The Resort by Sol Stein

were married in Dallas at a ceremony attended by four hundred people. Within weeks of their honeymoon, Abigail observed that Merle’s needs for sexual recreation tapered off to once a week and then once in two weeks. She twitted him about it only once; his face red with anger, he said sex was all right in its place, but it interfered with the supply of energy he wanted to devote to his genetic studies. It was thus inevitable that Abigail would arrange her life so that she might take her pleasure from time to time with, at first, older men who entered into their business life.
    Merle was not a typically jealous man, he was so preoccupied with other things, but Abigail, being prudent as well as wise, had a private meeting with a lawyer who was second only to Percy Foreman in the area and who advised her that in the event Merle Clifford ever asked for a divorce, this lawyer could make it cost him something like seven million dollars. Rage at someone’s infidelity, he counseled Abigail, is one thing, seven million dollars is quite another, and a man like Merle would never knowingly choose rage. However, the lawyer was wise in the ways of the world and cautioned her to keep her adventures private, which she did with one exception. And when Merle raised his suspicions with her, she managed to deny that anything had happened and at the same time allude to the seven-million-dollar advice she had received and from whom. Merle never raised the subject again.
    Merle’s preoccupation, other than the oil business, derived from his feeling that he was a mixture of his father’s superior and his mother’s inferior genes, and the one thing he blamed his father for was the use of his mother to reproduce him. He thought that a fundamental, irreversible mistake that would handicap him for the rest of his life unless he learned to use every ounce of brains that he had. Merle continued in his father’s oil business, but his off-duty hours were devoted to cramming his head full of all the learning he didn’t get at Harvard Business School. His intellectual pursuits included hobnobbing with some of the more sensible faculty at the university, who were always glad to get a splendid free meal at the Cliffords’, and one or two found a way to thank their hostess privately in a way that pleased them both. Merle Clifford ventured to New York, where he occasionally attended a salon conducted by a French lady that was frequented by conservative intellectuals and by more than one senator. He took Abigail with him on these excursions because her mind was good, she kept up with him as best she could, and wasn’t an embarrassment in that kind of company the way so many Texas wives were.
    Merle’s special interest in genetics also took him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend conferences, where he was always welcome as a donor and eventually as a participant. His only problem with his eastern ventures was that he suspected that a good many of the people he met in Cambridge and New York were Jews, and that bothered him somewhat more each year.
    Merle was torn between his sometime need for intellectual companionship and his horror at how many faculty members and graduate students in genetics had Jewish names. Worse still, he wondered how many of the others with ordinary-sounding names might be concealed Jews. Over the years he developed a series of discreet questions that enabled him, in the guise of a discussion of genetics, to probe the true ancestry of one suspect or another.
    He settled on the fact that New York was a dangerous trap, but in his travels over the next two decades, he came to the conclusion that San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore were rife with scholars and wits of Semitic origin. The statistics about Jewish Nobel prizewinners was appalling! Couldn’t something be done about these people?
    As the years went by, Merle traveled less to Cambridge and not at all to New York. For him, in his