Chapter 17

By mid-afternoon Wednesday, Tess and Kim had concluded their participation in the pro-am event and were back with us in the RV for a brief rest before returning to the Kingsmill course to practice.

This was supposed to be nap time, but Mrs. Hoop had come back to the RV earlier, taken her own nap, and was up and feeling feisty by the time the three of us arrived.

"Your parents want to meet us later, at one of those restaurants in the restored area of Williamsburg. I have the name written down, somewhere. It's Prince Something or King Something, or something."

"OK, Grandma," Tess said. "Did you enjoy being on the course today?"

"They need some rain around here! But I saw you -- both of you -- make some nice shots out there! Yes, I enjoyed it."

"Grandma, we're going to go into the back and freshen up a little, maybe lie down for a half-hour," Tess said.

"OK, dear, but before you do, I've got your mail -- from home? I brought it for you, but forgot to give it to you last night when we came in." She retrieved a small packet of letters and miscellaneous mail items from her luggage, and handed them to Tess.

"Thanks, Gram." Tess shuffled through the packet and didn't seem, at first, to find anything out of the ordinary. Then she opened one of the legal-sized envelopes and examined the contents.

"Hey, Will. You know anything about a 'Fresh' magazine?"

"Fresh?... Yeah. It's a girlie thing. Like Playboy, or Penthouse."

"I never heard of it," Tess said.

"It's pretty new," I explained. "The old girlie mags are hitting on some hard times these days, with the Internet providing its unlimited supplies of pin-ups and porn... I think this Fresh thing is an attempt to re-work the marketplace. They've evidently got their own web site, and they combine that with their old-style paper monthly edition. They specialize in celebrity skin."

"Skin?"

"Yeah. It's actually named 'Fresh, ' but guys generally refer to it as 'Flesh, ' Magazine."

"This is a letter for me -- from them. They want me to do a pictorial in their magazine."

"Really?" Mabel said. The old girl had perked up. "You gonna be a centerfold?"

"I don't think they have centerfolds, exactly, Mabel," I told her. "But they do have at least one pictorial a month with multiple pictures of some young actress or other celebrity -- or, sometimes, a little bit older actress who's, maybe, trying to remind folks that she's still around. But, whoever is featured in it, they don't ever have much on, in the way of clothing."

"It's really handy having you around, Will," Tess teased. "You're an expert on so many arcane topics."

"Hey, I've seen the magazine, OK? I enjoy looking at scantily clad females. You maybe ought to call the Border Patrol -- or the National Guard."

"So. What's it like? Is it tasteful?" Tess asked, once again ignoring my sarcasm.

"If you're asking, 'Is this a magazine I ought to want to pose for, ' the answer is -- definitively -- 'no way!'"

"They don't just do -- you know -- teaser shots?... Bikinis, maybe? Or carefully draped pin-ups that don't really show all that much?"

"Forget it, Tess. I'll go out and buy you an issue, so you can see for yourself. Listen, when they say they want you to do a photo spread, they're using the word 'spread' in its most fundamental possible sense!"

"Oh, my!" Mabel said.

Whoops. I had sort-of forgotten there, for a moment, to adjust my language to take the Old Girl's presence into account.

"Well, I would at least like to see an example," Tess said. "I mean, it's kind-of intriguing, wouldn't you say, Kim?"

"I think it would be a big mistake for you to -- pose nude -- for a men's magazine," Kim said.

"It would be insane," I added, for emphasis.

"Oh my!" Mabel said, again.

It was no shock to me to learn that Tess wasn't willing to just take my word for it. While she and Kim practiced their driving at the tournament venue, I was dispatched to the nearest newsstand to locate at least one issue of Fresh.

I found a place on Williamsburg's commercial strip that had two -- this month's (which had probably been published weeks earlier) and "next" month's issue, as well.

The older edition featured some extremely candid shots of a 22-year-old redhead whose name meant absolutely nothing to me, but who was billed as the heiress to the throne of a Central European royal house. The fact that her native land hadn't had an operational royal family for about 85 years hadn't been enough to discourage the intrepid editors of Fresh.

OK, so the woman's claim to the crown might not amount to much, if anything, but I had to admit that she was awfully well put-together. The poses, and their level of explicitness, might have been considered mild for, say, Penthouse Magazine, but there were several pages of lovingly produced full-page nudes, and they were sufficiently graphic to leave no doubt, whatsoever, that Princess Whatshername was, indeed, a natural redhead.

Looked like royalty to me!

I imagined Tess' pictures -- at this same level of explicitness -- and shuddered. Fresh Magazine certainly could make Tess famous far more rapidly than could her dynamite golf game.

The coming month's issue had a similarly fawning feature article about the acting career of a young blonde whose face and name (once again) meant nothing to me, but who, evidently, had spent the past decade -- since she had been a mere girl of eleven years -- as a cast-member of a popular television soap opera.

The article recited the names of every well-known actress who had ever graduated from soaps to movie stardom, and predicted that this young woman -- Lara Anne Wilford -- was on the fast-track to stardom, just like Demi Moore, and all the others.

Several remembered images of the nude Demi Moore flashed across my consciousness. Lara Anne was younger, bustier, blonder and, somehow, naked-er than Demi had ever managed to be (although she'd certainly given it her best shot on several occasions).

Lara Anne, I could see from the most explicit of the photos, had only the lightest sprinkling of golden blonde pubic hair, providing very little cover for her innermost private places. The individual threads of gold were clearly visible, as were the plump little labia beneath. I wondered if someone -- some extremely lucky male hairdresser, perhaps -- had been down there, individually cutting away two out of every three strands of pubic hair, so as to create this masterpiece of not-quite-shaven voluptuousness.

If the barbering job really had been performed by some guy, I fervently hoped, for his sake, that he was straight.

I was still staring at Lara Anne's perfect pubes when I sensed someone looking over my shoulder. It was the cash register guy, now a few yards away from his post, patrolling the store. "You going to buy those magazines," he said, "or are you just trying to memorize that girl's twat?"

I bought both of them. It was research.

When I picked up Tess and Kim at Kingsmill, each of them immediately snatched up one of the issues of Fresh and eagerly checked it out.

"We have... worse magazines than this at home -- in Korea," she said.

Oh, great. Thanks, Kim. That's what I need most: encouragement, from you, for Tess to pose for a skin mag.

Tess had the Lara Anne issue. "Did you see this girl's pubes?" she asked me, extending her arm so that I could see which girl (and which pubes) she was referencing.

"Yeah. I looked at the photos in both issues."

Tess sounded extremely disappointed. "It's like you said, Will. These are truly 'spread shots.'"

"Yeah. You gotta tell them 'no, ' Tess. There's just no doubt about it!"

"Yeah."

I could hardly believe how crestfallen Tess sounded! Tomorrow, she would compete in one of the biggest-money events on the LPGA Tour, and all her attention seemed to be on the tragedy of a missed opportunity to show the world her nude form.

If Fresh Magazine had featured carefully draped teaser shots of beautiful women -- like -- say, Vanity Fair sometimes did, I knew that Tess would have been a goner. She'd have already been in touch with the editors, finding out when they wanted her to drop her drawers.

Even Tess, though, could see that Fresh (aka "Flesh") Magazine would not be a proper forum for the introduction of the LPGA's new answer to Tiger Woods. Tiger, after all, had been around for more than a decade now, and I wasn't sure that anybody had seen his bare chest, much less the details of his reproductive system.

Tess knew better than to pursue an inquiry about something as blatant as this, but she was taking, very hard, her own quite-rational decision against doing so.

After dinner, the three of us, lying in bed but propped up in a semi-seated position, discussed it further. "I know I can't do it," Tess said.

She waited in silence. It was as if she wanted one of us to shout, 'Aw, go ahead! What the hell?'

Finally, she completed the thought: "... But, in one way, those pictures are kinda... neat, you know?"

"They were sexy," Kim agreed. "But, Tess, don't even think about it!"

"No, no. Don't worry. I'm not that crazy... But I'd like to have pictures of myself, like those! Not published in a magazine! But just -- y'know, to have them. Hey, I'm not going to look like this forever. Not for very long, even! Big-busted girls like me, pretty soon they've got these things hanging down to their navel. It would be kind-of neat, you know?... To have a set of really outrageous pictures? Something to look at, twenty, thirty years from now?

"Imagine! You get drunk some night at a get-together with the neighbors, and then you go and trot out the album -- the one you keep hidden under the bed, and you say to your friends, 'Here's how I looked, back in the day!'"

"Well, Tess, there are lots of photographers who do 'glamour' shots of women. There's a cottage industry for it -- women give the pictures like that to their husbands -- or boyfriends -- as anniversary gifts, and stuff."

"So you're saying I could make my own pictures? Get them made, by an expert?" Tess was definitely interested. "I'll bet you wouldn't mind, Will, getting a set of those for your birthday!"

She was right about my birthday, but I ignored that and answered the rest of her statement. "Sure, you could get pictures like that made, professionally... But you'd have to be careful. You don't just look for some guy in the Yellow Pages. You'd need to make certain the photographer was reputable, could be relied upon to protect your exclusive right to the pictures. You'd need a contract, providing very clearly that the photographer had no reprint rights, whatsoever!... Otherwise, you might find yourself featured, a year later, on some Internet web site."

"And if you become well-known because of the Tour," Kim added, "the pictures would become even more valuable, for someone to publish, without authorization."

But Tess wasn't listening to our cautionary words. "Tess of the Boobervilles," she recited. "That's what one of the girls in the dorm at UVA used to call me.

That one mystified Kim, and Tess had to explain that it was a "sort-of half-assed literary allusion."

So, OK. I was pleased that we had, at least, weathered this new storm. Tess was more eager than ever to take her clothes off for a camera somewhere, but she had at least been sensible enough to decide, on her own, that it shouldn't be for the cameraman from Fresh Magazine.

Dodged another bullet.

As usual on the night before the opening round, Tess refrained from any significant erotic contacts with Kim or me, but she was with us in bed while Kim rode me, horsy-style, to a noisy orgasm. I was confident -- reasonably confident -- that it hadn't been noisy enough to disturb Mrs. Hoop.

But, hell, if the old girl was still awake and listening, it had probably been a bit of vicarious fun for her. I figured Mrs. Hoop was out of the game these days, and that perhaps she had been, for some years now. Even so, I imagined she would have some pretty hot stories she could tell, if she were of a mind to.

Like me, I figured Mabel for a rapt student of history.

Later, with Tess asleep to my right, and Kim, satiated, out cold to my left, I spooned with Tess' sleeping form as usual, and, not long thereafter, felt Kim's naked body fitting itself to my back. She wasn't quite long-enough to parallel my backside for the entire distance. Her knees were bent before they could match the bend of my own, somewhat longer thighs. But Kim was right up against me, from her face (turned so as to rest her cheek against my back) to her knees. We wasted a lot of fossil fuel, keeping the RV cool enough overnight to permit this kind of fleshy wee-hours sandwich-making.