Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

Monday, September 2, 2024

Echo Park Lake is and always has been a magical place for me. The green park with its large pond had its rough years, but I prefer the park now with family picnics and people reading books by the lake than anything else. The bird life is also an intense experience, with more than 150 different types of species, and there are Largemouth bass, Bluegill, Rainbow trout, Redear sunfish, Channel catfish, Common carp, Green sunfish, and various turtles in its lake. What is surprising to me is what takes place in the late evening.

I have trouble sleeping and like to walk around the lake in the middle of the night. Strangely enough, there are no signs of humans in the area, except one night when I ran into a picnic near the lake. There were four people there: two females and two males. Oddly, one of the women was in the water with her clothes on or what looked like only a white slip but nothing underneath it. The wetness caused the slip to cling to her body, pretty much exposing her full figure. The two gentlemen are sitting on a blanket and deep in conversation, fully dressed in what looks like formal wear. I get the impression that perhaps they were having dinner at a fine restaurant and decided to stop by the lake. The other woman with them on the blanket was totally in the nude.

I froze when I saw them and found a tree to hide myself because I felt I wasn’t part of this social scene. I recognize the naked girl because I follow her on Instagram, knowing she is from this neighborhood. We never met, but I gathered from her postings that she is a visual artist. Most images she posts are of herself in various social/party settings. I subscribe to her post because she is pretty. Instagram is very much wallpaper of images, and in my youth, one would cut out photos to put on their workplace or bedroom wall. Still, now I use my phone to hold on to these visual dreams, and I’m fascinated with the thought that there is some version of a narrative taking place, but at the same time, I know it’s my overactive mind imagining these stories. But here I am, and I’m in the presence of this naked beauty and her two well-dressed gentlemen and that mysterious other girl in the pond.

When I watch, I feel it’s sexual, but I suspect that for my subject matters, there is no sex but an easy-going relationship between the four. Not even a deep friendship but a comfort in their skin, even if one is naked. As I watch secretly, I do have sexual feelings not only on the girl or girls but also on the setting. It seems that there is a possibility that an orgy can take place, but the casualness of what I’m seeing says 2 + 2 does not always equal four. At first, I thought there might be a hidden camera or perhaps a painter nearby who uses these people as models, but I didn’t feel or see another presence in the area.

What made this even more intimate was that the young naked girl saw me but didn’t look surprised or alarmed. Once our eyes locked, this evening became special. She moved her body and exposed her rear end as she put her elbows on one of the men with her hands on his lap, with her hands on her face as he talked. As he spoke, she wigged her bottom and kicked her legs back and forth, which was hypnotic; it was like a cat moving her tail forward and back slowly in front of a mouse. The other girl, the one in the pond, came out and removed her wet slip and wrung the water out over one of the gentlemen, and he acted upset, as one can be upset at a beautiful woman who is undressing in front of you.

The two gentlemen were in deep discussion, but the naked woman I liked whispered to the other girl. She looked up and saw me behind this tree. She just smiled and kept on talking to the other girl. Their voices would all overlap, and I tried to hear their conversation, but the dialog in my head was louder than whatever they were saying to each other.

Finally, they all got up from the blanket or ground, and as the gentlemen spent some time making sure their clothing was straight and no weeds were on them, the girls were like nymphs in the forest, prancing around the men. All four walked toward the docking area for the tourist paddle boats one can take on the lake. The boats are shaped like swans, which also exist in the park. I often wondered what these swans think of the wooden version of themselves floating among the water. All four got on the boat, and off they went paddling around. I stayed at my semi-hidden spot, but now the boat and they were far apart.

The boat was at the far end of the lake. I heard noises from the girls, and I could see the boats were shaking and swaying with their movements. The sound was magnified in the still of the night, with the stars above moving freely and with a silent presence. The boat stopped moving, and I could see it floating by itself or hitting the sides of the concrete part of the pond. I didn’t move, and they didn’t move. I expected something to happen, but then I found myself falling asleep.