"It's a matter of the WASP ethic," said one investment banker in declining an interview about the club's swimming practices. "What goes on at the R.T.C. stays at the R.T.C. We don't want the general public having a peek at the last bastion of old-school pleasure, the last oasis."

Nude bathing is strangely like the Tao: those who know the way of it speak not of it. Nonetheless, at the Racquet Club and the University Club on Fifth Avenue, another New York outpost of nude male swimming, sympathetic members took me under their water wings, allowing me to breast stroke a few laps in their pools to observe one of the city's most curious, enduring rituals.

Inside the Racquet Club are cavernous rooms for backgammon, billiards and obscure racquet sports played since the time of the French Revolution by the kind of people against whom the French were rebelling. The walls are lined with oil paintings of polo players, fox hunters and long dead horses of undying pedigrees. The club's membership is no less distinguished. George Plimpton frequented it for decades, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was also a member, although he resigned in an egalitarian gesture before becoming mayor. Members include a leveraged buyout king, Henry R. Kravis, and a Greek Prince, Pavlos.

My host, a hedge fund analyst in his 20's, took me to the top floor, where we stood first in towels and then in nothing at all above a perfectly placid pool best characterized by its limitations: it was too small for serious lap swimming yet too deep for simple wading. A small vaulted ceiling provided a womblike dome for a feeling more of relaxation than of athleticism.

On the street below taxis honked, and pedestrians shouted, but all sounds were muffled by the lapping of water. An elderly man with a Churchillian physique walked to my side of the pool. He began to swim his laps, and soon came perilously close to my area of treaded water. "You've got to watch out for a naked collision," warned my host, who detailed the worst injury sufferable in modern nude aquatics. "One guy wasn't looking when he was coming out of a lap and grabbed another guy. He felt something strange, but familiar."