SHE STUMBLED off the planks and got some concrete muck on her shoe. She wiped at it with her handkerchief, but that didn’t do it, so she spit on the handkerchief, hiked her skirt up, and bent her leg up to get at the muck, in the process showing a lot of leg.
Cornelius Murray, the manager of the resort, was watching from a window, enjoying the show, not only her legs, but her discomfiture. He smiled.
Ariane’s shoe was clean enough, but now she wondered what to do with her dirty handkerchief. Should she throw it away? It had cost her some money, and she could probably wash the muck out, so she wrinkled her nose and put the handkerchief into her pocketbook. She smoothed her skirt, stood up straight and continued on into the building, a little uncertainly now, a little worried that things might have begun to go awry.
Mr. Murray turned to the other men crowded into his unfinished office and said, “In a couple of minutes, we’re going to be very pleasantly interrupted. Let’s see if we can’t get this settled before that happens, okay? Once more around the table.”
The men groaned. Crowded into a room like a cell, with walls of gray concrete, surrounded by the smell of concrete, everything in ragged disarray, at a table littered with samples of carpeting, coffee cups, crumpled paper bags, coffee containers, cardboard chowder containers from Captain White’s, and overflowing ashtrays, they were trying to decide what to call the place.
“I think it’s a mistake,” the youngest of them was saying, “that’s what I’m saying. Babbington Motel is just nothing. It’s not even a name. It’s just a descriptive term. It’s what it is, and that’s that, not anything anybody is going to remember.” He was from Cincinnati. He worked for an advertising firm retained by the Norton hotel chain. His name was Clarence, and Mr. Murray enjoyed using it. (Mr. Murray never used his own first name, because he was sure he’d be called “Corny.” He was “Mr. Murray” to everyone who knew him.)
“So what are you suggesting, Clarence?” asked Mr. Murray.
Ariane entered the building. It was cool inside, in the passageways of raw concrete. Her footfalls scraped on the bare floor and echoed down the hall. She stopped walking and stood still. From somewhere up ahead she heard the sound of a voice.
“I’m not necessarily suggesting. I’m just offering a few suggestions.”
“All right. All right. What are some of the suggestions?”
She began walking that way, and just a little farther down the hall she came to a place where the corridor curved to the right to form an opening that faced the bay. This was the entrance to the large, nearly circular room that she had discovered at night. Now sunlight fell in a white wash over the concrete and the litter and equipment of construction: sawhorses spattered with concrete and stucco, mixing tubs and a small cement mixer, cans of paint in the colors of Italian ices. She stepped a little way into the sunlight and looked around. She had no doubt now that this must be the dining room, the restaurant. This would be where the guests would gather in the evening, to eat their dinner and sip their drinks—at tables near windows if they were lucky, with a view of the bay. It was the same bay she had known all her life, but the ranks of windows along the serpentine wall framed it and glamorized it, gave it a new setting, and imposed upon her a new point of view, the view from inside the resort. She saw that the room hadn’t progressed as she had supposed it would, and she approved of this. The place could surprise her. It was going to be up-to-the-minute, up-to-date, modern, and what did she know about that? If she could be part of it, wearing something sleek and trim, she’d be making a step up. In this setting, she would be glamorized, too, like the view from the windows, and she would blossom. She was confident of that.
“These are in no special order—” Clarence was saying from somewhere farther down the hall.
“For Christ’s sake, what are they?” a third man demanded. He was Parnell Waite, and he was just one month away from retirement. He had a nice little house on a lake in Wisconsin waiting for him. He had been present at the births of seventeen small resort motels around the country in the last ten years. Everyone considered him the father of the concept, and he didn’t mind hearing that, but he wanted to get this one over with and start fishing.
“I’ve got Edgewater Resort, Edgewater Resort Motel, Bayview, Babbington Beach Motel, Bolotomy Bay Resort Motel, Sunset Lodge—”
“You can’t see the goddamned sunset from here—” Mr. Murray pointed out.
“Sunrise Lodge, then, and Sun—ah—rise Motel, Sunrise Lagoon, Bay’s Edge, Sunrise Sands, Sunrise Shores, Sunrise Beach Motel, The Beachcomber Motel—”
“Geez, enough.”
“Well, I just want to throw out some of these ideas for the restaurant, the bar, the lounge—”
“Go ahead, go ahead.”
“The Barefoot Bar, the Reef Restaurant, Outrigger Bar, the White Sands, the Bayview Lounge, the Sea Gull’s Perch—”
“Are you kidding? Have you seen a sea gull’s perch?”
“Scratch that, then. But I think we really need to catch the nautical feeling. Maybe even a little tropical flavor for the bar and lounge. I’m thinking along the lines of something like bananas, coconuts, pineapple, rum. That sort of thing.”
“Yeah, that’ll go with the palm trees I see around town.”
[to be continued]
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