The Resort (10 page)

Henry reached out to take Margaret’s hands.

“You are a wicked lady.”

“You, my dear, are the naïve one, just an old-fashioned prude.”

Perhaps it was whatever they had ingested in the dining room, a middle-aged couple bound by half a lifetime shared, experiencing something new. As they stood, Henry put his arms around her, and suddenly the familiarity was an asset, and feeling ran high. Just then the lights went out, leaving them in the dark for a split second, then came back on.

“It must be a warning,” Henry said, not wanting reality to intrude on his euphoric state.

He started undressing.

“When we were coming back from our little stroll,” Margaret said, “I was thinking that it must be diffi
cult
to keep a place like this secret in the middle of things. But the cults and sects do. Remember when we met the mother of a Moonie—Rose something—and we didn’t believe her when she said her son was being held captive? We thought she was exaggerating.”

“Some of the kids seem to enjoy their captivity,” Henry said. “Did you think we’re in the hands of one of those sects this part of the country seems full of?”

“Something like that,” Margaret said.

“Remember the Joads?” Henry said.

“The Grapes of Wrath.”

“That’s it. Remember that camp they came to, it was like a prison. It had gates and barbed wire and guards, and the only way they could get out was to escape. Do you remember where that was?”

“Yes,” Margaret said. “California.”

Henry took Margaret’s face in his hands. There was no need to add anything. They were both of one mind. At the first opportunity, escape.

*

As he waited for Margaret, who was in the bathroom preparing herself for sleep, Henry lay stretched out on the king-size bed in his pajama bottoms, his hands clasped behind his head, trying to put the pieces together. Were all of those guests in the dining room unwillingly detained? Surely he couldn’t be the first to have thought of escape. That stuff in the food, even if one couldn’t avoid it, was that enough to keep everyone passive? Impossible.

He tried to let all thought drain from his head.

This place is a business, isn’t it? How do they keep it economically viable? They can charge what they like to my credit cards, it won’t last if there’s no one at the other end paying for it. Who supports this crazy place, not the guests? Where does it come from? This wasn’t a puzzle to be solved, but a place to escape from.

He let the muscles in his arms go limp, his body from the top down unwinding, then his legs. They needed rest if they were to make a break for it. They had to conserve energy, restore what had been lost during the long drive to the Big Sur area, and then in the tension of this evening. And from whatever it was in the fish mousse. Had they only been at Cliffhaven a few hours?

“What are you scheming?” Margaret asked, standing in her lavender Halston nightgown, her long hair brushed into loveliness.

He held his arms out to her. She sat on the edge of the bed.

His hands motioned her closer. She lay down at his side, and he put his arms around her, smelling the soap with which she had washed her face as he kissed her cheek, and then the side of her mouth, and then her lips gently as a lover would.

Margaret put her hands on his hair. She returned his kiss, gently.

Henry slipped his pajama bottoms off. Then she felt his hand, the familiar sensation, the excitement of his excitement.

Henry, who always wanted to look at Margaret’s face when entering, suddenly saw her blanch. Had he hurt her?

Her eyes were staring past him.

He turned, the mood breaking, to follow her gaze to the place where the far wall met the high ceiling. He had to turn completely about to see what she was staring at.

It was a camera like the ones they had in banks to photograph thieves at the tellers’ cages at the moment of a holdup. The camera was aimed directly at them.

The sound that came from Margaret was despair.

Henry, who had rolled away from her, got off the bed, grabbed the chair at the desk and put it underneath the camera, stood on it, but could not reach it. The ceiling was too high!

Livid, he got off the chair and went to the phone. When the girl answered, he said, “Get me Clete!”

“It’s quite late,” the girl said. “We usually don’t—”

“Get me Clete!” Henry demanded.

He was left holding the phone for what seemed the longest time. Margaret had slipped the lavender Halston back into place. Finally Clete got on the line.

“Hi, Mr. Brown,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

His voice sounded as if he’d been drinking. Is that what he did late in the evenings, or was it more of that dope?

“What’s that son-of-a-bitch camera doing in our room?!”

“So that’s all,” Clete said, woozily. “You didn’t have to haul my ass over to the phone for that tonight, did you?”

“I want that camera out of the room!” Henry said.

“Listen, old man, what did you expect, a Judas hole in the door? This isn’t an old-fashioned place, we’re up to date as hell. If you have to fuck your old lady in private, why don’t you just throw a towel over the camera?” Clete laughed.

Henry looked at the camera, eleven or twelve feet up the wall. How would he ever get a towel up there?

“Listen,” said Clete. “Get used to it. Very few of the guests around here have sex anymore. After a while you won’t even be in a mood for it. Anyway, the lights are going out in a minute. Now go to bed
like a good fellow,” said Clete, “and I’ll see you in the morning.”

Henry put the telephone on the cradle. He motioned Margaret to follow him into the bathroom. There he turned on both taps full blast and said into her ear, “They might have a bug in the room, too. We’d better be careful what we say.”

The lights in the bedroom went out, but stayed on in the bathroom.

“How considerate,” said Margaret.

The mood had gone.

Henry fished around in the dark for his pajamas, found them at last, and slipped them on, thinking how inappropriate the dacron and cotton fabric felt. What did prisoners wear?

As he slid into bed, he thought for a moment that Margaret had already fallen asleep, but she stirred and turned to put her arms around him.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you,” he returned even more quietly.

The only sound he could hear was the tick of his watch on the night table. Sleep was a necessity.

It was Margaret who broke the silence again.

“How can they run a place like this without the world knowing about it?” she asked in a whisper.

And in a moment she answered her own question. “No one outside,” she said, “knew about Los Alamos, did they?”

6

The sixty-year-old founder of Cliffhaven, Mr. Merlin Clifford, was a rotund man with pronounced ideas about genetics, which he spent much of his time and some of his considerable income developing. His wife Abigail, who not only was much younger than her husband but seemed even younger because she percolated with vitality, considered herself, with justice, the authority on the subject of Mr. Clifford’s own genes.

At the age of eighteen, Abigail had come to the Southwest from somewhere in Alabama where an individual’s family background was of greater consequence than his or her ability to charm adjacent humanity. When she met Merle Clifford, he was already in his late twenties and was running much of his father’s oil business. As a full partner, his income was stupendous for a young man, satisfying Abigail’s requirement that if a woman supported a man well in bed from time to time, it was only fitting that he
support
her in great style at other times.

Content that her new acquaintance Merle Clifford had enough money for her future needs, Abigail did not immediately rush him. Any man who had gotten to twenty-nine unmarried wasn’t going to be rushed, she figured.

Abigail observed how her new companion effused civility in his conversations with her. Merle said
please
and
thank you
and
you’re welcome
more often than any of the younger men she had now stopped dating. Though Merle didn’t smoke, he carried an elegant Ronson and was quick to light her cigarettes. He would rush around to open a door before she could touch it. He always got up when she entered the room and remained standing until she herself sat. His tone of voice with doormen and taxi drivers was suitably commanding, and when he instructed a dining room captain in their wishes for their evening meal, he sounded not twenty-nine, a bleak age for most men, but every bit an authority on food, wine, and the world.

In private Merle was different, a bit shy when he kissed her cheek the first time, hesitant when he reached to secure the button of her blouse just above her breasts.

He talked to her about his desire to travel to the far reaches of the world—Bali, Surinam, Japan—and shyly expressed his hope that she might travel with him.

“Didn’t you see some of those places during the war?” Abigail asked.

“I had a slight heart murmur,” Merle said. “They wouldn’t take me.”

Abigail patted his cheek. “Don’t look that way. I don’t mind if you were 4-F.”

It was dear that Merle minded even the designation. He led her away from the topic to his profound interest in genetics. He tried not to show his disappointment that she knew so little about the subject of his one intellectual passion. He recommended several elementary books, lending them to her as if they were volumes of poetry.

Abigail had noticed that Merle washed his hands not just before meals but at every opportunity. Thoughtlessly, she remarked on it, only to see a glower settle on his face. She had stepped over some line that protected his vulnerability. Abigail knew enough about the world to realize that whatever it was that made him vulnerable could also give her strength.

Abigail, at eighteen, had learned some things from books and much more from experience. In fact, she’d actually run into one previous handwasher in Alabama. That one had killed small animals as a boy.

One day, as Abigail and Merle set out riding over his estate on two of the thoroughbred mares Merle was proud of, she shouted across the space between them, “You ever run down an animal on purpose?”

As he turned toward her, for a second his face seemed as if she’d shot him between the eyes.

“Never!” he shouted back.

“Don’t tell me you never even killed a cat?” she insisted, laughing.

“Abigail,” he said, reining in his horse so that she had to stop alongside him and measure the seriousness of his words, “I have never harmed any of God’s animals, so help me.”

“I believe you,” Abigail said, standing in her stirrups, thinking that if this twenty-nine-year-old millionaire was telling the truth, which was doubtful considering his reaction, what would account for his handwashing? She’d read in some women’s magazines that mothers should watch out for children with the too-much-handwashing habit. Had Merle been one of those fanatical masturbators? Or was he still?

Abigail smiled at him. “I believe you,” she repeated, and galloped off, Merle in happy pursuit, not a clue in his head that she was determined to discover all of his predilections in pursuit of her own clear goals.

The opportunity she sought presented itself when he invited her one Saturday evening to have dinner at his home instead of taking in a restaurant meal and a first-run movie downtown. The Spanish couple who kept house for him provided a candle-lit meal so rich in pepper and spices she felt the same almost painful excitement in her bladder that had been brought on once when a boy introduced her to Spanish fly. She’d washed it all down with more red wine than she’d ever had at a meal before, and Merle drank right along with her, though he’d had two bourbons before dinner and she none. As soon as the Spanish couple had cleared the dishes and retired to their own cottage on the grounds, Abigail and Merle were on the bear rug in front of the roaring fireplace, their arms around each other, alone in the vastness of the house.

The inevitable happened, of course. After the first ardent kisses, Abigail excused herself long enough to insert the diaphragm she had brought in her purse just in case. As it turned out, she hadn’t needed to, for what she discovered that evening was that Merle had special preferences. While the young men Abigail had known liked to be stroked gently as part of the preliminaries, Merle wanted to have her do that for the main course. That evening, Abigail also learned that if while she was handling his needs, she permitted him to look at her virtues the way most men looked at pictures in Danish magazines, his ardor would burst like it was the Fourth of July. He was ecstatic at her favorable reaction and, courteous man that he was, soon thereafter attended to Abigail’s needs with skilled and purposeful hands.

Over the next few weeks, Merle sought and obtained several opportunities to entertain Abigail at home, testing to see if she could be repulsed by the kind of things he liked best to do. Abigail used these opportunities to refine her knowledge of his wants, a few of which proved to be truly extraordinary.