Yarns Without Threads 

The first time I saw Karen Myers she was naked. It was in Pennsylvania during the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college. She was perfectly tanned, with no bikini marks, and was serving a volleyball.

...

Risking hyperbole, I would say about Karen Myers naked that it didn't get any better. By any objective standard, if there is such a thing for naked women, she was in the 100th percentile.

Nude volleyball was the signature sport of the Sunnydell Ranch,¹⁰ in Clarenceburg,¹¹ Pennsylvania. It was featured on the cover of its brochures, mailed in a plain brown wrapper, and in its ads in the back of nudist magazines. It was a coed noncontact sport, the perfect activity for a nudist camp or, as they preferred to call themselves, a naturist resort.

...

The Sunnydell Ranch was not a ranch, though it had pretensions of being one. There wasn't a horse or a cowboy anywhere on its "twelve acres nestled in the foothills of the Poconos." Pam and Wally the couple who ran the place, gave things ranchy names and called everybody partner.

"Howdy, partner," they would say to you in their lacquered New Jersey drawls, their sun-dried skin hanging off them like leatherette upholstery.

I was working as a waiter in the dining room, trying to earn money to help pay my tuition at the sub-Ivy League college I was attending. In addition to my $115-a-week salary, I got room and board, such as they were, and all the naked women I could look at.

Let me tell you the truth right off: The law of diminishing returns applies just as well to nudity as it does to bushels of wheat. Seeing all that succulent flesh serving volleyballs, lounging beside the pool or, in my case, sitting and eating corn on the cob with a napkin in the lap, quickly becomes not only quotidian but antierotic. You soon begin to fantasize how people look with their clothes on.

Staff members were encouraged to take their clothes off as well. Pam and Wally believed that nakedness was a spiritual state. They gave talks about the transcendental quality of naturism at night in the Bunkhouse-a sort of combination social hall and rec room featuring a Ping-Pong table, board games, paperback western novels, a record player, and a collection of Vaughn Monroe and Gene Autry 45's. It was, according to Wally, easier to become One with Nature bare-assed than in clothes.

There were two major no-no's at the ranch: sitting down anywhere without first putting a towel underneath you, and public sexual contact. And it went without saying, of course, that any public tumescence was also strictly verboten. Believe me, it's the last thing that happens to you in a nudist camp.

When I tell men that I spent time in a nudist camp, it's always the first question they ask me. And I always tell them the same thing. You don't get one. Take my word for it. Besides the fact that most people, Karen Myers notwithstanding, look better in their clothes than out of them, there is something inherently detumescent about volleyball, archery, Ping-Pong, and the other noncontact sports that are big among the naturists. Call it the Volleyball Effect.

Nevertheless, I wore a bathing suit and an apron in the Chuck Wagon, the knotty-pine dining room with green plastic chairs and a large portrait of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, fully clothed. I considered it an occupational safety measure. We were carrying hot soup; the cook was half Japanese, half Cherokee, hit the sauce, and seemed very cavalier about the way he used knives.

Karen Myers came to the Sunnydell Ranch with her parents, Arthur and Phyllis, two anthropologists who taught at Columbia and had, apparently, each published seminal books in their field. They were in their late forties, thin, with the nervous, graceless energy of hard-core intellectuals. Arthur would sit by the pool, his schlong hanging nonchalantly on his thigh, reading books in German and smoking a white briar pipe. On one side of him would be his wife, Phyllis, a washcloth over each nipple to keep them from getting sunburned, reading books in French; on the other side would be his daughter, Karen, reading Erich Fromm.¹²

...

Arthur invited me back to their cabin for a cup of herbal tea after the Ping-Pong.

"I'm not really dressed for it," I said, with a stab at irony.

"That's all right with us," he answered, with no discernible sense of humor.

...

Karen Myers was majoring in social anthropology. I asked her what that was, and she told me. But I was hardly listening. Now that we were no longer playing Ping-Pong under a fluorescent bulb but sitting close together in the low light of the Lava lamp, with Karen sprawled out casually on the couch, the Volleyball Effect was wearing off.

As she went on talking, she shifted her posture with an apparent lack of self-consciousness. But I'm convinced she knew exactly what she was doing. As I was to learn, Karen Myers always knew exactly what she was doing.

Eventually her parents excused themselves to go to bed.

"Don't get up," Arthur said, as he wished me good night. If he'd had an ounce of wit, the remark would have been very funny. They disappeared into their bedroom, closing the door behind them and leaving me alone with their beautiful young naked social-anthropologist daughter.

...

"Are you self-conscious about your body?" she asked me.

"Not at all," I lied.

"So why do you walk around with your clothes on at a nudist camp?"

"I don't know. ... I guess I just like to be different. I mean, if everyone were wearing clothes, I would probably be naked."

"What if I got dressed now? Would you take off your clothes?"

She lit the joint, inhaled deeply, passed it to me. As I took a hit, she said, "Are you embarrassed because you have an erection?"

I shook my head quickly, holding in the smoke.

"Believe me, I've seen my share of erections."

"I don't doubt it."

"It's the great equalizer," she went on. "Women spend their lives as sexual objects. But when you're naked it's the reverse. It's the men who are self-conscious. You have to walk around trying to hide your feelings. Why hide them? They're just an example of polymorphous perversity. The body is full of sexual energy that just gets repressed, which causes all sorts of somatic problems, not to mention antisocial activity..."

As we smoked the joint, the conversation became more abstract. Terms like polymorphous perversity tend to bring the Volleyball Effect back. The fact was that, gorgeous and naked as she might be, she was boring me to death.

...

... she didn't even look at me when I served her her French toast the next morning. It was foggy and damp, and she was wearing a shirt in the Chuck Wagon. I can't begin to tell you how much sexier she looked in an open man-tailored shirt, than she looked stark naked.

... On the way down, I said, "It must be weird having naked anthropologists around your house."

"I grew up with it."

"Who was the short fat woman?"

"Margaret Mead."

"I just saw Margaret Mead nude!"

"You and half the population of Samoa."

... At no point during our time together would Cara Boleri ever be on time for anything. Or ever explain why she wasn't.

"So," I said, "are we going to see the Trevi Fountain?"

She shrugged, exhaled, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. Then she got up, grabbed my hand, and said, "Come."

We walked down the steps, hand in hand. But we didn't go to the fountain. In the three and a half months I was in Rome I never saw the Trevi Fountain.

We walked through the piazza, past American Express, then down a narrow cobblestone side street until we turned into a courtyard. At the rear of the courtyard was an outdoor stairway that ascended into a parklike overgrown hillside.

The vegetation was ripe; mimosa and bougainvillea spilled from rotting trellises. At the top of the stairs, hidden away behind a peeling white wooden fence, was a small house with a disorderly garden in front of it. At the far end of the garden stood a short dark man at an easel painting a tall dark man, smoking a cigarette, carrying a sword and shield, and wearing an ancient Roman helmet and nothing else.

"Ciao, Tomas," Cara Boleri called.

Without taking his eyes off his subject, Tomas called back, "Ciao, Cara."

We entered the garden together, and Cara Boleri said something to them in Italian, presumably explaining who I was because the model turned to me and said, "I adore Americans."

"Adora tutti," said Tomas, then, to me, in a stilted English, "How do you do?"

"Fine. Buon giorno."

"Basta," said the model, breaking his pose and walking over to me to shake my hand. "Paco Da Silva"-he smiled-"enchante."

My time at the nudist camp had accustomed me to the sight of naked people engaged in incongruous activities, but this was the first, and last, time I would see a naked Roman gladiator with a cigarette in his mouth.

...

We went inside and had a glass of Orvieto, sitting in the small, cluttered living room, full of Tomas's vivid paintings. He specialized in nude males and surreal still lives of vegetables. There were several large oils of scary-looking cucumbers.

In a corner, above a lacquered Chinese trunk, was a painting of Cara Boleri. She was lying on a couch, near an open window, afternoon light bathing her naked body.

I took the painting in, then turned away, only to see that she had seen me looking at it.

"What you think?" she asked me.

"Bella."

"Grazie," she replied, treating me to a very small smile.

⁹Short, chubby anthropologist (1901-1978) and author of Coming of Age in Samoa.

¹⁰Not its real name.

¹¹Not a real place.

¹²Enormously popular psychoanalyst, whose book The Art of Loving, a tour de force of reductive heuristics, was a best-seller in the 1960s.