"Well, they aren't really employees," Joanie said. "Our staff people
are generally folks who want to join the colony but who can't afford
the fee. Students and that sort. If Dr. Richards likes them, he gives
them staff jobs in exchange for room and board." She laughed. "We
couldn't very well have people on the staff who weren't sympathetic to
our ideals, you understand. It would quite ruin the atmosphere here."
"Quite," I agreed.
Lorraine returned, jiggling pleasantly, bringing with her two orange
juices and a grapefruit for Joanie. I gulped the juice down in a couple
of swallows. With something inside me, I felt a little bolder, and
started to look up-table at my fellow nudists.
At my immediate right sat a woman, who, out of embarrassment, I had
been studiously ignoring. I turned to look at her now, and she smiled
and said, "I hope you enjoy your stay here, Mr. Fieldston."
"Ah--thank you," I said. I looked helplessly at Joanie for an
introduction. Joanie caught the hint and said, "Fellows, this is Bonnie
Carter, one of the real old-timers at Sunland."
Bonnie laughed coldly. "Oh, I'm not such an old-timer, really," she
said with a poisonous glance at Joanie. "This is only my sixth summer
here. You've been here more than ten years, haven't you, Joanie?"
It was Joanie's turn to look piqued. But she flashed a smile and said,
"Eleven, dear. I was only a child when I first was brought here."
It was hard to get much of a glimpse of Bonnie without seeming to be
staring, but I managed to turn quickly around and grab a fast eyeful.
She was about thirty-five, and evidently just poised on the borderline
between the end of youthful beauty and the beginning of middle age.
By which I mean that she still had a good figure, but her breasts had
developed a bit of a sag and there was slightly too much loose flesh
in the vicinity of her throat. She was completely naked, sitting
with her legs crossed. Her dark hair was cut short in a stylish way.
Her face had a lean, intense look about it, the eyes just a trifle
too bulging. It was a hyperthyroid kind of look, if you know what I
mean--high-strung. She was wearing a wedding band.
Without much ado, she began to tell me that she was divorced, that she
had a five-year-old son in nursery school somewhere, and that she had
found that only in the nude was she a _person_. "Taking your clothes
off gives you a wonderfully _free_ attitude, don't you think, Mr.
Fieldston? As though all the strangling bonds of our society are just
swept right away."
"Exactly," I ventured.
"May I ask what profession you're in, Mr. Fieldston?"
I gave her a bleak smile. "I'm an advertising man, Mrs. Carter. But I'm
here on a leave-of-absence from my agency. I plan to write a novel this
summer."
"Oh, how wonderful!" she gushed. "You're actually escaping from the
bondage of _money_ and striking a blow for the freedom of your soul.
Magnificent!"
While this was going on, Meehan was busily conversing with Joanie,
and I was mildly miffed that he should be making time with the blonde
while I was locked in conversation with the Carter female. Not that
Bonnie didn't appeal to me on the baser levels too, but she wasn't
anywhere near the knockout Joanie was. Besides, I had met all too many
of Bonnie's kind at cocktail parties in the past, and I had hoped to
escape from them here.
After a few minutes I managed to widen the circle of my acquaintances
by getting introduced first to the middle-aged man sitting next to
Joanie across the table--his name was Norman Keyes and he was a retired
businessman, he said--and then to the fiftyish woman with the 60-inch
bust sitting up the table from Bonnie. After ten minutes in the mess
hall, the idea of nudity had grown a good deal less startling now that
the shock element was wearing off. I was still fascinated by the way
the big bowls of Joanie's breasts held themselves up without dangling,
and the trim buttocks of the two waitresses sent blushful thoughts
through my mind every time the girls wiggled by.
People were beginning to stroll out of the mess hall now. I asked
Joanie what the day's program was like.
"Oh, we have no formal program," she said. "Everything's strictly on a
voluntary basis. Any organized activity depends on who's interested in
what."
"What sort of thing do you have?"
"Well," she said, "Don Riemann conducts a calisthenics course every
morning after breakfast. And there are usually a couple of the men
interested in playing basketball or baseball or something, and when
there are enough for teams we organize games. And there's swimming, or
boating, or crafts, or you could go to the music room--we have a big
library of classical stuff--or you could just lie around on the grass
and relax."
"Or work on your novel," Meehan reminded me.
I nodded. "But I can't work on it round the clock," I said. "What about
evenings?"
Joanie shrugged, and the shrug did pretty things to her bosom.
"Everything is arranged by the members. Last night we had a square
dance, because Norm Keyes was here and he's a good caller. Sometimes
we have a Folksong night, or a game of twenty questions, or even a
talent show. And a few of us like to drive into town once in a while
and see a movie."
"You put clothes on then," I said anxiously.
Joanie smiled. "Naturally. The people in the town have very strict
laws."
I finished my coffee and stood up, realizing as I did so that I was
shamelessly exposing myself after having been chastely hidden under the
tabletop all during the meal. I fought back the impulse to break and
run. _Get used to this nudist stuff, boy. Lose your inhibitions. Make
yourself at one with the cosmos._
We left the mess hall. Joanie excused herself and Meehan and I started
to stroll back to our cabin. En route, we came upon a group of gyrating
figures that looked for a moment like a bunch of the damned, straight
out of Dante. But after a moment I realized it was only Don Riemann's
calisthenics group having its daily session.
Riemann was a burly, bronzed, gym-teacher type, around thirty, and he
was having the time of his life, bare to the skin in front of about
eight parishioners likewise peeled, shouting instructions for the next
contortion. I stood by in amazement. The group of exercise-lovers
included Bonnie Carter, Norman Keyes, Bess Olin (the sixty-inch-bust
grandma type) and five others I didn't know, all but one of them
obviously over twenty-one. The exception was a girl of around twelve
that I had noticed before. She was a little slip of a thing, with
meager little bumps where her breasts were going to be in a couple of
years. I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable watching her gyrating and
stooping with the rest.
"Doesn't that make you sick?" I asked Meehan.
"What? Calisthenics? Damn right it does."
"No, I mean the little girl. Running around naked with everybody else."
"You mean little Lolita there?" Jack laughed. "Don't let your Victorian
ways show through, Al. That's the right way to do it--get a kid into
this thing young, before she's all full of inhibitions and stuff.
What's the use of raising girls so they faint dead away the first time
they see a naked man?"
"I guess you're right," I admitted. "But I suppose I'm a puritan at
heart."
We walked on. I told myself that it was a good and pure thing for girls
of twelve to belong to nudist colonies. So far there didn't seem to be
any little boys of thirteen on the premises, at any rate. It was still
early in the season. I realized that this vacation was going to be a
valuable experience for me. It was teaching me already how, despite
all my pretenses of being an emancipated bachelor on the make, I was
still able to be shocked. It's easy to talk a good game about how the
pretenses and cockeyed inhibitions of society ought to be thrown in the
ashcan. But it's one thing to use that line on a girl you're trying to
lure into bed, and another thing altogether when you see a place like
this where the inhibitions and pretenses _are_ thrown into the ashcan.
We returned to our cabin and made the beds. There wasn't any maid
service around here; once a week you got a change of linen, but that
was it. By the time we had finished getting the place in order, it
was still only half past eight. The chores were done, and an enormous
expanse of daytime stretched out in front of us.
We stepped out onto the porch. I heard giggling, and saw our waitress,
Lorraine, come sprinting down the hill toward the lake, followed
closely by a long, lean, dark-complected customer I had never seen
before. Both of them were in the raw, of course. It looked like a
scene from an ancient Greek vase--Nymph Pursued by Satyr. Lorraine
was running pretty fast, and those lovely little knobs of hers were
bobbling up and down in a way that made my blood course a little faster.
She waved to us, gaily, as she flashed past.
"Where to?" I yelled.
"The lake! Come on along!"
I looked at Meehan and we shrugged and joined the wild dash. We all
plunged down through the opening in the trees and emerged in a level
area that ran gently to the water's edge. A rickety-looking dock
extended out about forty feet, and boats were tethered to it. We came
to a halt, panting and giggling. Lorraine's virginal-looking young
breasts were pumping wildly up and down, and sweatbeads glistened all
over her.
Between gasps she said, "Want you to meet--Nick Riccio, the assistant
chef--Nick--Al Fieldston--Jack Meehan--"
While Lorraine caught her breath, Jack and I shook hands with Riccio.
He was about six three and couldn't have weighed more than 170--one of
those lean Italians whose muscles are long and flat, like a racer's.
He seemed friendly enough, but there was something faintly sinister
about him, I thought. Probably my imagination. At the time I was
growing up in Chicago, _Italian_ was synonymous with _gangster_, and I
guess I had never really managed to rid myself of that stereotype. A
bad way to judge people, I told myself.
We capered out onto the dock. There was a diving board at the very end,
and Lorraine scampered up on it and took off into space. There are
few more stirring sights in all the world than watching a beauty of
eighteen or nineteen do a swan dive in the nude. She seemed to float
into the water, making a flawless arc through her breasts and buttocks.
She bobbed up immediately, laughing, beckoning us in.
I didn't feel like risking the diving board. I jumped in from the
dockside, while Riccio executed a neat jackknife, and Meehan followed
with a degrading bellywhop. We splashed around in the cold, clear water
for a while. The calisthenics group had broken up, and most of them,
too, came down to join us for a swim. By the time an hour had gone by,
the water around the dock was crowded, and you could see breasts and
buttocks and arms and legs come flailing up to the surface from time to
time like disembodied parts.
The horseplay was getting pretty rough and frenzied, and I had lost
whatever inhibitions I might have had earlier. I lost one inhibition
too many and made a mistake.
Actually it was an accident, to begin with. We were splashing about,
and there was water in my eyes and I couldn't see, and while I was
trying to get my bearings someone collided with me. I reached out
involuntarily and my hand came in contact with flesh.
Firm, springy, round flesh.
A woman's breast. Not too big, not too small. Just a neat handful, with
a stiff little nipple thrusting into my palm. It was all an accident,
but a nice one. I opened my eyes and realized that Lorraine had backed
right into me, and I had grabbed her breast and was holding on to keep
from going under. There she was, with her buttocks flattened up against
me and my arm around her and my left hand cupping her breast, all of
this going on just below the surface. For the first time since I had
peeled off my clothes, I felt my masculinity asserting itself, and I
was glad I was under water.
We maintained the pleasant contact for a moment, and I guess if nobody
else had been around we would have gone right ahead all the way. But
then Lorraine seemed to come to her senses.
"Sorry," she cried, and swam away.
I trod water for a moment, trying to get back to normal. I was forming
all sorts of interesting plans concerning the lithe brunette.
But all of a sudden, Nick Riccio popped up out of nowhere next to me.
He looked blazing mad.
"I saw that, wiseguy," he muttered in a low voice, and there was
nothing stereotyped about him now. He _was_ sinister.
"Huh?"
"Don't play dumb, pal. I saw the whole thing, the way you groped
Lorraine."
I smiled, I hoped appeasingly. "Hell, you've got the wrong idea. She
bumped into me and I grabbed her to keep from going under."
"You grabbed her a nice long time. Just don't do it again, pal. I'll
forgive you because you're new here. But Lorraine isn't free for grabs."
He turned and swam away. Suddenly I had lost all interest in swimming.
I found the ladder and hauled myself up on the dock.
Looking down, I saw the turmoil going on. I also saw Riccio and
Lorraine far out near the boundary buoy, and he looked meaner than
ever. Bonnie Carter waved to me. I ignored her. Meehan spotted me, and
came out of the water.
"You look upset," he said.
I nodded. "Make a note not to fool around with that Lorraine item," I
said. "I just grabbed her, and Riccio let me know she was his private
property."
"He looks like a tough customer."
"He is. Hell, it was an _accident_, Jack."
"Yeah," he said. "I know all about it."
"Now listen, Jack--"
"Can it. You through swimming?"
"For now," I said.
"Me too. Let's go get some sunshine."
_CHAPTER FOUR_
We legged it up the hill to our cabin. Meehan spread a blanket in front
on the grass and sprawled out on it. I decided I was going to get a
fast start on my book. I dragged a table out of the cabin, set it up
front, and got out my typewriter and some blank paper. Meehan was half
asleep, but he grinned at me and said, "You going to write your book?"
"I'm not going to wait till next Christmas," I told him.
I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and stared at the
keyboard. Now that I was actually right on the brink of beginning, I
felt a sudden queasy sensation in my stomach. I had been _talking_
about doing the book for years and years. Now I was finally calling my
own bluff. I didn't have any more excuses.
_How the hell do you begin?_ I wondered.
I typed out CHAPTER ONE and stared at the page. I was thinking that
there were two or three hundred pages after this one, and all of them
had to be written one word at a time. Sixty, seventy thousand words,
at least. I shuddered at the thought of filling all those nice blank
sheets of paper with words. It seemed like a staggering task to write
an entire consecutive novel in one big piece.
I lit up a cigarette and scowled at the typewriter for maybe ten
minutes. People kept walking past, and I kept looking up at them.
Joanie went by two or three times, and the redhaired waitress, and
Lorraine and Riccio, and practically everybody else. All of them saw
I was trying to work, and kept far away. Personal privacy was a big
thing at Sunland, evidently. But the mere fact that so many provocative
bosoms and backsides were passing in front of me all the time proved to
be distracting. Meehan was sprawled out on his stomach, watching the
passing parade out of half-closed eyes.