David Handler - The Hot Pink Farmhouse

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

She had made a solemn promise to herself about sneaking around in the night this way: Never again. I will not treat another man’s wife this way. I will not treat myself this way. But there was a mighty big problem with such a promise, she had discovered. It lasted only until it was put to the flesh test by a certain man, the right man, him. And then it went flying right out the window, along with shame, self-respect, and sanity.

I am not in control of myself, she realized as she steered the rocket-fast Porsche down the narrow, twisting country lane, its twin exhaust pipes burbling in the after-midnight quiet. I am a bad, bad girl.

She parked on Frederick Lane, a few houses down from the little inn, well away from its parking lot, and closed her door very softly when she got out. Sound carried in the village. And it was important that no one hear her coming to him in the night. No one.

The stars were out and she could see her breath in the light of the full harvest moon. There would be a frost come morning, first of the season.

She did not lock the car. No one who grew up in Dorset did. The newcomers locked theirs, of course. Sometimes, in the night, she could hear the alarms going off when raccoons jumped onto their fashionable Land Cruisers. What an intrusive, hostile sound that was. But she could not knock the newcomers. She would not have been able to stay here in her lovely little village, earning the kind of money she was earning, if it weren’t for them and their kids moving in.

Fallen leaves crackled under her feet as she strode softly toward the darkened inn. The earth smelled of rotting apples, a sweet, moldy aroma that reminded her of when she was a little girl on the farm. As she walked, she thought she heard somebody else’s footsteps in addition to her own. She paused, her ears straining, but now heard nothing. Her ears had been playing tricks on her. She resumed walking, her heart beginning to race with anticipation. It was after midnight and she was up to no good and she knew it.

This time her eyes were wide open.

They hadn’t been that first time, back when she was working as an au pair the summer after her freshman year of college. A wealthy Park Avenue couple had rented themselves one of the big summer bungalows overlooking the Sound. Two darling little girls they had. The wife was a society skeleton with a hyphenated name and an overbite. And Stephen was a grave, sensitive dreamer who yearned to write sonnets but traded in hedge funds because this was what was expected of him. How tragically romantic he had seemed. And sooo handsome. And then his hyphenate wife had to leave for Kennebunkport when Mumsy took ill. She moved into a guest room to see to the girls. And she and Stephen had talked and talked into the night. There had been soul-baring and there had been tears. And it had happened right there on the living room sofa. Three times, quickly in succession.

The poor man had been positively starved for her, she had told herself.

At summer’s end she had followed him into the city and their affair had continued in a succession of hotel rooms. She became something of an expert on the relative merits of their various accommodations. The mattresses at The Plaza were the firmest, the club sandwiches at The Carlyle the tastiest, the towels at the St. Regis the most luxuriant. After their trysts, she would ride home on the Metro-North commuter train, asking herself if these seasoned suburbanites could tell by her bruised lips and sated, dreamy countenance that she had just been ravaged by a married man. The career women stared at her with such flinty disapproval, she swore they could. The middle-aged businessmen, they just stared.

And then one day they were caught by his wife’s best friend as the two of them came out of the Waldorf. And she discovered that Stephen had done this many times before with many different young girls and she was not special and there was nothing poetic or glorious about it at all. She’d just been having a tawdry affair with a lying creep who should have been treating his wife, his children and any number of sweet young college girls a whole lot better.

That was when she swore it would never happen again. And it hadn’t. There was one boy, a boy she would have given everything to, but he broke her heart and she sealed it shut after that, and there was no one.

Until now. Now she could not help herself. She simply was not strong enough. Everyone who knew her thought she was incredibly tough. She was, in fact, weak. She was just very good at hiding it. Possibly, this was the one thing in life she was best at.

So every night she came sneaking to him like this, breathless with anticipation and desire.

The innkeepers locked the front door after midnight. But they kept a key to the kitchen door under a flowerpot on the back porch. She knew this because she had waited tables here in high school. There were very few jobs for teenagers in a village like Dorset. Every reasonably presentable girl in town had pinned up her hair and donned the blue gingham jumper at one time or another. It was a rite of passage, just like the prom-night kegger on White Sands Beach.

After she’d returned the key to its hiding place she slipped off her shoes and tiptoed barefoot through the kitchen, hearing the hum of the big refrigerators. It was still warm in there from dinner, and the scent of roasted duck lingered in the air. She passed through the swinging doors into the darkened dining room, careful not to bump into the tables that were set for breakfast. Up one step to the main hallway, past the sitting room to the curving staircase. It was a grand old three-story house, a sea captain’s house. There were eleven guest rooms in all. Up the stairs she darted, quick and light-footed as a girl, knowing it was wrong. Not caring. That was the truly crazy part-not caring.

No lights showed under any of the doors. The guests were asleep. She could hear snores coming from the second-floor front room-an elderly Jewish lady from Brooklyn, he’d told her. The old dear sounded like a French-Canadian lumberjack. Up to his third-floor rear room she ran, tapping on his door.

He immediately flung it open and she was in his arms and he was kissing her mouth and eyes and neck and it had never, ever been like this before. This intense. This feverish.

She broke away, gasping for breath. “My God, you are a total madman.”

“I’m just a sad case,” he said, his eyes gleaming at her in the light from the bedside lamp. “Haven’t you heard? Everyone says so.” He pulled her inside, closing the door softly behind her. The room was small and cozy, with a canopied bed, a rocker, a lovely old wardrobe cupboard. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“I had a little car trouble.”

He wore boxer shorts and nothing else. He wanted her badly. She could see this plainly.

“Well, that answers my first question,” she said tartly. “How you feel.”

“Terrific,” he answered exultantly. “Today was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Well, second best…” His hands reached for hers. “I was lying here thinking you weren’t going to come. I didn’t know what I would do if you didn’t.”

“Perhaps what you need is a hobby,” she teased him. “Have you thought about making your own jams and jellies? Or whittling? There’s a grand old tradition of Yankee whittlers that goes all the way back to Ralph Waldo-”

He plunged his mouth down upon hers, his hands flinging her skirt and sweater off her. She wore nothing underneath. Naked, she leaped into his arms. He carried her to the bed, pulling her up and over on top of him, kneading her breasts with his hands.