WELL, I told you so. I told you in this very column that the hectoring of my bad-girl friend Juliet was going to force my husband Stanley and me to misbehave on our trip to Jamaica.
Juliet had made me feel like a Victorian schoolmarm by ridiculing the shots I insisted we get before our first-ever foray to that Caribbean island. She had also mocked me for paying attention to the numerous alarms sounded by the guidebooks against venturing out on one’s own. Never mind that Jamaica has one of the highest murder rates in the world -- Juliet had been there 27 years ago and remembered naught but good things.
So I resolved to break out of the mold on the trip. I was going to come back with some spicy stories if it killed me, and at least one of them would not be about jerk seasonings.
Stanley was quick with a suggestion. He noted that the resort we were going to near Montego Bay had what it called an “Au Natural” (sic) side, with a nude beach that was supposedly much nicer than the one on the “Au Normal” side. He also knew that to discourage voyeurism, resort guests could only visit the nude beach if they were themselves naked.
Stanley had fond mammaries of a nude beach he had visited in France as a young man. So about three seconds after we arrived at our resort, he broke on through to the fleshy side. He dashed back from his scouting mission to report that the swimming area was indeed better there because the ocean floor was sandy. Better yet, he reassured me, most of the Au Natural folk were just as unattractive as we were -- some even more so.
I could hardly believe this was possible. So I agreed to go buff-side and was quickly buoyed by the sight of a naked, pasty, bowlegged old man and other elderly chubsters. Naturally, there was also a group of people who, head to toe, had achieved that uniquely burnished brown common to ancient movie theatre hot dogs and addictive sunbathers. Stanley disrobed in a trice while I inched out of my clothes, positioning beach-bags and snorkeling gear around me like a detritus fortress.
The next challenge lay in not staring at our fellow guests, especially when a friendly Floridian couple, naked as newborn mice, decided to chat us up. The woman, prone on a beach chair, murmured unintelligible remarks to me from afar. To be polite, I had to walk over to her to reply, while respectfully looking her square in the sunglasses. After that, her husband gave me some tourist advice while his package bobbled at my eye level and I stared intently at his hat.
Stanley, I should just point out here, looks quite a bit like Homer Simpson. (Whereas I’m the spitting image of Marge Simpson’s most repulsive sister, Selma.) So perhaps you can picture the cartoonishness of the scene when I say that the highlight of the afternoon came when my dear husband volunteered to get me a drink at the Au Natural bar, and marched off purposefully wearing nothing but a baseball cap and a smile.
I can’t say I was won over to nudism by our first experience. Nevertheless, the complete indifference of others to my avoirdupois meant I wasn’t as horrified as I’d expected. So a few nights on, when Stanley found out there was going to be a big bonfire on the Au Natural beach at 10 p.m., I was willing to return. I did ask the hotel’s social convenor whether one had to wear one’s birthday suit at night. She implied that it would be more courteous to show up in the altogether, but one could probably get away with a modest cover-up.
The clouds had rolled away from the skies that evening, revealing the glittering Caribbean heavens. (Interestingly, so close to the equator, the constellation Orion appeared to be lying on “his” side as if he were sunning himself.) The warmth of the evening and the consumption of many drinks persuaded us that a little skinny-dipping (or, as a sign in the Au Natural bar described it, “chunky-dunking”) was in order before walking over to the bonfire.
The beach was deserted. The starlit swimming was fine until we suddenly remembered the existence of sharks, and the grisly first scene in the movie Jaws, and decided to move in closer to shore.
“Hey! We should try the Lloydminster!” Stanley shouted suddenly, in full party mode. “I mean, the Lloyd Bridges!”
Now, you don’t stay married to someone for 25 years without being able to penetrate what appears to be a pretty incomprehensible code. “You mean Burt Lancaster, in From Here to Eternity?” I asked him. Stanley was indeed referring to the famous scene in that movie, in which Lancaster and Deborah Kerr roll around passionately while lying half in and half out of the surf. Somehow the dimwittedness of his suggestion’s delivery, the alcohol, our irrational fear of death by shark, and Orion leering down at a couple of Canucks frolicking goofily in the waves, combined to provoke in us both a prolonged laughing fit. Finally, after I’d rebuffed Stanley’s second proposal for “a full Lloydminster” with a guffawing “Never mind!” we noticed that at the very end of the beach a flame had sprung up, and figured out the bonfire was getting underway.
I had no intention of waddling over there as is, though Stanley was all for it. So I struggled into my clothes, he left his behind, and we walked hand-in-hand, still giggling, toward the burning woodpile. As we entered the sphere of the bonfire, we could see no signs of life beyond the silhouette of the resort staffer who had ignited the kindling. We were transfixed by the intimacy and magic of this tropical conflagration.
It was then, as our eyes adjusted to the light and the resort employee backed away from the woodpile, that we shifted our gaze and spotted the dozen or so other bonfire enthusiasts beside us, sitting on lawnchairs -- all fully clothed.
Stanley was the only nude person on the beach.
As this reality sank in, we heard the first blasts of the song Tequila, courtesy of a saxophonist hired by the resort. He was leading a few more fellow pyromaniacs along the sand toward the blaze, its cosily dressed audience, the utterly convulsed columnist from North Vancouver, and the solitary naked man staring deep into the fire, chortling and clutching his triple vodka.
