A Love Song for Sara

Adam sat at an outside table, a newspaper in front of him, waiting to see which one of the café's staff would bring out his coffee and a vanilla slice, the last piece for the day.

Sara came out, her young body fresh, appetising. She always flirted with Adam; a country girl down south from Queensland who'd moved away from her family, Adam didn't know why and she hadn't told him. She'd stand there chatting, and after the first two or three times Adam realised, as he drove away, that he knew what both her armpits looked like, lightly stubbled.

What did they talk about, that a nineteen year old girl raised her arms above her head and showed him her armpits, like two innocent sexes? Adam made a point, the next time, to pay attention more closely, to really listen to the girl. It was inconsequential chatter; girlfriends over for the weekend, going to visit her grandmother, cleaning. She was a friendly girl and the other café staff indulged her; she was good for business.

"I have to go in, be busy."

"You do, honey. See you next time."

Adam then realised what it was they talked about. Nothing, but when she talked to him, Sara played with her hair. Her arms raised above her head, hands pulling up her pony tail, playing with her hair; gazing down at him with constant eyes.

Her armpits were always lightly stubbled. Adam guessed she shaved maybe once a week, on Sundays before church, but he thought that destination unlikely. He smiled at the ridiculous thought. Sara proudly told him one day of her lineage, a polyglot mixture of French, English, some German and a touch of Aboriginal. Adam thought back to the little Koori girl from his past, and thought it easier for Sara to share that heritage, prouder. She was a little darker than most, soaking up the sun.

Adam knew what it meant when girls played with their hair, and wondered if she did. Sara was so spontaneous but young with it; and he thought, possibly not.

But seeing her armpits revealed with that light stubble, Adam speculated about her other likely stubble, her mound, her sex, and wondered how she kept herself there. She'd laughed off the idea of a boyfriend when the opportunity presented itself to ask, and Adam saw an innocence in her. He felt protective, but every time she walked away it wasn't just that. He knew exactly the shape of her ass, her long legs in tight jeans. She'd shown him the little tattoo on her shoulder, a little sail boat from when she lived by the sea, but the café's uniform was less revealing about the size and shape of her breasts.

Adam thought she occasionally trimmed her pubes, but didn't think Sara was a girl to fuss. He liked the idea of her pubic hair being longer than the two delightful hollows she showed him every day; when Sara played with her hair.

* * * *

I desire this girl. I shouldn't, but I do.

She's too young, for a start, not yet twenty. Perhaps that's part of the desire; a young innocence, a young mind, a young body. Young, young, young. I'm no longer young, so that's part of the problem. I'm older, a lot older than Sara, but desire doesn't stop, it doesn't have a use-by date; or if it does, it's still in my future.

I don't want to be without desire. I've said when I die, the last thing I want to see is a pretty face, some beautiful woman looking at me, gazing at me. The fact that I might be about to breathe my last breath at that time - sufficiently far away, I hope - seems to me right now more an inconvenience, not something that should bother me. It would like as not distress her, poor thing, so it would be nice if there was something I could do about that. But in the absence of God or Heaven, I fear she will just have to cope.

Perhaps it would be better to do what my mother did when she died, which was to arrange a parade, in the last week or two, of ghosts from her past. Her father was there, who died before I was born, there over my shoulder, but I couldn't see him. Mum told me I couldn't, and like all mothers, she was right - telling me just before her granny came by and waved hello. It seemed to me a very sensible arrangement, having beloved memories incarnate themselves in a still room.

I would love that. Every woman I've ever loved, coming by as young and beautiful as they were when I first ran in the rain with them, or when they first took their clothes off and I saw their beautiful bodies, when they first gazed at me. Arrange that, and I will happily go, right down to my very last breath.

Desire then, back to that. Don't take desire away, not yet.

Adam is my alter ego. Vanity makes him half a decade younger than me, even younger perhaps, his age deliberately left vague, unsaid; because if there's one thing a writer should have, it's the ability to select a useful, accommodating age for an ego. Or an alter-ego. If Adam is going to engage with this desirable young girl, let him be a suitable age.

But here's the thing. Young Sara comes out with a coffee and cake for me, and flirts with me, not Adam. She plays with her hair and looks down at me with those constant, confident eyes, and it's not Adam she's talking to. It's the man five years older than my imaginary man she talks to. Telling me of her life, her mother, her brother, the father who left her, but I don't know how old she was when he left. It's me who's a part of her life, her everyday, workaday life, not my character Adam. Me.

So that's the curious thing. What goes on in a young girl's head, that she wants to come out and chat, until the busy café drags her back?

It's desire, and curiosity too, with Sara.

* * * *

Adam was distracted.

He'd recently started going to an evening life-drawing class run by a suburban art supplies shop located in a small terrace of commercial places. A dentist, an upholsterer, several small professional service businesses, their signs showing the latest corporate promises, and the art supplies shop. An incongruous suburban collection of shops, where parking was never a problem.

Taking up two window fronts, one half of the shop was filled with shelves full of colour, pastels and paints, paper and brushes. A small collection of art folios on a bookshelf by the door, overseen by a helpful girl behind the counter, promised skills and expertise. Bronwen, the shop's owner, was an accomplished local artist, her large drawings and paintings regularly displayed and sold in small galleries dotted about the city.

She'd take Adam's fifteen dollars and show him through to the second room, a working studio space. Several large tables were placed up against the walls, leaving a wide, exposed area in the middle of the room surrounded by perhaps twenty easels, tilted back on their third legs like a herd of giraffes on the African plains. Right in the middle, an oasis in this bright white space, was a low platform with lockable wheels. Some evenings it might have a small stool placed upon it, other times a quilt left over from an earlier drawing session.

There was a small ceremony as the artists, always a mixed group of many ages, came into the room, claiming an easel with an eye to the platform, hoping for a good angle during the longest pose. A variety of papers would be placed on the floor or a table, depending what was nearby, and charcoal or pencils made ready; pastels perhaps, if skills had progressed that far.

Adam would smile recognition at faces remembered from the week before, or the week before that. He found it a curious thing that there would always be someone new, and someone gone forever, never to be seen again. Perhaps the experiment of drawing was a step too far, skills not quite measuring up to expectations, or the friend they came with not quite so keen. It meant a rotation of artists, so in a way it was fitting that the easels were arranged in a circle around the empty platform in the middle of the room.

Adam wondered if the correct protocol, indeed, was for each new person to take the first easel inside the door, and with each session, progress to the next place; eventually over time to arrive at the last place, and be politely shown the door. He subverted this by crossing the room and selecting an easel on the far side, opposite the door, unless someone had gone there first.

The group would slowly realise that amongst them there was a person without a bag full of drawing supplies, a new person perhaps, or someone remembered from several weeks before. The stranger would move around the room, nodding to the artists, until everyone was aware of his or her bare feet, and a tightly held dressing gown wrapped around their body for warmth and comfort. Bronwen would come into the studio and introduce the model, who would drop their gown and step on to the platform, and the timed poses would begin.

Adam had drawn several women in their forties or early fifties, one a woman with a severe, proud face, three creases on her belly and a heaviness on her ass; a second a thin white witch of a woman with wild and untamed hair, with dropped breasts and silver stretch marks on her belly, and slow eyes that closed almost sleeping as she lay within the circle. A third woman was less memorable because her poses were clumsy and unformed, and he threw away those pages after he got back home. He'd drawn a man with heavy balls, and a young woman with very short hair that showed the shape of her skull. She had high breasts, very lightly trimmed pubic hair, and a delicate, slender body.

One evening, Adam looked up to see Sara come into the room, wearing a faded red gown, wrapped tight.

* * * *

Adam in his drawing class is of course, me. The art supplies shop really is at the end of a cluster of six or eight shops on a suburban street, not a busy road, but a dividing line between two suburbs, so the traffic is steady enough. From the street the studio section is shielded from the public gaze by heavy white curtains, always pulled across the wide display windows. From the outside there is no clue that a nude model might be inside, carefully scrutinised by a dozen sets of eyes.

I knew of the row of shops from a year before, when, after leaving my tantra masseuse's studio at the end of the same block (but on the other side of the road so I didn't immediately recognise the suburb by name), I went looking for one of my eternal coffee shops after two hours of exquisite pleasure in my masseuse's hands. In the event there wasn't a café, so I turned my car around and drove a kilometre back the other way. I noted the existence of the art shop as I drove past.

Coincidentally, during one of my tantra sessions, the subject of drawing came up (this was before I went to the drawing classes), and my masseuse revealed she had attended one, "just down the road." Of course, it was the same place. Later, on my third time in the class, who should I see but the small, curvaceous woman who dropped her full breasts into my mouth and let me suckle on her long nipples, making sure I favoured each breast fairly, before stroking me to cream in her deep cleavage. My erotic worlds collided that evening and the next time I saw her, for we had something in common; our drawings, as well as our bodies.

The idea of drawing erotic pictures of women is strong in my head. Last spring and early summer, and again in autumn before it got cold, I went weekly to the studio space, re-awakening an interest in drawing that had dropped off. I'd been drawing throughout the year using images found on Tumblr, but less frequently than I really wanted - somehow the motivation to draw had diminished. Perhaps I was writing more, fulfilling my creative tension that way.

However, as all of the "how to draw" books say, nothing substitutes for the close study of a real person. What goes with this, reinforced by the history of many great artists, is the idea of a muse, the artist's model. In many instances an artist's muse is immediately recognisable in their body of work.

I'm not a great artist, very far from it, but the idea of Sara is there in my mind to be that muse, but a natural caution to keep my private erotic space separate from my domestic life stops me from ever asking her. I keep thinking one day I might, but so far, not yet. The idea of modelling most likely would never cross her mind, and I quite like her innocent flirting and would never want to lose that by crossing a line too wide. She might say yes, but just as likely, no; and I fear no.

What I have done in this little amusement, this piece, is to use a basic writer's ploy, "Adam was distracted," to (hopefully) grab a reader's interest to find out why. I cheat a little, because I've not written "why" but have progressed to some scene setting, leading up to a cliff-hanger, Sara about to be revealed.

I've then shifted the narrative focus to me the writer going to a life-drawing class, thus adding another layer to the piece and showing myself to be a most unreliable narrator. Also, in quite a blasé manner, I've introduced my tantra masseuse almost as if she's an incidental thing. She's not incidental, as I allude to an on-going relationship of some sort, some other part of my erotic world.

What am I actually doing in this story? Who or what is it "about?" Me, I suspect, not Adam.

* * * *

"Folks, this is Sara, she's our model tonight."

"Hello, Sara," they all said, and some raised their hands in greeting, "hi." Adam nodded his recognition to her, and she noticed him for the first time, her eyes widening in surprise.

She smiled her beautiful smile for the room, before looking down with a more private look in her eyes. She glanced up at Adam, curious at his presence, and mouthed, "Hello," just for him, her body still hidden from his eyes.

"A couple of five minute poses?" Bronwen suggested, "followed by ten minutes - two ten minutes? And a twenty. Then we'll have a break." The group nodded. "Is that okay, Sara?"

"That's fine," she replied, and dropped the red gown from her shoulders, making a puddle of cloth at her feet. She faced away from Adam, so all he saw were long legs that he already knew were long, from following her with his eyes as she walked away from him. The café seemed a million days away. Her hips were high, and he knew that too, as her jeans were always tight. Her waist surprised him, it was narrower than he'd thought. The top she wore in the café was quite loose, hiding the size and shape of Sara's breasts. It hid the slenderness of her torso, too.

Her waist was revealed, a span of his hands - but Adam knew now he would never touch this girl, her revelation was before him and it would suffice. He'd make it permanent, her slow reveal, and capture her forever. His drawing would never be enough, would never capture his quiet lust, but he could try. There were faint shadows on Sara's ribs as she raised her arms above her head in a pose Adam knew so well. Sara tilted her hip and goose-bumps thrilled down his arms.

Sara denied him, faced away from him, and he couldn't see the faint stubble he knew would be there as she raised her arms above her head in. Her hands were still, and her hair fell in a dark veil to her shoulders. Adam began to draw, to capture the essence of her in four minutes, one minute lost in a quiet contemplation of this girl he stupidly loved.

The room was silent other than the gentle sound of pencil or charcoal on paper, and the occasional fast rub of a finger as someone changed a line. Adam's vision intensified, and the girl's body before him was reduced to line and curve and shape. All he really wanted to do was strip his own clothes off and carry Sara away, gently lay her on a bed and make long, slow love to her. Instead, he caressed her with his eyes and saw every inch of her back, and saw that she was beautiful. He knew that already.

"One minute," Bronwen warned, and there was just time to correct the line of her leg, a little too thick on the paper. Adam smiled. He'd drawn the shape that lingered in his mind, not the limb and its shadow before him. He was losing his memory already, and needed to concentrate. "Thanks, Sara, that was lovely," Bronwen said.

Sara was indeed lovely, and in her next pose, turned forty-five degrees so each artist would see another view of her. Adam carefully rendered the shadow of her left nipple, just seen on the curve of her breast, and he captured the sharper angle between her hip and waist as her body twisted. Adam self-indulgently thought she was twisting her body towards him, but it was just a good pose to challenge every artist in the room with her angles.

Adam could see that Sara had posed before, not just for him. He took a step back, and compared the gesture he'd caught on the page with the lines of the model before him. He was pleased; he'd caught a gesture in her body as muscle groups pulled against each other, an inwards curve, an outwards tension. He rubbed a faint shadow with his finger, stepping forward to the easel to focus on his drawing. His own hand trembled a little as he edged in the contour of her belly. The drawing caught a part of him.

* * * *

You can see what I'm doing here, delaying Sara's revelation; teasing myself, Adam, my readers. It's a writer's ploy (this writer's ploy), the slow reveal; but this piece is also a contemplation about seeing and creating. By describing a drawn image from a drawing class, layering over it my mind's eye vision of a girl I see clothed once or twice a week but would like to see naked all the time, I'm pondering the creative process. How does a writer share the visions he or she sees in his head? By painting word pictures, obviously.

Do they work, these pictures of Sara, my depictions of women? Readers tell me from time to time that they do, and I treasure every word when they tell me. I think every writer does. We must do, surely, to make it all worthwhile, the time we spend writing the visions in our heads, the fantasies in our minds. It's not unreasonable to like praise, if the pictures are vivid and my readers want to see Sara. So I will continue to write, to share Sara. People say that, when they comment, "Thanks for sharing," as if it's a recognition of some personal truth that I, the writer, am sharing.

I have a philosophy that says any story, however fantastic, however much imagined, must have at its core some central, essential truth; an image, a memory, something that is utterly true, completely real. Without it, I believe readers will instantly spot that I'm faking it, making it all up, and it will show. But wear a little bit of truth on my sleeve, and readers will suspend a thousand disbeliefs. My challenge to them is to mine my words and spot the core. Every story, every chapter I've ever written, has such a core. Even this one.

I must also continue my other slow reveal in this piece. Who is the woman I go to? Is she real, or is she too just fiction, only dreams? Sara, I think you'll agree, does work in a café, but probably doesn't model for a life-drawing class. We know Adam is fictional, but how much of him is me? I know, but I wonder how much my readers guess?

In another story I have named my tantra witch Rebecca, in this story I shall call her Ruth. I don't know why - perhaps a Ruth has been waiting patiently in my subconscious, waiting to be written. You can therefore assume that neither name is her real name, and you'll also be saying, "My god, could you be more reliable?" As a witness? Or a narrator.

So, Ruth. Curvy, barely comes to my shoulder, she greets me at the door with a welcoming kiss, a comfortable kiss. Sometimes, increasingly so lately, a hungry kiss. She'll wrap her arms around me, pull me into the room, kissing me hard, wrapping a leg to my hip and she expects me to hold her tight, keep her balanced, keep her leg wrapped around me. I'm getting hard writing this, so that's got to be a real memory, doesn't it? Ruth pushes her belly against the thickening ridge of my prick, knowing a ridge will be there. The last time I went to her house and she raised her leg to my thigh, I could smell her arousal. That's to be wanted, isn't it?