Benjamin’s shame, his promises, his failures, his ardor, his indecision—these formed the swampy terrain which Ann learned more or less to navigate, understanding that any minute the ground was likely to give way, but feeling at the same time stronger, and more certain about what she wanted. “I want you out,” she finally said after one particularly bitter betrayal, and then, a week later, changed her mind.
They went to Paris to patch things up.
Their hotel was located on a quiet street in the Marais and faced onto a private park where Parisians walked their dogs in the early mornings. Most of the other buildings in the neighborhood were built of a dull basement-colored stone, but the hotel where Ann and Benjamin stayed was, rather curiously, constructed of a soft, rosy, un-Parisian brick. Like many hotels, it wound its way around a rectangular air shaft so that each room looked directly into the windows of the other rooms. There was a small garden at the bottom and a few lines of laundry, still in the still air.
The hotel was classified as a luxury accommodation, but it seemed during the week they were there to be undergoing a form of entropy. The air-conditioning failed. The fax connection to the outside world failed. The extraordinarily heavy curtain on Ann and Benjamin’s window fell to the floor, brass rod and all, and it took the two of them to carry it out to the corridor.
On the last day, after a breakfast of coffee and croissants, the elevator broke down. (“We do apologize, madame, but it is only five flights, just think of the guests on the top floors.”) She and Benjamin climbed the stairs and entered their room. The faint and not unpleasant smell of cigar smoke greeted them, smoke that must have drifted across the air shaft from another room.
Benjamin lay on the bed, his eyes closed, and Ann settled in a chair by the open window, spreading her newspaper in front of her. She loved to read Le Monde when she came to France; its linguistic turns seemed a sort of crossword puzzle, and each time she managed to translate a sentence she congratulated herself.
Church bells rang out from a distance, reminding her that it was a Sunday morning. Traffic sounds rose from the street. A dog was barking, probably from the park across the street. Then she heard something else: a woman’s strong orgasmic cry coming from one of the open windows of the hotel.
The innocence of it was what moved her first, the stunning lack of restraint. The music of the woman’s moan was immediately recognizable to Ann, this half-singing, half-weeping, wordless release that seemed to block out all of Paris, all of the hexagon of France with its borders and seacoast and muted overhead sky.
Benjamin’s eyes were suddenly open. He was smiling at her, and she was smiling back. Then they were out of their clothes—this happened in an instant—and into each other’s arms. His skin felt exactly right to her that day, its silver flecks and familiar imperfections. As they moved together on the hard French bed the rhythm of their bodies took them over, in tune for once, and it seemed to Ann that the red bricks of their hotel were melting into a pool of sensuality. She had never understood that curious, overweighted word desire, she had scoffed at that word, but this must be it, this force that funneled through the open air, traveling through the porous masonry and entering her veins.
Everything, it seemed, could be forgiven and mended now. She imagined that each room on the air shaft was similarly transformed, that men and women were coming together ecstatically as she and Benjamin were doing and that the combined sounds they made formed an erotic random choir, whose luminous, un-moored music was spreading skyward over the city. This was all they ever needed for such perfect happiness, this exquisite permission, a stranger’s morning cry.
Of course it didn’t last, how could it?
But she hangs on to the moment in these difficult days, even at this dinner table with her hand still in the lap of a man named Alex, whom she hardly knows or even likes. She is part of the blissful, awakened world, at least for a moment. What comes in the next hour or the next year scarcely matters.
DRESSING DOWN
You might say that my grandfather carried the idea of “dressing down” to new heights.
He was, of course, a social activist of national reputation and, as well, the first serious nudist in southern Ontario, the founder of Club Soleil, which is still in existence, still thriving, on the shores of Lake Simcoe, just north of Toronto. You’ll recognize his name at once if you’re up on your twentieth-century history.
His biography came out too late—he had been dead for some years by then—for him to comment on or defend his own beliefs as a naturist, not that he would have done so, not that he would have entertained for two minutes the rude intervention of a press interview. But how do you carry your wallet, sir? What do you do, sir, about, um, the male body’s sudden embarrassments?
Please, he would have said to the journalists from the Toronto Star or the Globe or the Telegram or whatever, please! The exposure of the skin to the sun and air is a private matter, and your interest in the project, gentlemen, ladies, is—forgive me—entirely prurient.
These same questions, I confess, also occurred to me as a young boy. How had my grandfather become a nudist in the first place and what did it mean to him to shuck off his clothes, all his clothes, for one month of the year? Was it so he could feel the gaze of a hot July afternoon spreading across the square lean acreage of his chest, and, in softer shadows, onto those other less talked about areas? And, another question, how did he reconcile his nudist yearnings with his Wesleyan calling, with his eleven-months-a-year job as YMCA director for eastern Canada?
If you drive the highway to Lake Simcoe today, you’ll be struck by the variety of signs greeting you left and right between the groves of pine and birch: one by one they gesture toward green-leafed darkness, offering winding trails, gravel roads, pointing the way to countless small hidden lakes, beaches, and stretches of inspirational shore. “Awake-Again Bible Conference.” “Bide-a-Wee Housekeeping Cottages, Reasonable Rates.” “The Merit Institute. Absolutely Private.” “Fish ’n’ Fun with Mike and Hank.” “STOP AND SAY HELLO—TED AND TINA.” “ADX Yoga and More.” And, finally, “Club Soleil.”
Club Soleil has never, not since its founding in 1926, had more than the most discreet of highway signs, hand-painted, black on white, a single board nailed to the trunk of a long-lived elm, with a roughly fashioned arrow tip pointing eastward toward a trail, one that discouraged (yet allowed) wheeled traffic.
Campers at Club Soleil slept in tents in the early years. Meals, vegetarian, were taken beneath the shade of an immense canvas structure known as The Meeting Place. Why vegetarian? Why Carrot Soufflé on Monday, Parsnip Purée on Tuesday, Swiss Chard Pie on Wednesday, and so on and so on? My grandfather was a meat eater for the rest of the year, but in July he lived on leaves, roots, seeds, the only nourishment going at Club Soleil.
The prohibition against the eating of flesh might seem to some visitors a contradiction when human flesh was everywhere displayed on the Club Soleil lawns and on the narrow strip of beach running around a promontory called The Point. The living hams and haunches of middle-aged men made their way between mixed flower and vegetable beds, another of my grandfather’s innovations. And so did the necks, shoulders, throats, and bellies of their wives. White jellied breast flesh jiggled in the Ontario sunlight, tested it, defied it. Buttocks. Thighs. Calves. Fragile ankle bones belonging to city lawyers, physicians, charity organizers, household matriarchs. Patrician feet stepped carefully across the beach pebbles and drummed up and down on the grass where a volleyball court had been set up for the young people.
My grandmother had difficulty with all this. It was only after she and my grandfather were married that he told her how he had been taken by friends soon after finishing university to a naturist beach on the Atlantic coast of France. He had greeted the new experience as a door swinging wide open in his existence. Some men are brought to life by the sexual spasm; my grandfather tasted ecstasy for the first time as he lowered his trousers on the slope of a French sand dune, t
hen, more cautiously, dropping his underwear as well, then stepping free. Dry heat and sunlight penetrated his dark manly parts, which since birth had been confined. A hundred other bathers looked on, or rather, they didn’t look on, that was the wonder of it, that they never so much as glanced in his direction.
He had not expected in his life to feel a breeze pass over his nether regions—this is the untethering miracle he tried to explain to my grandmother, and later to her son, my father. The pleasure was intense and yet subtle. It resonated across the width of his skin, the entire human envelope electrified—here was paradise. And it was in accord with nature’s design, as he saw it. It was true; he was able to see nothing perverse about his reaction. How could it be so when he became at that pants-dropping moment larger, stronger, nobler, a man charged with a new range of moral duty? The Protestant God of shame had nodded in response, nodded and smiled and drifted away, and my grandfather, so unexpectedly twitched into life, announced himself an instant convert. He walked straight into the sea, then, where the cold salt water flowed around every mound and recess of his body and completed the arc of liberation.
But how was he to bring the same set of circumstances and appreciations to rigid Ontario? And how, a year later, to explain his passion to his young bride, my gently brought up grandmother?
He was a man, however, who took for granted his right to make his dreams come true. Ever methodical in his dealings, he sent away to the International Naturism Institute in Switzerland for information, then began to look for a piece of well-sheltered lake property which he was able to purchase with part of his inheritance. Next he carefully sounded out a few of his more worldly friends. Might they be interested? Had they discovered for themselves the health-giving benefits of naturism, psychological as well as physical, the mind and body unfettered and fused? Did they know of others who might be interested in the venture? Discretion would rule the day, of course. Privacy, sanctuary, a quiet bond between comrades, an agreement to give one’s self up to the pleasures that God Himself had provided.
Yes, my grandmother said, but this is not the sort of thing that remains secret, no matter how circumspect one is.
She was right. Word got around. It was inevitable. But her husband’s passion for health and sun, his annual indulgence, only enhanced his dignity. It seemed he could do no wrong in those days. The imagined presence of this young, muscular, unclothed body, released to nature, to prelapsarian abandonment, and its contrast to the suited, shirted, necktied manliness he presented to the world as he went about lecturing on social justice or presiding over his YMCA duties—this misalignment only gave him a beguiling, eccentric edge, arousing even in the straitlaced a shrugging admiration and making of him an exceptional being, free-minded, liberal, a man of virility, who also happened to be clever and compelling—especially to women. He became, in the puritanical society he inhabited, rather famous.
My grandmother’s disinclination for nudity would not have surprised those who knew her well. Her interest was in covering up, not stripping down. The same week she married my grandfather she’d had curtains and heavy draperies made for the windows of the house they bought on Macklin Avenue. By the following summer slipcovers dressed the wicker porch furniture. Scarves in broiderie anglaise adorned every bureau. Pillows in my grandparents’ house were fitted with undercovers as well as overcovers, and she herself sewed a sort of skirt in flowered chintz, which was tied prettily with bias tape around the wringer washing machine when it was not in use. Lace doilies sat on the arms and back of every chair. Woolen throws were flung across the various sofas. Rugs lay scattered everywhere upon the thick carpets. Fullness, plumpness, doubleness. Hers was a house where one could imagine the possibility of suffocation.
Her own clothing, needless to say, comprised layers of underclothes, foundation garments, garters and stockings, brassieres, camisoles, slips, blouses, cardigans, lined skirts, aprons, and even good aprons worn over the everyday aprons. Her mind drifted toward texture, fabric, protection, and warmth, as though she could never burrow deeply enough into the folds of herself.
Which was why she had so much difficulty taking part in the annual July rites at Lake Simcoe. Naturism was not her nature. Nudity was the cross she bore.
At first she tried to make bargains with her husband. “I’ll go,” she told him, “but don’t expect me to go around with my clothes off.”
He reasoned with her gently, reminding her that nudity was an activity that, once established, did not allow abstentions. Nudity implied community. The effort to throw off cultural ignorance was so difficult, he explained, that reinforcement was ever needed. A single clothed person creates a rebuke to the unclothed. One person walking across the Club Soleil lawn in a summer dress and sandals and underpants is enough to unsettle others in the matter of the choice they had taken.
But going without clothes was unhygienic, she argued.
No, he said, not at all. (He had read his material from the International Naturism Institute closely.) Woven cloth harbors mites, molds, dust, germs. Whereas nothing is easier to keep clean than human skin, which is, in fact, self-cleaning.
Infection, my grandmother pointed out. From others.
Not a chance, he argued. Not when every camper is issued a clean towel at the beginning of the day, and this towel is used on the various benches and hammocks at Club Soleil, and even carried into the dining hall and spread on the chair before the diner sits down.
“It’s different for women,” she protested, gesturing awkwardly, miserably. “Women have special problems.”
My grandfather explained that when women campers were “having their time,” they had only to wear a short pleated skirt, rather like a tennis skirt. No one thought a thing of it, six days, seven days, nature’s timetable. There was, of course, no reason to cover the breasts or shoulders.
“I can’t imagine Mrs. Archie Hammond going around naked, not with her sags and bags.” My grandmother said this with uncharacteristic bitterness.
“Kate and Archie have both signed up.”
“Naked? Those two?”
“Of course, naked. Though naked, my love, is not really a word that naturists use.”
“Yes, you’ve told me. A hundred times. But naked is naked.”
“Semantics.” (My grandfather, it must be remembered, lived in the day when to snort out the word semantics was enough to win any quarrel.)
“You do know what people will say, don’t you?”
“Of course I know. They’ll say that visitors to Camp Soleil are licentious. That we are seekers of sexual pleasure, and that the removal of the artificial barrier of clothing will only inflame our lust. But these people will be wrong.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” she said. “I know Archie Hammond. I’ve seen how he looks at women, even with their clothes on.”
“Our bodies are God’s gifts. There are those who believe that our bodies are holy temples.”
“Then why,” she asked cannily, “don’t you ever see pictures of Jesus without his clothes on? He’s always got that big brown robe wrapped around him. Even on the cross he had a little piece of cloth—”
“This discussion is going nowhere.”
Indeed this discussion would have gone nowhere. It would have vanished into historical silence, except that my grandfather confided its essence to his adult son—my own father—years later, where it was received, as such parental offerings are, with huge embarrassment and rejection. How could such a private argument have taken place between one’s own mother and father? Why this mention of the unmentionables between them, infidelities, monthlies—was it really necessary?
“Don’t you see,” my grandmother, not yet thirty years old, said to her husband, “how humiliating this is for me? A grown-up woman. Playing Adam and Eve at the beach.”
He was touched by the Adam and Eve reference. It brought a smile to his lips, threw him off course. This was not what she intended.
“Do it for me,” he pleaded. He had
a slow, rich, persuasive way of speaking. “Please just try it for me.”
“Would you love me less if I refused?”
“No,” he replied. But he had let slip a small pause before he spoke, and this was registered on my grandmother’s consciousness.
“It’s wrong, you know it’s wrong. It fans those instincts of ours that belong to, well . . .”
“To what? Say it.”
“To barnyard animals.”
“Ah!”
“I can’t help it. That’s what I think.”
“We are animals, my precious love.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why don’t we make a bargain, then?”
She was suspicious of bargains. She came from a wealthy Ontario family (cheese, walnuts, whiskey) where bad bargains had been made between brother and sister, father and son. “What kind of bargain?” she asked.
“You’re crying.”
“I have to know. I need to know.”
“I propose that during the month of July we abstain.”
“Abstain?”
“From sexual intercourse.”
“But”—she must have paused at this point, hating this term sexual intercourse, and yet shocked that her husband would relinquish so easily their greatest personal pleasure—“why?”
“To prove to you, conclusively, that going unclothed among those we trust has nothing to do with the desires of the flesh.”
“I see.”
My grandmother was a passionate woman, but probably shy about the verbal expression of passion—and not sure how to show her shocked disappointment in the proposed accommodation. “I don’t know what to think,” she said, tears lining her lashes, knowing she had somehow been trapped in her own objections.
And so she was now faced with a dilemma. Her husband had countered each of her arguments about Club Soleil, and had even offered the ultimate sacrifice, an abstention from intimate relations during the unclothed month of July. She was cornered. She must respond, somehow, and of course she was at an age when people believe they will become more and not less than they are.