"Bodies, Water" by Maud Lavin

Central Park

Right below the Central Park Reservoir on a hot summer night, and the sex wasn’t even that great.

We are dressed in our finest, our downtown-NYC, age-early-30s finest. You–jacket, cotton button-down, jeans. Me–plum-colored thrift shop dress, wrap around with a flared skirt, violet stockings, and those shoes!, royal blue, bright bright blue, with heels, my favorites. We walk out of a Museum del Barrio exhibition opening, between 104th and 105th Streets on Fifth Avenue, stepping into the warm night. There is wine drinking and a crowd behind us, Central Park in front of us, sparse traffic on Fifth. We’re expectant, quiet, rolling across Fifth and down the broad sidewalk next to the Park. We head for the Reservoir. Too much to think about whose home we might end up at or even whether we’re going to spend the night together. We’re not a couple, although we’ve been friends a long time and this now is a date. Very much a date. It’s charged.

We enter the Park below 96th and make it as far as the bushes below the Reservoir path. My memory is hazy here. I don’t remember discussing it much. But somehow we decide we want to fuck under the bushes. Like a dare. Cutting through the what are we to each other. I’m exhilarated. I love sex outdoors. I peel up my dress and take off my pantyhose and shoes. You’re fast with your shoes and your jeans. You take a condom out of your wallet. I like the readiness about you. We’re surprisingly hidden under the bush. Anyone could see us who tried to. But from the sidewalk, no. Not from the Reservoir, either. They’d have to be cutting through the bushes like we did.

We grope and we kiss and we fondle. We finger. Stroke. It doesn’t take much. We’re each already turned on. And then I’m lying on my back and you’re on top. We do it straight up. But the sex, the sex isn’t all that. I’m distracted by the twigs, small stones, and dirt on the back of my legs and butt. Your movements, they seem studied to me, like you’re dancing. Controlled. Your skin is white and cold. Clammy, even. You come, I don’t, you offer to go down on me. But I’m fine with the adventure and want to get my shoes back on. The shoes now are more clear to me in the memory than the sex. That royal blue. I find them, leave the stockings, put the shoes back on. I have a warm glow, but I want to go home now, alone. We share a cab. I love the air.

Flagstaff Reservoir

All water on skin and bright, clear light and Arizona heat.

Ten years earlier. I have a summer job at the Museum of Northern Arizona and am living with other staff on the grounds. I’ve turned down an underpaid summer internship at the Met for this. With the Flagstaff salary plus the living space, I’d come out ahead. The MNA does field biology and archaeology more than cultural heritage, so most of the summer staff count birds or work on digs, and the grounds, outside Flagstaff, stretch for 200 acres on the Colorado Plateau. The Flagstaff Reservoir sits on the grounds. We summer staffers are in our twenties, and it doesn’t occur to us that our bodies could be unclean. Someone has furrowed under one part of the Reservoir fence, and at dusk or later at night we belly through in groups to skinny dip in the Reservoir. Dusk is the best, with enough light out to look up at the mountains, the San Francisco Peaks, while we swim. The water is so clean. The air sharp.

I love to swim. The release. The full feelings of the skin all over, while letting go of some of the body’s encumbrances. The grace of back stroke while looking up at the sky, the ease of breast stroke. Looking out at the woods and the peaks with the cool water flowing over me. Feeling strong in the water, unlike my clumsy self on land.

I couldn’t go in alone because the drop off was steep getting in and out of the Reservoir, and we couldn’t leave anyone in alone in case they were too tired to get out. So, naked and swimming, we were together.

The Michigan Shore

I want to go skinny dipping now with Bruce. We’re old and no longer have our youthful arrogance to cover us when we strip our clothes. I have less modesty and more than when I was young. Less because this is my body, and I like it, and I feel lucky to be alive. More because I know if we were caught, there could be derision: what are these old people doing naked in the water?

We’re living in Holland, MI, I imagine. Still getting back often to Chicago to do the READINGS series—and stretching those wine-soaked readings events to Grand Rapids, Holland, and Saugatuck as well. I’m writing up a storm. Bruce is doing his tap. And teaching a tap class for beginners, one that folds in history of tap with blues and swing, racial conflicts and triumphs. We’re relieved to like it up here.

It’s summer and it’s HOT. The beach at Holland State Park is full of tourists. Nice, too, though. But so hot during the day. We wait ’til the evening, and head to a lesser-known beach, the North Ottawa Dunes, on the way north to Grand Haven. There’ll be beach patrol, but maybe they’ll ignore us old people.

We get there, park, no patrol that we can see. The air is thick but clean. Not much wind. We take off our shoes, I put my walking sticks with them. We leave our pants too, and our towel. Maybe in the dark Bruce’s shorts can look like a bathing suit, my underwear like a bathing suit bottom. I take off my t-shirt too. I have a sports bra underneath, with material enough to look like a bathing suit top, if we get stopped. We walk to the water, wade in. Bruce is happy to let the wavelets wash over his feet and calves, just the massage he needs with his dancing and running. I look around, really—no one. I hand him my sports bra. Ah, it feels good to be naked on top. Like when I was a kid and my family lived in the sticks. It was so empty I could run around without a shirt like my brothers until I was 5.

I love to swim. I dive in. Bruce keeps an eye out. No big undertow here, I don’t think. I stay close in any case. Lake Michigan is a sea, a huge one with tides and undercurrents. Near the shore, welcoming water, no fear. Water cooler than the air. Soothing water. And I’m weightless, my breasts bobbing, my legs frog kicking, my arms reaching up and out. The water holds me up, frees my joints. My body. I swim back, he fingers me in the shallows. The sex, the cool water, our bodies, the hot night air.

Maud Lavin runs the READINGS series of creative nonfiction and poetry at Chicago's Printers Row Wine, edits, and writes. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Chicago Artist Writers, Portable Gray, Artforum, and other venues, and is forthcoming in Harpy Hybrid Review and Rejection Letters. Her most recent book, Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols, was nominated for a Lambda, and an earlier one, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, was named a New York Times Notable Book. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a person with disabilities.