The Wrong Pitch

I signed up for the retreat on a Tuesday night in March, half a bottle of wine in, and I remember thinking it would either fix my life or at least interrupt it. I was forty-four, divorced, and I had spent six years working as a lifeguard at a community pool where the most exciting thing that ever happened was a kid losing a tooth in the shallow end. My last real relationship had ended when I was thirty-eight, and since then my love life had been a flat line. So when I saw the ad for a week-long French immersion retreat in Normandy, with camping and music and wine, I paid the deposit before I could talk myself out of it.

The campground sat on a grassy field behind a converted manor house that looked like it had been holding itself up out of stubbornness since the eighteen hundreds. The organizers had rented a mess of mismatched tents and stuck little paper signs on them with names. I walked the rows with my duffel bag over my shoulder until I found mine.

Except it wasn't mine exactly. The sign said Jon AND Michele, in two different handwritings.

A woman was already inside. I heard her before I saw her, humming something and rustling around, and when I unzipped the flap she looked up from a pile of sleeping bags like I was a delivery she had been half expecting.

"Let me guess," she said. "Jon."

"That's me. I think there's been a mix-up."

"There has. They double-booked this tent and everyone else is full. I asked at the desk. I'm Michele, by the way. I'm forty-one and I test translation software for a living, which is exactly as boring as it sounds." She stuck out her hand. "So, options. We complain for two hours and sleep in the dining hall, or we split the tent and complain from inside it."

She was my age, give or take, with short dark hair and the kind of direct eyes that make you stand up straighter. I dropped my bag. "I've slept in worse," I said, which was true, since the Navy had once put me in a bunkroom with a broken air conditioner in August.

"Good answer." She kicked the second sleeping bag toward me. "That one's yours. It smells faintly of a stranger's ambition, but it zips."

That first night we lay side by side in the dark listening to the rain start up on the canvas. The tent zipper was broken at the bottom, so a cold draft came in right at ankle height, and we traded jokes about it for an hour. She had a way of filling silence that I have never learned. She didn't babble. She just noticed things and said them, one after another, until you realized you had been laughing quietly into your own collar for twenty minutes.

"You breathe like a metronome," she told me around midnight. "It's soothing. Don't take that the wrong way, it's not romantic, it's like a white noise machine."

"Thanks. I lifeguard. Even breathing is part of the job."

"See, that's a good line. You don't even know you're funny." I could hear her smiling in the dark. "Goodnight, tentmate."

The next day was classes and bad coffee and a walk down to the rocky beach, where I watched her pick her way over the stones in boots meant for none of it, swearing cheerfully the whole way. That evening there was a group dinner in the manor, long tables and too much bread, and afterward some people drifted into the music studio, a converted room on the ground floor with a piano missing three keys and a shelf of borrowed instruments.

I found an old classical guitar with a buzz in the fifth string and sat tuning it by the window lamp while the party went on down the hall. Tuning calms me. You listen hard enough at something that nothing else gets in.

Michele came in at some point and sat down on the floor against the wall with her knees up and a glass of wine, and I didn't notice her at first. When I did, I almost lost the string I was tightening.

"Keep going," she said. "I'm not interrupting. I'm observing."

"Observing what?"

"Your hands. I like your hands. That's all. You can keep tuning." She took a sip of wine. "Steady, patient, careful. It's a whole personality right there in ten fingers."

I felt my ears go hot, which at forty-four is an embarrassing thing for ears to still do. I finished the tuning, played half a verse of something old, and she hummed along off key on purpose just to make me laugh. Then she stood up, stretched, and said she was turning in.

"Walk with me," she said at the door, and it wasn't a question, but it also was, because she waited until I set the guitar down.

Back in the tent we got into our sleeping bags and the draft found our ankles again and she said nothing for a while. Then, out of the dark, casual as asking the time:

"Jon. Have you ever been with somebody who actually knows what she's doing?"

I laughed, then realized she wasn't joking. "What do you mean?"

"I mean in bed. Have you been with someone who knows what they're doing, and knows they know it?"

I thought about it honestly. "My ex-wife was strictly missionary," I said. "Twelve years of it. Lovely woman. Very predictable."

"Mm." In the dimness I could just make out her grin. "Then you're in for a treat."

I should say plainly what I mean by that, since this is a story about what happened and not about a vibe. Michele was a woman who knew her way around a body, hers and mine, and over the rest of that week she taught me things my marriage had never once touched, including how much I could enjoy taking a cock, which she happened to own a very good one for the purpose. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That second night we only talked. She told me about her last long boyfriend, a man she'd been with from thirty to thirty-five who thought adventurous meant trying a different restaurant. She told me she liked people who could keep up. I told her I was out of practice at everything and she said practice was the fun part.

The third evening was warm and the field smelled like cut grass and woodsmoke from the fire pit. After dinner Michele sat cross-legged on our sleeping bags with her bag open in her lap, digging.

"I found something at the flea market in the village today," she said, and held it up. It was a small brass key, old, maybe two inches, with a round hollow bow and a blunt edge. "Probably from a strongbox or a cabinet. The dealer wanted a euro. I paid two because I liked him."

"It's nice," I said. "Is it for a lock you're going to find?"

"Maybe. Right now it's for this. If you're willing, sit up and take your shirt off."

I looked at her. She looked back, calm, no games in her face at all, and that calm did more for me than any amount of sultry would have. I pulled my shirt over my head.

"Lie on your stomach."

I did. The sleeping bag underneath me smelled like campfire and somebody else's detergent. She knelt beside me and I felt the key touch the back of my neck, cool and smooth, the blunt