CHAPTER TWELVE

The group broke up, each of us heading back to his cabin to dry off. With the end of the dance, the impulse of spontaneity died away, and we were all just a bunch of cold, naked people, soaked by the rain.

I was tingling all over from Joanie's kiss. Tingling like a goddam teenager. The kiss had been part of the moment, the wild, spontaneous moment. We had both been carried away.

I wondered about Joanie. She had kissed me willingly enough, enthusiastically enough. Yet immediately afterward, despite her smile, she had worn a look of shock, a what-have-I-done? kind of look. And she had escaped quickly from the group, without a word to me. As though she had to get away by herself and think over the causes of the strange impulse that had led her to kiss me and let me kiss her.

I was pretty sure that Meehan had been wrong about Joanie's being a lesbian. But he had definitely been right when he said she was mixed up sexually. Frigid or just neurotically virginal, perhaps. Despite the abundant riches of her body, she had no more sexuality than a ten-year-old. Yet for one moment in the rain she had throbbed with the sort of inner warmth that befitted her superb feminine endowments.

Just for one moment.

Tingling and edgy, I made my way back to the cabin and dried myself off. Dancing in the rain had been grand, but now I felt cold, chilled through and through. I dried myself thoroughly and dressed in fresh clothing and settled down with a book.

I couldn't read. I couldn't concentrate. That damned kiss had shaken me all up.

Tremendous sexual desire overwhelmed me as I lay there. Fierce pains sleeted through my loins, and left in their wake a dull, pounding ache. If Harriet or Sandra had walked in the door at that moment they would have been raped. Even Bonnie, if she still were around, would have been welcome. I needed a woman—any woman—to calm me, to take the edge off this throbbing excitement. But no woman appeared. First a feast, then a famine. I wouldn't find it as easy as it had been to find a sleeping partner now. Bonnie gone, Harriet involved with Riccio's friend, Sandra working her wiles on that hapless architect ... the remaining single women in the camp were mostly dogs or else, like Mary Kinowski, they couldn't/wouldn't be made. And the one pretty girl available, Naomi, wasn't available, thanks to my pal Meehan.

So I just had to do without. Well, it was a refreshing change from the hectic humping of the earlier days. And in an odd way I felt that remaining celibate would help my chances with Joanie.

The rain continued on into the evening. Everyone gathered in the social hall for films—a couple of animated cartoons for the kiddies, and then some more of Dr. Richards' eight-millimeter films of past seasons at Sunland. Afterwards, the benches were cleared back and there was square-dancing. I danced a couple of sets with Joanie, but her behavior was distant and formally polite, as though she still were reacting to our kiss in the rain that afternoon. At ten, when the program broke up, I walked her back to her cabin. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, now, and there was some hope that tomorrow might be a decent day.

I stood hesitantly on the cabin porch, and a wild fantasy passed through my mind—that Joanie would invite me in, that we would peel away the wet clothing that at the moment hid our bodies from each other. My hands would slide around the taut fullness of her breasts, my lips would once again seek hers, her body would come to life, her legs parting to receive me, and we would merge in white-hot ecstacy.

Just a wild fantasy. But a nice one.

What really happened was more expectable. She smiled at me, opened the cabin door, said a cheery "Goodnight, Al," and walked in.

The door closed.

I wandered away, still living my little dream-fantasy. The drizzle continued. Twenty feet from Joanie's cabin I turned and looked back. The light was on inside, and she hadn't bothered to close the shutters. She was half undressed, walking around bare to the waist. For some weird reason this peeping-tom moment excited me. I had seen Joanie in the altogether from a distance of six inches, but here she was undressing with the blind open, and there I was standing in the rain staring at her bare breasts with my tongue hanging out....

Human beings are silly people.

I leaned against a tree and watched her unzip her fly-front blue jeans and step out of them. She wasn't wearing anything underneath. I could see her naked body down as far as mid-thigh.

I laughed at myself for what I was doing, and walked quickly back to the cabin. Meehan was there already, and he had a cat-with-canary-inside look on his face.

"Where were you tonight?" I asked. "I didn't see you at the movies."

"Did I miss anything?"

"Some Mickey Mouse and a film of 1954 fun at Sunland," I said. "Square dancing afterward, and Elinor served punch. Unspiked punch."

"I had a better time," Meehan said.

"With Naomi?"

"With Naomi," he agreed. "That girl has inhibitions, you know?"

"Sure I know."

"But she can be coaxed. And when she decides to stop acting inhibited—like, wow, man!"

I felt a pang of jealousy. For no good reason at all, since Meehan wasn't getting anything I couldn't have had if I'd kept my wits about me. "You scored, huh?"

He shrugged. "After much travail and suasion, yes. It was indeed a struggle. But a worthwhile one. Like a rabbit, Al. Or a mink. That's how she goes. Like a friggin' rabbit."

"Were you the first?"

"Not quite," Meehan said, looking up at the ceiling dreamily. "She gave me the life history after we got tired of doing it. I'm the third, she says. You can probably add one or two to the list. She was seduced when she was nineteen, and then again last year when she was twenty-one. Scared stiff of sex. Never had satisfaction in her life till tonight." Meehan sighed. "Ah, love! Life can be so beautiful! Yesterday she was a frightened little unvirgin who couldn't bare her fanny for anything, and tonight she's a confirmed nudist, and better still a satisfied woman. It's heartwarming, man."

"I'm sure it is," I said a little sourly.

"How's your novel coming?"

"I finished Chapter Two today."

"Don't rush it, Hemingway. You've got all summer."

"Yeah," I said, and moved along into my own room, feeling angry at the world and realizing I didn't have very much to be angry about that wasn't my own damn fault in the first place.

The drumming of the rain, and the general tenseness of my nerves, kept me up for a while. But I dropped off into sleep finally, and when I woke the sun was streaming in the window and it was a gorgeous day.

The grounds were a mess from the rain. But even at half past seven the sun was high and hot, and it was easy to see that by noon the day would really be a scorcher. I thought about the boys back on Wacker Drive. The office was air-conditioned, of course, but they had to step out of the office to eat and get home. It was probably 99 down in Chicago, with humidity to match. Here it was hot, but it was a dry, soul-warming heat, and there was always the lake to cool off in. Plus the advantage of having no clothes to wear.

It was such a good day that I decided to let the typewriter have the day off. Chapter Three could wait. After twenty-four dank and drizzly hours, I wanted to get out into that sun.

The trouble was that not too many facilities were available. The tennis courts would need another day to dry before they could be rolled; same with the volleyball court, though you could get up a game on the grass if you didn't mind risking a sprained ankle or two. The baseball diamond was similarly soggy and needed some toasting in the sun before anyone could use it.

The basketball court, being paved, was available. So after breakfast I got a ball out of the games shed and went down by myself to get some exercise while the morning was still young.

Playing basketball by yourself can be pretty dull. I ran up and down the length of the court a few times, taking layups and usually blowing them. When that got dull, I moved back a ways and took some set shots, at which I was pretty good, and then started throwing in some one-hand heaves from mid-court and beyond. After about fifteen minutes of steady dribbling and shooting, I had worked up a healthy sweat, and my skin was glistening. I sat down at the edge of the court to rest.

The day of rain hadn't affected my suntan at all. I was still pretty brown. It was a novelty to me to have the foot-wide strip around my middle just as brown as the rest of me, but I rather liked the effect. I also liked the way camp life had toughened me up, removing that incipient bulge around my middle and giving me some semblance of the lean, muscular fellow I had been a decade earlier. I was lying there admiring my tanned, hairy, sweat-shiny nakedness and deciding it was about time to take some more shots at the basket when I caught sight of Joanie coming through the trees toward me.

She was carrying some folded-up canvas. She waved and smiled at me, and I got to my feet.

"Lovely morning, isn't it?" she said.

"Sure is. Where are you heading?"

"To the dock," she said. "I want to get the sailboat in shape."

The camp owned a little sailboat, hardly bigger than a rowboat. Flat-bottomed, single-masted. Sailing it wasn't particularly difficult, and it was a popular item at the colony.

I walked down to the dock with Joanie. The rowboats and canoes and sailboat were all full of water. "The kitchen boys said they'd be down to bail the boats when they were through cleaning up," Joanie said. "But we might as well get the sailboat bailed now. Want to give me a hand?"

"Sure," I said.

I waded out into the shallow water and got the bottom end of the boat, while Joanie remained on the dock. She lifted the front end and hoisted the back, and together we got the little boat up on the dock. While I was lifting, I admired for the millionth time the play of muscles over Joanie's body. Nothing masculine or overdeveloped, mind you. She was utterly feminine in every respect. But the muscles and sinews rippled the way a cat's will, and it did things to the contours of her breasts and stomach that made me catch my breath.

Once we got the boat on the dock, it was an easy matter to tip it up on one side and let the rainwater drain out of it. After the final gurgle, we eased the boat back into the water. Joanie got in it and began attaching the sail, while I sat on the edge of the dock, dangling my feet and eyeing with pleasure the golden-brown loveliness of the girl in the boat.

"There," she said, when the last knot was tied. "It's all ready now for anybody who wants to use it."

"How about us?" I suggested, surprising myself by the way the notion rippled out of my mouth. "Why don't we go take a sail, now that we've put the boat into shape?"

Joanie looked nonplussed. "But I've got to organize the volleyball game," she said weakly.

"The volleyball court's all wet," I said. "Besides, you're always organizing things or bailing boats or doing something else useful. Why can't you just relax like the rest of us? Come on—I'll steer."

It took a little coaxing. Evidently the idea of just loafing away the morning never occurred to her. Besides, she seemed a bit leery of being all alone with me in the boat. But her arguments grew weaker and weaker, and finally she gave in.

She stretched out on the cushion in the front of the boat. I climbed in at the stern, and grabbed the tiller. There was only a faint breeze, and for an awkward moment I thought I might have to man the oars to get the little boat away from the dock. But then the sail filled and bellied out, and we began to glide outward.

Now, I was an Army man, and had no experience at navigation. But I got the hang of steering the boat quickly enough, and made the most of the light breeze. The lake was a fair-sized one, oval-shaped, with some coves and inlets down at the east end. It was ringed on three sides by dense woods; on the fourth was the Sunland dock. No doubt from time to time curious yokels from the town crept through the woods to train telescopes on the dock, but Joanie had told me earlier that it was a risky business: the woods were thick and well vegetated, with a particularly heavy growth of poison ivy. That and the barbed-wire fences helped to keep peepers out most of the time.

I headed for the middle of the lake, and then, taking advantage of the breeze, let the boat glide gently toward the coves at the east end of the lake. Joanie lay stretched out on her back, her eyes closed. She was smiling as the warmth of the sun bathed her.

Her breathtaking beauty brought a lump to my throat. It was like a dream, being alone in the boat with this naked goddess. My eyes came to rest on the clean lines of her face, on her strong throat, on the twin peaks of flesh jutting from her chest. They travelled lower, to the firm, unsagging belly, to the golden fleece at her loins, to the flawless thighs and perfect calves. And both of us naked. I fought back the wild craving to pitch forward onto her and take her by force.

"Sleeping?" I asked.

"Just relaxing," she said. "The sun's so glorious."

"It's a marvelous day." After a moment I said, "Not at all like yesterday. But there were some good moments yesterday despite everything."

"The dancing, you mean."

"And what happened afterward."

She frowned, for a moment, but she didn't seem displeased. I held my breath. She said, "Yes. That was nice too, Al. But so—unexpected."

"It's the unexpected things that you treasure most," I told her. I stopped steering and let the boat drift, and stretched out until the soles of my feet practically touched hers as she faced me in the boat. "You're a very mysterious girl, you know, Joanie?"

"Mysterious? Me?"

"Yes, you. It's funny, really. I know all about the freckle you have on your left hip, but I don't know a thing about you."

"Such as what?"

"How old are you, for one thing. Where you live. Where you went to school. What you do during the winter. What sort of person you are."

She laughed. "Whoa! Let me answer those before you ask any more."

"Fair enough."

She said, "I'm twenty-three. I live in Edgewater and I went to Wisconsin and majored in education. Since last fall I've been a Phys Ed teacher at a junior high, and if the Board of Education ever found out I was a nudist they'd probably fire me."

"How'd you get interested in nudism?" I asked.

"Oh, it wasn't any of my doing. My folks met the Richardses at some sort of political meeting, and they got converted. I came up here first when I was twelve, and I've been here ever since. For the last two or three years I've been sort of an assistant director."

"And you took naturally to this kind of life?"

She shrugged prettily. "When I was twelve I was too young to have inhibitions. The next couple of years, when I was developing and all, I felt kind of uncomfortable here, but since then it's been all right."

"And in the city?"

"I'm the most prudish thing you can imagine," she said. "A completely different person. I don't even wear dresses with low necklines. I don't mind nakedness, but it annoys me when people try to use their bodies as bait. Hiding all but a little, and teasing people."

"I know what you mean," I said. We were practically in the cove, now. I steered us away from a shady area, back into the open. I said, "How about a personal question, now. Have you ever been in love?"

She was silent a moment. I could tell that her desire to mask her personal feelings was warring with the relaxed atmosphere of conversation I had established in the boat. She said finally, hesitantly, "There was someone—once. A long time ago. Three years."

"It didn't work out?"

"No," she said softly. "He—he turned out to be married. I'd rather not talk about it, Al."

"All right," I said. I was grateful to know that there had been someone in her life, once. That she was not completely sexless.

"What about your parents?" I asked. "Don't they come here any more?"

Her face darkened, and she said with some difficulty, "They're—dead."

"Oh. Sorry," I murmured.

"They were killed in an auto accident. Three years ago. Right around the same time as—as I found out about him. I had a pretty rough time for a while."

"I'll bet you did," I said gently. I was beginning to fill in the picture, now—of this radiantly beautiful girl who had somehow been turned into an emotional cripple by the practically simultaneous deaths of her parents and the exposure of her lover's deceit.

To get off what was becoming an unpleasant topic, I switched over and had her asking questions about me. I told her about my job, about my newspaper work, about the book I was writing. We talked about my marriage briefly—the seventeen-month deal to a scatterbrained redhead who cuckolded me at least twenty times. We talked about how much I enjoyed staying at Sunland.

Everything was just perfect. The two of us naked in the boat on the quiet lake in the warm sunlight. Her bronzed body with its improbable perfection and athletic grace. The first beginnings of a real relationship between us. It had been a wonderful hour. Even when I said hesitantly, "After the summer—perhaps we can get together for a date—" and held my breath, waiting for the steel gate to clank down.

She said quickly, "I—I don't do much dating, Al," but in the same breath she said, "But it would be a nice idea to get together. Yes. Let's."

I was on my way to success.

Then I spoiled it.

We were lying utterly becalmed in an inlet where no one could see us from the dock. I felt myself growing taut with desire for her. As she lay there, eyes closed, I crept forward in the boat toward her. My motions caused her to open her eyes.

She looked up at me, and one glance at my body and at my face must have told her what I had on my mind. I felt about three inches high. There was a mournful look in her eyes, as though my foolish moment of randiness had smashed something terribly fragile, terribly lovely. She sat up abruptly, closing her legs and drawing them up underneath her in what would have been a gesture of modesty in a girl who was wearing anything.

I made my way back to my seat, face burning. I wished I could undo that moment. But you can't turn time back by wishing.

There was coldness in her voice, the coldness of steel, when she spoke. The words were like whiplashes. "We'd better head back to the dock, Al. There's a lot of work I have to get done yet this morning."