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 goodsâall 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had asked, had he and his family withdrawn to some South Pacific island not even on most maps to educate a handful of islanders?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 totallyâuntil 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 Sternesâbut 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 itâat 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 innocentâyes, 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 etherealâthe cock moving in and out of her so languidlyâthe 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?