Floating in our swimsuits, we felt we were in danger. The manager-owner, a young Filipino, was sitting chopping up vegetables for dinner at the table that served as a docking station and restaurant for the place. He was a bodybuilder who’d been working at a multinational corporation in the Arab Emirates and one day struck up a friendship with a Russian who invited him to Cambodia to oversee his personnel in his resort a hundred meters up the river. After a few years, the Filipino led a mutiny against the Russian and his practices, and now he ran five stilt houses along with his wife, the chef, and his other mutineering colleagues. The huts were joined by a plank walkway that led down to the ground and to a kitchen and the workers’ lodgings built in stone. We’d discussed his story; it was frightening and seemed impossible: the Arab Emirates, then this lost place, and all the while taking the bus to the Phnom Penh airport and flying out to international (physique category) bodybuilding competitions.

Barbara and I started kissing in the water. I slipped my hand into her bikini bottom. She swam to the wood ladder, with me following, biting her on the ass while she climbed onto the platform and grabbed hold of the two wood posts: the rotten taste of her sponge-like, soaking-wet suit.

She pulled me toward the bathroom. We stepped into the shower; there was the smell of sewer. In bed we made love in just one position; Barbara drooled a little. And we spoke during it, what would you like to do, I want to know who you are, what would you do. I always talked about my fantasies, not her. This time she said: “I want us to be watched.”

“By men or women?”

“Men.”

Our words slipped from mouth to mouth in saliva.

“I don’t feel like your girlfriend.”

“You’re my wife.”

“You don’t make me feel like your wife.”

We were sweating, our faces touching, our eyes stinging. I dried my forehead with one corner of the pillow.

Afterward, we lay breathing under the mosquito netting hanging from the ceiling. We caressed each other’s hair, the breeze blowing in, and the green outside going gray. The river sliding by.

Barbara said: “I feel so strange. Like I’m about to have a heart attack.”

“You’re just too relaxed.”

“Oh, you think so?”

“You’re not used to being this isolated.”

“Maybe.”

I’d calmed her down, but her fear was contagious: “You sure your heart’s okay?”

We held hands and were quiet a moment.

I got to my feet and went to the bathroom for an anxiety med. We took thirty drops each and almost missed dinner, where we sat, stoned, at a table for two, drinking cold beer and poking at crimson crabs.