“Mr. and Mrs. Hopson would certainly want you to use the Club.” She winked. “In fact, I distinctly remember Mr. Hopson saying that you should have a guest card if you ever appeared while they were gone.”
She pulled the sheets out of her typewriter, ran a card in and filled it out. I gave her the Bahia Mar box number. She signed the club manager’s name, put her initials under it, and handed it to me with a little flourish.
“These are good for two weeks, Mr. McGee. You can sign and be billed directly. The only restriction is that you can’t bring guests here. Except your wife, of course.”
“Unmarried. How about just one lady? One at a time.”
“No one could object to that. Please don’t be shy about mingling and introducing yourself. You’ll find all the members very friendly, particularly toward any friend of Mr. Hopson. And please put the card number on the chits you sign. Tonight we’re having an outdoor steak roast, buffet style. If you want to stay for it-it’s really very good-I can take your reservation.”
“Might as well. Thanks. You’ve been very kind, Miss… ”
“Benedict. Francie Benedict.” The smile opened her up back to the wisdom teeth. “I do wish I could show you where everything is, but I do have to finish this.”
“I’ll just wander around.”
“You can rent swim trunks from Albie in the men’s locker room.”
She was typing agahn as I pulled the office door shut. I found a dark, cool, quiet bar in the Moorish part. The sedentary types were there and in the adjoining card room, several grim tables of male bridge. I stood at an empty expanse of mahogany bar. The bartender approached with one eyebrow shoved up in cautious, supercilious interrogation. I whipped out my card, and his smile of acceptance would have looked more plausible if he’d been outfitted with those stainless steel teeth the Russians have developed. After he served my Plymouth gin on ice, the clot of members down the bar motioned to him. He leaned across the bar. There was a whispered question and answer; they looked me over and got back into their argument.
A pudgy chap with a statesman’s face and careful coiffure of white locks said in liquor-slurred tones, “But you got to face facts, Roy. The fact remains, we got the evidence right in front of us, the decay of the nashal moral fiber, mob rule in the streets, violence, punks killing decen‘ people. Am I right or am I right?”
I could imagine the same tired concept being stated in a thousand private clubs across the country on this May afternoon. They see the result, but they are blind to the cause of it. Forty million more Americans than we had in 1950. If one person in fifty has a tendency toward murderous violence, then we’ve got eight hundred thousand more of them now. And density alone affects the frequency with which mobs form. The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob. Life gets cheaper. Cops, on a per capita basis, get fewer. And the imponderables of the bomb, of automation, of accelerating social change create a kind of urban despair that wants to break loose and crack heads. All the barroom sociologists were orating about national fiber while, every minute and every hour, the most incredible population explosion in history was rendering their views, their judgments, even their very lives more obsolete.
They should hark to the locust. When there is only a density of X per acre, he is a plain old grasshopper, munching circumspectly, content with his home ground. Raise it to 2X and an actual physical change begins to occur. His color changes, his jaw gets bigger, and the wing muscles begin to grow. At 3X they take off in great hungry clouds, each cloud a single herd instinct, chomping everything bare in its path. There is no decline in the moral fiber of the grasshopper. There is just a mass pressure canceling out all individual decisions.
“Am I not right, sir?” demanded the pundit, making a stately turn to include me. I had not heard the more recent statements.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Right on the button.”
I was roped into the group, met the mellowed and important gentlemen, heard fond words about good old Frank Hopson, and discovered, fortuitously, that Frank was a realtor. “But with his holdings, he doesn’t have to work at it much. It’s mostly management and rental stuff on what he owns. Poor bastard, he’s a land merchant, and he can’t take a capital gains on anything, so he just doesn’t sell it off.”
One of them said, not to me, “I heard that for a while there, young Crane Watts was trying to work something out for Frank, some deal whereby he could put everything in one package, real estate business and all, give up his license and retire and sell all his holdings to an outside corporation and take his capital gains.”
A man beside me lowered his voice and said, “He’d be a fool to let Watts work on anything.”
“It was some time ago,” another said in the same low tone, and they stared toward the card room. I spotted the one who most clearly matched Arthur’s description. He was playing bridge at the furthest table, slumped, peering slack-jawed at his holding. He selected a card slowly, raised it high, whacked it down with a wolf yelp of laughter, then hunched forward, glowering, as the opposition gathered the trick in.
“I don’t know how he can afford that game.”
“He seems to get it somewhere when he needs it.
“She’s such a damned fine girl.”
“Sure is.”
I detached myself and went wandering to the courts, looking for that damned fine girl, Vivian Watts. A kid resting between sets pointed her out to me. She was in a singles match against an agile blonde boy of about nineteen, almost ten years her junior I would guess. It was the only court with an interested gallery. She was of the same physical type as Chook, not as tall. She was dark and tanned, sturdily built but lithe. And, like Chook, she had that hawk-look of strong features, prominent nose, heavy brows. As with all natural athletes, she had an economy of motion which created its own grace. She wore a little pleated white tennis skirt, white sleeveless blouse, white band on her dark hair. Her brown and solid legs had a good spring, bringing her back into a balanced readiness after each stroke, the way a good boxer moves.
It was easy to see the shape of the match. The boy was a scrambler, going after everything, returning shots it didn’t seem plausible he could reach, lobbing them high enough to give him time to get back for the smash, and preventing her from coming up to the net to pull them away. She tried a cross-court volley and put it just outside.
“Broke her service again,” a bald little man beside me said. He was as brown and knotty as walnuts.
“How does it stand?”
“Six-three to Viv, seven-five to Dave. Now then he’s got her nine-eight.”
He had a big serve and she waited well back, handled it firmly, moved to center court and drove his ground stroke right back at his ankles. He aced her on his next serve. Then on the next serve he tried to come to the net and she made a beautiful passing shot. Her return of his next serve floated and he let it go out by six inches. He took the advantage on another service ace. At match point, she again tried the passing shot as he moved up quickly, but the ball slapped the tape and, to the accompaniment of a concerted partisan groan, fell into her court.
She went to the net and, smiling, tucked her racket under her left arm and held out her right hand to the boy in a quick, firm congratulatory handshake. The smile was the first change of expression I had seen. Her tennis was pokerface, with no girlish grimaces of despair when things went wrong.
They moved off the court as other players moved on, and I drifted along with them, over toward tables in the shade. The boy went off, apparently to get her something to drink. When I moved near enough, she looked up at me with an expression of inquiry, and I saw that her eyes were a very deep blue instead of the brown I had expected.