The Off-Season Rules

I've lived in Crescent Beach for two years now, and I can tell you exactly what winter is like here. It's like somebody turned the whole town off at the switch after Labor Day. The population drops to a few hundred people, half the shops nail plywood over their windows, and the fog comes in and just sits there like a houseguest who won't leave.

I'm Dillon, by the way. I'm 53, recently divorced, a carpenter by trade. I moved here two years ago when the divorce finally went through, and I bought the cheapest fixer-upper on the street, a little cottage with peeling paint and salt-rusted railings that I've been slowly putting back together. It keeps my hands busy. It does not keep my brain busy. There's only so much sanding a man can do before he starts talking to the sander.

So that was me, last November, standing on my porch one grey Saturday afternoon with a mug of coffee, looking at absolutely nothing happening. The tide was out. A gull was screaming about something three streets over. That was the entertainment. That was the show.

And then my neighbor came out onto her porch, and I swear I have never been so glad to see another human being in my life.

Henrietta is 49, a retired kindergarten teacher who bought the cottage next to mine three years ago. She wanted peace and quiet, she told me once, and she got it, and now I think the peace and quiet is driving her as crazy as it's driving me. She was out there in a wool coat and a scarf wrapped up to her chin, holding her own mug, and she looked at me across the strip of dead grass between our places like I was a mirage.

"Please tell me something happened to you this week," she said. "Anything. A raccoon. A parking ticket."

"Henrietta, the high point of my week was a delivery truck. And it was the wrong address."

"Oh, that's tragic." She laughed and came down her steps to the property line, and I walked over to meet her, because when your entertainment options are that thin, you take what you can get. "I read an entire novel this week, Dillon. A bad one. On purpose. Because I had nothing else."

"You finished it?"

"I finished it and then I read the acknowledgments. That's how starved I am."

We stood there complaining for a good twenty minutes, and I'll be honest, it was the best conversation I'd had in a month. There's something about the off-season here that makes two neighbors standing at a fence line feel like a party. She told me about the church potluck she'd gone to where the average age was somewhere north of seventy. I told her about the one bar in town and how on a Tuesday night in November it was me, the bartender, and a fisherman who'd fallen asleep in his chowder.

"So here's what I think," she said, and there was a gleam in her eye that I probably should have paid more attention to. "We're both bored. We're both adults. We're both single, as far as I know."

"As far as you know, correct."

"Then let's make things interesting. Let's do something foolish and fun, and let's write rules for it so it stays foolish and fun and doesn't turn into some big emotional production. Because I have been through the emotional production phase of my life and I am officially retired from it."

I blinked at her. "What exactly are you proposing, Henrietta?"

"I am proposing a neighborly dalliance. A winter arrangement. November to whenever the tourists come back and we remember we have other things to do," she said it as plain as if she were proposing a carpool. "Well? Are you going to stand there with your mouth open, or are you going to get a napkin?"

"Get a napkin?"

"We're writing the rules. Rules are what keep it fun. Come on, I have a pen inside and you have nothing better to do, and if you say no I'm going to be reading acknowledgments again by four o'clock."

So I said yes. Obviously I said yes. A man can only take so much excitement from delivery trucks.

We sat at her kitchen table and she found a paper napkin from a diner somewhere and a pen that only sort of worked, and we hunched over that napkin like it was a treaty. She insisted on dictating and I insisted on writing, and this is what we came up with, seven rules, and I still have the napkin in a drawer, creased and coffee-stained and one of my favorite possessions.

Rule one, no kissing on the mouth. She was firm on that one. "Mouths are for talking and eating. Everything else is fair game." I wrote it down.

Rule two, no taking off all clothes. "Somebody always keeps something on," she said. "It keeps it silly. Silly is the point."

Rule three, no furniture. "Floor only. I don't want anyone getting comfortable."

Rule four, no loud noises. "The Hendersons are close enough to hear a shout, and I will not be a story at the post office."

Rule five, no staying overnight. "You go home when it's done. Nobody wakes up next to a neighbor."

Rule six, no dessert. I asked her what that even meant and she shrugged. "No romantic dinners. No candles. No bringing me chocolates like it's February. This is not a courtship."

And rule seven, no saying the other's real name. "Pet names only. If I hear my own name I'll feel like I'm at a faculty meeting."

"Wait," I said, looking at the list. "Rule four is no loud noises, but you're a kindergarten teacher. You spent thirty years being loud on purpose."

"Retired, Dillon. I'm retired from that too." She took the napkin and read it over, and nodded once, and tucked it under the sugar bowl. "There. Foolish, fun, and contained. Are we agreed?"

"We're agreed."

"Then take off your coat," she said. "It's cold on my porch and I refuse to break rule four on the first day."

Now, I want to tell you I played it cool walking the ten feet from her kitchen to her back porch, but I was fifty-three years old and I hadn't been with anyone except my ex since the Clinton administration, so my hands were probably shaking a little. She led me out to the porch, which had a roof and a windbreak on one side and a view of nothing but grey dune grass, and she turned around and looked at me with her hands on her hips like a woman about to inspect a drywall job.

"Floor only," she reminded me. "And nobody's naked. Rule two starts now."

"Anything else before we begin, teacher?"

"Just this. If anything stops being fun, we say so, and it stops. Deal?"

"Deal."

She pulled her scarf off first, then her coat, and then she grabbed the hem of her sweater and hauled it over her head in one motion, and I did the same, and I will tell you, stripping down to your underwear on a cold porch in November with a neighbor you've only ever talked to about raccoons is the fastest cure for boredom I have ever found. We were both shivering and laughing by the time we got down to the last layer, her in a plain white bra and cotton underwear, me in gray boxer briefs that had no business being seen in public, and the cold air on my skin was doing nothing for my dignity.

"Sweetheart, you're shivering," she said, and she'd already got rule seven going, pet names only.

"You're blue, honey. Some arrangement. We'll freeze before we break rule two."

"Rule two is in danger right now, that's all I'm hearing." She spread her coat flat on the porch boards and laid down on it, patting the space beside her. "Floor only, like the rules say. Come here before the Hendersons see something that needs a story at the post office."

So I got down on that coat beside her, cold wood underneath, cold air everywhere else, and she rolled onto her side facing me and put her hand flat on my chest, right over my hammering heart, and held it there.

"Well," she said. "The heart works. That's a good sign at our age."

"Give me a minute and the rest will report in too."

She laughed, and I pulled her against me for warmth, and we lay there on the porch floor in our underwear figuring out the geography of each other like it was a puzzle we had all winter to solve. Her skin was cold and then warm where I touched it. My hands learned the shape of her back and she made a small pleased sound, carefully quiet, rule four already in effect, and pressed her mouth to my throat.

"No lips," I managed. "That's, mm, that's rule one."

"I know what the rules are. I wrote half of them." She lifted her head and grinned at me, and her hair was everywhere and her eyes were bright as a kid's on the last day of school. "Honey, you want to know a secret? I'm going to enjoy breaking these rules even more than following them. Starting with rule two."

She reached back, and I heard the clasp of her bra click, and that was the end of the first ten minutes of the arrangement.

So there we were, her bra gone, both of us laughing at the sheer audacity of it, and she pressed in close and said, "Your turn, sweetheart. Fair's fair."

"Nobody said fair."

"Everything about this arrangement is fair, that is the point of the rules." But I didn't take anything off, because my hands were busy, and hers were busy, and we were lying on a coat on a porch floor warming each other up like a couple of teenagers, except neither of us had been a teenager since the Reagan administration, so maybe more like two adults who knew exactly what they were doing and were doing it anyway.

Her mouth was at my ear and I felt her breath and she whispered, "You know, honey, you're in good shape for a man who hammers things for a living."

"Carpentry keeps a man honest."

"Does it keep him warm?"

"Why don't you find out." And she did, she pulled me tighter and ran her hands up my back and I did the same to her and we were generating heat, actual heat, out there in the November grey.

Then something funny happened. I can't even tell you what it was. Maybe I said something dumb about the Hendersons or she made a face, but she burst out laughing, that real laugh, the kind that shakes the shoulders, and she tipped her head back and I turned at the same moment and my mouth, which had been aiming for her jaw, landed square on her lips.

Not a peck. A full mouth-on-mouth kiss, dead center, rule one shattered like a windshield.