"I learned a valuable lesson not long ago. Well, it's been nearly a year now. Like I told you I'm an art teacher in the public school system back in the city. I travel from school to school in kind of an ambassadorial role. I'm more or less a supervisor these days."
"You don't look old enough, hon." our host said. I laughed.
"Oh believe me, I am. Teaching in the public school system ages you quickly. I discovered my first grey hair the other day."
My dark-brown hair, though still damp, hung behind and well below my shoulders. The man stroked his goatee. "I discovered mine some time ago."
We both laughed. The fire was raging now in the fireplace, the cabin warm to a point where I no longer needed the men's size long-sleeved wool shirt he'd loaned me. And the red jug wine he kept filling my glass with was warm going down. I thought about unbuttoning the shirt but stopped at fingering the top button as I told my story.
"Anyway, about a year ago they sent me to this weekend seminar upstate in Syracuse. I went alone. I got in late in the afternoon on a Friday and once I'd checked into my hotel room—the seminar was being held at the hotel—and after I called Derrick—"
"Why did you call Derrick?" the man asked, glancing over at him on the couch, unconscious.
"To let him know I got in safely."
"Oh. Right. I've forgotten all these little marital niceties. It's been a long time for me..."
"Anyway, after I checked into my room I went downstairs to the hotel bar to unwind and have a couple of glasses of white wine. Flying makes me nervous and they hadn't served any alcohol on the little shuttle plane I flew up in. It wasn't even a jet, can you believe it?"
The man, whose dark-brown eyes rarely left my flushed face, was looking at me over the rim of his glass of red. It was jug wine and we were drinking it out of former jelly jars, the kind that have pop-off lids. All of which suggested, it seemed to me, a certain frugality. Like my grandmother's.
"Sorry, I only have red," he said, his smile refreshing.
"That's OK."
"Big drinker are we?"
I swallowed some more of the cloyingly sweet "Red Burgundy."
"Can you believe it? Before I met Derrick, right out of college, I'd never had a sip of alcohol before."
"Marriage'll do that to you. Go on. I didn't mean to interrupt your story."
"I'm really hot," I said, squirming on the uncushioned wood chair. It was a wood table for four, with Derrick's compromised, nearly-empty wine glass left behind at his place to my right. "Do you maybe have a tee shirt or something I could...?"
"No. But I know one thing, dear. I love it when you wrinkle your cute little nose."
Feminist or not, I blushed, undid the top two buttons of the man's plaid shirt and began rolling up the sleeves. I could feel myself perspiring underneath. The sweat trickling down my sides, my ribs.
"It's a fireplace not central heating," the man added, looking at my shirt's open vee. "It's not like I can turn it down."
"No, I'm grateful for it," I said, one sleeve now rolled up to my elbow. "An hour ago we were freezing cold out there."
"Lost."
"But found now," I smiled. It all sounded so...Biblical to a lapsed Catholic.
"Indeed. So you went down to this bar..."
"And it was almost completely empty. It was still pretty early. And I'm sitting there sipping my wine, minding my own business and this guy comes up—he was about your age—comes up and asks if he can sit down and we start talking and it turns out he's conducting tomorrow's seminar, he's some kind of art critic or something, he judges shows, and he starts buying me drinks and we're talking and he puts his hand on my thigh and—"
"Did you push it away?"
The feminist in me hesitated. "No," I admitted.
"So you liked it."
"I liked the attention. He was a lot older and he wasn't my type or anything but—"
"Sort of like me," the man grinned.
"No," I said, looking down at the drying brown smears made by the bread I'd cleaned my bowl of stew with, greedily, beef stew. "I wouldn't say that. I do have a daddy thing going, but..."
"So there's hope for me?"
"Hope?"
"I'm joking. Go on."
"So we were pretty drunk by then and at one point I got up to go to the ladies' and when I returned this guy pulled me close to him, held me by the wrists, and said, whispered in my ear, 'I'll give you a hundred dollars to go up to my room with me right now.'"
At which point our host burst out laughing. "Did you ask him what for?"
"Guess."
"Oh I thought he just wanted a companion to discuss art in an intimate setting."
"Yeah, right. Although that's kind of the way it went at first."
"You went up with him?"
"No. Not at first. I told him I wasn't a...I told him I was just here for the seminar. He said he knew that but the offer still stood. We'd have to make a stop at the hotel ATM, that's all."
I paused at this point, glancing over at my husband Derrick asleep on the couch. A drugged sleep. I'd wondered why the man, our host, had insisted, each time we emptied our wine glasses, that he collect them and take them back to the kitchen counter and top them up there, rather than just bringing the jug to the table. At the time I assumed he was embarrassed to be serving such swill to, well, sophisticates from the city. Brooklyn anyway.
Even when Derrick stood up suddenly, bumping his knees against table's underside in the process, even when he stood up and staggered, and our concerned host had jumped up and run over to him, leading Derrick by the elbow to the couch...even then I had not yet put two and two together. Derrick sank down at first, a blank look on his face, mouth open, before tilting to his right, his head nearly hitting the couch arm as he toppled over. The man had lifted Derrick's legs up onto the sofa's other half. And put a couch pillow under his head. Then he did something curious. Letting out a grunt he went to the trouble of rotating Derrick's limp body onto its left side, meaning his back was to the room. To us. The man insisted this was so Derrick didn't wake up with a "fire burn" on his face; but now I wondered if he hadn't done it so my husband, even though unconscious, wasn't "looking" at us while we went back to sitting at the table, drinking and talking and laughing.
"So you ended up going to his room with him but...you said, 'not at first.'"
I squirmed on my chair again. Undid another button. They were plastic, pearly-white. Like semen in color, come to think of it.
"He did something really crazy next. We had another drink and then he leaned over and he said to me... 'Two hundred and fifty. For the whole night.'"
"And you said," the man laughed, "take me to the ATM?"
"No. I said something stupid—and way too loud—like..., "Spend the whole night with you?"
"And he said 'yeah. We'll get up early, you can go back to your room...I have to conduct that seminar in the morning. Keep your voice down please.'"
I looked across the rustic table at our host, a man I'd never laid eyes on before an hour and a half ago. A man who now knew my—our—darkest secret. Well, the first part of it. The beginning. I emptied my glass and he, smiling inwardly at some private thought, brought the half-empty jug of wine over.
"Good," I sighed. "Because I don't want you putting anything in MY glass."
The man jerked a thumb at Derrick. "What, you don't think he just got overwhelmed with relief after being lost in the woods all afternoon."
"The prick," I muttered.
"What?"
"He's such a loser sometimes. The worst sense of direction of anybody I've ever known." I clucked my tongue. "The dumbass can't even read a compass."
"Can I tell you something? He's—you're—not the first person to ever get turned around on these trails, and wind up on my doorstep."
"Did you drug them as well?"
Our host found this amusing for some reason. "Usually it's a guy, alone. And I don't do guys. I leave that to you city slickers."
