we would like the opportunity to offer it to you formally rather than retrospectively. Our bedding is made to our specifications by a small supplier on the U.S. mainland and we do not, as a matter of policy, sell it through our retail channel. If you would be kind enough to confirm or otherwise, we will close our internal record either way. With warm regards, [Name redacted], General Manager" I cried at the kitchen table. I had spent three weeks sleeping like the dead on a stolen mattress topper, and now the general manager of the most expensive hotel I have ever stayed in had written me a personal handwritten letter, not threatening, not legalistic, just kind, politely asking whether I had taken it. I wrote back. I confessed. I sent a cheque. I asked, with the cheque, whether I could possibly know the brand, because it was the only bedding I had ever loved. He wrote back a second letter, two weeks later. He returned the cheque. He said that as a goodwill gesture from the resort, they considered it a memento, and he asked only that I refrain from doing it again in future. He did not tell me the brand. I did not blame him. For seven months I lived on the stolen one. I treated it like a museum object. I washed the sheets around it and never it. When my husband sat down heavily on his side I felt physically ill. I knew, somewhere in the back of my head, that bedding does not last forever, and that one day this would go flat, and on that day I would have nothing. Then last October, a friend of mine, who had heard the hotel story at a dinner party because it is, frankly, the only interesting thing I have ever done, sent me a text. "I think I found your bedding. Look up West Month. The thousand GSM one. Tell me if I'm right." I went online. I looked at the photographs. I read the specifications. A thousand GSM, which is a full kilogram of filling in every square metre, against the four hundred that everything in the shops is made of. Diamond stitch quilted, in closed pockets, so the filling cannot slide out to the edges when a body moves. Deep pocket, eight to twenty one inches, which is why it had gone over that enormous hotel mattress in the first place. The weight matched. The description matched word for word the feeling of the thing I had stolen. I ordered two. They arrived on a Tuesday. I put one of them on the guest bed, next to the room where the stolen one was. I lay down on it. Then I went and lay down on the stolen one. Then back. Then back again. I went through this sequence about four times. They were the same thing. I do not know whether the resort's supplier is West Month or whether the resort uses a version of a similar build. I do not care, because the layer on my bed now feels exactly like the layer I committed a crime for in Maui. The thing I had thought was rare and unattainable and worth stealing from one of the best hotels in the world was sitting on the internet for a fraction of what I would have happily paid through the nose to a luxury hotel boutique. And I did not have to buy a mattress. That is the part that still gets me. I was quoted four thousand dollars for a new bed the winter before that trip and I put it off, and the answer was a layer that goes on top of the one I already own. I have since ordered four more. One for the guest bed. One for my mother. Two for my daughters, who both said they did not need one and both now text me about it. The stolen one has been retired to a linen bag in the cupboard, where it lives next to my wedding tiara and the school reports of my grown children. It is a relic. It belongs to a younger, more lawless me. If you are reading this, and you have ever stayed in a hotel and lain there in the dark thinking, "I would, in fact, steal this bed," I want to spare you the international incident. It is West Month. It is not stolen. It is for sale, on the internet, for a fraction of what you would expect, and you do not have to write a letter of apology to anybody. — Marina, 51, California P.S. — I have not been back to that hotel. I want to. But I am not sure my photograph isn't taped to the back of the housekeeping office as the woman to watch. P.P.S. — The one I ordered is the thousand GSM, diamond stitch quilted, deep pocket. Measure your mattress before you order. Mine is thirteen inches with the protector on and it went over the corners without a fight. They go up to twenty one, so a pillow top is fine, which is what caught me out with a cheap one years ago. It also goes in the washing machine, which I did not expect and which the resort presumably knew. P.P.P.S. — They are running 47% off at the moment with free express shipping and thirty days to send it back. Get the guest bed done at the same time. Because the week after you put it on your own bed, somebody is going to stay with you, and they are going to come down in the morning and ask what is on your spare bed, and you are going to have to explain that there is nothing on your spare bed, and that is the whole problem. This is what happened in my house. I have learned my lesson. Two. Always.

Where the ad sends people

usewestmonth.com

Sale Ends Tonight

West Month