I wondered if the Portuguese captain of the island steamer had acquired a nervous tick as we stood by the pier on the South Pacific island of Kaila and watched two crew members haul supplies off the ship and onto the dusty ground in front of two grass huts that seemed to constitute the port of Kaila. Disconcerting too were the islander men receiving the goods—all bronzed with muscular bodies, none particularly young, but still in a superb physical condition as could readily been discerned because they wore only skimpy colorful loincloths hard pressed to contain the goods.
The captain was watching me closely. He eyes were twitching, there was a silly sort of leer on his face, and he kept moving his tongue back and forth inside one cheek and making popping noises. He had been quite all right up to now during the two week's supply voyage through the islands that had brought us here from Tauranga, New Zealand. But I left him now, stopping and asking one of the islander men, in my broken Spanish, where I could find the school of Doctor Sterne. He pointed west along the coast and said it was about a two-mile walk. There was to be no other option on this small island but walking.
Hefting my duffle bag over my shoulder, I started out on a path running just in from the coast, sheltered from the pristine white-sand beach by line of coconut palms that were thin enough in depth for me to maintain eye contact with the sea but still shielded me from the sun and on the edge of a jungle. I indeed was on the edge of a jungle, as a lush one, in the manner of a Rousseau painting, started at the other side of the pathway. The mystery of the verdant tropical isle also surfaced thoughts of Somerset Maugham in my mind.
I too was a writer. Coming here with a purpose. Doctor Sterne, a tenured professor of education at NYU, was a leading authority in educational methods. Why then, my editor at
The Times
had asked, had he and his family withdrawn to some South Pacific island not even on most maps to educate a handful of islanders?
"That's what we'd like you to find out and write about, Ryan." Nancy Day, my editor, had said. "I understand that you know the family."
"Just the daughter, Michelle," I answered. And, yes, I had known her well, I thought. I had known her totally—until I had realized that she was just a substitute for what I really wanted and until she, although with her father and mother and brother, had left New York on some inspiration in educational methods her father had devised. All four had worked in education in some capacity at NYU.
Why here? Why indeed, I thought as I trudged along the path toward "the great Sterne experiment." What did the inhabitants of a remote-in-time-and-space simple paradise like this appear to need in terms of a New York education?
The farther I walked along the coast of the island, the more and more I felt steeped in the worlds of Rousseau and Maugham. Kaila was truly an exotic island passed by by time and social convention. Originally Spanish, I had learned, nearly five hundred years earlier it had been brought into the edge of a struggle of Pacific control between the Spanish and Portuguese, and when the gun powder had dried, neither empire knew which had won the battle or which had wound up with control of Kaila. The islanders hadn't seemed to care and continued their basic life for centuries without the need for the outside world.
Had they found a need for the Sterne educational methods? That was one of the key questions I was to write about in a series of features on the Sterne project for
The Times
. This little slice of paradise may or may not have learned anything useful from the Sternes—but what had the Sternes learned from them? Would they ever want to come back into the world of New York? Apparently many of Walter Sterne's colleagues in the academic circles wanted to know the answer to that question. I surmised that not all of them wanted him back.
I heard the waterfall coming up on my right before I came upon it and when I did come upon it I was transported into the sensual world of Gauguin. They were both a couple of years younger than I was, perhaps nineteen or twenty, both beautiful of countenance and perfection of body. They were standing in the pool at the base of the waterfall, facing each other closely. Her torso was leaning back, one of his arms supporting her with an embrace at the waist. Her far leg, from my perspective, was hooked on his hip. He was turned enough toward me that I could see the root of his cock expanding and contracting in length as he languidly fucked her. His lips were suckling on one of her melon-firm breasts.
If a fuck could be called peaceful, reverential, this was it—at least at the start of what I observed. The exotic, lush-foliage setting and the musicality of the waterfall completed the image or primeval calm.
Completely absorb in a scene that should have shocked me, but that seemed so natural to this setting, I pulled out of their sight behind a banyan tree and watched the two young beauties couple. It was so Gauguin, so primitive and basic, natural and wild. And innocent—yes, exhibiting an innocence in the natural order of life that all that was Western society, New York, had made dirty and sordid.
What could the Sternes have to teach innocent, sensual islanders like this?
As I watched, not daring to breathe the scene seemed so ethereal—the cock moving in and out of her so languidly—the two started becoming more heated, needy, and insistent. He moved her to the edge of the pool, laying on her back on a bed of ferns, grasping and squeezing her breasts in strong hands, standing between her bent legs, pumping her increasingly hard and furiously with his cock, while, digging her heels into the soft ground, the young woman raised her pelvis to him and met him thrust for thrust.
They were babbling to each other in broken Spanish, both lost in what became a wild, animal thrusting of basic procreation need. Until, with a mingled cry from them both that sent seagulls cawing and soaring up from the foliage overhead, he collapsed on top of her, embracing her head in his muscular arms as she wrapped her legs around him below his still undulating buttocks to hold his body close to her and to trap his spurting seed deep inside her.
I quietly passed them by, in awe of this basic, clean, and innocent playing out of life as it suddenly seemed to me should be played. What, indeed, did the Sternes or anyone else from the West have to offer these folks?
This was driven home yet again not long before I reached the Sterne compound, when I came upon another scene of island breeding. Off toward the beach this time, I picked out figures almost hidden in a tangle of free-floating banyan tree roots. The man was older this time, maybe in his forties, stocky but solid and muscular. The woman much younger, again younger by a year or two than I was. She was bent on her belly over one of the banyan roots, her head and arms dangling toward the sand at the top edge of the beach. He was standing behind her, between her spread legs and crouched over her body—kneading her breasts with his hands and feeding her cunt with his cock. Once again natural and sensual in this setting, neither sordid nor shocking. Just a slice of the languid continuation of life on a remote tropical island where time and space had little meaning.
It struck me then that both this woman and the one I'd seen earlier had a slightly distended belly that may or may not portend that they already were with child.
I was struck with the question that had been revolving in my mind as I had walked and was trying to devise an approach to this series of articles of who was teaching who what as I came into the clearing of the Sterne compound to the sound of a deep voice calling out in English, "Let's gather, the reporter has arrived."
Doctor Walter E. Sterne, tall, ruddy blond, strongly built, perhaps in his early fifties, was standing in the center of a gathering of small grass huts, with a larger, open-sided assembly area off to the side with row of benches inside. As I walked up, a woman of perhaps forty, raven-haired, voluptuous and sensual of body, joined him—Kathleen, his wife, I surmised. And then a young man a bit younger looking than I was joined the welcome committee. He was dark-haired and sharing the sensuality of Kathleen, who must be his mother—Rod would be his name. And last, my own Michelle, tall and blonde, like her father, less curvy than the mother but still with a body of breath-taking beauty.
They had grouped in a reception line to greet me, all just in colorful loincloths, like the Kaila islanders. Both mother and daughter had gone native and were letting their breasts hang free, fuller than those I'd seen so far of the young islander women, but just as firm.
Mark up one in the education column for the islanders, I thought, as I stepped forward to greet my hosts for the next two weeks until the island supply steamer showed up again. I suddenly felt much too overdressed in my cargo shorts and T-shirt. But that was easily remedied—and soon.
* * * *
We were squatting around a low grass-woven tray table at the edge of the beach, eating my first meal on the island. In addition to the Sternes and me, a middle-aged man—identified as Santos, the chief of the village that had formed around the Sternes' compound and the nucleus of the students of Sternes' education experiment—was seated with us. He was the older man who had been fucking the young woman on the banyan tree root. Serving us were Maria, his daughter—the young woman he'd been fucking—and Isabella, her sister—the young woman who had been fucked in the waterfall pond. The two were serving us the meal. Off to the side, down on his haunches, his dick escaping the loincloth and nearly dragging on the ground, eyes following all movement at the table and looking for the need to run off and fetch anything needed, perched Domingo, the young man who had fucked Isabella, his sister, at the pool.
We, in essence, were being served by the head family of the village. A heavy-set, dark-complexioned woman with Maori tattooing stood off to the side, her meaty arms crossed, and supervised the service.
A small, remote community, close relatives fucking each other—I should have been shocked, but I wasn't. The gene pool must have been restricted here for centuries. It hadn't prevented the islanders from having beautiful bodies and faces, though. And, I had noticed, particularly large equipment—the men were hung and the cunts on the women that I had seen included large, puffy labia and a view of more than one set of folds.
