The Houseboat Secret

I lost my wallet at the church fair on a Saturday in June, which is the kind of thing that happens when you eat a funnel cake standing up and try to pay for it one-handed. I was twenty-eight years old and I had been in the town of Bell Harbor, Michigan, for exactly four days, up from East Lansing to do fieldwork on shoreline plants for my master's degree. My field contact was a man named Nathan who owned the feed store and who had already told me three times that the best coffee in town was at The Anchor and nothing else was worth discussing.

The wallet turned up the next morning, which I did not know yet when I pushed open the door of The Anchor at seven-fifteen with my pockets feeling wrong. A waitress about my age, short dark hair and a name tag that said Sammi, looked up from the counter and pointed a coffee pot at me like she had been waiting.

"You the botany guy?"

"That's me."

"Somebody brought your wallet in last night. Found it by the pie table at the fair." She slid it across the counter, and there it was, everything intact, cash and license and the sad little student ID I keep meaning to replace. "Marta found it. She said bring it by her place if you wanted to thank her, but mostly she said don't make a thing of it."

"That's a very specific instruction."

"She's a specific person." Sammi poured my coffee without asking and gave me an address out by the north dock. "She does acupuncture. Lives on a houseboat. You'll figure it out."

I figured it out that afternoon. The houseboat sat at the end of the quiet dock like it had been placed there by someone with strong opinions about serenity, painted a deep green, with a small sign that said Marta Foster, L.Ac. I knocked on the converted cabin door and a woman opened it who looked maybe my age, twenty-eight or so, with pale blond hair pulled back and the calmest face I have ever seen on a living person.

"You're the wallet," she said.

"I'm the wallet. Elliott." We shook hands and her grip was firm and brief. "Thanks for turning it in. I would have been pretty useless without a license and about sixty dollars."

"It was all there. I checked." She said it plainly, no charm in it, just a fact. "You're doing the plant survey for the county?"

"You heard about that?"

"Nathan tells everyone everything. It's his whole hobby." She stepped back from the doorway, not quite inviting, not quite not. "If you want to sit for a minute I have tea. If not, the wallet business is settled and you're free."

I sat. It was the tea that got me, but it was mostly her, the way she moved around the small cabin like noise was something she had opted out of. She was twenty-eight, she told me later, and she had lived on the boat three years, and she asked questions the way some people fire arrows, one at a time, all the way to the center. What was the lake like at night for the survey work. Did I like fieldwork or did I just like being outdoors away from advisors. How long since I had anyone cook me a real meal.

"Grad school," I said. "The answer is grad school."

"That's what I thought." She refilled my cup and did not push.

I booked a session for the following Tuesday before I left. I told myself it was because my shoulders hurt from hauling equipment, which was even true, but it was also because I kept thinking about that cabin all the way back to my motel room, and the quiet of her, and how she looked at you like she already had your number and was in no hurry to dial it.

The cabin smelled like mint and something woodsy, cedar maybe, and it was warm in the way rooms get when someone actually lives in them. She had me take my shirt off and lie face down on a padded table that had clearly seen thousands of people before me, and she worked in silence for the first ten minutes, just the small sounds of her moving and the lake slapping the hull underneath us.

Her hands were nothing like I expected. I had braced for something clinical and got fingers that found knots I did not know I owned and stayed on them with a patience that felt almost personal.

"Where did you learn to do that," I said into the face cradle.

"Four years of school and a lot of practice. Hold still." She pressed a point near my shoulder blade and something in my back let go with an almost audible pop. "You carry all your stress right here. Most people do."

"I carry it everywhere. I'm an overachiever."

I heard her laugh, a low short sound, and then needles went in along my back, little pinches that bloomed into warmth, and I lay there drifting for a while while she adjusted things. When she told me to turn over I did, half floating, and she worked on my forearms and then my hands, and that was where the session changed temperature. She held my left hand in both of hers and pressed a point in the webbing of my thumb and looked at me while she did it, a long unhurried look that had nothing clinical left in it.

"You're staring," I said.

"You're noticing." She let go of my hand slowly. "Most people fall asleep. You've been awake this whole time, watching me work."

"It's interesting work."

"It's not the work." She said it without any tease in it, just an observation, and she rolled her stool back a few inches and sat there with her hands on her knees. "Do you want to tell me what you actually came here for?"

I sat up on the table, needles out by then, and rubbed my face. "Honestly? I don't know. I've never been with anyone like you. I don't even know what that means yet, I just know I've been thinking about this boat for two days and I don't think it's the needles."

She nodded like I had told her the weather. "There's a thing I can offer," she said. "I've done it once before, a few years back, with a man who was only here for the summer. It worked fine. No expectations, no promises, nobody checking in on anybody. Just something secret and simple while you're in town. It ends when your fieldwork ends, whenever that is, and we go back to being people who nod at each other at the diner."

"And if one of us wants more than that?"

"Then that's the wrong arrangement for that person, and they say so, and we stop." Her eyes stayed on mine. "I'm not asking for anything, Elliott. I'm telling you what exists. You can think about it, or say no, and the Tuesday sessions keep happening exactly like this either way. They're billed like anyone's, they are separate from this, and they never depend on it. If it ever tangles up with the treatment, I refer you to a colleague in Traverse City and we sort it out like adults."

I looked at her hands, which were small and steady, and at the lake through the little window behind her, and I thought about how my one serious relationship had ended seven years ago, amicably, the way you end things when both people are just waiting for a bus going different directions. I thought about how long the summer was going to feel otherwise.

"Okay," I said. "I'd like that. The arrangement, I mean. That one."

"Good." She stood up and crossed the small distance and put one finger under my chin, tilting my face up to hers, and she waited there, not moving, giving me the whole length of a breath to back out. I did not back out. I leaned up and kissed her, and she kissed back with the same unhurried patience she brought to everything, like we had all the time in the world and she intended to spend it.

When we broke apart she was smiling a little, the first full smile I'd seen on her. "Still no expectations," she said. "But I lock the door when the sign is flipped. And the sign is about to get flipped."

She flipped the sign, and I heard the lock click, and then she stood there in the middle of her little cabin with the evening light coming through the windows sideways and turning her hair copper, and she said, "Come here, but come slowly. I like slow." So I came slowly, which turned out to be its own kind of torture and its own kind of reward, and we kissed standing up in the middle of her treatment room with the padded table behind me and a shelf of glass jars catching the light beside us.

Her hands went under my shirt and flattened against my stomach, and she made a small considering sound, like she was reading me the way she read backs and shoulders. "You're warm," she said. "Good circulation. That bodes well."

"For what?"

"For everything, hopefully." She stepped back, took my hand, and led me through a curtain into the back of the boat, which was a bedroom about as big as a generous closet, a bed with a quilt, two portholes, and not one other thing, which told me something about how she lived.

"Last check," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking up at me. "You want this. Plainly. Say it out loud, because I like hearing it and because I want no fog anywhere. And if anything stops being good, either of us says stop and we stop."

"I want this," I said, and my voice came out lower than I planned. "I really want this, Marta."

"Good. And I want you, plainly, out loud, so we're even." She reached up and started unbuttoning my shirt one button at a time, taking her time about it, and I put my hands over hers when she got to the last one because I wanted her to know I was paying attention to every part of this and not just the parts people usually mean.

We got each other undressed in the unhurried way of two people who have decided there is no clock, and I will not pretend I was graceful about it, I nearly fell over stepping out of my pants and she laughed into my shoulder, and then we were on the quilt and she was under me and over me and beside me by turns, and I learned that she liked her neck kissed and her ribs touched lightly and that she made a specific low sound when I did both at once. I asked before I went lower, because she had set the tone for asking and I liked it, I liked it a lot actually. "Can I use my mouth on you?"

"Yes," she said, on a breath, "yes, please," and the please undid something in me.

She was responsive in a way that felt generous, she told me what worked and what worked better, she pulled my hair a little at one point and apologized for it and I told her not to apologize, and when she came she did it with her hand over her own mouth and her eyes open, watching me the whole time, which was somehow the most intimate thing that had happened yet. Afterward she lay there catching her breath and then rolled over to the little drawer in the wall and came back with a condom, holding it up between two fingers. "New partner, new condom. House rule."

"Sensible house."

"I'm a sensible woman with bad intentions," she said, and tore the wrapper with her teeth, which did not seem sensible at all and was terrific.

She put it on me herself, slowly, watching my face while she did it, and then she climbed over me and sank down with a long exhale, and for a while neither of us said anything worth writing down, just her name a few times and mine a few times and some words that were not words. She rode me like she did everything, patient and thorough and then suddenly urgent, and when the urgency came she braced her hands on my chest and said, "Don't hold back on my account," and I did not hold back on her account. We finished more or less together, her second time, and she collapsed onto me with her hair across my face and the whole boat rocking gently underneath us like it approved.

We stayed like that for a while, sticky and slow, the portholes going from gold to gray. Eventually she peeled herself off, dealt with the condom, and came back with two glasses of cold well water that tasted like iron and lake, and we drank them sitting up in her bed like it was a thing we had done a hundred times. Then she reached over to the little shelf by the bed and picked up an index card, worn soft at the corners, and handed it to me.

"What's this?"

"A recipe. Chamomile, lemon balm, a little mint, steeped longer than you think you should. It's good for the days you carry stress everywhere." The handwriting on it was fine and slanted and old, the letters leaning like they were tired of standing up. "My grandmother's. She wrote out maybe