The Hotel Suite in Greenwich: A Married Woman on a Discreet Afternoon for Herself

I booked the room in my own name, paid in cash for the second key, and walked into the lobby of a Greenwich hotel at two in the afternoon like a woman with somewhere to be. Because I was. My husband was at a conference in Boston, the kids were with my mother through dinner, and I had given myself exactly four hours of being no one's wife, no one's mother, no one's reliable thing.

I had found him through a friend who would not stop talking about him after her birthday. She told me, over a second martini at a bar in Westport, that she had spent an entire afternoon being touched by a man whose only ambition was her pleasure, and she had walked out feeling thirty again. I drove home that night with the windows down and the question already settled in my chest.

He arrived exactly when he said he would, with his table folded under one arm and a small leather bag in the other hand. He did not look like a fantasy. He looked like a man — early fifties, silver in his beard, dark eyes, the kind of build that comes from caring about the body you live in. He shook my hand the way you would shake a friend's. He asked where I would like the table. He asked if I had eaten. He told me to take whatever time I needed.

The hotel suite had those heavy curtains that make any room feel like the middle of the night when you draw them. He drew them. He set a small candle on the dresser, dimmed the lamps, and pulled the chair into a corner so I would have privacy to undress. The white sheet on the table looked, in that light, like something out of an old painting.

He started at my feet. Of all places. He held one foot in both of his warm hands for what felt like a full minute before he moved at all, and I felt some hard thing inside my chest begin, finally, to loosen. By the time he reached my calves I had stopped apologizing to him in my head for the way my body has changed. By the time he reached the small of my back I had stopped apologizing for being there at all.

He never spoke much. When he did, his voice was low and even, the way you might speak to a horse you did not want to startle. He told me he was going to move the sheet. He told me, before each new place his hands went, that this was for me. He asked, more than once, if I wanted him to keep going. I always did.

Somewhere past the hour mark he asked, very quietly, whether I would like him to use his mouth. I said yes before I had decided to. He covered my eyes with a folded cloth — I had not asked, he had simply read the way my hand kept drifting up toward my face — and then he took his time. There is no other way to say it. He took his time the way a man takes his time when he is not in a hurry to be anywhere else, with anyone else, ever.

When it was over he did not climb up onto the table with me. He did not unzip anything. He covered me with the sheet, kissed the back of my hand once like an old-fashioned man, and went to the bathroom to wash up. He came back with a glass of cool water and sat in the chair in the corner and let me be quiet for as long as I needed.

I paid him the rest of his fee, plus a tip I had not planned on, and he tucked the cash into his bag without counting it. At the door he said, only, take care of yourself this week. Drink water. Be slow. I nodded like a woman who had been given a piece of useful advice from her doctor.

I drove home on the Merritt Parkway with my windows cracked and the spring air coming in and a small foolish smile on my face. I made dinner. I kissed my children. I was, that night, an extraordinarily patient mother. My husband called from Boston around ten. I told him I had had a quiet afternoon. Which was true, in a way. It had been very, very quiet.