The Lifestyle by Terry Gould Page B

gratification!” said Chuck, grandly sweeping his arm across the water. “‘Generate me!’ says the land. ‘HereI come!’ says the cloud. And that’s without the benefit of religious morality, societal morality—”
    “But what about that indiscriminate aspect of sex without morality?” Joe piped up from the southwest point of the compass. Everybody turned and held up hands to block the sun to look at him. “Can’t it just be a lot of strangers groping in the clubs you were talking about?”
    “Oh, I agree, that’s exactly what it
can
be,” said Leah. “I don’t know about them being immoral, but they certainly just fuck and don’t even know each other’s name. They don’t even talk. It’s just ‘Hello,’ touch-touch, fuck; ‘Hello,’ touch-touch, fuck. That’s the main reason we don’t switch partners.”
    “That’s the main reason you go to clubs!” cracked Ed.
    Leah leaned forward and slapped his shoulder.
    “For a fringe element it can be like that,” Mark, the fast-food distributor, informed Joe. “Arms and legs waving out of a pile—that’s the stereotype. The vast majority aren’t orgiasts.”
    “Just the vast minority,” his wife Julia laughed. “No, we pretty much stay to ourselves in that kind of environment,” she reassured Joe. “The club we go to, the main thing is just display—people dressing up. It’s really the erotic value we’re after—for each other—that’s really what it is.”
    “I don’t understand what your moral problem is anyway,” said Greer, Bill’s wife, a golden-tanned executive in her late thirties who was getting fed up with my constant call for commentary. Over dinner the previous night she’d told me she was a strict moralist in all ways but one and thought the drug dealers in her neighborhood should be executed. Like many of the lifestyle tourists on the beach, Greer voted Republican. “The people who are involved in this are consenting, responsible adults,” she said. “Nobody is being forced or coerced into anything. It doesn’t have to be defended on moral grounds. Defending myself is the last thing I feel like doing on vacation.”
    “We have a lot of fun at our club because we
know
everybody,” Carla remarked to me, as Bill worked the oil around her ankles and between her toes. “I come from two abusive marriages which were really immoral. Don’t
tickle
me!” She put her arm around Bill’s waist and pulled him back. “I can tell you there isn’t a thing Ed’s gonna make me do I don’t feel comfortable with.” She put her other arm around Ed. “You want to write a book, write it straight. Don’t worry about the moral criticism. Just tell em we wear saucers in our lips. They’ll think it’s holy business.”
    From the direction of what the swingers called “the prude beach,” General Joyce presently leaped through a border of feather shrubs in a splash of white sand and came running toward us waving her bathing-suit top above her head. “I got the scoop on the togas, guys!” she yelled. “I got the scoop on the togas!”
    She pulled up breathless beneath our umbrella, the center one on the beach. “Ricco’s working on it right now!” she shouted left. “At four o’clock I’m gonna pick up the togas!” she shouted right.
“Everybody
—meet at the pool to get your toga at four!”
    As there’d been some question of whether the seamstresses in Loreto could supply the togas for the disco party tonight, there were cheers up and down the beach.
    “How big are the pieces of material?” Leah asked.
    “Well now,” Joyce said coyly, “I don’t know. But they are see-through, you know. Muslin.”
    “Can we wear ’em to dinner?” Bill asked.
    “Hey, no sheet, no eat,” Greer said. “Come on, Joyce—talk to Pascal, the restaurant’s Italian.”
    “That’s right, and we’re pre-Italian,” argued Chuck.
    “I just got through giving this guy a definition of immorality and you want me to impose myself