I had never seen him before. He smiled at me, seemed to know me, and then he introduced himself as Randy, from Louisiana, and he said he was in California for the week, on business. He looked over at my wife, who was talking with a few people a few feet away from us. "Your wife?" he said. I nodded, intending to introduce her when she was finished with her friends. "What would it take," he said, "to get a couple of nights with her alone?"
My head snapped up and I simply said, "Ah, what?" He repeated his question and I shook my head in disbelief. "You want to buy my wife for the night?"
"A couple of nights," he said. "How much? Everything has a price," he said. "Ten thousand? Twenty? Fifty? Name your price and I'll have her back by Sunday morning at ten." I couldn't believe my own ears. He was wanting to rent my wife for two nights. He was boldly asking how much I'd charge to let him sleep with her for two nights.
She finished talking with the people she'd been conversing with and came over to where I was standing next to the man who'd just asked to rent her for a couple of days. She nodded to him and smiled, then asked me to introduce her to my friend.
"He just asked me how much to rent you for a couple of days," I said. She smiled and looked him square in the eye, then turned her head to the side and squinted one eye.
"You don't have enough," she said without hesitation, giving him a smile that said there was not enough money in the world to buy time with her.
"I asked your husband to name his price," he said. "He refused, but I'm sure you could use money at this stage of your lives, like perhaps for your business. Maybe it is not as secure as it could be," he said as if he actually knew that. In fact, it hadn't been doing that well. We had, actually, been getting dangerously close to bankruptcy over the past year, but how would he know. "How much do you need to get the business back on its feet?" he asked with a grin.
"A quarter million," I said, "Give or take. You got that?"
"Then that's your price," he said with a confident grin. "Okay, how do you want it?" I shook my head.
"No way," I said. "That's crazy. You're not fucking my wife for two hundred and fifty thousand," I said adamantly.
"A half a million then?" he said. My wife and I looked at one another, realizing it would get us out of the hole that we were in. That it would save our business that was about to tank. It would mean we wouldn't lose everything. It would mean that the business would survive.
She looked at me and smiled. "Two nights?" she said.
"Don't decide right now. Think it over," he said. "Talk it out. Let me know by tonight. Five hundred thousand dollars, two fifty a night. Think about it."
On the way home she was silent until we pulled into the driveway. "We wouldn't lose everything," she said without looking at me, her gaze out the front window.
"You could fuck him for the business?" I asked.
"I could do anything for the business," she said softly, turning to open the car door. Inside we didn't speak for a couple of hours, until, actually, we were getting into bed. "It would solve all our problems," she said quietly. "Indecent Proposal," she said. "Robert Redford and Demi Moore."
"You could do that?" I asked.
"For the business," she said softly, climbing into bed and turning off the light.