“Is that unusual?” Bruce asked, moving closer to the desk.
“Well, now that you mention it, yes. There are a lot of people who don’t like big breakfasts but most manage to drop in for at least a little something.”
Bruce turned and looked back over the dining room, noting the many empty seats and setups that had not been disturbed. He felt a surge of suspicion.
“Why don’t you give him a call, Charlotte?”
“Who me? Chase a man? No way.” She thanked Mr. Pat and they went into the lobby.
“Are you sure you don’t want to check his room?” Fern asked. “Just to make sure he’s all right?”
“No. It really doesn’t matter.” She tried unsuccessfully to camouflage her hurt. “I’m going back to the room for a minute. You run ahead to the beauty parlor and tell them you want to be stunning! She will be, too,” she said, turning to Bruce. “You’re in for a treat!”
“I can’t wait,” he said as he waved the two of them off. Then he went directly to one of the house phones. The operator came on in a matter of seconds.
“Connect me with a Mr. David Oberman, please. I don’t know his room number.”
“Just a moment, sir.” He gazed around the lobby as he waited, watching the men and women with tennis rackets, bathing gear and golf clubs slung over their shoulders make their way to the fresh outdoors. He wished he could be one of them. After a moment he heard the line ring. He let it buzz five times and was about to hang up when Oberman finally answered.
“Hello,” he said weakly.
“David?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t wake you up, did I, buddy? It’s Bruce Solomon. From last night.”
“Oh yeah. No, I wasn’t asleep.”
“The girls were kind of wondering what happened to you this morning. I think Charlotte was disappointed when you didn’t make it down for breakfast.”
“I know. I promised to meet her there but I gotta tell you, I’m feeling pretty rotten. Must’ve been something I ate at dinner or the drinks or something. I’ve been throwing up all morning.”
Bruce held the receiver so tightly against his ear he felt pain. For a moment he didn’t utter a sound.
“You still there?” David asked.
“Yeah, sure. What’s your room number?”
“Four-twelve. Why?”
“I’ll be right up.”
In two seconds he was in front of the main elevator which looked like it was stuck on the third floor. He was about to run up the back stairs when the doors finally opened and he barged in, bumping clumsily into two overdressed elderly dowagers on their way to the art class. They glared at him angrily and he muttered an apology. He banged the “four” button hard with his fist. “Let it be too much to drink,” he repeated. “Let it be too much to drink.”
“No one plays cards ’til four in the morning!” Flo Goldberg slammed the bathroom door behind her. Manny groaned as he bent down to put on his shoes. The layers of fat rippled down his abdomen, spiraling into wider and wider circles as they descended. Naked from the waist up, his upper body seemed to contain an old inner tube, deflated and soft, running over itself. His excess flesh dropped over his pants waist. In order to tuck in his undershirt, he had to press the palms of his hands firmly against his abdomen and take a deep breath. The material strained at the seams. He stood up and ran his fingers through his hair, looking like a man in a daze.
The shrillness of her morning voice lingered in his ears. From the moment his eyes opened, she was at him. After the Champagne Hour was over he had left her to go to the Card Room. She had gone up to their room without him. He promised it would only be an hour. Despite the fact that he was quiet when he came in and didn’t put on a single light, she was awake the moment his overweight body hit the bed.
“It’s four in the morning, Manny.” He grunted and turned his back to her. “Bastard,” she said, but it was already too late. He was in a deep sleep. In the morning, she picked up the argument.
“I’ve come home late after playing cards before,” he said, turning to the closed bathroom door. There was no response. He went to one of the opened suitcases and took out a shirt. As he put it on, he thought about that beautiful blonde bar waitress with the small birthmark just above the cleavage of her breasts. Before the night was over, he had probably stuffed over a C-note’s worth of five-dollar bills into that valley of promises.
“How much does it take?” he had asked.
“How much do you want?”
Everybody roared. That’s my kind of broad, he thought, not out to put you down, not teasing and then turning you off, but a straight put it on the table, lay it on the line, broad. He’d stand in line for that one.
His wife opened the bathroom door. Dressed only in her bra and panties, she sauntered to the closet. Still thinking about the barmaid, he came up behind her and cupped her ass in his palm. She jumped away instantly, as if his hand was on fire.
“What’s the matter?”
“Why didn’t you find your way in early enough last night if you wanted some of that?”
“Aw shit,” he said and turned toward the bathroom. She smiled to herself. It had always been good strategy, always good technique. Most of her girl friends did it too. The rule was that if you were having affairs, fooling around, you continually accused your husband of the same thing, made something out of every possible opportunity he had, and read something into everything he said. Then he’d be so busy defending himself, he’d never have the time to spot your own little escapades. So far, knock wood, it had worked.
She slipped into her beige-and-brown pinstripe pinafore, the one that was the rage for women in their twenties, and stepped back to admire herself. Not bad for a forty-four-year-old woman, she thought, a woman with a married daughter and a son in his first year of law school. Sure, she was a little chunky at the thighs and a small flabbiness had begun to form under her upper arms, but continuous exercise and dieting kept her from slipping away and falling into the netherworld where dwelled “the women of no return.” It was her way of categorizing so many of her female friends who had gotten careless and let their bodies go to pot.
She knew they still looked at her with envy and she was proud of that. Indeed, her vanity was one of her rationalizations for her extramarital relationships. If it weren’t for those periodic affairs, she might easily lose her self-image and neglect her figure. She certainly wouldn’t have kept it up for Manny’s sake. Look at him, look at the physical mess he had become. He was so out of shape that whenever they did indulge in one of their infrequent sessions of lovemaking, he moved like a man recovering from a coronary.
Thinking about lovemaking brought a flush to her face. Just once she’d like to be able to be casual with a man as vibrant and virile as Billy Marcus, the young bellhop, instead of rushing to find a meeting place, rushing to have a climax, and then rushing to get back to her husband. But that was one of the sacrifices one had to make when one had a demanding husband and son.
When she thought more seriously about it, she was always intrigued by the mysterious way offspring could escape the worst in their parents. How she and Manny had ever produced such a genius as Bernard she’d never understand. It must have had something to do with the genes of their forefathers. It certainly wasn’t handed down from them. She had been little better than an average student in high school and Manny had barely graduated, yet Bernard had the IQ and aggressive personality of a man destined to succeed in whatever he chose. She sensed that Manny was somewhat uncomfortable with his son, even resented him in many ways because the son was everything the father was not. No matter how Bernard tried, the lines of communication were closed, yet Manny loved him probably more than life itself.
She suddenly became aware that she was scowling at herself in the mirror. Her eyelids drooped and her mouth soured at the corners. She took a deep breath and forced herself to smile. Later she would get a mud pack treatment and sauna at the health club, maybe have a session with the cosmetologist too. She’d buy all the help she could get.
Flo Goldberg had always thought of her body the same way she thought of her wardrobe. It was adjustable, changeable, and something to be manipulated. She could take it in here, tone it up there, color it differently at one spot, trim it at another. It wasn’t quite yet the era of disposable parts, but there were certainly ways to rejuvenate what one had. Concern about her body and her looks took up an enormous part of her daily life. Bernard accused her of being vain but he was still too young to know how it felt to cross the one-way bridge into middle age.
“What am I doing?” she mumbled as she looked at herself in the mirror. Without thinking, she had pressed her palms against her breasts. She dropped them and spun around quickly, in anticipation of Manny’s entrance from the bathroom, but he wasn’t coming out. The noise she heard was strange. “Manny?”
She walked to the doorway and listened. It sounded almost as if he was choking. She knocked on the door.
“What the hell are you doing in there?”
“Nothin’.” he croaked in a raspy voice. “Go down to breakfast without me. I’ll be along in a while.”
“Really, Manny, are you throwing up?”
“I just got the dry heaves, that’s all. I’ll take a bicarb.”
She lingered for a moment, thinking. Then she checked her watch. The dining room was due to close in ten minutes.
“Some card game,” she yelled into the door. She picked up her purse from the small table near the bed and headed out. She heard him heave again, hesitated, and then thought “serves the bastard right.”
After that, she left.
Ellen stood up behind her desk and reached over to shake hands with the tall, attractive Nick Martin. Jonathan, who had just introduced them, stood at his side, looking more like an interpreter and translator than a general manager. Finally he sat down on the black vinyl couch to the right of her desk. Nick took the seat to the left. He tapped a cigarette out of his gold-plated case and offered one to Ellen. She shook her head and sat back.
“Jonathan describes you as an investor, Mr. Martin,” she said. She hoped her voice didn’t betray the nervousness she felt. Business negotiations were still one of the areas of the hotel’s management where she felt insecure.
“Call me Nick, please.” His smile reminded her somewhat of Richard Conte’s, confident, bordering on cocky. There was something about him that made her feel uncomfortable. Suddenly she was reminded of something Mama Golden used to say. “First impressions may not be de best, but dey remain mit you de longest.” Her first impression left something to be desired.
“Let’s come right to the point,” she suggested, holding herself tensely in the chair. Instinctively she felt bluntness was the best tack for someone who felt unsure of herself. Bluff him with a facade of toughness. “Why are you or the people you represent so anxious to pour money into the Catskills at this particular time? The whole area is in a state of decline. We’ve been hurt by jet travel, packaged tours, the growing popularity of Mexico and the Caribbean, everything.”
“Let’s just say I represent people who specialize in bringing places back to life.” His eyes twinkled, the smile freezing on his face. There was only the slightest movement of his head toward Jonathan who sat back, trying to look nonchalant and relaxed.
“I hope you understand, Mr. Martin … Nick … that even though the Congress, despite its popularity and reputation is somewhat of a marginal operation at the moment …” She paused, congratulating herself for the use of the term “marginal operation,” “I am not out in the market actively soliciting investors.”
“I understand that completely,” Nick said. “And we’re not out actively soliciting just any hotel.” He sat back to let that sink in. “I’m thinking of the future and I’m sure you are too. If certain situations come to pass, it just might be important for you to be able to get financing so you can expand and take advantage of them.”
“I assume you’re talking about the possibility of gambling coming to New York State.”
“Precisely.”
“The most logical place to have it would be in the Catskills,” Jonathan butted in. “It’s already got the reputation and its own built-in hospitality industry.”
“You have all the basic facilities needed to make the Congress the showcase of the state, possibly the entire country,” Nick said. “Now I don’t want to give you, or you, Jonathan,” he said, turning to him, “the impression that the people I represent are in the habit of throwing their money around. We’ve done a good deal of preliminary research and a number of marketing studies.” He smiled again. The smoke traveled up from the cigarette between his fingers. Ellen noted the strong, yet at the same time casual way he conducted himself. Do I look like an easy mark, she wondered? He made her conscious of her nervous foot movements under the desk. She stopped them immediately.
“Almost all of the hotels in the Catskills are in a transitional state. Those that don’t make the appropriate changes, open themselves up to new customers, will be out of business before the decade is over.”
“Some of them are already on their way out,” Jonathan added.
“You need to prepare for the possibility of gambling, Mrs. Golden, no matter what your personal reservations about it are. Until then, you need to expand, update, and construct more facilities—luxury suites, auditoriums, rooftop dining rooms, things that will attract convention groups. It’s a vast market, one that you people in the Catskills haven’t even begun to tap.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you that gambling is the wave of the future for us, or conventions either,” Ellen said, her eyes growing smaller. “Our operation may well be marginal at the moment, but somehow or other I’m sure we’ll come through. You may consider us old-fashioned, Mr. Martin, but we’re a family operation and we’re proud that we’ve built on a foundation of tradition. Why, my in-laws—”
“But that’s exactly why my people have chosen you,” Nick interrupted. “We want to buy a hotel that combines the best of the Catskill’s past with the potential of the Catskill’s future.”
“You want to
buy
a hotel?” She wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. She looked at Jonathan but he was mute. Then she turned to Nick. “Am I to understand that you’re interested in buying out the Congress?”