My knees were quivering (visibly, no doubt) and my voice, when I squeaked "hello" to the man, was so like the sound of a rusty hinge that I glanced around in surprise.
The tall, gray-haired man looked at me strangely and asked if I had a vacancy.
I throttled the moronic impulse to gibber "I feel like there's a great big one in my head!" and carefully mouthed the words I had rehearsed for such an emergency as this.
"Yes, I have," I chirped. "Would you care to see it?"
"Please," he replied, with a pained expression that seemed to say, "Well, what in hell do you think I'm here for?"
I led the way to one of the single cabins in the rear. He followed close behind me. It was about three hundred feet from the office to the single cabins–much too far for two people to walk together without saying a word. Coyotes were howling in the blackness of the hills, and I felt like howling with them.
I was hot with embarrassment as his footsteps padded along behind me. I cast about frantically in my mind for a topic of conversation. If only I had noticed the state on his car license I could ask him how the weather was where he came from. But I couldn't risk saying merely, "How's the weather where you came from?" He might sneer, "Same as it is here. I just came from the other side of town."
He tramped along close behind me, without saying a word. We still had more than half the distance to go to get to the cabin. Suddenly I had an idea. Maybe something in his costume, or an emblem or pin he might be wearing, would give me a topic for conversation. I turned and looked back at him, searching for pins or ornaments in his lapel and working slowly up to his face, which was ten or twelve inches higher than my own. The yard lights, bright lights on a pole on one of the grass islands, made the details of his clothing visible. Just as I got up to his eyes I was struck by his expression. He didn't say it, but I could literally feel him thinking it: "Well, what the hell are you staring at?"
We went the rest of the way in silence–still more of it. I sighed with relief as we reached the door of the single cabin–at last the ordeal was over.
And then I realized I had forgotten to bring the key!
His eyes were on me, impatient, obviously bored with my stupidity and slowness.
"I–I forgot the key. I'm very sorry. I'll go get it," I stammered.
Throwing dignity to the Banning breezes, I broke into a run as I headed back toward the office. Not only was I in a hurry to get away from the pitying contempt in his expression, but I was afraid that if he didn't get a little satisfaction soon he'd just get into his car and drive away. It would be terrible if I lost my first customer, especially after such a bad start. I'd never have the courage to tackle one again.
Seizing the master key out of the desk drawer, I rushed back and opened the door, snapping on the light and motioning him into the cabin.
His eyes flicked over the maple furniture, the red carpet, the Venetian blinds, and back to me.
"Well, the cabin's okay," he said.
We embarked on the trip back to the office, while I pondered over the inflection of his words.
He filled out the registration card, paid me four dollars, accepted the key from my frigid hand, and turned to give me one last contemptuous glance before he stepped out of the office.
I sank onto the davenport, weak with relief that my initiation into the horrors of cabin-renting was over.
I suppose the affliction from which I suffered would be called customerphobia. Such a word, if it existed, would be defined in the dictionary as "a morbid fear of customers." No doubt in extreme cases the victim would run shrieking at the sight of a customer. (As a matter of fact, I had had to exert a lot of self-control to keep from doing that very thing!) I grace the ailment by the coining of a name only because I discovered others can suffer from it too. Grandma, later, was to go through a violent attack of it, with much more disastrous results.
The next car that drove in that night disgorged a dark, trim looking man with big ears who demanded, "How mocha get two people?"
"Four dollars," I said.
"How mocha get three people, four people?"
"Five dollars and a half; six-fifty for four people," I said. "I wanna to buy it," the man declared.
"All right," I said indulgently. "Just fill out this registration card."
"No, no–no, no no!" he cried, shoving the registration card away in horror. "I means, I wanna to buy it, I wanna to buy it to belong to me. I got thirty thousand dollars down pay. You wanna to sell your motel?"
"Well," I hedged, "we hadn't really thought of selling. How much did you want to pay?"
He fingered one huge ear, and I saw the glitter of a diamond on his finger. "Let's let me look at it, first. Then I make you offer."
I showed some of the empty cabins to him and his wife, a meek little woman who clambered out of their car and trailed along after us. I led them out to the land behind the back row of courts. It was just a gigantic splotch of blackness at this time of night, but I described it to them. They were very much impressed.
When we were back in the office Mr. Gorvane–for he had introduced himself by now–said, "I been looking around, this is nicest court in Banning. I wanna it to belong to me. I offer you seventy-five thousand."
I gasped. By selling, we would make eleven and a half thousand dollars profit. That was a lot of money, especially considering the short length of time involved.
I promised him I would talk it over with my husband the following weekend. I took his address–he lived in Los Angeles–and told him that Grant would stop in to see him in a little over a week.
Every once in a while during the rest of that evening, I caught myself almost on the verge of tears. I tried to figure out what was the matter with me, and I realized that I was unhappy because I was afraid Grant would insist on selling the motel. I wanted to keep it, no matter how much we might be offered for it.
Still, I was glad Mr. Gorvane had made the offer. My relatives and the few of our closer friends to whom we had told the price we were paying for the motel had insisted that we were being fools, that the motel couldn't possibly be worth it; that the business about the owner being sick and having to sell was an old, old gag, that we'd lose every penny. I had never really doubted the wisdom of our course, but it was nice to have my faith in the value of our motel upheld. And if some one offered to buy it for seventy-five thousand the day after we took possession, probably in a couple of months, with the beginning of the season at Palm Springs, (a popular winter resort twenty miles from us) and the influx of winter tourists into California, we'd be offered even more.
After those two encounters, the edge wore off my customerphobia. I rented two more cabins before I went to bed. I checked carefully to be sure that all the neon lights were on. Then I locked the office door and the door that led outside from the living room, and lay down on the bed with my clothes on.
The scrunch of wheels on gravel brought me off the bed several times, but it turned out to be cars going into the restaurant next door. The beam of the headlights of cars turning around in the restaurant parking lot shone between the cracks of our Venetian blinds, casting stripes of light against the wall, and made me think cars were coming into our driveway.
There was no doubt, though, that the next car I heard was in our driveway. Besides the agitation of the gravel, there was a thud, and then loud, excited male voices.
I hurried to the door and looked out. A battered roadster, which had apparently come from Williams street along our private road and entered the graveled driveway from the rear, had banged up against the curb of one of the grass islands. Two young men in the roadster were arguing in a heated and highly alcoholic manner.
The idea of approaching two angry, unpredictable drunks didn't appeal to me, but I knew I couldn't let them stay there, making a disturbance that would be sure to annoy our customers. "Thish ish too the highway!" one of the men roared.
"No,