I froze upon approaching the pool bar; there must have been a mistake. Where were the strawberry-and-whipped-cream people? Drooping breasts hung off slouched women like Christmas ornaments. Fat rolls sheltered shriveled penises. Wrinkled bare asses sagged into heart shapes. The restaurant was technically on the prude side, but this was clearly only in theory. I wondered if we should turn back, but there was nowhere safe. Our only refuge would be our room. I gave Hadley a sheepish glance, preparing to grab her and bolt, when my mom appeared, mercifully dressed in a bathing suit and toga. Harry stood nearby chatting up a sixty-year-old topless woman. Hadley reassured me it would be okay just as we heard Harry: "Nudity: it really just opens your heart," he explained, gesticulating. "Can't you feel the cosmic pulse out here?"
Hadley and I were the only guests at the bar under thirty. Most were over fifty. Had we stumbled into a Levitra ad? I suddenly remembered my mom's Tantra retreats ("a spiritual bonding community," she explained) and Harry's constant advocacy for polysexuality. I had one of those "holy fuck" epiphanies that only hallucinogens or watching a man with toilet paper wrapped around his dick chat up your mom can spur: I was a voyeur into my mother's kinky middle-aged sex life.
Panic hit me, but I fought against it. I hated people who were uncomfortable with open sexuality, and I would not join the prudes. But when Hadley disappeared to the bathroom, I gulped down two double vodka tonics. For a precious moment, they were the only things I saw that were stiff.
A thin, middle-aged blonde woman sprawled across the bar towards me as I put down the second glass. She asked what I was doing here. I explained. "But, but," she slurred. "Why'd your mom take you here?" Hadley crept back from the bathroom under a full ogle from the bar. The blonde, having spread to a fully prone position across the bar, demanded again why Mom had brought me. Good question: Why did she bring me to Hedonism?
I was a voyeur into my mother's kinky middle-aged sex life.
I didn't fully know. We'd always been very close. Through her storm of bad boys, we'd stuck together; we bonded through the stolen money, kick-outs and move-back-ins, and in the end there were few walls left standing between us. As a result, she was relaxed and open-minded, and it was easy for me to tell her when I became sexually active. For her part, she'd turned to yoga and eastern spiritual practices to cope, and when she spoke candidly about the nudity in them, I felt no right to suppress her happiness with my expectations of conventionality. Still, I'd figured she and her activities would remain an abstraction at Hedonism — sure, she might be naked somewhere, but I wouldn't encounter any evidence of it or have to think about it. Then I heard a fat, gap-toothed man bellow at my mom across the bar: "I saw you in the hot tub!" I signaled for the bartender.
By the end of dinner, Hadley and I were committed to getting shitty. We escaped my mom and Harry and stumbled amidst the genitals that occupied the bar stools and hot tubs along the veranda. We drank fast and heavily. I remember little: an elderly woman in a see-through fishnet dress collapsing on the pavement; a couple with sheep puppets strapped to their crotches sitting quietly in the corner of the club; an erection emerging like a telescope over the bubbling waters of the hot tub.
My mom called in the morning and suggested we meet for breakfast. I sighed but accepted. I'd just spent months away at college, and after this trip, I would disappear again. Instead of two separate couples shadowing each other on opposite sides of the resort, we were very much here together, and I only hoped for a shade of normalcy in the daylight.
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