Yarns Without Threads 

"Are we ready?" Bill asked, turning to Molly.

"Ready for what?"

...

"We were going to swim!" There were tears in her eyes, darkening the elusive green.

"But it's raining, sweetie," Bill protested, "and it's cold and late and-"

"It's best in the rain."

"What? What?" Bernie shouted. "She wants to swim? The young lady wants to swim? So let her swim; it's a constitutional right. I personally will grease her down. I have in the back of my car-"

"You'll swim with me, won't you, Bernie?"

Howard found himself resenting the "Bernie" (he sad been coldly "Place"), as he resented the way Molly-o snuggled up to Bernie now, one breast nudging his solar plexus.

"Me? You mean me swim? Excuse me, my dear, this is another question entirely. After all I just ate two olives in my last Martini. Otherwise I'd be glad to oblige."

"Really, dear, it's out of the question," Beatie added with a heavily matronly air that even Howard could scarcely abide. "Besides, we have no bathing suits. Bill didn't say anything when he called about-"

"But that's just it. We don't need any bathing suits. It's no fun if it's not spontaneous. We have a lovely private beach, and I thought we would all just slip out of our clothes and- It was going to be so exciting! I mean, I remember when I was in college, a bunch of us kids sneaked off to a quarry with a case of beer and- Oh, everybody was so beautiful that night, so free and beautiful in the moonlight!"

"Moonlight!" Howard could not help breaking in, though he did not want to seem to stand against her with the veteran wives and their scared husbands. "Just look at the moonlight!" He pointed through the splintered pane to the sky whose murkiness an occasional lightning flash showed without dispelling.

"It'll be wonderful! Wed be like ghosts in the lightning. Nude ghosts." Noo-oo-oo-oode, she said it, lingering dreamily over the vowel of what was for her a magic word. "Nude ghosts."

"And now listen!" Howard persisted, hushing them so that they could hear the noise of the sea on the rocks. "It would tear you to pieces."

"Oh, how can you all be so sensible! I wish your precious Irving was here. At least he knows he's a corpse!" And shedding clothes as she ran, she headed out the door into the rain and toward the roar of the ocean. Her brassiere she flung back over her shoulder as she disappeared in a final theatrical gesture.

"Bravo!" Marvin shouted, clapping his long, thin hands together. "Bravo!"

...

Suddenly Howard realized that the darkness before the house to which he had pointed an instant before was blazing with light, through which the slowing rain ran stitches like a sewing machine gone mad. Someone (it must have been Molly-o through all her tears) had switched on a bank of floodlights under the eaves. But why, Howard wondered; and he pressed his face against the window, staring out into the pointless glare.

Molly had apparently not gone swimming at all, but was sitting quite naked on a stone bench just at the verge of the last dune. She was set in absolute profile, her knees drawn up before her, her arms braced behind, and her head thrown back so that her hair fell onto the stone seat. Howard had not realized that it was so long and full, caught up in the pony tail she usually wore. In that excessive light and at that distance, all color was bleached from her body, leaving her perfectly black and white. She appeared no more or less real than the marble Venus, which also stood in Howard's direct line of sight, naked above the lily pads and under the faltering rain. Tintless and eyeless, without motion and with her hair down, Molly was the twin of the statue, another Aphrodite.

Howard knew she was aware of his watching her as surely as he knew his wife was watching his watching; and he turned away with a sigh.

In ten minutes, Molly was back with them again; she had changed into riding breeches and a man's plaid shirt, but was barefoot. "Soup's on," she said grinning and lifting her arms over her head, she stretched until the shirt was taut from nipple to nipple. She could not have been wearing a brassiere.

"What about Guggenheim?" Marvin asked.

"Guggenheim!" Achsa cried scornfully. "Next it'll be charades."

"I can't play any of those category games," Molly said, looking quite pleased with herself all the same. "I'm too stupid."

"The only thing I ever played in my life," Howard put in from the doorway, where he stood gulping the damp, cold air by way of therapy, "was croquet. I was at Yaddo in '49, and all the time we weren't at the race track, we were playing-"

"You mean that stupid game for children with wooden balls?" Achsa asked.

"I never knew a child with- Isn't there some danger of splinters-" Bernie began, whooping with delight.

"Were you at Yaddo, too?" Molly-o inquired, slowly easing herself over, then rising to sit on her feet like a Japanese. She looked admiringly at Howard as if she had just discovered his most dazzling distinction. "Bill was there once. Long, long ago in '38."

"That's not so long ago," Howard objected. "It was that year that the Museum of Modern Art bought my-"

"I was six years old," Molly said, casting her eyes down modestly.

"Oy! Oy! Oy!" Beatie cried out. "It's the only answer. Oy! Oyl Oy! Imagine it, six years old."

"Bill says that in '38, they used to play nude croquet!" Molly lingered over the vowel of the magic word again. "You know, at night when the middle-aged prudes were asleep. There were lots of interesting people there that year. I don't remember their-"

"Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot," Marvin suggested. 'They'd look good at nude croquet."

"And Henry James," Jessie added.

"We have a croquet set somewhere, don't we, Bill?" In her mounting excitement, Molly ignored their quips. "Don't we? Don't we?" She ran over, silent on her bare feet, and shook her husband until he opened his eyes, staring at her unseeing-ly. "Don't we have a croquet set? We can play it nude, just like you used to do at Yaddo, can't we, Bill? It'll save the whole party! Howard, why don't you go down into the basement and look just behind the steps. I'm sure you'll find it, in a big cardboard box that says-"

"Croquet, I'll bet," Howard finished for her, while Bill, blinking sightlessly repeated, "Nude . . . nude . . . nude. . . ." and fell back again onto the seat snoring.

"Oh, Bill!" Molly sighed, then turning once more to Howard, "Well, we'll just have to play without him!"

"It's raining again," Howard said by way of answer. He had been holding one hand outside the door, cupped under the dripping eaves; and he wiped it off now on Molly's plump cheek. "Wet! It's a bog out there. You'll have to make it water polo."

"Oh, we're not going to play out there, silly. We'll play in here where it's all comfy. Right herel Just move some of these chairs back-and turn off that ridiculous music, and we're all set." As she snapped it off Leonard and Eva stood gasping in the sudden silence, like a couple of sea creatures hauled out of their element. "Well, get it, please. Go and get it," she insisted, laying a hand on Howard's arm.

"Howard," Jessie warned him, rising to her feet. "Let's not commit ourselves to anything childish. Really, it's late already and we have a long way to go."

"It's only eleven-thirty-seven," Howard answered, consulting his watch. What he would have done if his wife had not intervened he was not sure; but there was nothing to do now but go after the croquet set and see what would happen.

He found himself wishing that it would not be there, but, of course, discovered it immediately (he who could never find anything at home) at the bottom of the steps where Molly had said it would be. He wrestled the clumsy cardboard box up the steep stairs, tearing a chunk of flesh out of the back of one hand on the doorjamb and scarcely feeling it. "It's here," he said triumphantly, casting it down at Molly's feet and sucking the bleeding place. He liked the taste of his blood. "Strip already!"

He had thought he was joking, but before he could laugh or try to stop her, Molly had stripped off her shirt, leaving herself bare to the waist. "Think fast!" she said, tossing the checkered blouse at him and beginning to fumble with the buttons of her riding breeches.

Bill, still asleep, writhed on the oaken chair, calling out in a choked voice, "Please, please, please. . . ." and Bernie rushed toward Molly-o in sudden panic, pulling off his jacket to put around her shoulders. "What is this? Minsky's?" he yelled, flushing and paling by turns. "We're not going to go through with this craziness, are we? What are we anyway, high-school children who think you're only living when you take off your clothes? Howard, you tell her-you're an artist, naked women are your bread and butter. A joke is a joke, but I'm forty-four years old-forty-four-an underwear salesman."

"What are you getting so excited about?" Howard calmed him, feeling superior to them all. "Let's be reasonable about this and-"

"Reasonable!" Molly flung Bernie's jacket contemptuously aside, and stepping out of her breeches now, confronted them in a pair of pale green pants (the color of her eyes), covered with tiny red hearts. "Well, what are we waiting for?" Her skin was smooth and tight, unmarred by childbearing and unmarked even by the crease of brassiere or girdle. On shoulder and thigh, breast and belly alike she was tanned the rich brown of one who turns patiently under the sunlamp, reading a fashion magazine and loving nothing more than her own flesh.

"Just because Bill married a nudnick, do I have to play the bohemian in my old age? Nude croquet! I don't know which is worse, the nude or the croquet! Listen, Howard, God knows we've got nothing to show each other by letting down our pants. We're naked enough now, for Christ's sake!"

"Bernie's right," Marvin said, looking directly at Molly who had gone on undressing and stood now with her underpants hanging delicately from silvered thumb and forefinger; if he saw her, he registered nothing. "It would be more to the point to put on steel masks and lead drawers, to hide in all decency a nakedness we can no longer pretend is exciting or beautiful. All our compromises are hanging out, our withered principles dangling obscenely. We can't even remember to button our flies!"

"My God, what difference does it make!" Achsa cried out. "Let's show what we can't hide anyway. Let these children look at what they have to become, what they are already, even if their mirrors aren't ready to tell them yet. I only wish I could take off my skin, too." Her dress and slip, her brassiere with the discreet padding, the girdle she wore only to hold up her stockings, she had off in a moment, rolling them into a ball and heaving them at her husband's head. He did not even lift a hand to block them, but bowed as they went past him, smiling obscurely to himself. Achsa was almost completely breastless, skinny and yellow with strange knobby knees and two scars across her flat, flaccid belly.

"You've all gone nuts," Bernie protested. "Nuts! I'm getting out of here before I find myself galloping bare-ass like a kid. What are we doing, grown men and women? Maybe it's kiddie night in the bughouse! Beatie, come on." He had picked up his rumpled, Italian-silk jacket, stuck his panama on the back of his bald head. "Well, come on!"

"I'm not coming, Bernard," Beatie answered quietly, bending over and beginning to unlace the sensible shoes into which her solid, unlovely legs descended. "I'm going to stay."

"You're going to play nude croquet-nude croquet? Are you crazy, too?"

"No-only a little drunk. Nude croquet, nude pinochle! Achsa's right, what difference does it make. Listen, Bernie, I manage to get one night in three months away from the kids -away from a house of flu and measles and diaper rashes. Well, this is the night and here I am and so I intend to stay at least till I've done something I'm sorry for. Do you understand? Excuse me, Bernie, but tonight I don't go home early."

"You're not only drunk," he screamed, pulling her by the arm. "You're crazy, plain, ordinary crazy."

"So, I'm crazy. Just let go of me, Bernie. Let go of me!" She turned on him, her usually mild gaze now coldly ferocious, staring at him until he dropped his hold, then bent down to pull off her stockings. "Go home Bernie, and when you get there, wake up little David and tell him his mama says-tell him I say-'Merry Christmas.' "

Everyone laughed and Molly shouted, "Hooray!"

...

"Why don't you go, too?" Achsa asked, whirling on her husband. But Marvin was already undressing without a word, placing his black shoes, his socks with the garters attached, his pants folded neatly onto a book-shelf which he had cleared by throwing the books on the floor. His limp, usually almost unnoticeable, grew more evident as he stripped.

Beatie meanwhile had staggered to her feet again, her shoes in her hand, and was making her way to the door, yelling, "Wait, Bernie. I'm coming. Wait! What am I doing here?"

"He's gone," Howard said, stopping her and whirling her around. He was one drink past the simplest truth, and so he lied to her without thinking, though he could still see through the window the red gleam of Bernie's Cadillac, in which he must have been sitting in sullen indecision and self pity. "It'll do him good to spend a few hours imagining you in a game: of nude croquet."

"I don't know what got into me," Beatie sobbed. "You don't understand, Howard. He's in trouble, bad trouble, and I should stand by him. What else can a wife do but stick with her husband? It's her duty, isn't it, no matter what? I just don't know what got into me. "I-" She dissolved once more into tears, Howard patting her head uncertainly, until all at once she looked up and winked. "It's all a joke, right, Howard? 'Duty,' 'husband,' 'stand by'-a joke! That's what's so hard to remember." She sat sprawled on a gilt and brocade chair that looked frail and ridiculous under her, her legs spread wide and one hand on her heart. "I'm here and I'll play if it kills me. Jessie, come here and help unbutton me."

"Oh, good," Molly shouted, clapping her hands. "Good for you. You're a real sport!"

"Some sport," Beatie responded ruefully. "Poor Bernie!"

"And what about those two?" Achsa pointed to one corner where Leonard and Eva stood staring at each other mutely, their hands clasped. Then, even as she spoke, they began to undress each other, still without a word, moving in a slow pantomime that converted each unbuckling or tug of a zipper into a caress.

"And you, Jessie?" Howard turned deliberately toward his wife, wondering exactly how angry she was. He had already taken off his shirt and his T-shirt revealed his fat chest, the thick blond prickles which covered it.

"Whatever you say, Howard." She was apparently going to try the tack of patient submission. "If you want me to join in this-"

"Certainly. You're only young once."

She sighed a little; she had never looked so haggard, so ugly. "Tell me, Molly, is there a room on this floor where I could undress? I'm in poor shape for climbing stairs."

"A room! To undress!" Howard protested, feeling the request as somehow an intended rebuke. "But we're all going to be playing in here together in a minute, without a-"

"What harm does it do you, Howard? I'm willing to stand naked side by side with these young things and let you make comparisons, since it amuses you to torture yourself in this way. But getting undressed is a private matter for me. For pity's sake, indulge me a litle. You can stay here with your-"

"I'll come with you," Howard volunteered, not quite knowing why.

"There's a room in there," Molly-o said, shrugging her shoulders a little contemptuously so that her breasts bounced. She pointed a tapering, tanned arm toward a door on her right. "A music room we hardly use any more."

...

Coming out again, he almost walked into Molly-o, who flung her arms around his neck and kissed him briskly. Her breasts were astonishingly firm despite their size, the nipples, not brownish or purple but really pink as a child would paint them, hard enough to press uncomfortably into his soft flesh. Jessie's, he thought dimly, had never been like this even when she was quite young. "Oh, thank you, Howard," Molly said breathlessly. "You saved the party. I thought we were going to have to sit there and talk all night. I had you all wrong. I-"

He grabbed her again, returning the kiss hard, his hands slipping down her back until he held her around the hips. Her mouth fell open all the way under his and he could feel her knees bend, her body sag, though whether from passion or alcohol he could not tell. I'm just doing this to shut her up anyway, he told himself; I'm not even excited. . . .

He jumped suddenly under a resounding smack on his right buttock, and Molly skittered off, smiling at him vaguely over her shoulder. Beatie stood behind him, grinning broadly and quite naked. "Shmendrick!" she said. "Big Brother is watching. Do you call this croquet?"

She had not called him shmendrick, Howard realized, since they were both fifteen and they had fumbled their way into what was the first affair for both of them, more like friends playing than lovers. Then Beatie had really fallen in love for the first time and-somehow thirty years had gone by! "Thirty years!" he said, perhaps aloud, but Beatie did not respond. He looked incredulously at her body, a girl's body when he had touched it last, now all at once full-blown, the muscle tone gone, the legs mottled blue-black with varicose veins-like someone's mother.

...

When they rejoined the others, they discovered that someone had set the record player going again, and that the overhead lights had been turned off. Only two huge gilded and twisted candlesticks illuminated the big room now, one set before each of the wall-length mirrors; and reflected back and forth, from glass to gleaming body to glass, the points of light were multiplied to thousands. Leather-bound folios, opened to the middle and set spine up, did duty for wickets. The others were already bent over the varicolored balls, mallets in hand. They had begun to scream insults and encouragement at each other, at ease in the friendly dark that camouflaged their bulges and creases and broken veins.

After a while, he could begin to make them out more clearly through the flickering shadows: Leonard, vaguely hermaphroditic, pudgy and white; Eva, her cross falling just where her pancake makeup gave way to the slightly pimpled pallor of her skin (there was the mark of a bite on one small breast); Jessie, whose body was astonishingly younger than her lined, witch's face, but whose grey below betrayed the red splendor of her hair; Achsa, tallow-yellow and without breasts; Beatie, marked with the red griddle of her corseting and verging on shapelessness; Marvin, sallow and unmuscled beneath the lank black hair that covered even his upper arms. He dragged more and more wearily behind him a withered left leg, creased from hip to knee by a puckered and livid scar, testimony to the osteomyelitis that had kept him in bed through most of his childhood. Only Molly pranced and preened, secure in her massaged and sun-lamped loveliness. To each of the others nudity was a confession, a humiliation. Yet they laughed louder and louder, though no one knew precisely what he was doing; and the crack of mallet on ball punctuated their chatter.

"Let me go! Let me go!" Achsa begged him, kicking and scratching. "What are you doing to him? My Marvin! Let me go!" He finally released his hold at the moment the overhead lights were switched on again, fixing them all in their nudity and helplessness, caught for one everlasting instant as in a flash-light still.

Molly had begun to scream, a single note, high and pure, that seemed as if it would never end; and whirling about, they all stared at her in the hard light, even Bill, startled back to awareness on his bishop's throne. One arm concealing her breasts, the other thrust downward so that her hand hid the meeting of her thighs, Molly-o confronted them in the classic pose of nakedness surprised, as if she knew for the first time what it meant to be really nude.

"Let's go in the water. . . . But first, where can we undress?"

"Just follow me ... this way."

He knew the place well and now led Simona through a narrow passage among the rocks. Behind these rocks they stepped across some other lower ones and then went around a huge mass which sealed off a tiny beach of very fine, black sand at the foot of glistening, black rocky walls around a pool of shallow water filled with black seaweed. The effect was that of a room, with the sky for a ceiling, a watery floor and walls of stone.

"No bath-house can match this," Giacomo observed, looking around him.

"At last I can shed my clothes," said Simona with a sigh of relief.

She put her bag down on the sand and bent over to take out her bathing-suit, while leaning against the rocks Giacomo stripped himself in a second of his shirt and trousers. The sight of him stark naked caused her to give a nervous laugh.

"This is the sort of place to go swimming with no suits on, isn't it?" she said.

"Unfortunately, one can never manage to be alone." Giacomo replied, thinking of Livio.

He walked, still naked, with bare feet, over the cold sand in her direction, but she did not see him coming because she was pulling her jersey over her head. Her nakedness, he reflected, made her seem more virginal than ever. Her low-swung, round breasts had large, rosy nipples, and a look of purity about them, as if they had never been offered to a masculine caress. Indeed her virginal quality was so overwhelming that Giacomo did not dare press her to him as he had intended, but stood close by while she pulled her head out of the jersey. She shook back her ruffled hair and said in surprise:

"What are you doing? Why don't you put on your trunks?"

"I'd like to make love right here and now," said Giacomo.

"On these rocks? Are you mad?"

"No, I'm not mad."

They were facing each other now, he entirely naked and she naked down to the waist. She crossed her arms over her breasts as if to support and protect them and said entreatingly:

"Let's wait till tonight. . . . And meanwhile let's go swimming . . . please . . ."

"Tonight you'll put me off again."

"No, it will be different tonight."

Giacomo walked silently away and proceeded to put on his trunks, while Simona, obviously relieved, hastily donned her two-piece suit. She shouted gaily:

"I'm off for a swim! If you love me, you'll follow!"