Two Eight Nine: Disclosures

I was sitting outside with a lovely neighbour here at the lakeside flat the other night, talking and working our way through a bottle of Belvedere vodka with iced tea. How Deepest South is that, do you think? I'll note that we were in separate deck chairs on the upper deck, and that we were properly socially-distanced. This is the time of the Red Death, and I've been socially-distanced and properly masked throughout. My neighbour herself is a lovely girl. She's been here in my apartment complex for almost four years now. She has long, toned legs, a mass of reddish hair, and is something of a party girl, though she's no one's fool. The night itself was good. Cool for the season here, with the scent of earlier rain still in the air.

At some point she confided in me that she was and always had been "a total sexual deviant". I hadn't heard the word "deviant" in twenty years, and I was immediately intrigued.  She reached out one arm and tapped her glass on mine and drunkenly repeated that she was "such a deviant". Of course I asked. How could I not ask? She told me that she'd lost track of how many people she'd had sex with, and asked me if I remembered my own body count number. I do, of course, but that's because I've always written such things down, all the way back into my teens. Everything is written down, everything is annotated. I did become a trained historian, after all. I didn't ask whether she didn't know her own number because it was so large or simply because many of her encounters had been drunken couplings that she barely remembered. Please note that I'm not imposing any moral judgment here, and I never would.  She's lovely and probably thirty or thirty-one. I can make a guess at what the number might be, but the only significance it would have is if she and I laid bets on whose was higher at her current age.

She then told me that she felt like a deviant, too, because she'd had girls in her past. She'd always loved girls, she told me, though she hadn't had the nerve to hook up with more than a few--- which of course is very much like my friend Jill in NZ.  How odd that she finds being at least occasionally bi to be so wicked that she can only admit it after several large vodkas.

She looked at me and shook a finger and told me that she just knew I was someone who tied girls up and whipped them. I had to laugh at that. Good guess, I told her. Very good guess. But of course I do love playing with blindfolds and silk scarves and riding crops and candle wax with lovely young companions. My neighbour told me that I was just so obvious, that that was something all men my age who had "all those bookshelves" liked. I did shrug and tell her that with age you learned to rely to technique and style rather than raw physicality. That was all okay, she said. Older men came up with interesting things to do. And you, she said, I'll bet you're really good at doing scenes and telling stories with girls. That's something I was proud to hear.

This does not--- let me emphasize that ---end with the two of us in bed, or with her on my couch being whipped. It doesn't. It ended with us clinking glasses and just talking until two or three in the morning.  In a non-plague year, it would've ended with a long hug and maybe--- maybe ---a goodnight kiss.  But it wasn't a night that was going to end in bed. It didn't need to, and while I love flirting shamelessly with her, I'm not going to step outside any bounds.

But it did make me think. During the night out on the deck, we talked about our respective experiences and pasts. I've usually been someone to whom strangers in bars or on trains confide their secrets, and my neighbour found me to be a good listener and a safe confidant. I'm glad that she does. Importantly, she hasn't been embarrassed or nervous around me since. That matters, too.

Nonetheless, it is an odd thing. She told me that she hasn't had anyone who'd understand about her secrets in years. I've been feeling the same thing lately. Confidantes are hard to find lately. Certainly harder than when I was, say, twenty-five or thirty. It seems much less safe these days to admit anything to anyone. In the time of the gender wars, admitting anything to anyone seems like putting a weight on their shoulders or, worse, like some kind of demand or threat.

I've always loved the whole experience of drunkenly telling one another secrets, about disclosing one's past and interests and fancies. There's a delight in that, in the sharing. Sharing fancies and obsessions is very often better than sex-in-the-flesh. Mutual surprise, the moment of laughing with someone at shared things, the electricity of being on the borderline between flirtation and seduction--- all those things make disclosures fun.

Yet it feels less safe now. Not just because the other person might be turned off, but that they might be angered. I'm less and less sure these days about such things. It's hard to offer up compliments, of course, although my neighbour is fine with my obviously appreciating her legs. But it is harder to tell the stories girls and I would've talked about twenty years ago, or maybe even ten. The world has changed around me and sometimes I haven't followed along with it.

Two Eight Eight: Compliments

Well, I am still afraid to be seen on a dance floor, and I'm still afraid to use the pool where I live. But tonight's worry is about compliments.

Yesterday evening I was down in the courtyard talking to one of my neighbours, a lovely red-haired girl who's been here for almost four years now. She had friends over to use the pool, including one girl whom I'd seen before and was very hot indeed. My neighbour told me that she'd an awkward conversation with our property manager about the girl.

The property manager had been talking to my neighbour when the visiting girl climbed out of the pool. The manager looked at her and commented that the girl had "really come into her own". My neighbour shut the conversation down by crisply saying that, yes, the girl had become a grown woman at some point in her life. She told me yesterday evening that she found the comment "creepy and inappropriate".

I had to partially agree with her, at least on general principles. I'm not sure I'd go as far as "creepy", but it was an awkward and very odd comment. "Come into her own" sounds just a bit too much like saying "well, she's in her prime breeding years". I suppose it also sounds like "well, she's finally inherited that five million from her rich uncle", but that's really not any less odd and awkward,

Now, yes, the girl is very attractive. Late twenties, maybe five-seven, very slender, long light brown hair, lithe and lissome in a very high-cut maillot. I've exchanged a few words with her in passing. I know her first name, and that she works (I think) at Sephora. That's all I know, really. She doesn't have a local accent,  but I know nothing about her origins or life.  She's certainly attractive, and she's been pleasant to me. I told my neighbour that if I wanted to compliment the girl, I'd just say that she was very attractive and let it go at that. My neighbour assured me that saying that would've been fine, but the whole breeding-years implication wasn't.

Now my neighbour has been someone I've chatted with and had courtyard drinks with these last few years, I'm sure that I've walked by her, raised a red Solo cup or a wineglass, and said something like, "God, girl, you have long legs!" or just said, "Great legs, girl!" when I've seen her in short shorts on her balcony. She's always just smiled, raised her own drink, and nodded her thanks. We're on good terms, and she's never been annoyed by anything I said. I've always made any compliments part of my persona as an aging roué, and she's responded to the persona. I may be lucky in that she and I are born natives of a region where that particular persona still has some currency. We both know how the ritual works.

I'm no longer sure what I'd do in terms of complimenting a lovely girl in, say, Manhattan or Wellington. Tonight I'm thinking that it's like being on a dance floor. At some point you lose the belief that you have any skills, that you might have something to do or say that would make you feel like you're doing things right. Offering up compliments is always a risky thing, but I think I've lost the ability to do it any place that isn't...here in this city or this downtown.

Two Eight Seven: Dance Floors

I always loved being on a dance floor. But I think we've reached the stage where I won't risk that here. I'm not about to risk the mockery that's reserved for anyone past his early thirties who takes the dance floor. Oddly, I'd still dance all night in Europe (excluding Britain). That may be because standards for dance floor skill are much lower in France and Germany than in. say, NYC or LA. Or because one assumes that Euro club culture is less appalled by age-disparate couples. Or just because I might not be able to understand the mockery when it's in the local dialect of Foreign. Nonetheless, as much as I miss dancing, I think that stage of my life is done.

I will miss it. I think of girls like Liberty or Levin or Jill in New Zealand and think of dancing at rooftop bars in distant cities. But that won't happen again. To be seen on a dance floor at my age--- even dancing to music I love, even (or especially) dancing with a young companion, leaves me open to mockery. I'm not at a stage in my life where I can deal with that.

If there's anything positive to be said about my life this spring, it's this. 

Someone left me this message:

"I just want it noted (preferably in the preface to your book, when it's published) that i thought your posts should be a novel before it was cool to do that (scroll down your comments). an epistolary novel about an aging roue with a wasted phd, stuck (for hinted at but never fully explained reasons) in the deepest south, stewing in the heat, spinning and re-spinning his stories out over the aether and late into the night about a debauched but well-traveled past ... until one night a voice answers back, a sharp hip-boned girl of inappropriate age from an impossibly hip city on a different continent. they go back and forth, flirting, testing each other, telling their stories, but there are cracks and neither he nor she (nor the reader) know if they are what they present themselves to be. she says she's bored and wants danger, real danger, but is afraid she doesn't have what it takes to go all the way. he wants to be dangerous again, really dangerous, but is afraid of the same thing. they talk themselves into an assignation, he forces himself out of his southern lair to make the trip to new york (montreal? prague?), and texts her the room number at a boutique hotel ... he's pacing the room, waiting, drinking ... she's hours late, will she show? is she real? or (a cold, sinking feeling) could it it be someone from the past, from the time of those unfortunate misunderstandings? and then there's a knock on the door ... i'd read it, is all i'm saying. "

I'll be living on the energy in this for a long while. It's like survival food to a lost Antarctic traveler.

Two Eight Six: Saint Tropez

Tonight I'm thinking about Levin and the nudes her painting professor did of her. I remember looking at the framed nude portrait she had  in her bedroom and envying her older lover his skills. I can barely draw stick figures, and his portrait of Levin was amazing--- sunlight and shadow, the way her nakedness blended with the room, the way the furniture and windows set off how lithe and alluring she was. I'd seen her naked, of course, seen her naked in all sorts of rooms. But I did envy him the things he must have seen in her, the things he brought out in her image. He could see things in her that I couldn't. I could write about her; I could tell her stories. But I couldn't see her.

I can't decide whether thinking of Levin made me recall a 1991 film called "La belle noiseuse" or whether seeing the film again not so very long ago made me think of Levin and her portraits. If you haven't seen the film, please do take this as a recommendation. I purchased a DVD of it not long ago and sat enthralled with it here in the lakeside flat. I'd seen the film years ago--- probably because Jane Birkin is in it, and Ms. Birkin will always be a major crush of mine. "La belle noiseuse" was released in 1991. A young Emmanuelle Beart is the female lead, the muse to an aging painter. Beart would've been twenty-six, I think, when it was filmed. The film is almost three hours long, and Mlle. Beart is naked through most of it. The story is about Beart and the painter, about her modeling for him as he tries to reclaim the ability to paint. It's deeply powerful--- about obsession as much as desire ---to watch the painter pose her, move her, drive himself as he does figure studies, as he tries to build a painting from an idea he gave up twenty-five years before.  Much of the film is about the techniques of painting, about shots of a disconnected arm wielding brushes or charcoal, doing washes, sketching out lines and curve. It's a film I wish I could've watched with Levin all those years ago, and it's a film I wish I could watch with my blonde NZ  friend--- Jill, we'll call her ---down in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The act of painting, the act of drawing--- that's an erotic thing all on its own. I've never been able to draw or paint or even sketch.  Once upon a time I did do photography. I spent Saturday mornings at university climbing over buildings looking for architectural moments, and I did spend time photographing girls with whom I was involved, dressed and undressed both. Some of the photographs I took of lovers and companions were good, and my subjects appreciated how I made them look. But no matter what I could do with a pre-digital SLR, it wasn't painting or drawing. In those days I tried to emulate the styles of fashion photographers I liked. I may have been reasonably good at it, but it always lacked the power of a painting. I could do light and shadow, I could pose a girl in some wicked outfit or naked on a rooftop...but it wasn't the same as the painting on Levin's wall or the sketch she gave me of herself in a rented seafront bedroom.

That bedroom sketch, with its shadows and the hint of the girl face down on the bed, did remind me of David Hamilton. Hamilton died in 2016; I only discovered that a couple of days ago. When I was first off at university, Hamilton's photography books were something art-school girls as well as aging nympholepts collected. "Summer in St. Tropez", "Dreams of a Young Girl", "Sisters", "Premiers Desirs"--- I had all of those when I was eighteen or nineteen. I even saw the film versions of "Premiers Desirs" (yes, a very young Mlle. Beart was in that) and "Summer in St. Tropez". Levin had her own copy of "Dreams of a Young Girl"; I do remember that.

I suppose all those books are long out of print. We're long past the days when David Hamilton's photos of young girls were on art-photo notecards and postcards. You know why, of course--- Hamilton's models were are all either in their teens or at least appeared that way (Emmanuelle Beart was twenty when "Premiers Desirs" was filmed). By the time he died, Hamilton must've been on any number of enemies lists and very likely being considered for indictment under British law about "historical offenses" with young models.

Nonetheless, I do remember Hamilton with fondness. You could always tell his photographs--- the long-limbed, coltish models, the way he used sunlight and settings down in southern Provence. Levin told me once upon a time that she knew that there was something very cliche-pervy about Hamilton's work, but that she couldn't stop looking at it and wishing both that she could sleep with all the models...and be one herself.  I haven't owned any of his books in years and years, but I'd like to see them again. I know what I thought of them in my own undergraduate days, and I know what I thought of them a decade later. But I have no idea how I'd see them now. We see bodies and nakedness very differently from the way we did in Hamilton's day, or even in the Nineties. We see the idea of coming-of-age very differently, too.

It's so easy for me to imagine Levin at nineteen or twenty as a Hamilton model.  I just wish I could have drawn or painted her myself. I wish I could have taken more photos of her, especially in that city with wrought iron and a seawall--- and saved them down the years.  I wish I could've looked at Levin naked in a deserted Victorian house and painted the passion I always felt in her.

One day I must ask Jill in NZ if she's ever posed nude for paintings. She's had nudes taken of her on camera phones (what posh, wicked Millennial girl hasn't?), but I'd love to know if she ever posed to be sketched or painted--- or even posed for higher-end art nudes.  I can imagine some ghostly figure with a DSLR shooting photos of Jill, but she needs--- has needed since she was the age of a Hamilton model at St. Tropez to be painted. It's only paint on canvas that draws passion out.

Two Eight Five: Pedagogy

Someone told me once in passing that a certain kind of erotic linkage underlay all education. They were talking about Plato and the Symposium, but I understood what they meant--- that the desire for knowledge and erotic desire are often hard to separate one from the other. Falling in love with a certain kind of knowledge is easily transmuted into desire for the person with the knowledge. Having one means having the other. Or so any number of French coming-of-age novels and any number of films about teacher-student affairs tell us.

Back a while ago I wrote this about my friend in New Zealand:

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it)  

She also wrote me to say that:

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!


I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things.  Those questions do matter to me. She was I think thirty or thirty-one when she answered those questions, and I do wonder how she sees her fifteen or sixteen year old self, and if she has any regrets.

I think I noted before, too, that I've come to suspect that not all the stories she's told me over the years have been true. So while I'd very much like those stories to be true, I just can't be sure. It's sad and disturbing that I can't just believe her outright these days, and all the more so since for years I've known that I'd run off and live with her or marry her for the asking.

But let's assume it's true. Let's assume that she did have sex with her science teacher. And that she gave head to a Maori teacher-trainee behind the gym. Those are great stories, and I can add them to my list of teacher-student stories from girls I've known.

Liberty of course slept with her coastal ecology instructor when she was at university. From all I understand, the environmental sciences department (regarded as a haven for hippies) was notorious for things like that happening. I do love the idea of the sleeping bag and the dock (see my earlier entry), and I'd like to know if she slept with him again after the field trip. I suppose it's possible that it was only that the rules are suspended on field trips, but it's something I wish I knew. And if she was ever jealous that the instructor (oh, obviously and inevitably) slept with other co-eds in his classes.

Levin told  me once that she'd slept with one of her art professors. In some ways the affair had been a perfect art school cliche--- she'd even modeled for him. She was rather proud that he'd painted and sketched nudes of her. She had one framed in her bedroom. She was proud of being his muse, proud of being painted. The affair (and it lasted for a while) was art school cliche and filled with art school drama. Levin discovered that the professor had also slept with a boy she'd dated her freshman year...and who was now living with a girl Levin had once had a fling with. I nearly fell off her bed laughing and applauding.  She agreed with me that it was funny, although it made her feel that  art school was far, far too claustrophobic and incestuous.  I'll note here that I found that whole round robin thing far easier to believe than some of my New Zealand friend's stories, if only because I'd spent enough time around art school undergraduates and faculty in my clubland days. Art school always seemed to me to be a mix of indie mumblecore movies and Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen.

I will say, too, that the framed nude she had in her bedroom was very, very good. Very evocative, very powerful, very alluring. I did envy her art professor's skills, and I envied him for seeing all the things in Levin that he'd put on canvas.

Marsha told me once that she'd  had a thing with someone who was almost her teacher. She was in geometry in Grade 10 and he was a student teacher doing his required couple of weeks of classroom teaching. She ran into him away from school the next semester (memory says at a pizza place) and he remembered her. All the stories I've told here about Marsha involved cars--- the vintage MG in Thessaloniki, the Triumph along the river road here, the police car on the  levee ---and so does this one. They first had sex in a parked car here, though I'm unclear whether it was around the lakes by the university or atop the levee along the river road. I do remember her telling me that the car was a battered old hatchback, and that he had an ice chest with beer (dark beer, she remembered-- Heineken Dark?)  in the back. She got her skirt up and rode him in the car, and of course there was road head.  They may have done it at his parents' house a few times, and once she made him park at night in the school parking lot and do her with the seats lowered. He'd have been maybe twenty-two. His people, she told me, were "wild Hungarians", and his name was distinctively Magyar. Memory says that he went to Colorado, and of course in some perfect world (or at least a rom-com world) she'd have met him again when she was as the Colorado School of Mines. That didn't happen, but it should have. She told me the story just before she and I went to her senior prom together, possibly to make me just jealous enough to be competitive. After all, he was older and almost her teacher.

Teacher-student affairs do intrigue me. Or maybe it's that I'm interested in how girls see them a decade on. My NZ friend, Levin, Liberty, and Marsha all seem to have taken the encounters in stride. None of them was (or thought she was) in love, none of them felt 'groomed' (or at least felt that that was a bad thing), and all of them liked having the stories to tell later. Levin and Liberty certainly saw their academic affairs as just part of their lists of adventures, and certainly not as anything traumatic. My friend in NZ saw her affairs as competitive markers amongst her friends, who were notorious posh bad girls.

If any of you out there reading this have experiences that you've turned into stories, do tell me about your own academic encounters. Tell me how they happened, and what you thought while they were happening. Tell me how the memories feel to you now, some years on.

Two Eight Four: Lithography

I'm thinking tonight of a girl from my past, from far back in the last age. She and I knew knew each other casually when I was at grad school, and there was a brief affair back in my clubland days.

Her name was Levin, and I did like that name. I can't recall how she ended up with the name. I've known posh families who gave daughters first names that were family names--- a girl might end up with her mother's maiden name. That explained the Schuylers and Mackenzies and Hunters that I knew at university. Levin's name may have come from that. But there's also "Anna Karenina", isn't there? Remember that Kitty and Levin were the other couple, the couple of whom Tolstoy approved. I suppose that back in those days I'd have hoped she was named after a character in "Anna Karenina", even if the name came from a male character. I'll note that I've always liked androgynous names on lovely girls. You're free to make of that what you will.

Levin was doing fine arts at the university here--- lithography. She was five-four or five-five, I think. Pixie-cut blonde hair,  very slender, tanned.  I can't recall the colour of her eyes, though I want to say blue or green.  Soft voice, I recall. She'd learned Portuguese at uni and spent a year studying there. She had a signature look, I remember: white singlet, skinny jeans, ankle bracelet, espadrilles. Sometimes cotton drawstring trousers.  She bought the singlets in packs of three, sized for young boys. Always worn next to the skin, of course. I laughed with her about air-conditioning and how she was always the girl with erect nipples.  She had a barbell piercing in her right nipple--- the first girl I'd ever seen with one.

I remember her rooms at university--- sketches and lithographs tacked to the wall, the smell of chemicals from the lithography process. No idea whatever happened to her, though I think she wanted to go out West. I do remember sitting on her sofa and watching her work on her sketch journals (was the brand Pentalic?) and drinking vodka-limes with her. I wish I'd kept some of the sketches she gave me.

Levin always told me that she liked my bookshelves and liked it that I'd listen to her talk about art. She had good tastes in music, I thought. We both liked New Wave and synth-driven dance music, and we spent more than a few nights dancing at the local clubs near the university. I can remember standing behind her on the balcony at a place called Options on spring and summer nights, arms around her, kissing her shoulders, feeling her press back into me, knowing that she was all bare flesh under charcoal linen drawstring trousers.

It was a brief affair, and casual.  There was a time back in the last age when it was still possible to have casual affairs. I'm not sure that people-- at least people under thirty --have affairs any longer. And from what I'm reading in late-Millennial and Gen-Z literature, sex in these later days seems to be more about apologies than passion. Anyway--- Levin and I had a few months together off-and-on and parted friends. We even had goodbye drinks when she went off to do an MFA on the other side of the continent. We spent a last night together in her empty rooms on a tree-lined street, her art supplies all in boxes. I remember that her wardrobe all fitted into a couple of duffel bags. She'd be leaving the next day with her whole life in the backseat of a compact car. I did give her a couple of my  shirts as a goodbye gift, along with a couple of sketch journals (if not Pentalic, what was the brand?). That wasn't a bad way to part. I kept the sketches she'd done for me for rather a while; I think I had a favourite framed.  The sketch was one of a bedroom with light coming in through French windows. The room was one we'd rented one weekend in a city known for wrought iron balconies and genteel decay. I always told her that the city outside those windows could've been Alexandria or Charleston or Lisbon.  There was a hint of someone on the bed, and she told me to imagine it was her, face down over the bed, looking out to the city while I took her from behind. I did like that, liked the idea that she'd turned that hint of shadow on the bed into something I'd remember.

Levin is easy to remember tonight--- kisses on her ankle bracelet, kisses on that nipple piercing (still shocking in those days), Pet Shop Boys playing and her hands always smelling of lithography chemicals. I've reached the time in my life when I spend time remembering girls from the last age, when melancholy becomes the dominant mode in my thoughts. Easy enough to remember Levin's hipbones and ankles and the pale gold fuzz on her upper thighs. Easy enough to remember a time when art and desire and the taste of vodka-lime all went together.

So let's think of that tonight, and a couple of lines from Cavafy:

These things are all so very old---
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

Two Eight Three: Skin

I have been thinking today about going down to the pool. It's a perfect day for it: cool, slightly breezy, sunlit.  Summer is almost here, and we'll have  soul-killing heat and humidity until some time in October. I should be taking advantage of the afternoon. Yet I can't bring myself to do that. In a better world, I could talk with certain girls--- Liberty, say, or my New Zealand friend, or the girl in Asheville ---and explain why body fear has set in. There's no one here to ask for support or advice, alas.

I could begin by noting that after six weeks of lockdown for the Red Death, so many people are worried about I've heard called having acquired a "Coronavirus 15"--- extra pounds put on by inactivity and stress eating. There's very much that.  That does make me a bit shy about going into the pool.

Yet it's not so much that. It's not fear of a few extra pounds. It's fear of being mocked or questioned about the body piercings I have. I can laugh and say that, well, it's not like the current governor of New York isn't supposed to have the same things (and Bella Hadid certainly has them). I was in the pool the last few summers and never felt any body fear or body shame like this.  I can't bring myself to be anywhere where I might be mocked or questioned about my piercings.  And I've lost track (or control of) what messages the piercings might send to any of the bikini girls who do frequent the pool.

My lovely blonde friend down in New Zealand always told me that when she'd borrow her family's beach house for a long weekend (sometimes for a week) she'd pull her BMW into the garage and start undressing as she went into the house. She told me once that her shoes would never make it past the door and wouldn't be needed again until she was on her way back to her own house in Wellington. The beach house had an in-ground pool, and she told me that wearing a swimsuit in her own private pool was simply not something that was ever going to happen. She did the same, she said, whenever she borrowed her (divorced) father's house on the South Island, too. Swim naked, sunbathe naked, read naked on the patio. She used to tell me that in a week at either place, she'd be barefoot the entire time, always sleep naked, and that the only thing she'd be likely to wear would be a faded old denim shirt or a cotton pullover sweater when cooking or in case there was a cool wind in off the Tasman Sea or Marlborough Sounds.

Liberty was the same way. On weekends when she and I would rent an AirBnB house on the coast or on a mountain lake in the Carolinas, she'd wear (if anything) just one of my shirts or one of the lightweight cotton sweaters she habitually pilfered from my closet. Her goal, she told me once, was just to be naked in sunlight--- she always talked about doing that one day on the Gold Coast in Australia or on an island in the Caribbean, just being naked for a whole summer, swimming and snorkeling and turning darker and darker.  She said that by the time she was in her mid-teens, she found herself unable to get to sleep if she was wearing anything. She felt, she said, absolutely secure and powerful and alive when she was naked in sunlight or in the water.

That's an attitude of course that I can admire and be excited by, but it's never something I could adopt or emulate. I can look down to the pool this afternoon--- the pool is empty right now ---and imagine that the water would be perfect. But there's no way at all that I could go down myself right now.

I can't imagine feeling sunlight on skin, and I certainly can't imagine ever having my body seen any longer. I'd absolutely be too ashamed and fearful to have anyone close enough to see my flesh up close, let alone taste or smell or touch it.