dramatic end to the land, to America. Carmel is part of the peninsula that juts out into the Pacific and holds two other towns, or communities: Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach.
Pacific Grove is a quiet area of families and retired couples of modest means. It is a religious town and it is one of the few islands of abstinence, a dry town and proud of the fact. Consequently, Pacific Grovians have to drive outside of the city limits to package stores and is literally ringed with liquor stores. At night, the people drink at home, quietly, behind drawn shades.
Most of the people who live in Carmel and Pebble Beach regard Pacific Grove as a quiet place and seldom go there.
At the entrance to the peninsula sits Monterey with its harbor and fishing fleets and Cannery Row of John Steinbeck fame. Cannery Row is nothing more than a tourist place now with only one cannery operating and the rest of the canneries and warehouses housing craft shops and clothing stores.
Hippies, with a record store, a health food shop and a leather craft shop, have made a foothold on one end of Cannery Row.
Hippies are seen in Monterey and Pacific Grove and Carmel. They are a problem because Carmel lies between San Francisco and Big Sur. It is an attractive stop-over point for hitch-hikers and a problem to the city fathers.
There are no hippies in Pebble Beach. It is more a community than a town. Here, in breath-taking loveliness, behind walls and gates that are guarded, live the very rich. Here is the famous Del Monte Lodge where only the wealthy and famous can afford to stay. Here is the world-famous seaside links of Pebble Beach, scene of the glamorous Bing Crosby Clambake once a year. Here are movie stars and society matrons, all with an elegance and fresh clean good looks that go with the peninsula. Here, on any day, one is apt to see a blonde with that scrubbed, spanking-clean, mint-mouthed smile and dazzling white turtleneck sweater and slacks striding through the Beach Club or to Club Nineteen or seen walking down the fairway, following some golfers.
Here, at Pebble Beach, behind guarded gates, the beautiful, talented, and rich people gather to play and party, and some of them stay to live.
Pebble Beach has its own security force which guards the gates, charging admission to tourists who look respectable and patrolling the roads that cut through the forests and parallel golf courses. They patrol past the gates with gravel roads that twist and lead up to grand homes. Most of the elegant houses are hidden from sight by shrubbery and fences, for residents of Pebble Beach pay well for beauty and privacy.
There are famous admirals, generals, movie stars, and business men living there. By and large, far and away, you couldn't find a group with more character. There were a few; those that had inherited their money and couldn't handle it. There were those that came from old money, had a good family name yet suffered the inevitable consequences of too much in-breeding that bordered on the incestuous. Such a person was Web Hardman. His home at Pebble Beach was one of the best. Hidden from the road, it commanded a sweeping view of the Pacific, had a private beach and was ringed on the land side by a high cyclone fence that spawned barbed wire at the top. The gate was opened electronically, but only after a visitor had obeyed an amplified voice command and stepped up to a pillar where a television camera scanned them.
Such precautions were not out of the ordinary in Pebble Beach, for it was expected that people valued their privacy and the security patrol was there to reinforce it.
Web Hardman seldom went out and played a very respectable and passive part in the peninsula's social life. No one, outside of a trusted few, ever suspected what went on in his house. Lights late at night, parties and music, were far from uncommon at Pebble Beach, and the security patrol's principle problem at night was seeing that tipsy drivers got safely home. Whenever Web's name was mentioned in the peninsula's paper, The Monterey Herald, he was described as, 'One of the coast's most eligible bachelors.' Web did his best to keep his name and picture out of the paper.
Carmel is a tourist and retirement center. It also has a population of young people, many of whom work in its stores and shops. They are usually young, intelligent, ambitious, and attractive. They are the type of people concerned with where they live, concerned about beautiful surroundings. They are usually ambitious people, eager to get ahead, drawing some sort of identity from waiting on or associating with the rich.
Unlike Pacific Grove, Carmel is far from dry and it harbors some of the best bars on the peninsula. The Red Lion, a facsimile of an English pub; Su Vecimo with its Mexican motif; La Playa with its casual elegance and thick adobe walls; El Matador with its austere, regal, bullfight atmosphere. On any weekend, the mentioned bars – and more – swing late, crowded with attractive couples. One such couple sat in a comer of El Matador, drinking Irish coffees and gazing soulfully into each other's eyes. They had that sad, tender, troubled look that soulful lovers sometimes wear. The man, rugged, tall, and good looking, was obviously containing his anger and disappointment. He will be leaving the next day for the jungles and rain forests of South America where he will engineer a camp and build a bridge. His wife looked at him bravely, holding back her tears. She must, for they both know that others in the bar are looking at them, the males especially. Men always look at her. She had a wild mane of naturally red hair it frames her face in an untamed flame-licking way. Her skin was that creamy white that so often goes with red hair and her eyes are a vivid blue and set wide apart. Her mouth is large, almost but not quite too large and her wetly glistening lips are full-formed. Her profile was pure and clean and made one think of the poets in Ireland and the misty isles and a natural kind of majesty and royalty. If her face and hair weren't enough, there was her body. God must have been in a wild and ecstatic mood when he created her. Most women would give a fortune to have her body. Tall, with sensually flaring hips and long elegant thighs, she possessed a slim waist that rose to two perfectly round breasts that bulged excitingly beneath the soft sweater she was wearing. She leaned forward and put her elbows on the table as she looked wistfully at her husband, and every man could see that she wasn't wearing a brassiere by the molten, rubbery way her breasts moved. Those breasts, those two firmly jutting mounds of flesh with their nipples straining and pointing through the wool, were real! They were almost – not quite – too big for her slim build.
She had two black moles – beauty marks – on her face: one on her cheek and one on the side of her chin. She wore only a little makeup and she didn't even need that. Her eyelashes were unusually long, and her generously fun lips seemed always to be wet, to have a sheen to them. Her smoky, startlingly blue eyes had a hot provocative look to them. That look was always getting her in trouble because men misread her intentions.
This attractive redhead, this girl who reminded men of Raquel Welch, was Kim Stewart! She sat staring at her husband, Hank Stewart, engineer, husband, a scion to a Pebble Beach fortune. He was cut off from that because he eloped with Kim. Kim had worked as a waitress in a local restaurant, The Butcher Shop, when she had met Hank. He had swept her off her feet, rushing her beyond her belief. Within two weeks of meeting, they were married and Kim was walking about a quarter of an inch off the ground when their world came crashing down.
First it had been his family. They didn't approve. They were proud and powerful people. They were lofty and the family tree went back to New England and the Mayflower. She was coldly ignored, and Hank was told in formal and frosty terms that he was being cut off from any funds. This, in itself, wasn't too much of a blow. Hank had money of his own and a profession: engineering. He opened a small office in Monterey, and they rented a one- bedroom cottage in Carmel near the beach. They were happy with chilly night walks on the beach and hurrying home to a bright fire and hot toddies. They would sit by the fire, listening to the waves crashing on the beach and feeling the warm glow of the fire. Hank reassured Kim that in time, his parents would come around. 'They'll see what kind of a person you really are.'
Although she didn't say so, Kim was determined to show them by example what kind of a person she was. They would see that they were wrong, that she was an asset to their family even if her parents were poor and she had to work for a living. They would see Hank happy, and they would realize they were wrong. Kim vowed to lead a life that would be beyond reproach.
And that vow led to and helped sharpen their real problem. Despite her looks, Kim was not sensual. In fact, she was exactly the opposite. She felt her body was too well-endowed, that it was too shapely and provocative and as a result, she went to great lengths to hide it. And, the more she tried to hide it the more she called attention to it. Even her walk got her into trouble because it was a liquid thing that made the bottoms of her buttocks twitch in a way that made men grit their teeth. Kim was aware of her walk and when she tried to slow it down, repress it, keep it subdued, she only succeeded in making it slow and slinky. It was the same walk used by a stripper who stalks across the stage and removes the last tantalizing shred of clothing and stands magnificently naked except for a trivial G-string, sheer black stockings, and high heels. Kim walked with that breath-taking
