by Mike Heppner
Stuart shot her a warning look, then turned to their guest. “Maybe Heath would like to eat,” he said, rolling his eyes, trying to enlist Heath’s support. “Hey, you look like you need a new drink,” he said, but Heath covered his glass with his hand.
“I don’t want to make trouble for you guys,” he said, more to Stuart than to Marlene. “I was just kidding about the movie thing. I don’t want to pry into your personal lives.”
“You’re not prying,” Marlene said. “We don’t have any secrets around here. Isn’t that right, Stuart?”
Stuart put down his fork. “Hon. Stop.”
She continued in her easygoing voice, “There’s one thing you should know about us, Heath. We’re not normally this formal around the house.”
“Hon . . .” The word died in Stuart’s throat.
“I mean, we’re not this dressed up,” she said, smiling now. “The fact is we’re not normally dressed at all.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Stuart snapped. “You’re being silly, Marlene. Heath doesn’t need to hear this.”
“We haven’t actually been to a nude beach yet. I want to go, but Stuart says—”
“Just zip it, okay?” he hissed.
Her moment of courage left her. “I’m sorry. I’m spoiling the night.”
Feeling sorry for her, Heath said, “Hey, no, you’re not spoiling anything. Really. I think I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” she sighed.
“I do. I’ve met people like you before.”
Stuart turned his anger on Heath. “Like who?” he asked.
As Marlene fought back tears, Heath insisted, “It’s okay, guys. You don’t have to explain. Trust me, it’s a lot more common than you’d think. I used to live near this special camp when I was a kid. I had a good friend who went there with his family every summer. It was cool.”
Marlene wiped her eyes. “It was?”
“Totally! I even ran the naked mile when I was at UNC. All my friends did. There was a guy in my dorm who was a nudist. He used to hang out in the hallway, and no one ever said anything.”
“All right, I’m not listening to this anymore. You two can finish eating by yourselves,” Stuart said, pushing back his chair.
“Then let’s talk about something else,” Heath said. “I’m just saying you guys shouldn’t be ashamed. You should be proud of it. I’ve got a lot of respect for the nudist community . . . or whatever it’s called. The nudism community. Nudist, nudism. Nudist.”
Marlene laughed gratefully through her tears. “That’s nice of you to say,” she said.
“Speak for yourself,” Stuart barked. “No one’s a nudist here.”
“So,” Heath asked Marlene, “what about streaking? Have you ever done any streaking?”
She blushed. “Not much. Well, not yet.”
“Not much. What does ‘not much’ mean?”
“You know . . . we’ve been out to the backyard a few times.”
Heath slapped the table. “Oh, dude! I’ve got to get this on tape!”
“Nope,” Stuart said. “No movies, nothing. Marlene, knock it off, okay?”
Heath set aside his plate, no longer interested in eating. “Think about it, guys. We could make a streaking video. We could even use Mr. Pike’s camera. We’d shoot it on the weekends.”
Marlene turned the idea over in her head. “Where would we go?”
“Here, there, wherever you’d like. We’d go all over the state. It’d be like”—he fumbled for the right words—“a naked tour of Rhode Island. And you’d be the perfect host for it, Marlene.”
Flustered, she asked, “Me? Why?”
“Because you’re a nice person. People can relate to you,” Heath said.
Stuart was eager to deflate their growing enthusiasm. “People? What people? You’re not actually taking this crackpot idea seriously, are you?” he asked Marlene.
She reached across the table for his hand. In a quiet, pleading voice, she said, “We wouldn’t have to show it to anyone, Stuart. It could be just our little thing.”
“No.”
“I’d even edit the master tape for you,” Heath added. “You’d really be doing me a favor. I could use the extra practice time in the studio.”
Stuart didn’t know what to say. Much as the idea repulsed him, he also saw some sense in it. If they had a few of their naked adventures preserved on videotape, maybe they could stop torturing themselves like this. They could take the tape out once a year, watch it for a laugh, then put it back on its shelf. “This is crazy,” he said, mostly to reassure himself. At least he still knew what crazy was. If not his dignity, he still had his self-consciousness, which distinguished him from Marlene.
“Please, Stuart,” she said.
“All right, don’t nag me. I’ll think about it. But you have to promise me one thing.” He grasped Marlene’s hand tighter until it hurt her a little.
“What?” she asked.
“This is all you, Marlene. Understand? Not me. This is your thing.”
She nodded gladly, not wanting him to change his mind.
“Tell Heath,” he said.
She turned to Heath. “He’s right, Heath. This is all me. I’m the crazy one.”
Stuart took his hand away. “All right, fine. Now let’s eat. This dinner took me two hours to make.”
“Wait! When do we get started?” she asked.
“The first warm weekend,” Heath said cheerfully. “Keep an eye on the temperature. As soon as it hits sixty, I’ll be right over.”
The first warm weekend came in late February, and not a day too soon. The winter had been especially hard on Marlene, and it was all she could do to not take off her clothes at work. Carla Marshall had noticed something strange about her and considered it another good reason for Marlene and Stuart to come along to Martha’s Vineyard.
“Our time-share’s right on a private beach,” she said that Friday, about an hour before the close of business. “We’ll go skinny-dipping!” Marlene looked unhappy behind her desk, so Carla added, “Unless that sort of thing makes you nervous. We can just go to the regular beach instead of the nude beach. But like I always say, it’s fun to try new things. And it’s not like you’d be the only one doing it.”
That’s the problem, Marlene thought. I want to be the only one. If everyone else is doing it, then it’s not special, and if it’s not special, then I’m not special. But there was no telling Carla this, so she just said, “I’m not sure if Stuart will be able to join us. He’s working on a new novel.”
This was the only excuse Carla would ever accept, as she held Stuart’s writing in such high esteem that one might assume (wrongly) that she’d read his book. “It’ll be just us, then,” she said and slipped a manila folder into the tinted plastic in-box screwed to the wall of Marlene’s cubicle. “Bill will probably be working in the darkroom all week anyway. But I hope you can twist Stuart’s arm. I don’t want him to think that I’m just this boring person who works in a bank.”
“He doesn’t,” Marlene said. “Stuart likes you.”
Carla smiled; she was used to hearing this. “Stu’s a great guy. Anyway, I’ve got to run. I’m meeting Bill in a half hour. We’re driving up to Vermont for his birthday. What are you and Stuart doing this weekend?”
“Oh, nothing exciting,” Marlene said. “Hey, don’t worry about us. You two have fun up north. Wish Bill a happy birthday for me.”
The next morning, Heath arrived at the Breens’ with his video camera and a case of special lenses and filters. Stuart brought him into the living room and went upstairs to fetch Marlene. Furrowed lines on her forehead were the only signs of the argument she’d been having with herself all morning. “Why aren’t you ready?” he asked, annoyed to find her exactly as he’d left her ten minutes earlier, sitting at the foot of the bed.
Marlene looked up from her lap. “Is he here?”
“Yes, didn’t you hear us talking just now?”
“No.”
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“That’s funny. I can usually hear people downstairs when I’m in the bedroom.”
He ducked out of the room and left her to finish getting dressed. Rousing herself, she put on sweatpants and a T-shirt, came down the stairs with her sneakers in her hands and tiptoed into the kitchen, where she eased open the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of Chardonnay and poured some into a juice tumbler. Gulping down the wine, she ran the glass under the sink, rinsed out her mouth with lukewarm water and stepped into her shoes, which squeaked against the linoleum tile.
“Marlene?” Stuart called from the front steps.
“Coming!” She wiped her lips on the back of her trembling right hand and joined the men outside.
From Providence, they drove twenty minutes to Brenton Point in Newport, just south of the Newport Bridge. A two-lane road curved around a lighthouse and continued along a stretch of coastal grass. Past a low seawall, big blocks of broken shale tumbled to the beach. The place was largely abandoned, and the usual reek of kelp and dead fish was as strong as ever.
Heath pulled onto the grass and stopped the car. He’d expected to have a better sense of what to do next—where to shoot, what to tell his talent—but now couldn’t think clearly. He felt like he’d never picked up a camera before. Through the windshield and across the blue hood of the car, he saw a thicket of autumn olive trees, then an opening where a narrow trail led into the scrub. About as inspiring as staring at a brick wall.
“Well, it’s a start,” he said and stepped out of the car. The others followed. Heath knew that if he didn’t start asserting himself, the whole project would fall apart. Think big, he told himself. Think different. Think like Brian Wilson.
As Heath unloaded his equipment, he decided that the world was divided into two camps—those who were like Brian Wilson and those who were like Mike Love, the Beach Boy who, of all the others, had been most opposed to the Smile project. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that if Love had been more supportive, the album might’ve actually been finished, despite the drugs and Wilson’s dementia and dwindling self-confidence. Countless times on countless tapes, Love undermined Wilson by repeatedly dismissing his latest efforts as avant-garde crap. “Do You Like Worms” was crap, and “Heroes and Villains” and “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.” In a sense, he was right. “I Love to Say Dada” was certainly not as polished as “In My Room,” or “Help Me, Rhonda.” Perhaps it was too much to ask Love to appreciate the abstract lyrics and inscrutable structures of Smile. His reasons for being a Beach Boy weren’t the same as Brian Wilson’s. Wilson believed that art, at its most spiritually honest, was assembled rather than produced, discovered rather than contrived. Thus the elliptical fragments, the hours of apparently incompatible riffs and patterns collected on tape. The purpose in spending so much time in the studio was to create not a heady, impenetrable masterwork but a simple, beautiful collection of popular music. “A teenage symphony to God,” he’d called it. But in 1967, Mike Love was less fragile than Brian Wilson, so he won the battle. Smile was lost.
Like Brian Wilson, Heath had encountered more than his share of Mike Loves. Mike Love was anyone who said to him, “Huh?” or “What are you talking about?” or “Who’d ever want to see a movie about that?” The fact that Heath couldn’t answer these doubters didn’t matter. Brian Wilson couldn’t answer Mike Love either. All he knew was that something beautiful was going on here. He’d worry about the whys later.
While Stuart stood lookout by the car, Heath took his camera and led Marlene into the woods. With every step, he felt more and more ridiculous, and his goal of creating something beautiful—his own “teenage symphony to God”—more absurd.
They stopped short of a clearing, where three men in rubber boots were fishing on the beach. The temperature was cool, and the blanketing sound of the wind had an eerie note to it. “This looks good,” Heath said. “Maybe we’ll have you start here, then I’ll follow you back to the road.”
Marlene hesitated before taking off her shoes. Her sweatpants came next, followed by the rest of her clothes. As she undressed, Heath felt nothing—not arousal, not even mild interest. He was too nervous about doing his job to think of her as anything other than his subject.
Once naked, Marlene looked down at the men on the beach. One of them was crouched at a tackle box, fixing his rig. A dog had entered the picture, a golden retriever that was splashing around in the shallows among the rocks. The men were drinking beer.
A trance lifted, and she realized she’d covered her breasts with her hands. This was a natural reaction, of course, but still disappointing. She wanted to believe that she had no inhibitions, yet here she was, unable to be as brazen, as shameless, as superhuman as she’d have liked. So, she did have inhibitions. Whenever she thought of the people that she most admired— and Stuart was at the top of the list—what they all had in common was a confidence she lacked herself. Stuart wouldn’t agree, but she knew him better than he did. He was her idol, her role model. Whenever she introduced him to one of her friends, she would say, “He’s a writer,” and her friend would invariably look dubious until she produced a copy of his book. But whenever he introduced her, no one ever asked what she did, and if it came up, no one doubted it, or looked dubious, or demanded proof. The fact that he’d written a book still amazed her, and it wouldn’t matter even if he never wrote another, because he’d done something with his life, something definite and tangible and beyond the immediate confines of where he was or who he was with at any given time. If you typed in his name on the Internet, something happened; it wasn’t much—just a list of reviews and books for sale on eBay—but it was better than nothing. The invisible world registered and reaffirmed his existence every day, whereas Marlene’s name brought up only a single reference to another Marlene Breen, who lived in Oregon and sold real estate.
Making a decision, she lowered her hands and showed her breasts to the men on the beach. When one of them looked up, she stepped back and hid in the shade of the autumn olives. “I think they saw me,” she said.
“Do you want to stop?” Heath asked.
She shook her head but said, “Just go check, okay?”
He went to the clearing and pointed his camera down the beach. The fishermen looked the same as before, concerned only with their beer and their lures and the golden retriever dodging between their legs. Heath focused on the three men, then pulled up to show Marlene hiding in the woods. He wanted to highlight the proximity between the naked woman and her surroundings. “You want to take a walk?” he asked.
Still worried about the men, she crept back into the open. Gradually, she became less afraid. Her body looked more beautiful than ever before. Her breasts were lovely, her stomach tight, her legs firm and muscular. Again, she went to the edge of the clearing, but didn’t hide when the men glanced her way. Instead, she stuck her hip out at them, and the cool ocean air tightened around her waist.
“I can see the bridge from here,” she said. Farther up the beach, the Newport Bridge looked as familiar as a picture from a travel brochure. Seeing it made her feel both small and powerful; small, because the bridge was so enormous, and she was nothing compared to it, but powerful, because no one else near the bridge was naked, only she, and that made her equal to it. “All right, let’s go,” she said. Bundling up her clothes, she stashed them between two large rocks.
In the ten minutes he’d been waiting by the car, Stuart had seen about half a dozen vehicles drive past the park entrance. One was a state trooper’s, another a Coast Guard van. Just as the van was driving away, he heard what sounded like his wife’s voice in the distance. His cock stiffened, and he reached down and massaged himself through his pants.
Marlene came out of the woods, followed closely by Heath, who said, “We got some great shots.”
For Marlene, the thrill of the experience was already wearing off. “Oh, it was okay,” she said, “but I chickened out at the end. I should’ve gone down to the beach. There were these guys fishing there.
I should’ve flashed them.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Heath said. “You got as close as you could. Any closer, we would’ve blown it.”
She shook her head. “No, you can always get closer.”
Oh, like you’re some fucking expert, Stuart thought. Marlene’s professionalism was starting to annoy him. “Come on,” he said, roughly hustling her into the car. “Let’s try not to get arrested.”
Driving back to Providence, Stuart wondered why he was in such a bad mood. Was it because of Heath? No, both Heath and Marlene had done a fine job. His problem was with himself. To be honest, he would’ve said the same thing if he were Marlene: I should’ve flashed those guys on the beach. I should’ve done more.
Over the following weekends, they’d have several more chances to do just that. Every Saturday and Sunday, Marlene, Heath and Stuart went out in search of new locations, whether to shoot a quick flash ’n’ dash or a full-scale outdoor masturbation scene. By mid-March, they’d collected more than twenty scenes, nearly two hours’ worth.
Somewhere in the midst of this, Allison returned from London. She and Heath had been apart for three months, during which she’d switched from smoking pot to snorting coke, resulting in her dropping ten pounds she really couldn’t afford to lose. In her absence, Heath had started working on a screenplay loosely based on her experiences in Europe, which she’d told him about over the phone. Showing the script to Allison had turned out to be a mistake; she didn’t like seeing herself through someone else’s eyes and resented Heath for trying.
“It’s easier for me to use people’s real names when I write the first draft,” he told Stuart as they sat in the living room of the Breens’ apartment, waiting for Marlene to get out of the shower. They’d just returned from another long weekend expedition. After each session, Stuart always insisted on watching the raw footage at home, before Heath took it back to the editing lab in Warwick. “I was going to change it later, but she doesn’t believe me.”
