Rear Fence Lessons

My name is Lance Oakley, I've been a runner most of my life, and I have spent most of my adult life being the sensible one. I coach track at the community college. I pay the bills on the first of the month. I floss. When Irina and I got married nine years ago, I was the one who read the mortgage paperwork twice before signing.

So when I asked her to come sit on the back porch with me at dusk that warm October evening, she thought I wanted to talk about the gutters.

Irina is thirty-six, a freelance graphic designer, and she can read my face better than I can. She sat down across from me with her iced tea and waited. The light was going orange over the roofline. Beyond our six-foot wooden fence, the neighbor's pool sat empty and drained, waiting on repairs that had been promised for weeks.

"I don't want to talk about the gutters," I told her.

"Okay." She stirred her tea. "Now I'm nervous."

I had rehearsed this on my drive home and it had sounded much better in the car. I just said it plainly, the way I say most things.

"I want to do something dumb. Something not sensible. And I want you to do it with me."

She set the glass down. "Define dumb."

"You know how we've been lately. Fine. Comfortable. Like a couple of accountants." I leaned forward. "I keep thinking about how it felt when we were twenty-four and you organized that charity 5K and I signed up just because you were running it. Everything felt like it might go somewhere. I miss that."

"That was twelve years ago, Lance."

"I know how long ago it was. I did the math." I took a breath. "So here's my idea. One week. Every day we do something outside this house that we would never normally do. And every day we get a little closer to that fence."

I pointed at it. The fence. Six feet of weathered cedar, and past it, that empty pool, and past that, the neighbor's back door.

Irina looked at the fence, then at me, then at her tea. I could see her running the same risk assessment I had run for thirty-six years. Then something shifted in her face. She had been a competitive swimmer in college, and every so often I caught a glimpse of the girl who would dive off a block into cold water at six in the morning without hesitating.

"Closer to the fence," she repeated. "Like, a game."

"Like a game. Rules are, we both agree to each day. Either of us can call it off any time, no argument."

"And nobody's actually planning to be seen."

"Nobody's planning anything. That's the point. It's the almost."

She laughed, and it was the laugh from when we were younger, the one that came out of her when a plan was bad and she liked it. "You want to play chicken with a fence for a week. Fine. I'm in. But I get to pick at least two of the days."

"Deal."

She reached across the table and took my hand, and she asked me straight out if I was sure, and I said I was sure, and that was how it started. We shook on it like idiots, which made us both laugh harder.

* * *

Day one was hers to choose, and I should have known she would make me suffer.

I was in the kitchen marinating steaks when she came out the back door, and I genuinely forgot what I was doing with my hands. She had on a thin yellow sundress, the one with the small straps, and she had done something with her hair, and when she walked past the window toward the grill I could see she was not wearing anything under it.

She is my wife. I know her body. But the knowledge that she had stepped into our own backyard bare under a scrap of fabric, in broad daylight, with a six-foot fence between her and the world, did something to my pulse that a locked bedroom never does.

I watched her from the kitchen window. She knew I was watching. That was the entire design of it. She bent to check the grill and the dress pulled up the back of her thighs and I gripped the counter as if I needed it.

"You're staring," she called through the screen.

"Absolutely I'm staring."

"Good. Bring the steaks."

We ate at the little table on the porch. The light went down slow. Under the table, her bare knee found mine and stayed there. At one point she looked over her shoulder at the fence, just casually, the way you check for traffic, and then back at me, and raised one eyebrow.

"Day one," she said. "Verdict?"

"We're not stopping this game."

She smiled and took a bite of steak and let her foot slide against my ankle, and we sat out there long after the plates were empty, talking about nothing, both of us aware of the fence the whole time.

* * *

Day two was mine, and I chose it because of what I do for a living. I coach stretching for college runners all day and behave myself completely, and I had never once let myself think about coaching my own wife on our own lawn at sunset with nobody to answer to.

I laid a towel out on the grass about ten feet from the fence. Farther out than day one, which was the point. She came out barefoot in shorts and an old college swim shirt with the sleeves cut off, and she looked at the towel, then at the distance to the fence, and did the math out loud.

"Ten feet. Yesterday was the porch. You're an escalator."

"I'm a track coach. We talk in increments."

She lay down on the towel and I started her on hamstring stretches, the same cues I give my distance runners. Flat back. Reach long. Breathe out on the reach. Her legs are a swimmer's legs, strong and smooth, and my hands were supposed to be instructional.

I put my palms on the backs of her thighs to guide the stretch, right at the hamstring, professional, textbook. She held the position. On the second set my hands slid up an inch. On the third set another inch. She could feel exactly where my hands were and she made no move to stop me, but she did talk.

"Coach, is this technique or is this a hand?"

"Technique," I said, moving higher.

"Because it feels like a hand."

"It's both." I leaned close to her ear. "Say stop any time and I stop. You know that."

She turned her head on the towel and looked up at me, sun in her hair, grass smell rising off the lawn, the fence standing dark and patient at the edge of the yard. "I know it. I'm not saying it. But you're going to have to ask me for the next part, because I want to hear you say it."

So I asked her. I told her I wanted to keep going, higher, right there on the lawn with the fence ten feet away, and I asked her plainly if she wanted it too. She reached up and pulled me down by the collar and kissed me, which was her way of saying yes out loud, but she also said the word against my mouth so there was no confusion.

The sky went from orange to purple while we lay there on the towel. We did not do everything we could have done. We did what day two called for, hands and mouths and her shirt pushed up and my own control fraying at the edges, and every so often one of us would glance at that fence and we would both grin like we were getting away with something.

Because we were. That was the entire point, and we had both finally admitted it.

She lay back afterward, breathing hard, looking up at the first stars. "Day three is mine," she said. "And Lance? I've been thinking about that empty pool."

Day three started midmorning, which surprised me. I figured she would wait for dusk like the rest of our little schedule, but she came out of the bedroom at ten thirty in a robe, carrying a paperback and a folded towel, and dropped the robe on the porch steps.

She had her bathing suit bottoms on and nothing above them. Thirty-six years old, two decades of swim meets in her shoulders, and she walked across her own lawn like the sun was paying her a compliment.

"You're staring again," she said without turning around.

"It's becoming a habit."

"Good. It's day three. Staring is encouraged." She spread the towel on the lounge chair, settled in, and opened her book. "The pool is empty, by the way. Drained for weeks. Nobody's out there. It's just a big concrete bowl and us."

"That's the entire plan? A lounge chair?"

"The plan is that I'm topless in my own backyard in broad daylight, and you have to come to me. I'm not doing anything. I'm just reading." She turned a page. "The doing is your problem."

So I stood in the kitchen like an idiot for a while, watching my wife read a thriller by the fence, and then I decided I had been sensible long enough for one lifetime. I walked out barefoot across the warm grass and knelt in the shade beside the lounge chair.

She didn't lower the book. "Hi."

"Hi. I'm going to kiss your hip now. That okay?"

"You're asking permission to kiss my hip."

"I'm a rule follower. It's day three of breaking that."

She set the book down on her stomach and looked at me. "Yes, Lance. Kiss the hip."

I started low, near the edge of the suit bottoms, and traced the line of her hip with my mouth, slow, following the bone. Her skin tasted like sunscreen and salt. She kept the book up for about a minute, and I could tell she was reading the same page four times, because the page never turned.

"You realize," she said, her voice a little rougher, "that the fence is right there. Anyone in that pool could look up."