CHAPTER THREE

It was just after ten by the time Jack and I were finished installing ourselves in Cabin Nine of the Sunland Health Colony. A few people were straggling back from the dance now. We saw them going into other cabins, turning on the lights.

"We might as well sack out," Jack suggested.

"Might as well," I agreed. "Time to meet everybody in the morning."

We exchanged uneasy glances. I figured he was probably thinking the same thing I was—that he wanted a good night's sleep before he would feel much like walking nude into a square dance.

Washing up, we headed for our individual bedrooms. I lay awake for a while, thinking of Joanie Baker's buttocks, thinking of the nude photo of Sandra Richards I had seen. Then I told myself annoyedly that I had come up here to write a novel, not to spend my time chasing quail. Besides, Dr. Richards had warned me that any actions which violated the rules of decency or caused embarrassment to other members were likely to result in expulsion. I didn't know exactly how closely the decency of the colony was safeguarded, but I was willing to bet that a couple caught necking anywhere but behind the closed doors of a cabin would get the heave-ho instanter.

After a while I fell asleep, even though it was at least three hours before my normal bedtime. The night passed quickly. The next thing I knew, the sunlight was streaming in, awakening me, and I was going to the window and looking out at the busty beauty of Joanie Baker, this time unencumbered by the sweater.

You'll remember my describing how with some difficulty we got Meehan awake, and how the three of us started up front for breakfast. It was weird, walking along with this radiant blonde between us, and all three of us bare as the day we came into the world. Joanie walked pretty close to us, and once or twice we collided a little bit and the round fullness of her breast grazed my side. Touching her flesh, in my present super-sensitive state, was like touching a hot iron. I pulled away instinctively every time she brushed me.

It was a glorious morning. Birds were chirping, the sun was warm already, and the air was as fresh and as tangy as new wine. And I had to admit there was something refreshing about getting your clothes off, all your clothes, and letting the air get to your skin.

We emerged from the path and I got my first good look at the area we had seen only vaguely the night before. Joanie once again pointed everything out. The social hall was off to the right. Over to the left was the kitchen and mess hall, and further to left was an oddly humpbacked building that housed the colony library, music room, and crafts shop. Straight ahead was what I had taken to be a wall in the dark, but it was merely a solid row of hedges about ten feet high, broken in the middle for an entrance. I could see the dirt road winding off into the woods that lay beyond.

"Hungry?" Joanie asked.

"Starved," I said.

"Me too," Jack chimed in.

We entered the mess hall. I felt a giddy moment of vertigo as, mother-naked, I stepped inside. A single long table ran the length of the room, and about fifteen people were eating. Those parts of their bodies that were visible above the table were absolutely bare. Two waitresses were making the rounds with trays. They were pretty little things, a brunette about eighteen and a redhead perhaps a year or two older, and they, too, were peeled. The redhead came paddling by, on her way back to the kitchen with an empty tray, and she gave me a shy little smile. I jerked my head around and watched her adorable pink backside vanishing kitchenwards.

We sat down. I took the first empty seat in the row, Meehan sat down at my left, and Joanie went around to sit facing us on the other side of the table, with her breasts trained on us like cannon. I felt dazed, so dazed that I looked straight ahead, at Joanie, and not at any of the other people at the table.

There was a frosty moment of silence.

Then I became aware of a pair of breasts jutting over my left shoulder, practically poking into my ear. I looked around and saw that the agreeably constructed pear-shaped mammaries belonged to the brunette waitress, who was waiting to take my order for breakfast.

I had a sudden dizzying impulse to reach around and pat the brunette's buttocks affectionately. It would have been a catastrophe. I restrained myself with an effort. But the girl was so goddam cute—say, 37-25-35, slim but busty, and downright pinchable.

She said, "Good morning. My name's Lorraine, and I'm your waitress this morning. I hope you had a good night's rest."

"Yeah—yeah, sure," Meehan said.

"That's fine," Lorraine beamed. "You're Mr. Jack Meehan, is that it?" She turned to me again. "And you're Mr. Al Fieldston. What would you like to have this morning? We have choice of orange juice or half grapefruit, flapjacks, bacon and eggs, sausages—"

She reeled off a few more items, and then we halted her and ordered. After she had taken Joanie's order too she bounced off into the kitchen. Her rear end had a delectable wiggle when she walked.

I said to Joanie, "Even the employees are nudists around here, eh?"

"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."