When you arrive at Phil's bed and breakfast, for whatever reason, you know you should be there. You have decided that you and your wife need reconciliation in such a way that only lots and lots of sex and eating in bed can provide. Or you want to surprise your bigshot boyfriend with a trip that even he wouldn't have fathomed, complete with lots and lots of sex and breakfast in bed. Or maybe this is really the only place in the world where you and your super secret extra special lover can meet, where spies don't know, private eyes can't follow, and it doesn't occur to anyone that the person with who you are having lots and lots of sex and breakfast in bed with has a different last name than you do.

You are greeted by Neil, a septegenarian, who walks with an odd kind of shuffle-hop, due to a very sore back. Neil was one of the first customers at Phil's, back when he was a wee lad of thirty-three, and the sex he had was so incredible his back has never been the same, and when he retired, he knew he must spend his remaining days at Phil's. He has a permanent smile, a broad smile that takes up most of his face, and wrinkly eyes, eyes that that understand your predilection for stockings, candle wax, doctor's uniforms, or extra butter on your toast.

He has white hair in his head, lots of it, and on his sagging chest, coming out of his ears, his nose. He wears a perfectly black, very very expensive tuxedo jacket with no shirt beneath, bicycle shorts, and very expensive Italian loafers. Somehow, he gets your bags up to your room faster than you could have. Somehow, he knows exactly which room you think is perfect, and gives you the south-facing window so you can paint your loved one, that north-facing window so you can watch the wind whip the snow about the valley, that east-facing room so can watch the sunrise as you eat toast and lemon marmamlade with your new groom, or that west-facing room so you can watch the sunset as you debauch your new bride.

Neil knows, and that is why folks who come to Phil's more than once inevitably start calling him Mr. Wondeful. His laughter fills the manor, and has been the cure for more than one case of impotence for whcih the trip to Phil's was planned, has gotten more than one reluctant maide to eagerly pounce on her beaux, has reminded more than one elderly couple of the things they use to do when they were young and naughty, things they thought they had left behind, things for which the trip to Phil's was not intended, but which they are oh so glad they did. And Neil, Mr. Wonderful, makes the greatest Denver omelette that you have ever eaten in your life.

Phil's is a beautiful place. After Neil has shown you to your room and you have satiated the beginnings of your lusts, you can wander around the graceful halls and sit in the cozy rooms to chat with the other temporarily exhausted guests. The drawing room has green walls and a lovely white babygrand piano with an exotic array of tropical plants spilling from the top of it. The couches are plush, make you want to cross your legs and sip wine, the easy chairs are leather and perfect for smoking cigars, the lamps are tiffany and suggest that it is for such lamps that money was originally intended. One of Phil's famous seven Italian marble fireplaces is in the drawing room, where Mr. Wonderful keeps the embers at a ladylike glow.

In the library room, however, the fireplace is kept at a roar all day long. The books in their shelves reach up and stretch to the ceiling far above, though Neil is able to scramble up and fetch whatever tome catches your eye. They are not dusty, but the books smell of dust, like a good book should. Amongst the several hundred books there are seven copies of Lady Chatterly's Lovers, in which Neil has highlighted certain passages for you to read outloud to your loved one, five copies of Sons and Lovers, five copies of The Diary of An„is Nin, three of Henry Miller's Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus, and one of Ulysses. Also, there's Gastronomie pour les Amours and The Good Housekeeping Cookbook. Neil is eager to take requests. Couples are encourage to play Bridge or Hearts at the inlaid oak card table, to try their hands at some Chess (as foreplay), to drink what they like from the bar stocked in etched glass and tiki tumblers. Late at night, when the fire has been allowed to die down to put a few hardy coals, the library is empty, always, and midnight rendezvous on the oriental rug have managed to save more than one marriage.

The dining room holds another two of these fireplaces, because it is such a large room, because it has to fit the long dining room table. Phil's is a bed and breakfast, which means most meals are taken in one's room, but on certain holidays that guest are invited to a lovely Estonian buffet, with every form of fish know to man, caviar, crab, lobster, and no matter what time of year it is, asparagus, fresh asparagus. For desert, chocolate everything. Chocolate covered strawberries, chocolate covered rose buds, chocolate covered grasshoppers, chocolate cake, pudding, ice cream, mousse, even chocolate zwieback for diabetics and hypoglicimiacs. Phil's does not discriminate against anyone for any reason, so long as the person requests a a room for two.

Another fireplace is in the trophy room, a place for the men to retire as their better halves sleep, to sip brandy, port, or sherry (but don't tell the others). It's all dark oak, mahongany, and stained ash, with a deep maroon carpet and stiff, manly highbacks. There's lions' heads on the walls, tiger, zebra, ox, elephant, whale, tyranosaurus rex. The men sit around the fire, allowing it to calm their el n at maintaining rigid ability for hours at a time (must be the Estonian winter air), and tell each other war stories: the one in Saigon with the perfect eyes and penchant for biting, the one in the barn right above the horse stall while her father lurked in the shadows with a shotgun, the one in an alley, the one at home in the middle of the day with the curtains open and the children playing right outside, obvlious! Most of the stories aren't true, but that's okay, the brandy is good, the animals' heads have encouraging snarls on their snouts, and the fire makes everyone's eyes bright and alive.

Abd it doesn't matter how liberated a person is, how anti-sexist, how equalitist, how opposed ot gender roles- when women gather, it's often in a kitchen. They stand next to the black kitchen fireplace amongst the stainless steel and copper, cup warm cups of tea and coffee in their hands, and tell each other how wonderful their men are. Or they sit in bathrobes and sweat pants, the lingerie temporarily put away, (rips to be sewn later), and talk over cocoa about world affairs, the meaning of life, or Neil's wondeful homemade cheese danishes. Sometimes the women voice concerns of a copulative nature, and the others are eager to give the best and most sincerely friendly advice. Men are reluctant to to receive sexual suggestions, unless they are told it was a woman who suggested it. The women know this, and their cheeks glow as the discuss positions, the uses of touch, the best way to season a pork chop before broiling it.

The other fireplace- well, know one except Neil knows where it is. One can clearly see the chimney above the gables as one arrives, but if one carefully counts back in one's mind, one can only recall six fireplaces. One may have stayed in, over the years, all seven guest rooms, and none of them have the fireplace, though they have wondeful four poster beds with deep downy comfortors and tremendous as well as functional pillows, large bathtubs with claw feet and bedecked with bath oils, soaps, luffas, sponges, deep cedar wardrobes with a sturdy cross bar which will support the weight of a full-grown woman, and a lovely cherry wood china hutch where breakfast is served twenty-fours hours a day- but no fireplace. It's something to ask Neil about on one's next visit, but conveniently, one forgets about the extra fireplace in the anticipation of getting to that four poster bed, that bathtub, that wardrobe. That Denver omellete.