Sand in the Sheets

The Saltwake Hotel sat at the end of the boardwalk like an old dog nobody had the heart to put down, three stories of faded teal siding and salt-stained windows, and I pulled into its empty lot at four in the afternoon on a Thursday in late October with a duffel bag and a bottle of rye and absolutely no good reason to be there, or at least no good reason I was willing to say out loud. The town of Dune's End had gone full ghost by then, the fudge shop shuttered, the arcade chained up, the boardwalk planks groaning under nothing but wind, and I suppose some people would find that depressing, but I had paid for depressing, I had booked it six weeks in advance, non-refundable, because depressing was sort of the whole point.

Here is the ritual, and I am aware of how pathetic it sounds, so let's just get it over with. Three years ago, in October, a woman named I'm-not-going-to-tell-you ended a five year relationship with me in a parking lot much like this one, and every year since, on the anniversary, I check into some fading seaside hotel alone, drink too much, stare at the ocean, and feel sorry for myself in a controlled environment where I can't embarrass anyone but me. I'm Ashley Kline, I'm thirty-four years old, I build decks and porches for a living, and my hands are rough in a way that makes massage therapists wince, which is a detail I will get to. Year one was a motel in Westerly. Year two was a place up in Narragansett. This year, the Saltwake, because the photos online looked properly sad and the room was cheap.

I carried my bag up the outdoor stairs, past a pool drained for the season and full of leaves, and pushed through the front doors into a lobby that smelled like old carpet and the ghost of breakfast buffet, and there behind the front desk sat a man in his late fifties with reading glasses and a crossword, a big soft man with a name tag that said CLARENCE. He looked up, took his time finding his voice, and said, "Checking in, sir, or just lost?"

"Checking in. Kline. K as in..."

"I got it, I got it." He was already sliding a room key across the counter, and then he paused, frowning at his computer screen the way older men frown at computers, like the machine has personally insulted them. "Well, huh. It says here you booked the package."

"Package?"

"The couples thing. Intimate Couples Renewal, massage for two, champagne, the works. You booked it, Mr. Kline."

I had, in fact, booked it, on a night in September when I had been drinking and feeling sorry for myself well ahead of schedule, on the theory that booking a couples package solo was the bleakest possible joke and I deserved the laugh. "Right, that. Look, I need to cancel that part. It was a mistake. I'll just take the room."

Clarence winced, and I could see the arithmetic happening behind his glasses, a nearly empty hotel, a payroll to think about, a man standing in front of him asking to remove money from the till. "Well, sir, I'd love to oblige, but the thing is our masseuse, she drove all the way out here for her shift, she's still on the property, and honestly you're the only appointment she's got all week..."

"Clarence, it's a couples massage. I'm one person. It's in the name."

"Mr. Kline."

And that was when the door behind the desk opened and she came out, and I will be honest about the moment, because I have replayed it enough times. She was twenty two, maybe twenty three, she introduced herself as Maddy Bowman while wiping her hands on a towel, a small woman with dark hair pulled into a messy knot and a cardigan over what I would later learn was a very small amount of clothing, and she looked at me with a frankness that made me stand up straighter. "You're cancelling on me?" she said. "The one appointment I have all week?"

"I'm sorry, it's just, the package is for two people, and I'm..."

"One person, yeah, Clarence told me. I don't care about the champagne. I need the hours, Mr. Whatever your name is, it's the off-season and I haven't worked in eleven days." She crossed her arms, and something in her face was not quite anger, it was more like a dare, like she had decided something about me already and was waiting to see if I would live up to it or disappoint her. "Come on. One hour. You'll feel better and I'll eat this month."

I want to tell you I resisted, that I cited dignity or grief or the sanctity of my annual pity spiral, but I was thirty-four and lonely and she was looking at me like that, so I said, "Fine, okay, one hour," and Clarence beamed at us both as a man who had successfully transferred a problem to someone else's desk, which in fairness is the entire job of hotel management.

* * *

The massage room was down a long carpeted hallway lit by buzzing fluorescents, one of those interior rooms with no windows, and Maddy had it fixed up with candles that were clearly hotel property and a radio playing something soft and indistinct. The lighting was low and warm and it made the room feel like it existed outside the building, outside the season, outside October entirely. She pointed at the padded table and said, "Okay, so, first step of the Renewal package is what my training calls guided relaxation, which is a fancy way of saying I talk at you while you settle in. You undress to your comfort level and lie face down, towel over the lower half, and I'll step out for a minute."

"Comfort level," I said, and my voice cracked slightly, which at my age and profession was humiliating.

"Everybody's different," she said, with a small shrug, and I noticed then that her hands, which had looked so sure on her hips, were actually fidgeting with the towel, folding and refolding the corner of it, and that made me feel weirdly better, like we were both pretending at this.

She stepped out, and I did the usual math, underwear or no underwear, and kept the underwear because I was raised right and also because I was terrified, and lay face down with my face in the cradle and listened to her come back in, the door, her bare feet on the tile, and then her voice, low and professional again, telling me to breathe, telling me to let my shoulders drop, and then her hands landed on my back and I remembered why I'd mentioned the carpenter thing, because she said "oh, wow, okay, you're all knots," and I laughed into the face cradle and told her that was the job.

She worked in silence for a while, and the silence was comfortable, the kind you get with strangers on a night when nobody has anywhere to be, and I was drifting, actually drifting, my anniversary and my rye and my parking lot all receding, when I opened my eyes by accident and got my first real look at her in the candlelight. She had traded the cardigan for a thin loose tank top, white or close to it, and these soft gray yoga shorts, and she had leaned away from me to reach for the oil on the little cart, and the light was behind her and the fabric was thin and there was nothing underneath it, and I could see her nipples, plainly, clearly, the exact shape of them through the cotton, and my breath caught in my throat like I'd swallowed one of the knots she'd been working out.

She didn't notice, or she pretended not to, reaching down to warm the oil between her palms, and I put my face back in the cradle and stared at the floor and told myself to be a normal person, a client, a professional, and my heart was hammering so hard I was sure she could feel it through the table, through my ribs, through everything.

"You doing okay over there?" she asked, her hands settling back onto my shoulders, and something in her voice I could not quite name, some little curve at the end of it, almost amusement.

"Great," I said, into the hole in the table. "Really great. Very relaxing."

"Mm," she said, and started working the oil down my spine, slow, and I lay there with my eyes shut and my pulse going like a jackhammer and wondered, in a distant and doomed sort of way, exactly what I had signed up for.

The oil went down my spine and along the backs of my shoulders and she worked it in slow, long strokes, and I have to tell you the thing about an hour of silence and warm hands and a dark room is that your body stops taking orders from your brain, which is how, after maybe twenty minutes, I realized with rising horror that I was not lying flat. The towel was tenting. Slightly. Noticeably. To anybody who happened to look, which, because I was face down, she could do freely and I could not monitor.