La Dune du Pilat

There was something about the man’s body; it intrigued him more than the others lying there. The curve of the lumbar region above his buttocks was covered just below its tan line by faded orange linen trunks, and it seemed the focal point of the entire afternoon for some unknown reason, as if the world had shrunk to a fisheye lens and at the center lay the small of his back.

Every time Marc glanced up, peering over the frames of his sunglasses, his eyes found strange comfort in that singular spot, as the rest of the beach spun unknowingly around it and the sparring sounds of seagulls and children’s laughter drifted in and out. For the hour before Graham returned, he entertained periods of visually scanning the man’s body, wondering what it smelled like, if there were small black hairs on the shoulder blades, if the man would wince if he began to pluck them. It was a pastime relished greatly while it lasted.

Once Graham appeared atop the white crest of the dune, he pulled his shirt over his head and kicked off his running shoes, approaching Marc. He sat up crisscross and opened his book to appear distracted, unable to engage in conversation.

Graham approached him with his characteristic wide gait, swinging arms, and cracking knuckles heard from far away. He’d just been for a long run. 

“I’d never leave if we didn’t have to,” Graham’s naturally loud voice entered the back of Marc’s head and sent a thin shiver down his back.

“Neither would I.”

The two were perched mildly above the beach itself, where evening bathers were wading into the sea, splashing their hair, toweling off, soon to make the climb back up the dune just to inch

down once again on the other side, to the oasis that was the caravan park, where they’d start a fire or open a bottle of wine. Here the sun rose late and set late, Marc had noticed almost immediately, and the scent of sand and salt and heat changed depending on the time of day.

“Renée’s asked me to go to Bordeaux with her tomorrow,” Graham said, “for some bits and such. Figure I should.”

Marc sat silently looking away from him, scanning the flat strip of beach for the man he’d seen earlier. After a few moments he replied, “oh good,” and wondered if this too was one of those

instances in which Graham secretly wanted him to ask if he could come along. Truthfully, Marc had been pining for some time apart - he’d thought the six-week Workaway trip would somehow allow for that, but it hadn’t. Still, there was an internal thread of something he’d been following blindly since the flight, something unreachable inside himself that he’d expected France to bring out in him, to suddenly make known or recognizable. Two weeks in, and nothing had come to surface.

Marc felt at times like an animal cursed with a parasite, without anybody to save him or remove it from his body unless he were to be submerged in some sort of antidote-laced pool, to once and for all cast out this thing inside him that had been feeding on his thoughts and driving him crazy. He wished he knew what it was.

“Just for the day?” he asked Graham, who’d sat down at his side and started digging his

hands into the sand. He hadn’t shaved for a week, Marc registered.

“She said she wasn’t sure,” he replied and released his left hand. “But if it’s overnight her

sister lives there and we can stay with her.”

Did he mean we, Marc wondered, as in me and him, or Renée and him? He didn’t want to get roped into an excursion he didn’t want to go on anyway. He’d been to Bordeaux plenty of times as a child to visit his grandparents anyway. To him, the dune was a haven and he planned on staying there. “Is it okay if I stay back?” Marc heard himself ask, unexpectedly not beating around the bush this time.

“Of course, yeah,”  Graham said standing up, his eyes following a lone paraglider on the horizon. Whether he was flying toward or away from them, Marc couldn’t tell. “I’m off for a swim. Coming?”

Marc began to rise but hesitated, his mind refocusing at that moment on the location of the captivating man he’d been watching. “No thanks. I like how the sun’s hitting the water.”

“Suit yourself,” Graham said, and bound down the remaining slope toward the plage.

In the morning, Marc could tell by scent that the night rain had ceased not long before he’d opened his eyes. The bedroom window had been cracked, but apparently this time the slant of the rain allowed for no puddles on the floor – his own luck, since Renee had scolded him lightly last Thursday for leaving it open in the kitchen after she nearly slipped while making her espresso.

The house was empty – Henri had driven into Arcachon for Luc’s swimming lesson and surely Renée and Graham had set out for Bordeaux already. Marc didn’t waste a minute in bed. He showered quickly, knowing he had the entire day to himself and simultaneously knowing it could very well be the only one he’d get for the next month. There was something quietly significant to be done and he could sense it in the air like smoke. Alongside that feeling the humidity arrived and hung around relentlessly, causing him to sweat the second he emerged from the washroom, salty beads of it gathering on his neck like scales.

Moments later, carrying in his shoulder bag a pot of green grapes, a bottle of rosé, cheese twists, earpods, a towel, and his friend Mason’s copy of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Marc set off for the

dune, thinking absently of what he would do later because, as much as he enjoyed it, swimming and lying down and then swimming again got old after a few hours, at least by himself. He half-wished

Henri was here to brush up his French, bearing in mind Henri probably became tired of it relatively quickly, what with Marc’s nasally Québécois accent, but nonetheless it helped his retention.

Speaking French was one thing – thinking in it was another, and it had been a long time since Marc thought seamlessly in French, and reminiscing on the fact, he felt that losing that ability meant he’d lost a facet of his very self. He thought suddenly about the man on the beach from yesterday, knowing undoubtedly that he must be French and that furthermore, that he had been alone on the sand with nobody to talk to. Marc wasn’t the type of person who would approach people like that, and he didn’t understand why he felt compelled to approach this man in particular, aside from the allure of his back and the feverish temptation that brought to light. He wouldn’t, in fact, approach virtually anybody else, would he? Perhaps it was his so-called “parasite” drawing him toward the man, but perhaps it was instead the invisible thread he’d been following that had led him there. 

And behold, there he was, Marc observed from the northern edge of the dune, right in the center between the rise of the sand and the gentle crash of the white waves. Sparsely dotted with people, the beach was just beginning to glow from the sun overhead, which first warmed the caravan park and the spindly forests which preceded the large spine of sand protecting the coastline. Marc half expected the man, wearing the same pale orange trunks, to wave at him, but he was gazing out at the sea, standing with his hands on his hips.

To avoid arousing what he thought could be suspicion, Marc read for an hour, underlining various phrases and passing glumly over ones he couldn’t quite understand. The people who bothered to pause their reading and search the definition of a word they weren’t familiar with were to Marc, the same people who wouldn’t cross the street without a “walk” sign or would publicly correct you for pronouncing espresso as “ex-presso.” He often found that learning every minute detail of certain things created unnecessary problems; it was the essence itself that he deemed valuable, the personal experience gained in the act of reading, consuming paragraph after paragraph and eventually forming an idea of what it’s trying to say. People were sometimes similar, in a way. Marc preferred to understand individuals not as collections of ideas or traits or even sources of personal reflection in life, but as beings etched into the very fabric of his own experiential world, a part of it. His perception of somebody, say, the orange-suited man on the sand, was a unique perception nobody could ever replicate, even if false or generalized. What he represented to Marc, the man himself may never come to know, and he thought it peculiar. He set the pencil between the pages of the book and snapped it shut, replacing it into his bag.

“May as well,” Marc mumbled to himself, and at that, ambled with his things from the usual spot up on the dune down to the plage, considerably closer to the man on whom he’d kept a watchful eye.

He set down his things on a hot patch of sand and pulled off his shirt, a beige 2012 Olympics tee Graham had bought him a few summers ago when they had first met. Neatly folding up the shirt, Marc saw the man tilt his head upward toward him and stare momentarily into his eyes, penetrating his own. So with nothing but a glance, it was true. Marc had always been curiously insightful with these things, despite his reservedness. Intuition and the rare surge of confidence, he supposed, were all he needed sometimes.

The man had hence returned to coolly staring up at the sky, so Marc decided to open the bottle of rosé – it was nearly noon anyway. Perhaps it would extrude some conviction from within. Graham had bought this bottle, and as he remembered this Marc felt a pang of guilt for the expedition he seemed to be on to acquire the mysterious, handsome man from the beach. Graham would be fine, he assured himself hazily, whatever happened; he’d hinted at moving back to Cornwall anyway, something Marc would never think of. He’d only be holding Graham back from his own freedom, and that’s the last thing he’d want to do.

The man’s chest, which Marc watched rise and fall as with the breeze, was tanned as bronze as his slender back, suggesting a holiday house or an extended stay at the caravan park – but with whom?

The rosé had already gone lukewarm; Marc regretted not bringing the ice sleeve Renée kept in the freezer. He still drank it, sipping straight from the lip of the bottle, aware that if he’d even simply imagined the man looking at him before, surely now he wouldn’t be able to resist at least a casual glance. Lying back, using his crumpled shirt as a pillow, Marc stretched out, making an X with his limbs and wondering what Graham was doing at that moment.

“Tu nages?” a voice behind him asked a minute later. Marc opened his eyes and craned his neck backward. Upside-down and blocking the sun was the man in the orange bathing suit.

“Uh, ah oui, maintenant?” Évidemment, Marc. He felt embarrassed for being caught off guard.

“Oui,” he replied casually, stepping toward him. “Ce n’est pas froid, je promets.”

“Je sais,” Marc said, setting down the bottle.

“You are not French, are you?” 

“Non,” Marc replied, still desperate to impress. “J’suis Canadien.”

“It’s okay,” the man offered Marc his hand. “I speak English.”

“Mais je parle Français aussi,” he protested as he took his hand and was brought to his feet.

“OK. Well, I saw you looking at me. Alors…”

Marc blushed, not quite aware of how obvious he’d been. He had always imagined that his observations of others were well-rounded, closed-circuit fantasies, immune to their attention, capable of offering full-fledged daydreams to Marc and only Marc without them ever noticing. This man had seemed to not only notice but embrace it.

Something came loose then, something he’d just been reading about seemed to be tattering in the wind between the two of them, this confusing message, that his personal freedom wasn’t defined by doing whatever he pleased, but by moving past it, finding some “open future” past whatever he was dealt. This, naturally, being one of the passages that he couldn’t grasp. What was Graham to him right now, what was this man, what were their roles, what had he imagined for them? What did he want to do? What was he dealt? What was the difference between doing whatever you wanted and embracing the so-called open future? Why was that freedom - what was right?

They walked back north together, Marc holding the empty bottle and his sand-matted towel, the man with the tote slung over his bare shoulder. Turning back toward the beach Marc watched the

Sun closer to the Atlantic and became momentarily frightened for what would happen next. He knew, deep down, that something would have to happen – something significant, because he had felt it earlier, he’d felt that charge in the air, something like a potential energy, the atmosphere incapable of releasing it unless a human being much like Marc acted as the instrument by which it shakes itself free.

It was half past six then, still hours until dark. The man had said he’d been coming up annually from Pau, where he lived with his sister in a flat by the river overlooking the train and the River Ousse. He said that the dune was the only place he felt himself, the only place he found solace, meaning, or “limpidité.” Seulement moi pour moi, he kept saying. 

“I go through these periods,” he said turning to Marc on walk to the Café Ha(a)itza, where they’d agreed on having dinner, “where I think I’m better off alone. Where I get so focused on my own freedom that I tell myself something stupid like nobody sees the great dune like me and nobody could. But then I meet you. You understand.”

Marc asked himself internally if he really did understand or if he was simply agreeing for the sake of the conversation. He replied, “but we don’t see the dune in the same way, do we? I mean yes, we both see it as significant or beautiful, right? But how can we diminish our own experience of something so much to it being the exact same as somebody else’s?” Marc then thought of Graham – if Graham was in love with Marc the same way Marc was in love with him, if they were worth the same to one another, and if it even mattered in the end. Was one direction of love more meaningful than the other?

“Ah mais voilà!” the man said, smiling with charmingly crooked teeth. “When they are together, two separate experiences of the same beauty makes something completely new, no? Is that not what love is?”

Much later they departed from the small restaurant on the corner, stomachs full of Bordeaux Blanc and pizza. To the east the large, ghostly trees hung overhead, thickening as the road is

overtaken by the brush behind a hotel. To the west a waning moon rose slowly over the sea, reflecting on its surface a milky white line to the horizon.

“I do like you,” Marc admitted, the two men standing in the intersection, listening to the sound of the crickets and the waves and the way they intertwined with one another.

When the man laughed, he held a certain glow in his body, translucent and familiar. “J'espérais. I like you too. Do you want to walk to the water?”

“Yes.” 

And Marc knew what yes meant. He knew exactly what was going to happen when their feet touched the sand, knew that he would feel confused, enthralled, and pensive all at the same time. Knew what afterward would entail, the walk back to the house. The unseen change. He had known, at least partially, since he laid eyes on the man’s body from afar. He had sensed something new, a different way forward perhaps.

The problem wasn’t Graham after all, not totally; it was this whole decade of his life. It was the fact that he was twenty-nine and had nothing to show for it. No job security, no stable home, no life savings, no publications. All he had were his books and the stained mohair carpet from his late grandfather. Marc felt like he needed to be in a constant state of pursuit, of experience, friendship, sex, approval, intoxication, what have you. If you weren’t actively searching for something else, what was life even about?

They’d reached the end of the concrete and stepped without sound onto the cool moonlit sand. A few couples, here and there, perused the short, picturesque beach as though looking for

something, never sure where they were going to step next. Approaching the water Marc turned to the man, confession on the tip of his tongue.

“Don’t,” the man whispered, stepping toward him, brushing his toes with his own, bringing his hands to Marc’s waist. Marc remained quiet and leaned forward, knowing what was coming, that it had been coming for a long, long time, and when he pressed his lips to his, a string was cut, a knot undone, a proverbial question answered.

When he opened his eyes, smiling, Marc could see faintly in the distance and looming behind the man the smooth, bare-faced Dune du Pilat, mysterious and as beautiful as ever, bathed in a light unlike anything he’d seen before. Shutting his eyes again, he wondered in the silence if this wondrous feeling would last.