The Resort by Sol Stein Page A

middle age, it had become a foreign capital, fraught with hazardous encounters. By the time he was in his late forties, Merle’s home-rootedness became an inconvenience to Abigail. However, he was prevailed upon to attend a not terribly important seminar in genetics at the University of Texas because of its geographic convenience. It was at that lackluster meeting, however, that he met the single most brilliant individual in his field he had ever encountered, a younger man by the name of Tarkington. Merle flowered, listening to Tarkington’s incisive brilliance. He invited Tarkington to his home for a weekend of good conversation. It was only at the end of it that Merle learned, quite accidentally, that Tarkington was a changed name and that while Tarkington was not a religious man, there was no blinking the fact that he was a Jew.
    Merle felt betrayed. Had he known about Tarkington’s background, he might have still engaged him in conversation, but not as a friend, not in his home.
    Merle thought quite a bit about Tarkington’s physiognomy and build. There was absolutely nothing to give you a clue to his origins. In fact, he was quite a good-looking man, even handsome, and he stood straight, effusing strength in a way that reminded Merle of his father. The only odd thing about Tarkington was that he smoked cigarettes in an amber holder, which Merle considered foppish.
    When Tarkington phoned to invite the Cliffords to dinner at the Tarkington home, Merle pleaded a prior engagement, but wished he had come right out with a definite never. Three weeks later, looking for a certain letter that had been addressed to Mr. & Mrs. Merle Clifford, he thought Abigail might have taken it into her bedroom. Merle was looking for it in the drawer of her night table, when he came across an amber cigarette holder that still had a half-inch of snuffed-out cigarette in it. What was it doing here? He dreaded fire, and absolutely forbade Abigail to smoke in her bedroom. Why was that cigarette holder being kept? When Abigail had not accompanied him to Cambridge the preceding week, he had thought nothing of it.
    The thought that Abigail might have fornicated with a Jew—even if she didn’t know he was a Jew—obsessed Merle’s mind. He could ask her outright. She might lie. The whole thing might only be a further embarrassment between them. He waited another week and then asked Abigail, as casually as he could, whether there was the slightest possibility that she might be pregnant.
    He saw the alarm in Abigail’s face. There had only been contact between them once in recent weeks, just before the trip to Cambridge, and Merle’s seed had been spent outside her body as was now their custom. Was he accusing her of infidelity openly? Did she need to consult the lawyer before they talked further?
    “I have my period, if that’s what you mean,” Abigail said, astonished to see instant relief on Merle’s face. When he kissed her on both cheeks, she could feel the heat of his face, and both his hands that held her were trembling. However astute Abigail was, she could not guess that Merle had been near an intolerable internal panic over the possibility that his wife might bear Tarkington’s half-Jewish child. He felt as if he had escaped a terrible danger, a humiliation worse than death.
    Even Texas was no longer safe. Within a month three significant things happened. Sam Clifford died. With his father dead, Merle relocated himself and Abigail to Orange County in southern California, where he would find the comfort of more like-minded people. And soon thereafter Merle Clifford started assembling the parcels of redwood forest that would eventually become Cliffhaven.
    Something needs to be said about the death of Sam Clifford. One would never have suspected he was past eighty. Up until the month before his death, he exercised vigorously, swimming at the country club two or three times a week, playing golf without a cart, and doing twenty sit-ups