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.

After a long silence he said, "Al?"

"Mmm?"

"You aren't typing much."

"I'm thinking," I said, wishing he would shut up.

But he didn't. "I'm thinking too," he said, "About Joanie Baker. What do you think of her?"

"She's a knockout," I said, looking up sourly. "She's stacked and she's got a fabulous body. Did you need my opinion that badly?"

"Just wondering," he said. "Think she's a virgin?"

"How the hell would I know?"

"You've seen enough."

I shrugged. "She looks like the healthy uninhibited kind. She probably wouldn't mind a nice healthy lay every now and then. You understand?"

"Aren't you?" he shot back.

"Jack, I'm trying to work—"

"Just let me get my point across. I say she won't put out."

"Why don't you go try finding out?"

"I will, man. But the prognosis isn't favorable. I say she's a dyke, Al."

I goggled at him. "Her? Why, she's so goddam normal she's sick! If that girl's a lesbian then so am I."

Jack laughed. "You like to sleep with girls, don't you? Well, so does she."

"How can you tell?"

"Just a trained instinct of mine," Jack said. "She's like a girl scout who never grew up, get me? And you know what sort of stuff goes on in girl-scout camp—"

"All right, all right. So she's a dyke. Will you let me get some work done, now?" I grumbled.

He clammed up, and I went back to staring at the blank sheet in the typewriter. The thought of Joanie Baker being lesbian bothered me. It didn't seem right that a girl with such marvelous breasts, with those wide hips and strong loins, should be queer. She was built to love, I told myself. Having her ought to be like making love to a surging river. I pictured myself lying beside her, her muscular body rippling, her sinews tensing with passion, and shook my head. Jack had a sort of instinct about such things, but this time I doubted him. Nothing in Joanie's behavior had been anything but apple-pie normal. Maybe she was a virgin, maybe she just didn't have any use for sex at all, but I couldn't see her as lesbian or anything.

I managed to stop thinking about her. I tried to concentrate on the book.

After five more minutes I realized that my mistake was in trying to begin the thing just like that, right off the bat. Writing a book was a big job, especially the first time you tried it. You had to work up to it in slow easy stages.

Instead of starting to write the book, the thing to do was to write an outline of the plot. Four or five pages, nothing very elaborate. Then, I told myself, I'd take the outline and work it over, expanding it, filling in the background and the characters, until I had around twenty pages written. Then I could block the outline off into chapters and begin the book. It was a lot easier to think in terms of a bunch of twelve or fifteen-page chapters than it was to keep the whole plot together in my mind.

So I started to tap out the outline.

It came pretty easily. After all, I had been carrying the book around in my head for a few years. It was set in an advertising agency background, because that was what I knew best, but I didn't figure the book to be autobiographical in any way. My hero was a hard-driving louse, who would claw his way to the top of the agency only to learn when he got there that fame and fortune and $100,000 a year wasn't all there was to life, and that now that he had reached the top he had to admit that he was a pretty hollow sort of person who had sacrificed himself for a goal that wasn't worth the sacrifice.

Nothing profound and Joycean, you see. But I figured it was a good honest theme, and I could back it up with plenty of authentic background detail and characters. It was a story I understood, and a story I wanted to tell, and a story I would feel better for having told. What the hell, it wouldn't be art, but at least it would be a sincere effort, and I might even make a few bucks out of it besides. I wasn't worried about that part of it. As I said, I earned enough dough to keep me happy without needing a six-figure sale to Hollywood. Not that I would object to one, mind you.

So I sat there tapping out the words, one after another. I became oblivious to the world around me. I knew it was getting hot, and I was dripping in my own sweat, but I didn't mind that. I kept going until I had five and a half pages of outline typed out, and I felt pretty exhausted, and I stopped and looked up.

Bonnie Carter was standing right in front of me, stark naked, smiling.

I snapped out of the dream-world of my book and back to reality. The snap was so sudden that I didn't have time to adjust to the special sort of reality I had been living in all day, and it struck me with a jolt that I was sitting here typing away with nothing on and everything hanging out visibly. Automatically I clamped my knees tight together in embarrassment. Then I relaxed, remembering where I was and that concealment didn't matter here.

"I've been standing here for fifteen minutes," Bonnie said. "You were so absorbed in your work you didn't notice me, Mr. Fieldston."

I managed a foolish smile. I really hadn't known she was there. I looked at her, and just then she looked closer to thirty than forty. She had been swimming, and her body still gleamed moistly, and when she stood with her shoulders straight there was hardly any sag to her bosom. Her legs were thin and good to look at, and all in all she seemed attractive right then, even though she had been one hell of a drag at the breakfast table. The only thing that bothered me about her was the slightly popeyed look she had, the hyperthyroid bit.

Somewhere a gong sounded. "Lunchtime," I heard Joanie Baker yell distantly. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see that it was quarter to twelve. I had spent the whole morning on my miserable few pages.

Meehan scrambled to his feet and said, "Coming up front, Al?"

"Couple of minutes," I said. "I want to read over what I've written. Don't wait for me."

"I'll save you a place," he said.

He ambled off. I smiled at Bonnie and, picking up the typewriter and the package of typewriter paper, went into the cabin. I was standing by my bed, reading the first couple of paragraphs of the outline, when I heard the cabin door open and close again.

"I told you not to wait for me, Jack!" I called without looking up.

"My name isn't Jack," Bonnie said softly.

She came into the bedroom, naked, and closed the door. She slipped the door-hook through the eye. She looked flushed and more youthful than ever.

I was surprised and almost a little annoyed. There were supposed to be rules about knocking before you went into someone else's cabin. And you weren't supposed to set up situations like this, either.

I don't know what I would have said—something impolite, maybe—but suddenly my body took a hand in the situation without consulting me. Up till now, there had always been a group of at least three, and the social frame had acted as an inhibitor. But now here I was locked into a bedroom with a strange and rather good-looking woman, and both of us were naked. My natural masculine reaction occurred. Bonnie saw me getting excited, and she moved toward me, and suddenly I wasn't annoyed any more.

"It's going to be a marvelous novel, Al," she breathed huskily. "I can tell. I watched how hard you were working. I'd like to read your manuscript, if you wouldn't mind."

"It isn't really a manuscript yet," I said awkwardly. "I was just working on the outline—"

And then she came another step closer to me, and all discussion of manuscript-reading came to an end. She pressed herself up against me, and I gasped with pleasure—it had been a respectably long time since I last had had a woman—and my arms went around her, sliding down her back to the full, quivering flesh of her buttocks, and then I brought my hands up to cup the heaviness of her breasts. Her nipples rose stiffly into my palms like two live things moving of their own free will. Her mouth approached mine; for a moment I stared deep into her hyperthyroid eyes, reading the hunger for a man, any man, and then my lips were against hers and my eyes were shut tight and my tongue was exploring the inside of her mouth.

Still clasped in a tight embrace, we tumbled down onto my narrow bed. She was panting and gasping now, and she had a wild look about her. Her breasts leaped and jiggled with each motion she made. I wanted to slow things up a little, to bring them along a little more subtly. But she wasn't in the mood for subtlety. She pulled at me and cried out, "Take me, Al, take me!" and I did.

She gave a convulsive quiver all over her body, while I gritted my teeth and tried to stay cool, and the tips of her fingers dug painfully into the knotted muscles of my back. And she quivered again and again and again, every quiver a tremor of pure delight for her, and then finally I couldn't hold out any longer.

My heart was thundering. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked down at her. Her eyes were open, and they still had the hyperthyroid look. But the irises had changed color, it seemed—from blue to a smoky green—and she had lost the tense, neurotic look she had worn at breakfast time.

She smiled at me. "What time is it?" she asked coolly.

I've been asked many things after a bout of amour, but never in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice. I looked at my watch. "Five after twelve," I said. The whole thing had taken no more than ten or fifteen minutes. It had seemed endless, but you never can be very sure of time-perception at times like that.

She said, "We'd better get up. It would be a shame to miss lunch."

"I suppose it would," I said, a little sourly.

I pried myself loose from her and went into the john to tidy myself up. When I came out, Bonnie was sitting up, rearranging her coiffeur.

She smiled again. "I did it four times, darling," she reported blandly, as though telling me about her boy's latest report card.

I didn't have any handy response to make. I just grinned foolishly. I began to get the notion that this Bonnie was quite a character. Quite.

We headed for the mess hall. Everyone else had long since gone up, and the grounds and road lay empty and quiet in the noonday sun. Bonnie said, "I hope you aren't shocked by my behavior."

"It's a pleasant way to be shocked," I said.

"I have an uncontrollable sex urge," she confided. "I had to have a divorce because my husband couldn't satisfy me. I went to a psychoanalyst to see if he could reduce my sex drive, but that ended in a fiasco when I seduced him. I'm really not a healthy woman, Al."

"You're healthy enough."

"Yes, but it's not right. I'm shameless. This morning at breakfast I knew I had to have you before the day was out. I could feel the throbbing that had to be stilled, the fire that had to be quenched—"

I began to form a pretty clear picture of Bonnie Carter. She was a spoiled, self-indulgent rich bitch with a hopped-up metabolism and an insatiable hunger for men, which she apologized for afterwards. There had been nothing very personal in her seduction of me. She felt a throbbing, so she walked into my bedroom. Most likely a candle would have served her just as well.

We reached the mess hall and walked in. A few people looked up at us as we came in, but most of the colonists had the decency not to make a fuss about the fact that Bonnie and I were arriving twenty minutes late for lunch together.

I practically collided with Lorraine as she came out of the kitchen, toting a tray. She carried the tray hugged up against her midsection so that her breasts actually rested on it. It made a neat effect, as though she were serving them for lunch. She smiled at me, but it was a guilty smile, and she reddened. She blushed all the way down to the tray.

I took a seat next to Meehan and Joanie. Bonnie found a seat at the far end of the table. I was sitting next to Don Riemann, the calisthenics lad, and we introduced ourselves. Lorraine came over and took my order for lunch. She was polite but distant. I imagined Riccio had given her a good talking-to.

I ate quickly, catching up with the others. After lunch, Joanie stood up and made an announcement. "Attention, everybody. Don Riemann wants me to tell you that he'll be conducting a class in advanced tumbling this afternoon at two. Anybody who's interested, meet with Don at the mats near the tennis court."

That little chore over, Joanie dismissed the group. I wandered outside with Meehan. The moment we were alone, Jack said, "It took you a long time to get to lunch today."

"Yeah. Didn't it?"

"I saw the Carter woman go back into the cabin, but I figured it wasn't my business."

I chuckled. "She's a regular hellion. I can tell you that there's at least one woman around this place who isn't a lesbian."

"Wild, huh?"

"The works. And all in fifteen minutes," I said.

Jack frowned. "She looks like the clinging type. You may be in for more bother than you're bargaining for."

"I'm not bargaining for anything," I told him. "She's a nympho. When she uses me up, she'll start on you. Be prepared, man. Like I mean, ready."

"It's my motto," he grinned. "I'd much rather be chased by that Baker girl, though."

"Queer or no?"

He shrugged. "I like a challenge."

"Speak of the devil," I muttered, as Joanie advanced on us from the rear.

"Mr. Fieldston," she called. "Al! Could I talk to you for a moment—alone?"

"With pleasure," I said.

Meehan gave me a curdled look of envy and walked away. Joanie headed for the rear steps of the social hall. She sat down on the steps, in a probably unintentionally provocative legs-wide position. My bout with Bonnie, though, had left me better able to resist the unnerving impact of Joanie's magnificently full-blown nakedness. I sat down next to her, studying her deep breasts with academic interest.

She said, "I don't mean to pry into your personal affairs, Al. But I couldn't help noticing today that you seem to be developing an—ahem—interest in Bonnie Carter."

I fidgeted. "Well, not really. I mean, that is, Bonnie seems friendly to me—"

Joanie flashed the girl-scout smile. "Around here we don't have to be tied down with petty modesty, Al. Bonnie was seen going into your cabin when the lunch-gong rang, and the two of you didn't show up for fifteen minutes. I don't think I'm jumping to conclusions when I assume—"

"You assume correctly," I said.

"Don't think I'm trying to meddle. I just want to warn you about Bonnie, Al."

"Warn me?"

"She's an extremely sick woman."

"I can see that already."

"She's highly neurotic on the subject of sex. Dr. Richards keeps considering asking her to leave the colony, but he's such a gentle man he can't bear to hurt Bonnie. Besides, she's never offensive in public. But I want you to know what you're getting mixed up with."

I nodded. "I could tell she wasn't normal. She practically raped me at lunchtime."

"Each summer she picks out a man," Joanie said. "She can be very demanding. If she gets any encouragement at all, she can be almost intolerably possessive. She might keep you from working on your novel. Now, for all I know Bonnie may be just the sort of woman you want. But if she isn't I advise you to lay down the law to her right away, before she begins to think she owns you." Joanie was still smiling cheerfully. "You must think I'm a dreadful meddler. But I'm only interested in protecting you from that—that bottomless pit of a woman."

It was an unfortunate metaphor, and it broke me up. Joanie started to laugh too, even if she didn't see what was funny. I told her that I appreciated the warning, and that I would do my best to disentangle myself from Bonnie's clutches right away.

And then—unexpectedly—I reached out and put my hand on Joanie's thigh.

"Joanie—"

Deftly she removed the hand. "Sorry, Al. I think you're swell, but please don't—"

I suspended my hand in midair, about to reach out for Joanie's swelling breasts, and then my sanity returned. She was still smiling, but there was a strange expression in her eyes, a steely expression of contempt and loathing masked by surface friendliness.

I was rocked.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You're a very beautiful girl, Joanie. I got carried away, I guess."

"I understand how it is. But I'm not—not available. I don't mind displaying my body, but you mustn't assume that every nudist is automatically—automatically—"

"Sure," I said, profoundly uncomfortable. "It was an accident. Forgive me."

We parted friends. But I felt a tight band of anguish across my belly as I walked alone back to the cabin. It was by way of being a hectic day. And I had made two mistakes already. Life in the nudist colony was not quite the uninhibited orgy some people might picture. If anything, the absence of clothes made for a much more complicated system of mores.

In the water this morning I had made an involuntary grab for the lovely Lorraine, only to find out that she was spoken for. And just now I had been within inches of caressing the most superb bosom God ever fashioned, only to have a steel wall clang down. And—between the two incidents—I had practically been raped by an attractive but somewhat overripe and definitely whacky nympho. An odd sequence of events. I thought longingly of Lorraine's pretty boobs, and of the Aphrodite that was Joanie Baker. I couldn't have either of them. But I could have Bonnie Carter, and I didn't want her. It always seems to be that way.

Meehan was jotting down some notes when I came into the cabin. He looked up.

"Well, Romeo? What was the pow-wow about?"

"Joanie wanted to warn me about the Carter female," I said. "Seems Bonnie eats men alive. Joanie gave me the tip that I ought to break things up in a hurry."

"Sounds like good advice."

"And then I made a pass," I said. "It was sort of an accident again. Like I mean, here was her thigh, and there was my hand, and—"

I saw a cold glare of jealousy flicker in my pal's eyes. He said, "You want every woman in the goddam place, don't you, Al?"

"This one's all yours," I said. "My hand got removed as if it were a sprig of poison ivy. She told me she just wasn't available. Your theory may be right after all, much as I hate to admit it." I sighed wistfully. "But there's something wrong with the universe if she's really queer.

"A body like that was built for love. With men, I mean."

"There ought to be a law."