Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,72

in the community, and Willoughby and Hank had given a few parties of their own in return. Lately, Willoughby had been considering joining the garden club.

As the ferry neared Davis Park, to which they had been invited by some straight friends, Willoughby looked around. Hank was somewhere at the other end of the boat. As for Willoughby, he was surrounded by jauntily dressed young men with dark horn-rimmed glasses and by girls equipped for the weekend with hemp baskets, canvas suitcases, and paper shopping bags. The bags were crammed, for the most part with cornflakes and gin. The girls were mostly career women from East Side apartments; uniformly frantic-faced and dressed in tight white pants or patterned bell-bottoms. As a matter of fact, it was their very uniformity that made him spot Gillian Blake. She stood out. Willoughby knew Gillian on a small-talk basis: She and her husband had attended a few parties both in the city and in King's Neck where he and Hank had also been guests. Blake was an abysmal square, but Willoughby found Gillian likable. For a woman, he thought, Gillian wasn't bad-looking. There was a certain… litheness about her.

Gillian saw him and motioned for him to join her.

"Well," he said. "It's good to see you. I mean, most of these people are so utterly depressing."

"Yes," she said, "Mad Ave. on the make. But what are you doing here?"

"Hank and I are staying with some friends," Willoughby explained. "And we're looking forward to it ever so much. You know, we haven't been to a sixish in such a long time."

"I feel the same way," she said. "Everybody needs a sixish now and then."

Willoughby laughed. Actually, the sixish was a rather charming custom. It was practically a tribal rite for the single people of Fire Island, especially Davis Park. The sixish was an evening cocktail party to which each guest brought his own drink. Some brought mayonnaise jars full of martinis, while others carried measuring cups filled with bourbon, and they all gathered where the noise was. They crowded onto the porch of one of the stilt-supported houses and jammed into one another and made social contacts. Most of the guests only gave their first names and occupations. Frequently they lied about their jobs, saying they were copy writers or television producers when they actually were clerks or stenographers. Eventually they paired for the evening. One of the rules was that you never selected anyone from the house at which you were staying. The people who stayed at a house usually were chipping in to rent it for the summer. They also shared expenses and cooking and housekeeping duties. Sleeping with somebody in your own house could lead to all sorts of complications within the group. The principle of exogamy had a very practical basis, Willoughby reflected.

As a whole, he thought, Fire Island was an anthropologist's delight. Each community was, to some extent, different. There was Ocean Beach, which was solidly built up and even had a small year-round community that necessitated a school. Ocean Beach was famous for summer residents who were prominent in the arts and in the entertainment world. There was Kismet, a middle-class community that included some interestingly built homes, a bar and a tennis court. There was Fire Island Pines, which was beginning to turn gay around the edges, and there was Cherry Grove, which was the loveliest community on Fire Island. Cherry Grove included a good hotel, gourmet-level restaurants, and a cornucopia of artistically decorated and beautifully kept summer homes. There was also Davis Park, which once had been a quiet beach for young marrieds in search of low rentals and solitude, and which now was a popular meeting ground for singles – most of them weekend refugees from such East Side hangouts as Friday's and Maxwell's Plum. They ranged in age from their early twenties into their late thirties, and there were a few men in their early forties. On weekends, they thundered herdlike off the Long Island Railroad trains at Bay Shore and Sayville and piled into taxis for mad dashes to the ferry docks. Willoughby smiled at Gillian. "You'll have to look us up," he said.

"Without fail," said Gillian. "But where's Hank?"

"Oh, we're having a silly quarrel," Willoughby said.

"How about you? Where's your husband?"

"He's not here," Gillian said. She added a tone of mock melodrama to her voice. "I'm on my own."

"Marvelous," said Willoughby. "That should be some sixish."

"Which one?"

"Whichever one you're at."

"Willy," said Gillian, "you're a real