It is Matthew’s habit at the beach to take long walks and think. The sound of the waves rolling in, the rhythm of that sound, makes him feel less confused. Perhaps it merely muffles or regularizes the sound of confusion, but the effect is the same: he can let his thoughts roam, sometimes quite productively, while, subtly, he ogles the women. In the summer we are considering here, the most daring women were wearing bathing suits cut startlingly high on the hip, sometimes even above the hip, their legs bare right to the waist. When these women — or, more frequently, girls, since the most daring suits were usually worn by girls of an age Matthew couldn’t guess with certainty — walked past him, he would try to take them in without appearing to notice them, his eyes apparently on something far ahead, thoughts roaming productively to the soothing shuffle of the surf, while his peripheral vision was working like mad. So narrow was the bit of fabric at the crotches of these suits that he could sometimes see a bulge of soft skin protruding from either side of it, and the miracle fabric clung so closely and thoroughly to the flesh beneath it that it sometimes formed an inviting crease at the center, a Spandex dimple.
There he was, that summer day, walking along the water’s edge, when he spotted, from quite a long way off, the woman making the sand castings. She wasn’t a girl; she must have been somewhere in her thirties, but she was wearing one of the daring suits, a black one, cut low in front, high on the sides. She had abundant blond hair, and it was blowing in the wind. She sat with the awkward unconcern of a child, bent to her task, apparently thinking of nothing else, careless of her appearance. Her legs were open, thrown out to the sides as a child would throw hers out to the side, and pubic hair fringed the skimpy crotch of her suit, golden, like a girl’s hair in a fairy tale, catching the light and Matthew’s eye, so that he couldn’t help looking. In memory, it seems to him that he saw that narrow band of black fabric from far away, as if that alone had caught his eye from far down the beach, the curlicues of hair, glistening with oil and salt, gleaming like a frame. As he passed her, she looked up for an instant and smiled at him, and he smiled back and nodded, but he hadn’t had the nerve to stop and speak to her because he had been staring at her cunt, after all, and he suspected that her family might be nearby — parents, an ancient grandmother, a loutish husband — sitting on aluminum chairs, watching him with vague concern. There were some children nearby; they might be hers. Besides, he told himself after he had walked by, she was enjoying herself. She was having such a fine time being a child at the beach that it would have been rude to interrupt her, to have stopped, attracted by her quite adult legs, her woman’s breasts, her grownup’s pubic hair, when she was playing there as if she were a child. After he’d walked a good long way beyond her, he turned around and headed back. Well before he reached her a little girl ran to her and began tugging her, and she pulled her legs in, rose quite gracefully, brushed the sand from her bottom, and walked off, an attractive, graceful woman, not the gangling girl she had seemed to be when she was playing in the sand.
The idea for the sand molds didn’t come to Matthew that day, but days later, one night after he had gone to bed, when he had brought the memory of the woman to mind and was masturbating. He remembered the way she was playing, and though he meant to concentrate on her mouth, her breasts, her spread legs, the hollows where the muscles in her thighs were stretched, the pubic curls, his perverse intelligence turned the spotlight of memory on the juice container and the bricks of sand. He went limp in his hand while his mind raced along, diverted against its will from sensuality to ratiocination. Thus, perhaps, are more ideas born than the circumspection of inventors permits us to know.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 528, Mark Dorset considers Attention, Focusing; Thinking: Focusing the Attention; and “Inspiration” from this episode.
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🎧 528: It is . . .