Sven

I know that’s not your real name. Forgive me, I’ve forgotten it. It’s been over a year since our paths crossed, and then it was only for a moment. You’ve likely forgotten me altogether. You seem like the kind of man who meets a lot of people.

I’ve forgotten your name but not your face, etched with the lines of good living (wind, sunlight, smiling), and above it, that wild, Germanic mane. Your forehead, nose, and cheekbones were that mask of coarse tan you see on people used to defying their natural pallor, a shade of brown that on closer inspection is actually accreted pink. Your hands were as broad and thick as bear paws. You seemed a different breed entirely.

I didn’t forget your name, actually. I never learned it. I heard you say it, but it passed through the net of my comprehension like water. I wondered about that later. At first I attributed my forgetting to a fog of inattention that had settled over me, a symptom of the tyrannical melancholy I was living under then. I failed to make memories of many things that happened to me during that period. But I find I can recall nearly everything else about meeting you, and I’ve begun to see how your name might have held a certain menace for me. I think my mind would not permit the syllables of your specificity to lodge there and risk unraveling the unhappy stability of my life.

Of course I couldn’t see then how badly it needed unraveling, how inevitable the undoing would seem to me when it was done. That all came later and began much in the way my subconscious feared it could with you—the embedding of a stranger in my thoughts. But that’s not what I want to tell you about. Let’s just say that you were a sort of prototype.

When we met, I was lying on a blanket on the sand, reading, remember? It was a cracked-spine tatter of a book I’ve read many times. I’d picked it up again looking for comfort, that sense that the author was a real human person, conjured by his words, speaking to me. That summer I’d decided to reread everything he ever wrote. Devoting myself entirely to this small project seemed like as good a plan as any. It was enough of a future to get me through the day at least. For months despair had been gathering like a storm, a thunderhead looming on the horizon of my life. I felt it coming in my bones: heaviness, a lethargy so profound it was existential. Back then I believed I was depressive by constitution. So did my husband.

I was on my back, blocking the sun with the paperback, and my arms tingled from the effort. Then suddenly a great gray head knocked the book away and descended on me, smelling me out between blasts of meaty, chuffing breath. A beast’s black nose stamped my cheek wet, his pink tongue lifted salt from my collarbone, and a man’s voice called, “Hey! Bruno! Hey, get!” The dog withdrew and your face slid into view overhead, white teeth and apologies. 

If you remember me at all, you probably remember this, though your version would be different, the counterpart to my memory. What did I look like to you, lying there on the beach? It was early fall, still warm in the sun, and my legs and arms were bare. Did you see me before Bruno did and let the dog loose on purpose? Or did you follow him down to the beach and find him already upon me?

I can still picture your expression as I scrambled to my feet—jolly bemusement, no trace of smirk. You looked at me, then beamed hearty delight out toward the sparkling sea, the exact shade of your eyes. The possibility that you might be intruding did not occur to you. "If this isn't nice," you said, "what is?" The tone of your voice was deep and rich but your accent strung the words alongs peaks and valleys of intonation, which, with your cheer, gave it a lilting quality. 

You can’t imagine how strange it all seemed, Sven. You were pulling your t-shirt over your head in that boyish way—though you were very much a man—tugging from the back of the collar like you couldn’t wait to feel the sun on your body. In the center of your barrel chest was a patch of golden hair. I felt a dreamer's disorientation but couldn't tell if I was crossing the line of sleep or wakefulness. We watched your sheepdog loping in the surf. You grinned at me, then offered your name and a wide, calloused hand for me to shake. 

My husband appeared then, sliding a little on the dunes. I think he'd been down to the beach only once or twice in the three days that we'd been there so he hadn't learned to take the path of packed wet sand that ran along the creek. He spent most of his time up at the campsite, fiddling with the solar battery pack, adjusting the firmness of the mattress pad, and “optimizing the internal temperature" of the family-sized blackout tent by lifting and lowering the shades in concert with the ever-changing cloud cover conducted by offshore winds. He was a techie playing at outdoorsy. 

It had been a fight to get him to agree to take the time off, and then a week before the trip, he bamboozled me by buying a carload of REI gear with money we didn’t have. Maybe this was his way of atoning for his initial resistance, an apology with the promise of future camping trips imbedded inside it. I think this is what people mean when they say someone’s heart was in the right place. They never say how much more it takes than that. All I could see was the credit card statement and the fussiness of all that stupid gear, and I couldn’t see anything through the rear windshield of our car. The trip I planned, the gear he bought—these things seemed like heart, little sacrifices on the altar of our marriage. Could we have known that by then those overtures amounted to nothing more than offal?

My husband greeted you by saying, "So you're the new neighbor." You nodded, shook his hand. I understood this to mean that the kids who had the campsite beside us last night had gone. Too bad. You would have liked them. I heard them tell my husband they were driving up the coast before their fall semesters started, one last hurrah before they went their separate ways for college. They had two acoustic guitars and a pup tent. The boy strung a cloth hammock between two trees and they spent the afternoon cocooned inside it, one of the girl's tanned, coltish legs extending occasionally to toe the dirt and set them swinging again. At sunset, he made a fire and she stepped into boots and a pair of cream-colored knit socks that she pulled up over her knees. 

Over the flames of our own fire I watched them make a feast out of a box of Cheez-Its, a package of hotdogs, and a bottle of Charles Shaw red. My husband had something gamey bubbling in the dutch oven over the fire and two burners of a Coleman portable going. He was wearing a headlamp and flicking between recipes on his iPad. He waived off my offers to help, but from time to time he’d turn to ask again why I refused to sit in the ultra light chair he set up for me next to his by the fire pit. I sat on a boulder with my back to the dunes and told him it was because the chair was downwind from the smoke. 

   That night, the wind was low, and over the distant crash of surf, I could hear the kids fucking in their tent. Every so often the girl would laugh, a silvery little peal, and then they’d resume their moaning with greater enthusiasm. I pictured her astride him, their single sleeping bag an unzipped tangle. In the moonlight of my imagining, sweat dripped down the satiny brown facets of the girl’s belly, and her tits were twin teardrops of creamy white to match the knee socks she still wore. She leaned back in her seat and rode him with fierce control, then stooped forward beneath the low guy line of the pup tent to offer her puffy pink nipples to his mouth. He sucked them as she bore down deeper on his cock. When he bit at the border between pale and tan along the tender outer curve of her breast, out spooled the music of her laugh, which dissolved into panting grunts as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her mouth to his. 

I reached inside my sweatpants and found the hair sopping with arousal. The fullness of my physical response startled me. It had been a long time since desire made an instrument of my body. I began to stroke my pussy in time to their lovemaking. At first the sensations were so powerful I thought I wouldn't be able to bear them, but soon the kids’ rhythm had my hips thrusting to meet my fingers. I bit my lip to keep quiet and felt myself on the crest of a crushing orgasm, when suddenly, as quick as it had come, the wave deserted me. I gave chase for a few fumbling minutes, but it was no use. The situation had turned sickly, sapped of sexiness. I felt foolish, sticky with sweat inside the oppressive insulation of the sub-zero sleeping bag. I rolled onto my side and pretended to ignore the sounds of the kids' perfectly synchronized climaxes, while my husband snored beside me in his own synthetic sarcophagus.

He and I still fucked from time to time in those days, the demands of biology filtered through conjugal obligation. But I couldn’t have told you the last time we’d been really intimate. Genuine, spontaneous affection had long since dried up, leaving behind those pruny pecks of greeting and goodbye. That’s why I was surprised to feel his arm draw around my waist as we stood there with you on the beach, Sven. You’d just finished saying the name of the town where you lived, another name I would never remember. I flinched a little at my husband’s touch—did you catch that? In any case, you understood my husband’s meaning a beat before I did. “Ah, well,” you said, still smiling, and threw your arms open to the sea. “Bruno!” You called to your mutt and jogged down to the water to meet him.

In the campsite next to ours sat your late-model Allegro motorhome, charmingly dilapidated, like you. That night, a rope of purple lights was strung above your windshield. I sat on my boulder seat by the fire and looked at those lights and wondered what the inside of your camper looked like. My husband said my name sharply. “You know that chair is moveable, right? You can pick it up and put it anywhere you want to.” Touché. A few months later I would start to really rearrange things, to play with portability and find out what was moveable and what was not.

Tonight as I was walking home I saw an old Allegro parked along the north side of the park. It’s been tent-city over there ever since the rainy season ended and it started getting warmer. I don’t begrudge anybody a place to lay their head, but I’ll be honest, I get a little nervous walking alone there at night. I tell myself the people inside the tents and campers are no different than the people in the lofts and townhouses downtown, which is to say, a mixed bag, some good, some bad. There’s no crime in being poor. I wear my headphones with the volume turned low when I pass through. There’s no crime in being a woman, either. 

But there is danger in it, just as I know there’s danger in being poor. Danger that shifts and morphs, that menaces by different modes. Tonight in the park, the danger was my legs and arms, a sundress worn braless, and my fear was the old one: that the simple geometry of my body would be taken for an invitation. That day on the beach the danger was in what you reminded me, that I was—that I am—desirable. I did not take it as kindness then. 

When I saw the Allegro tonight I thought of you. I was free to think of anything I wanted. The nerves pricked to self-preserving alertness passing through the park condensed into excitement. What if I had slipped from my tent that night and knocked softly on the door of your camper? I studied the square metal latch on the door of this Allegro and thought about what it would have felt like to lift yours. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I’d say, but you’d be rising to your feet, already smiling. “Come in, come in.” The lights are on inside, you weren’t sleeping. On the arm of the brown suedette sofa is a tattered copy of a book. “Let me give you the grand tour,” you say, your voice rising and falling. It’s cadence reminds me a little of yodeling. We must step over the shaggy circle of your dog sighing in his sleep to see the dinette and little kitchen, the narrow bathroom stall. Everything is shades of brown except the white sheets on the unmade bed behind the accordion door in the back. The sight of this so soon makes us both a little shy, so you offer me a drink. You’re massive in the galley, my body skims yours when you move. You smell of wood and soap. 

“Now I will show you my favorite part,” you say, and lead me to the cockpit. “Please sit.” When I move to take the passenger seat, you say, “No, no, here,” and gesture to the captain’s chair. The seat is a plush bucket, the helm a massive wheel before a trifold panel of controls. You are grinning with excitement. “Nice, eh?”

You take the chair beside me and pull a joint from a compartment in the console. As we pass it back and forth, the pot plus the kitschy interior of the camper have the effect of unhinging us, first from time and then from place. Instead of the darkened trees along the creek, the windshield frames headlights on asphalt, bisected by broken white line. I grip the wheel underhanded, as if I’ve done it before. “We could be on our way to anywhere,” I say. “Yes!” you say, “Exactly!” Your fingers dart out to touch my elbow, but then you remember yourself and pull them back, your grin beginning to fade. 

But, no, I want you to keep smiling. I want that smile for myself. So I climb across the cockpit and into your lap, planting my lips on yours, working my fingers into the dishwater tangle of your hair. You open your mouth to me. When you break the kiss to breathe, I tug open the buttons of my flannel shirt. You beam to find my breasts bare beneath it, and you roll the firm nipples under your rough palms. I can feel you growing hard beneath me, and I cannot resist the urge to slip to my knees between your legs and undo the button of your fly. A massive, veiny erection springs forth, the head pink and glistening above the scrunch of your foreskin. Around its base is a copse of golden hair just like the thatch that grows above your heart. My tongue extends to the salty moisture at the tip, and my two hands roll your thick cock over my lips and down over my breasts before I take you deep into my throat. Your legs quiver as I suck, and I know I’m wetter for you now than I was for the kids the night before. You seem to know it, too—you’re lifting me, devouring my mouth, carrying me with those broad hands wrapped around my thighs toward the back bedroom. But passion is often clumsy. Your jeans make a shackle around your legs to trip you. The dog whimpers as you stumble, and our conjoined mouths pass laughter back and forth.  

You toss me onto the white sheets and we shed our clothes. You kick at the denim, then pull off your shirt by the back collar, just as you’d done on the beach. Your smile for my naked body is the same one that took in the view. It does not wane until you’ve entered me completely and your face contorts with pleasure. That long-awaited fullness—of flesh, of feeling—births its own need, to drive. For all your solid strength, you yield easily when I push you to your back and take my seat on top of you. I ride you to feel you, slow and rolling, and when I sense your cock inside me swell nearly to bursting, I tip forward to invite your upthrusts and grin down at you as we come.

What might have happened next, after we lay together for a moment, after the quiet joy of orgasm receded? Would you have started up the engine and driven us away, on up the coast? Would you have taken me back to the town whose name I can’t remember? Or would I have slipped back into my own tent to take my place beside my sleeping husband? Maybe the next morning would have happened just as it did in reality. Do you remember it? You appeared with your travel mug to ask for a cup of coffee. I couldn’t look at your face as I stood to get the portable press contraption my husband had bought. You and he chatted in an affable but hedging way. That’s when I heard you say that the purple lights on your camper that glowed through the night were a kind of motorhome semaphore, broadly understood by people on the road as an open invitation to visitors. I fumbled with the scoop and scattered coffee grounds on the picnic table. My husband asked to see the inside of the camper, and you led him away, grousing good-humoredly about the gas-mileage, while I stayed behind, waiting for the water to boil.

When I got home tonight, Sven, I pulled my tits from my dress and lifted the skirt and came for you, lying on my belly on the sofa. And since I did, I decided you deserved a letter, though this is one I’ll never send. I wouldn’t know to whom or where. 

Yours,

© 2020 ROSEMARY CUMMINGS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.