WINNIE IS my one friend, and my only neighbor way up here on this mountain. She has short hair, which she dyes blond, and she’s married with two kids who are always coming over to my property to pick apples. Winnie exercises and eats right. In many ways, she is the opposite of me. That’s part of why we’re friends: so we can each see the road not taken, and we can enjoy the scenery along that road without having to walk it ourselves.

The apple tree stands midway between our two houses, with about an acre of land on each side. My lot is bigger than Winnie’s and more overgrown with raspberry bushes and milkweed and mountain mahogany and grasses. I tell Winnie’s kids to watch out when they come to pick apples, because there’s a bear around. Its scat is all over the place: big, apple-seed-laden piles. In fact, Joe and I had to search to find a place under the tree that was free of the stuff. I haven’t actually seen the bear, but I can smell the vinegar scent of its urine, the rank odor of its body, and I imagine it’s pretty fat by now and ready for winter. Winnie keeps an eye on the kids, but sometimes they escape out of the house when she’s trying to put bread in the oven, for instance. These kids were meant for the outdoors, and I think that’s great, but I worry about the bear.

Winnie’s marriage is a typical one, which means that sometimes it gets rough, but then it gets better. As far as I can tell, there’s not a lot of passion, but there is that blend of patience and knowledge and affection that marks long marriages. Except for the boredom part, it seems pretty appealing. The boredom would kill me, though. Winnie’s house is very organized. She lines up cans in one cupboard and plastic containers in another. She makes lists. Sometimes I envy the clean edges of her life, how marriage and motherhood seem to be enough to hold her together, although I don’t completely understand her for this very reason.

Winnie thinks I’m amusingly wild, and I like regaling her with stories. So when she came over that day for our usual five o’clock margaritas, I told her about Joe and me under the apple tree. Winnie’s kids, five and six, were playing in the grass, and Winnie and I sat wrapped up in blankets and drank our strong drinks and watched the sun set over the mountains. I told her about how Joe’s kisses had a certain pull to them, how his hands had a certain knowledge, how his fingers listened. I told her that it was startling, at this age, suddenly to be experiencing such orgasms: orgasms that came so easily, the muscle contractions spreading through my body with unexpected force; but orgasms that, despite their force, were grounded in tenderness. I had never believed that being with a man could seem so safe and gentle.

Winnie rubbed her fingers over her lips in a thoughtful sort of way and said, “Jeez, Gretchen, I wish I was having sex like that.”

She meant it too. I could hear it in her voice. So I said, “Well, a lot of days I wish I had kids.”

We like to lust after each other’s lives. Come right down to it, neither of us would trade what she has, but still, there’s that occasional yearning.

“I haven’t kissed someone new in thirteen years,” she said.

“I don’t have anyone to sleep with me at night,” I said. “Not most nights.”

“Well,” she said, “we could all use more than one life.”

We sat for a while and ate some of her homemade bread with havarti cheese and the last of this year’s raspberries, the sweet kind that grow over by the property line between my land and hers.

“Can I ask you something?” I finally said. “When you have an orgasm, during sex, you’re telling yourself a story in your head, right? You’re imagining another scene, other than the one that is occurring, right?”

“I think that’s probably true,” she said.

“Can you have an orgasm without it?”

Her eyes moved across the pasture, as if the pasture were the landscape of her brain and she were examining the horizon for memories. “I don’t think I can. I think I need the story. I’ll have to pay attention next time, to be sure.” She stuffed some bread in her mouth and looked up at the sky.

“Because I couldn’t. Come. Without a story,” I said. “But then, with Joe, I suddenly can. I mean, it’s ridiculous!” I told her I knew it sounded like I was doing a disservice to womankind by granting the man too much credit, by having too much pleasure, by exaggerating the possibilities. It was also just the beginning of an affair, not the part that tests and tries you. I knew that too. “But I just want to be happy right now,” I said. “I want to store these moments up for later.”

“That sounds smart,” she said. “Have another margarita.”

“I’ve had bad sex before,” I said. “Plenty of it. Bad sex, mediocre sex, ok sex. But suddenly this. It has to do with how there we are. It’s a whole different way of being, really. And it’s confusing my body. I just didn’t expect it.” I stabbed the knife into the havarti and looked at her.

She said, “Maybe you should figure out a way to make this work. And just so you know, married sex can be good too. It can be great.”

“I believe it.” I said this like I meant it, which maybe isn’t true, but I’d like it to be.

Winnie looked at me and bit her lip, and I could tell she was reminding herself of all the things she didn’t like about my life, so that she could confirm her choices. As part of righting herself, her eyes veered off to her kids, as if to say, There. That’s what you have. There they are.

“Can I ask you one more thing?” I said. “These stories in your head, they have some violence in them, don’t they? At least sometimes?”

Winnie raised her eyebrows and said, “Gretchen,” in that tone of voice you use with a child who’s gone too far. But then she backed away from it and sighed. She’s very patient. That’s another thing I like about Winnie: her great capacity for finding fondness for people, even after they’ve irritated her. Now she found her fondness for me and said, “Probably. Well, yes.”

I said, “I think most women link violence and arousal. Some buried evolutionary remnant or cultural leftover. It’s true for me. Or it was, before Joe. But here’s what I’m getting at; I was thinking about this while I was cleaning today: Humans are going to evolve. Someday, when you and me are long gone, humans will change for the better. This violence, it’s going to disappear; it’s just not going to be inside us anymore.”

Winnie gave me an endearing look and said, “Gretchen, that’s very optimistic of you.”

“I know,” I said.

"You seem very young today," she said. "It's lovely. Your cheeks are flushed."

“It’s ridiculous, I know,” I said. “I’m thawing. I’m evolving. And I’m sorry I sound this way, but I can’t help it. I don’t know what to do, because he’s a good man, and I’m in love.”

JOE HAS one strange quirk, I’ve come to find out: he will make love only outdoors.

“I can’t breathe inside,” he told me.

“It’s more comfortable inside,” I said. “There are things like beds and blankets and heat. Winter is coming.”

He shrugged. “I can do it. I’m capable of it. But I don’t like it, not as much.”

So I immediately started thinking of ways to meet his request: Blankets I could pull from the shed and wash. Sleeping bags. Perhaps a little tent.

Now we were under the tree again, mostly naked, but Joe’s green flannel shirt was thrown over my back for warmth. I was on top of Joe, and he was inside me. We had stopped to catch our breath and let our heartbeats calm, and he noticed, while he was flat on his back, that the bear had recently clawed the tree. The bark had been shredded away, leaving long, pale streaks of tender wood. What had happened, he surmised, was that the bear had gotten all the apples within reach, then had climbed to get the ones at the top.

“See, if we weren’t outside right now,” Joe said, “I wouldn’t have seen the bear’s claw marks. These leaves wouldn’t be falling through the sky. And I couldn’t watch the way the light hits your body. And they’re all very beautiful.”

That made me shy, so I laughed and said, “Schoolkids, that’s what we sound like.”

He said, “I know. It’s great.”

He leaned up to kiss me, and his hands went to my breasts, and his lips moved to my throat, which made my back arch, and then the nerve pathways traveling between my mouth and breasts and pelvis were all activated, and then his hands were on my hips, rocking me harder now, and there was a long period of me feeling good, so good that I had to hit the ground with my fist and could not help but moan and thrust my body into Joe’s with a violence that would have scared me had it not been matched by an equal tenderness. I was telling my body to come, come, and I was afraid I was going to go numb, but then the inside of my body broke out in a sweat — that’s what it felt like — and I heard myself making noises that seemed a little out of hand, and then an image flooded my mind, of Joe walking with his arms out, embracing the world, and I thought, Oh, yes, just let yourself do this, and he made his own animal noise as he came, and we both sounded like the wild creatures that humans can sometimes be.

For a long time Joe ran his hands over my back and front and thighs, and he told me about bears. This time of year, he said, a bear will spend almost twenty hours a day foraging. Now that they’ve switched from summer flowers and grasses to berries and apples, they have to work harder to get the calories they’re going to need for winter. Bears mate in the spring, but they have delayed implantation, which means the fertilized egg floats freely in the uterus all summer and implants in autumn. Joe said, “Black bears are solitary and intelligent and curious, just like you,” and he kissed me. “One of these days,” he told me, “we’re going to see this bear.”

When he was done talking about the bear, I talked about women and sex, since that’s what was on my mind. I told him that the reason women can come more than once is that after orgasm, a woman doesn’t return to an unaroused state, but rather to a preorgasmic level of arousal. Though I’d been aware of the female orgasmic capacity before I’d known him, I had been unable to have more than one. I said this was probably good for his male ego, but that wasn’t why I was telling him. I had my own selfish interest in the topic. I told him that these orgasms made me feel strong, and also that they smoothed over all the hurt in my life. I told him that I had recently decided that good orgasms took some concentration, some imagination, and a little spark of craziness. They also relied heavily on a feeling of safety and generosity.

Joe sat there, head propped on one hand, the other touching my body.

I said, “Do you have to be somewhere? Do you need to go?”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. Then I added, “The more orgasms a woman has, the stronger they become. The more she has, the more she can have.”

He seemed curious in the best way, willing to listen without expectation or judgment.

I said, “I just think you should know all this.”

He said, “I think I should too.” Then he leaned over to kiss my nose, and we made love again, and the only time I spoke was to whisper that I wanted him to feel good, too, and that he needed only to tell me what to do. Then I listened as hard as I could with my body. He was on top of me this time, and when he crumpled down on me and buried his head into my shoulder, I wrapped my arms around him and traced his back with my fingers.

While we were resting this way, a gunshot sounded from somewhere in the valley: hunting season. A flock of geese took off honking into the sky. I moved Joe aside so I could sit up. The world — the songbirds and mice and deer — seemed to stop, braced for danger, alert and waiting. I hugged my knees close to my body and breathed out and stared at the sky.

“You startle easily,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

Joe sat up beside me, and we stayed that way for a long time in silence. Winnie would be bringing her kids home from school soon. Since the apple tree is in full view of her house, we had to take her schedule into consideration. We waited until the last minute, then gathered up our things. After Joe climbed into his truck, he jumped right back out again to kiss me one last time, mumbling something about “Good God, I’m forty-two,” his eyes sparkling, and then he drove away.

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