Dear Bettina,
Perhaps you don't remember me, but I hope you do. We met at the Arch Cape Writer's Retreat in Oregon three summers ago. I'm sure you recall the craggy cliffs overlooking the Pacific and that stretch of shoreline with its rugged outcroppings and postcard-quality niches. You likely remember the quaint A-frame writing domiciles, and the heavy-timber longhouse where we'd all converge in the evenings to have a meal and then read aloud our day's scribblings.
I don't know about you, but I wrote very little that weekend. Between the two of us, we didn't have much to share at the communal table. We didn't really have the chance. No doubt you remember Claire, the grandmother who effectively ran the table. Every evening, without fail, Claire had a new and overwrought erotic flash fiction to orate. It was sex without context, straight-up explicit ripped-bodice intercourse in unrelenting purple prose, third-person omniscient. You and I shared more than one rictus of disapprobation as she waxed sexual. And yet everyone else, all the other silver-haired ladies and the one balding man, lapped it all up, as did the instructor. By the end, the other grandmothers were reeling off erotic flash fictions of their own, and so too was the bald guy—his name was Dale, I'm remembering now.
But I wasn't writing anything. I spent most of the daylight hours staring out the window, waiting for waves to crash up against the rocks. They rarely did. Each day, with each new erotic fiction I heard, I grew more and more disconsolate. By day five, I'd convinced myself I had nothing to offer in writing that any audience would want. They wanted no context. I thought perhaps you felt something similar. I'd see you out on your veranda every few hours, one arm propping up the elbow of your smoking hand, lit cigarette pulsing against the fog. On day six, I decided to walk over and join you.
I asked you for a smoke and you indulged me. I asked how you were liking the retreat and you said you'd like it a lot more if the erotica was worse. I laughed. You said it had yet to reach that hallowed “so-bad-it's-good” territory, though Dale's erotica came pretty close—you called it “très male-gazey,” and I kept laughing, because that was by far the best construction I'd heard all week. I asked if you were writing and you said yes, sort of, but just letters. “Love letters?” I asked, thinking it was right en pointe. Letters were for friends only, you said almost gravely. Emails and texts were for lovers—you always wanted to have a digital record for when the gas-lighting started. I snorted a laugh at that, too, as if it were obvious. I told you I was totally blocked and didn't know why. You pointed out that realizing you'd unwittingly paid hundreds of dollars to attend what amounted to an erotica workshop for sexagenarians could only really inspire disdain. You mentioned Claire's name, barely above a whisper. She'd been going on about adding everyone on Facebook, so you said you'd temporarily deactivated your account. I laughed and you laughed. You said you needed to get away, clear your head, take a retreat from the retreat. You were going to go to the beach, see if that stimulated anything. You told me to try writing a letter to someone or taking a walk. “That might get the creative juices flowing—that's how Claire would phrase it,” was what you said.
I tried the letter thing but I had no one I could write to, so I went for a walk. I made my way along a footpath that wove across the rocky incline. It took me down the cliff-side and back up, and I wound up on an outcropping overlooking a cove. The fog cleared and I spotted you down below—your hair was unmistakable, red as a lit cigarette. You'd lain down on the rocks, your bathing suit beside you.
A few seconds passed and I felt très male-gazey, so I turned away. But you'd seen me—you called my name. You made no mad scramble to cover yourself. You waved me down. I stepped off the path and went gingerly down the rock-face in a daze. When I got out on the rocks in the cove, you told me I was overdressed. I mumbled that I hadn't packed a suit. You spent several minutes convincing me that it didn't matter. Finally, I stripped down. I joined you on the rock. I don't remember what we talked about. The waves were getting up. You suggested we walk down the beach. Then you were taking my hand and . . . I truly hope what happened after that was memorable. For me, it was a blur—things such as that never happen slowly enough, but I remember that the feeling was exquisite, like a slow dance in fast-forward.
Anyway, we got dressed again and took the long route back to the retreat. A few of the sexagenarian erotica writers milled around their verandas, eyeing us leeringly. We'd be inspiration for their last afternoon of writing, perhaps. But when we reconvened at the longhouse, they were all rather restrained. It was as if contemplating the possibility of an honest-to-goodness, non-fiction liaison in such close proximity had stifled them, had obliterated their imaginations. Claire had nothing to share. She seemed almost bashful.
The closing session commenced the next morning and we all exchanged muted goodbyes, but afterwards I was not nearly as restrained as the rest. I told you that I really liked you and that I wanted to stay in touch. You seemed hesitant, like maybe you weren't as much into me as I was into you. I asked for your contact info, a phone number or email or anything, and you gave me your address—that is, your postal box—so I took that as a gentle let-down.
In the months and years since to follow, I've resisted the urge to write you, not wanting to look clingy or stalkerish. A few times a year I remember your laugh or your smile and get the urge to write, but I resist and then everything is left unwritten. Writing to you would be unseemly. You're a charming young woman, and I came to accept that I'd likely been consigned to a welter of forgotten would-be suitors who didn't quite meet your mark for more than a tryst.
But then, last week, I saw something on Facebook, and I couldn't fight that urge any longer. You see, when Claire tried to add us all on Facebook, I accepted her request. I never did unfriend her. And since the Arch Cape Writer's Retreat, she's apparently further expanded her audience. She has a successful erotic blog and a bestselling eBook culled from her finest posts. Her faithful are always clamoring for something new. Sometimes I click on the latest link, stopping to check it out much as one does a car accident—it's a sort of literary rubbernecking, I guess. Just last week I came upon the following piece, the sample story from her forthcoming collection. It's entitled “The Beach Lovers,” and I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting it here in its entirety.
They kiss without surcease, pressed against the wall of rock. She leads him across the smooth, soaking stone that girds the cove, and he follows, reluctant by virtue of his confusion. He hardly knows her. She would be his muse.
She takes him to the sodden sand. She casts aside her swimwear. Her hair is brick red, her breasts small and ardent. She undresses him. He's handsome enough, body firm but for an endearing curve of a belly. His face twists with querulousness. The tide twirls inquisitively toward their feet and draws back.
But his member leaves no questions. It stands stiff, reaching outward and upward as if en route for a celestial body. She wraps her fingers around it, hefts it. He stares agape at her searching hand. Her fist works, torquing while exploring his length.
Her next measurement is with her mouth. Her knees sink into the sand. As she enthrones his manhood's ruddy crown atop her tongue, she caresses him, rumpling the tender skin and stretching it smooth again over his span. Her sopping sex hovers over soaked sand, and soon enough she explores herself. She secures him within her lips, teetering eagerly, admitting more of him into her mouth. Now both hands work at her prim archway, one prying, one fingering.
All the while, his head swivels both ways. His pleasure shatters his sheepishness. The tide reaches up, touching their feet and drawing back.
She stands up, pulling him down. She presses his head into her sex, grinding against his face. He pulls back, gasping, but he can't keep away. His tongue lolls toward her. She pulls herself apart, legs bowing out in a diamond shape. He licks her almost daintily, his eyelids and tongue aflutter. When he's found that bejeweled niche, her hands play in his hair and then in her own. His tongue incarnates the tides, so persistent is his lapping. Her skyward scream is cancelled by the crash of distant waves.
She pushes him away and pulls him up, gripping his member again, tugging it harder, baring her teeth. She stakes her feet in the beach, legs at shoulder-width parting, and she feeds him into her. She takes the bulb of his shoulder in her palm. He shrugs into her, deeper and deeper. His face distends with reverence and wonderment. She stares through him.
The tide swirls and foams beneath them, crawling past them, including them in it's embrace whilst insinuating itself in theirs. A froth rises up on her mons, frosting her rubicund pubic strip.
Her gaze breaks, whelmed by his speeding thrusts. Her mouth opens and closes. She blinks rapidly. She draws back, slipping off him. She regains her equilibrium by turning her back to him, raising her leg. She sets her foot in his palm, and with that, she accomplishes the arabesque à la hauteur.
He eases into her again and thrusts with more purpose now. His gaze fixates, spiralling in on her elegant body, suspended as it sustains each salvo from his enlivened haunches. He bares his teeth and clenches his fist on her foot. She declares her passion, and her pleasured shriek echoes off the rock face, skirling around in the cove.
He releases her foot and she makes an elegant spiral around and down, knees splashing through the tide and sinking again into the sand. She pulls him to her, but not down. She stays him with her mouth once more. She pushes together her breasts, kneading and squeezing.
His manhood springs free from her lips and then, as the tide snakes through them, rushing back to the ocean, he releases beads of glimmering white from the empurpled helm. The lion's share of his seed finds the retreating water. Mingled in the sinuous foam, his semen is carried out to the sea.
He collapses to his knees, falls into her embrace. He kisses her shoulders and her arms.
But she is standing again. He tries to pull her back down to him, to lie with her in the sand and await the next turn of the tide, but she is walking away. She leaves fresh footprints in the sand. He's paralyzed, watching her go, not dropping his gaze until she has evaporated into the fog climbing down the rock. He looks as if he's seen a ghost.
He drops into the sand, letting the ocean rush up around him. His muse has come and gone, but unlike the tides, she will not return. When her footprints have been erased, he pulls himself up with extraordinary effort and slouches onward, trying to retrace her steps.
Does that seem at all familiar? Because when I read it, a lot came back to me out of the blur. I mean, those lines referring to the “sopping sex” and the “empurpled helm” read a bit too heavy-handed and are neither here nor there. I'm humbled by the “length” line, though I'm less impressed with the “belly” reference. I don't remember the encounter being so showy or acrobatic, as lovely as it was. And I must say, I have no recollection of the coitus interruptus into the tide—if that truly happened, I hope you were cool with that. Either way, that part about semen returning to the sea is just sophomoric.
But looking past all that, I'd say Claire has altogether improved. As much as the experience and the memory has been reduced to pulsating glimpses that have fogged over, the feelings are vivid and precise. Those still live in my skin and bones, and Claire's conveyed more than a bit of it all—the apprehension, the bewilderment, the exertion, and the release.
Yet at the same time, she can't quite capture just how magnetic you felt and how close you pulled me. She doesn't have anything about how our kiss tasted like cigarettes.
And it keeps drawing me back. I find myself rereading Claire's piece and remembering more. I like it a little more every time. Is it so bad it's good? Or is it just good? Even though she's taken creative license with the ending, it nonetheless rings true—when I think of you, it feels like maybe I did watch your footprints smoothing away to nothing in the sand. Perhaps you were my muse, because I haven't written anything since.
Even if you and I will only ever have the beach, it sort of heartens me that someone could make something resembling art out of it. It would have been better, however, if it could have been something more than flash fiction.
Yours Truly,
John
