The Resort (6 page)

“How do you know I find you attractive?” Clete said.

Charlotte quickly flicked her fingers at his hardened crotch.

“Hey, don’t do that.”

She moved her hand gently across his jeans.

“Better?”

“A lot better.”

“You ever fuck a Jewish girl?” Charlotte asked.

“Not that I know of,” Clete said quickly, thinking of the Minter woman.

“You don’t sound sure,” Charlotte said, removing her hand from his jeans.

“I’m sure, I’m sure.”

Clete had eyeballed Phyllis Minter on her first day in the dining room. He’d have guessed her to be thirty-five max, though her eyes and carriage conveyed the self-confidence Clete associated with older women. It wasn’t just her tits, ass, and legs, it was how it all came together, even the way she held her fucking head high. If he was ever going to sample Jewish pussy, it ought to be hers. He’d bring her head down to where she could see what he had for her.

It was a simple matter for him to find out her room number. A small favor got him the key from someone who would never tell Charlotte.

*

Phyllis Minter was born two years before World War II ended in a part of Brooklyn then inhabited almost entirely by Jews. Her father, a good-looking man as proved by a World War II photograph, returned from the army safe, got a job driving a cab in Manhattan on the swing shift. As an ex-serviceman, when he cruised for customers, Morton Minter naturally gave preference to men in uniform. During his second week, his cab was hailed by a man in soldier’s uniform, who had him drive to somewhere under the El-tracks and there pointed a pistol at Morton’s head and said, “Let’s have your dough.” Morton turned to tell the man he was an ex-G.I. trying to make an honest living, but as he turned around to do so, the man fired. It was the last sound ever heard by Morton Minter, who became the first cab driver casualty that February in New York City. The thief got less than six dollars.

Phyllis was told that her father had gone back into the army. Though only four, she refused to believe it. He hadn’t said good-bye, and his uniforms were still hanging in the closet. Phyllis’s mother, a fragile woman, let her sanity be shrouded in grief. Unable to cope, she let relatives place Phyllis, kicking and screaming, into a Hebrew orphanage run by an Orthodox sadist, who had an excessive interest in barely pubescent children. He kept his eye on Phyllis. When she was almost twelve, the director called her to his office and offered her twenty-five cents to do something Phyllis had only read about in a book that circulated clandestinely among the girls for under-the-cover reading late at night. Phyllis, a cynic at twelve, was quite prepared to sell the only thing she possessed that was of interest, but not for twenty-five cents. Though the director preached socialism—which he called “sharing”—Phyllis was the possessor of a remarkable intelligence and had read the countervailing literature. This was a society in which one sold for the highest possible price, which wasn’t a quarter. She ran away to try her luck.

By the time Phyllis was seventeen, she was well-to-do, though she had slept with only four men in all that time, and with each of them a few times at most. The first two were easy—older men, married, with a penchant for youngsters—who learned to their dismay that Phyllis understood not only what jailbait meant but was
quite prepared
to trade their freedom from prosecution for a fair sum. The sum, which seemed unfair to them, was designated as fair by Phyllis, who pegged the amount to the largest sum she thought she could get away with. She was not a pirate, but a canny businesswoman who never overreached herself.

Her third mark was a popular crooner, who enjoyed the groupies clustering around him in his dressing room at the Paramount. Through a friend of a friend, Phyllis infiltrated this group, attracted the crooner’s attention, whose mistake was to assume this very bright and pretty young girl was one of his worshipers. He allowed himself to be seduced. When the time came—which Phyllis put off as long as possible in order to raise the price—she surprised him by confessing that she was not interested in his passing affection but in endowment. He told her to git, whereupon he was visited a day later by a policeman in uniform, who didn’t threaten arrest or anything unpleasant, provided the crooner paid Phyllis Minter her due. “You her pimp?” screamed the crooner. “Get the fuck out of here!”

The police officer, a man thoroughly at home in the ways of the world, patiently explained that his role was not unlike that of the theatrical agents the crooner was used to. There was a certain amount of money to pay each month—it wouldn’t make a serious dent in his income—and the policeman, who would see to it that it was paid, took, with permission, ten percent before turning the balance over to Phyllis, who was now sixteen and looked several years older. It was the stink bombs—rolls of camera film wrapped tightly in cardboard—that caused the management of the Paramount to urge the crooner to settle with the aggrieved.

When the policeman next showed, the crooner offered a deal. Instead of monthly payments, five thousand dollars cash, a bounty at the time. After the transfer of the money, they shook hands, as businessmen will.

The policeman, prepared to turn over Phyllis’s share to her, thought of negotiating his fee upward to twenty percent. The expression in Phyllis’s face in response to his proposal was fearsome. He’d seen men—but never a woman—look like that.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

With a minimal movement of her lips, which she’d seen women of menace do in movies, Phyllis reminded the policeman of his wife. She said, “I’ll visit the police commissioner first, then her.”

That was all it took. The policeman, having worked with Phyllis, believed her. He not only turned over her ninety percent, but to show his continued good will introduced her to a man he had only told her about, a stockbroker who was having a particular run of postwar luck with laundered dollars.

They were still in bed when Phyllis suggested that the stockbroker invest her forty-five hundred dollars cash in whatever was his best going deal.

“You can’t always guess perfectly in this business,” the broker said, not wanting to put her off entirely because he wanted a repetition of the pleasure he had just experienced.

“Oh that’s easy,” Phyllis said. “Whatever turned out best for the year, you’ll consider the first forty-five hundred mine and the rest whoever else’s.”

It took a little persuasion, but Phyllis became the most fortunate investor on the street. Whatever was the most productive deal of the year, turned out to be what she had “invested” in, even if her friend had to make up the difference out of his own pocket.

Her eventual affluence decided her. There was no point to getting married; she already had what she considered her “alimony” from several men. She moved, at twenty-three, to Los Angeles, where an acquaintance introduced her to the prospects of real estate. As one might expect, she turned into a terrific saleswoman because she never seemed to need to make the sale. Phyllis Minter was thirty-five when she went to that new resort she had heard about—Cliffhaven—to rest and reflect in an environment she suspected would suit her: she was told everybody went there in couples. She, as usual, would go alone, and by that very fact be both exceptional and, just in case, desirable.

When Clete inveigled a key to Phyllis’s room, she thought she’d found her exit visa from crazy Cliffhaven.

“You’re a terrific looker,” Clete told her.

These California beachboy types, thought Phyllis, had the style of a preformed hamburger. He was examining her with his eyes. That part was free.

Clete had come in with the express desire of having what he thought of as his first Jewish pussy, but when he saw the way Phyllis moved her mouth, he thought he’d try another avenue first.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said. “You hungry?”

“What’s in it for me?” Phyllis said, biding her time.

Clete decided to show her. He let his jeans and shorts drop.

“Don’t you think you ought to take your sneakers off?” asked Phyllis.

Clete looked down. It was kind of ridiculous-looking. He had to sit down on the edge of the bed to untie his Keds. When he got them off and pulled his
pants and undershorts off, he stood up. But the process of undressing on order had minimized his tumescence, and she was staring at it, which didn’t help.

“Okay,” he said, figuring thirty seconds of that chick and he’d be back in form.

“What’s the quid?” Phyllis asked.

“Quid?”

“Quid pro quo. You give, you get.”

He wasn’t about to get involved in affectionate foreplay with a Jewess. He made that clear.

She laughed, which didn’t help his rigidity any.

“What the hell do you want?” Clete said angrily.

“Out of this place,” she said.

“Nobody gets out of here.”

Phyllis went into the john and started washing her face, ignoring him.

Clete tapped her on the shoulder.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“You do what I say and I’ll get you out afterward.”

“You take me out and we’ll do it on the outside. That’s my condition.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I’d lose my job.”

“You’ve lost more than your job,” she said, pointing.

Clete wanted to shove a crowbar up her ass, the fucking Hebe!

“Why don’t you put your pants back on,” she said, “so neither of us has to look at it.”

“You bitch!” he said. If he struck her now the marks would show. There’d be an investigation. That stupid broad would tell them everything.

“There must be somebody on the premises who’ll
put up with your droopy miniature,” Phyllis said. “Vamoose.”

He got his shorts and pants on, tied his sneakers. He would have slammed the door, but he didn’t want to attract attention.

When he left, Phyllis Minter lay on her bed, thinking. She’d encountered men who asked her if Minter was a Jewish name, adding that she really didn’t look Jewish. Was that anti-Semitism, curiosity, or just a compliment? She’d never taken the subject seriously till her door was bolted shut in Cliffhaven. Maybe whatever her father had run into in Europe had affected him the same way.

As for this place, Phyllis thought, she didn’t doubt for a minute that she’d get out, maybe using the orange-and-blue-uniformed
putz
she’d just humiliated. He’d be back. She wasn’t afraid of any man whose baton she could lower. Other women she’d met sometimes boasted of their ability to give a man a hard-on real quick. To Phyllis that was child’s play. Making a man lose his by talking him down, that was a skill she was proud of. What she found strange, as she lay with her hands clasped behind her head thinking, was that in all of the previous ruminations of her life, she’d centered her ambitions on succeeding financially, showing the orphanage and her crazed mother and dead father that despite their abandonment, she could make out. All that seemed behind her now. She wasn’t the once-poor kid, or the mark for lechers who’d turn the tables on them. She was, by the definition of others, a Jew. Okay, she’d show them. She’d not only get out of this place, she’d kill at least one of the bastards on the way.

*

Clete wished Charlotte hadn’t asked him about whether he’d ever fucked a Jewish girl. All it did was bring that brass-balled Minter woman into his mind. He was glad Charlotte wasn’t like that. He was on track with her, a really good two-way street. Maybe she’d asked the question because…

Clete looked at Charlotte. “You ever fuck a Jewish guy?”

Charlotte didn’t answer immediately. That was a mistake.

Clete sat up straight. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you. Take it easy.” Charlotte patted Clete’s crotch, not sensually as earlier.

“Yes or no?” He was standing.

“Come back down here.”

“Answer my question.”

“Come back down here and I’ll answer.” Clete sat down on the bed.

Charlotte pulled him down to her. With her face close to his, she said, “The only Jewish so-called person I ever got close to before Cliffhaven was a girl in my dorm. Arlene. Forget her last name. Itsky something, I think. She used to go around without a top a lot of the time. I don’t blame her. Fantastic tits. She once came to my room to ask me something about some course, I forgot what, and when she sat down on the edge of my bed, I couldn’t help myself, I reached down and touched her breasts.”

“You what?” Clete said.

“You would have, too,” Charlotte said, laughing. “It was nice. Don’t worry, I’m straight, it was just a thing of the moment.”

“Sometimes I don’t understand you.”

“Ditto. Like now. You going to get out of that uniform?”

Clete loved it when Charlotte sort of ordered him to undress in front of her. It reminded him of shows he had seen in Vegas, only he was on stage.

“Come
on
,”
she said. “You’re keeping me waiting.”

He didn’t know what it was, but just her words, maybe the way she said the words, got him going. He could feel the tightening.