The Houseguest Read online

  The case of one Barbara Rentzel was remembered: a travel agent whose wont apparently was to scream filth in Doug’s face as he took her through multiple climaxes. The story had been recorded in the desperate letters she wrote him after being discarded, each of which he carried for a time deep within the legal papers in the attaché case, because he either enjoyed rereading accounts of anguish or wished to give his wife sufficient time to find them.

  For it had lately occurred to Audrey that Doug must by now not only be aware of the surveillance she had maintained on him for many years, but be at some pains to abet it. In any event, that suspicion served her amour propre.

  The remaining voice on the tape would seem to be that of a winner, at least amongst the trio at hand. For one, she had the thin soprano tones and the tentative phrasing of the grown-woman-as-schoolgirl that Doug preferred; for another, she had the sense to ask nothing, not even a return call, and to express only her longing for him and in romantic not carnal language. She sounded about fourteen, but as Doug was no longer attracted to jailbait, she was certain to be mature and could be even as old as forty-odd.

  Audrey carefully left the tape at the point at which the last message ended. Had she been at all malicious, nothing could have been easier than to erase it, and there had been a time when she would certainly have done so. Perhaps it was just as well that Doug in those days did not yet possess an answering machine: nothing could have resulted from such an exercise of spite but the loss of the impeccable moral status by means of which she survived. Such an action could not but be succeeded by others of the same character, each more bitter and thus even less effectual than the former, for pride can never be served by negative means. Not to mention that Audrey was by nature an ironist who was capable of seeing in the rain that fell on a picnic, the staining of one’s special dress an hour before the start of whichever memorable event, and like calamities not altogether unwelcome confirmations of her basic pessimism. In contrast, Doug habitually entertained favorable expectations. He and she were fundamentally well matched.

  She found the key to the large drawer at the bottom of the desk’s left pedestal, a key that was conveniently kept amidst the paper clips in a little leather-covered open drum on the desktop, next to a larger one that held freshly sharpened pencils. She unlocked and opened the drawer and removed the attaché case from it. Though Doug could be erotically ingenious, his powers of invention were notably banal in other areas of life, and the first time Audrey encountered the little cylinders of the combination lock she had no hesitation in moving them to represent the month, day, and year of his birth, and the hasp popped open on the instant. That had been three attaché cases ago, as of this time, yet the same maneuver was still as valid.

  But today, for the first time ever, there was nothing in the case, not even any legal papers. Audrey was hard hit by this discovery, as she had never been by the occasional item of flimsy lingerie tucked into the pocket in the lining of beige suede. Moving by sheer habit, she replaced the case in the locked drawer and returned the key to a paper-clip burial before sitting down to deliberate on the edge of Doug’s bed. She might have remained there until her husband returned from his walk, in flagrant violation of their tacit agreement, had not the tone of the telephone, so thin in timbre yet so piercing, sounded at that moment, restoring her self-possession.

  She snatched the instrument from the box and said, “You have reached Douglass Graves’s number.”

  As she expected, the caller was surprised by this greeting and for a long moment preserved the silence. But when the voice finally came on the line it was not a woman’s but hoarse and coarse.

  “Get Charlie for me.”

  Audrey knew an odd emotion which could have been either relief or regret. She answered sweetly, “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

  The caller rudely contested her assertion. “Don’t gimme that. You just go and get Charlie.”

  During such an exchange with a person who was evidently her social inferior Audrey usually felt if not wholly in the wrong to be anyway on an uncertain footing. Therefore she now applied some cogitation to the matter and, after an instant during which she was conscious of the heavy, menacing breaths at the other end of the wire, came up with a possibility.

  “Could you mean Chuck, Chuck Burgoyne?”

  The question was received with a grating utterance between a grunt and a chuckle. Then, in manifest derision: “You just tell Chucky-wucky to call Tedesco, see?”

  “Yes, Mr. Tedesco. Do you want to leave a number?” But, with an uncompromising click, the line was dead.

  Audrey took a sharpened pencil from the leather cup, then looked through the desk in vain for a piece of paper. Though she had been taken aback by the current emptiness of the attaché case, she was not astonished to find that the drawers were barren as well. Doug did no work at the island house; he did little enough at the office. The job was a sinecure in a family-owned firm, which employed serious attorneys for the serious work. Doug had barely squeaked through law school in his day, and his passing of the bar exam had been a mystery the investigation of which would surely serve no one’s interest at this late date.

  She returned the pencil to its place with the rest of those which would through lack of use stay sharp eternally. The message was simple enough, the name easily remembered: call Tedesco. No doubt the derisive “Chucky-wucky” should be omitted. In her experience this was the first message of any kind that Chuck had received from the outside world since his arrival. But then, she neither monitored the incoming phone calls nor was always first to get the mail.

  There had been no calls or letters in recent days. It was one of those periods in which one’s usually attentive friends, suddenly and as if in concert, forget one’s existence. This was far from being unprecedented, yet it was unusual this early in the season. A certain general disaffection usually appeared along about the third week in August, as if in preparation for the complex emotions of the imminent Labor Day, at once another end and another beginning, but as of early June the summer was still new, with many people yet to arrive—but perhaps that was the explanation.

  The phone rang again: no doubt Mr. Tedesco, with a revision or addition to the earlier message. But even before the receiver reached her ear the female caller was speaking, in a peculiarly ugly whine.

  “… this to me? I’ve been sitting here crying all weekend. You’re hateful, absolutely hateful. I didn’t realize you could be so cruel. You’re a shit, a complete shit! … I didn’t mean that. Please answer. … . You’re there, I know you’re there.”

  “Yes I am, you whore,” said Audrey, hanging up. She was really more impatient than angry.

  Doug naturally had seen his son at the top of the steps to the beach; there was nothing wrong with his peripheral vision. In fact, he had no physical disabilities whatever, unless some were so subtle as to elude the thorough examination he underwent annually, not to forget that he reported promptly to his doctor at the first appearance of the symptoms of even a common cold. He drank no more, and often less, than two glasses of wine a day and had never smoked. On each day of the island weekends he walked two miles of shoreline; in town he worked out three mornings per week in the gym at his club. He had lived more than half a century, and he was still the man his son would never be. If Bobby had any character at all, he would have shouted down to him. Not only was Bobby’s the superior perspective, but all of nature ordained that the younger man was the one with the obligation to take the initiative in such a case.

  The moral question aside, Doug was grateful to Bobby for staying mute. He had never been able to speak easily to his son. Audrey provided security, but Bobby made him feel vulnerable. Perhaps it was unfair of him to blame Bobby for the scandal at the Wilmot School, his son having been one of the underaged victims of the male faculty members, pederasts to a man (with the ironic exception of Hargrave Bond, English master and poet with an international reputation, the only one of them to display effeminate
ways), but neither was it his own fault that the boy was so passive as to suffer such use for months without complaint—if indeed Bobby had not enjoyed it! Doug himself, age fourteen, had first punched the golf pro who once made advances to him in an otherwise deserted country-club locker room. “All right for you,” chided the hairy man, with a simper, and then Doug kicked him in the testicles and went promptly to have him fired. The experience had given him a prejudice against golf, but as it happened when the time came Bobby chose it as his own favorite sport and placed high and often first in junior tournaments: another example of their profound difference, each from each, which went to the bone and could not be called the product of Bobby’s conscious defiance. There was no means by which he could have known of his father’s experience with the invert. Doug had never revealed this to anyone. His discretion as to sexual matters was absolute, and he went to many pains to keep it so. He had only contempt for those whose greatest satisfaction came from revealing what should have been their secrets.

  Doug had been coming to the island all his life. The land on which his house stood had been in his family for three generations. Yet he had not been in or on the ocean for more than four decades. His younger brother had drowned in a boating accident when they both were children, and he had thought of the sea ever since as an enemy and had ignored it insofar as that could be done when it was so close at hand. Most of the island’s seasonal residents were boating people, and there were friends of Audrey’s who sought to lure him on board their craft, but he successfully resisted all such importunities. Fortunately, Chuck Burgoyne had proved landlocked, indeed had seldom left the house since his arrival: that alone was enough reason to think well of the young man. He embodied Doug’s idea of a perfect houseguest in all ways: he was genial; he was self-sufficient, needed no tending. He was not a zealot. Nor did he fall into moods. Above all, he was not vulgar.

  But what Doug found inexplicable was that Chuck would be a friend of Bobby’s: what in the world did he see in him? Lydia obviously was out to rise in the world, but what could a fellow like Chuck gain from an association with Bobby? As to Lydia, Doug did not find her sexually attractive. He had had his moments with some of the other female houseguests brought by Bobby throughout the decade past (though sometimes, in the earliest years, when the girls might not yet have reached the age of consent, nothing more occurred than fondling), but Bobby had chosen another type to marry than those he had previously dated. Lydia’s scholastic accomplishments had earned her four free years at the university to which Doug had to pay a fortune to send Bobby, and the irony of this state of affairs was that her father was if anything more prosperous than Doug, who in his own opinion was a poor man, for the real money was in a trust from which he was provided with only a modest annual stipend, his own father having had no higher regard for him than he for Bobby. With the inconsequential salary paid him by the firm controlled by his uncle and cousins, his yearly income from all sources was not nearly sufficient to support his own tastes, not to mention what was spent by Audrey over and above her own modest independent income and that needed to maintain Bobby.

  He now checked the mileage on the pedometer at his belt, even though he had walked this route every Saturday and Sunday morning for many summers, but consulting the instrument was what distinguished exercise from mere stroll: precision was always a value well worth honoring. By now he had worked up quite an appetite. If Chuck was not up and about when he returned, Doug really would be disappointed in him, unless of course the poor fellow was ill, but how tiresome that would be with a guest, especially on a Sunday.

  Lydia encountered her mother-in-law in one of the hallways.

  “Believe it or not,” said she, “I’m still looking for Chuck’s room.”

  “Bobby hasn’t given you the tour yet?” Audrey assumed a smirk.

  “I haven’t ever thought to ask,” said Lydia. “Until now I’ve known how to get anyplace I wanted to go.”

  “Well, this is our part of the world, Doug’s and mine.” Audrey threw a hand towards her own shoulder, but she made no offer to show the rooms behind her. “The guest rooms are on out the hall you’re in. Go on past your room and through the door at the end.”

  “Gosh, is there more of the house out there? I thought that door went outside.”

  “It does,” said Audrey. “Or rather, onto a little open-sided but roofed passage called by some, I believe, by that awful word breezeway. The guest rooms are back there.”

  “Aha,” said Lydia. “Separated.”

  “We thought that was nice and private.” Audrey frowned. “It can be inconvenient when rain is blowing in off the ocean. I should in all honesty say that like everything else it was Peter’s idea … Peter De Vilbiss, the architect.”

  “Oh yes,” Lydia said hastily. “It’s a remarkable piece of work. It certainly makes the most of all the features of the property.” She despised herself for speaking in this fashion, but there were times when doing otherwise seemed impossible. She continued now through several more banalities, concluding with a reference to “both sea and forest.”

  “Doug dislikes sleeping in a room that looks out on water,” said Audrey. “Hence his faces the hillside. But that’s what he wanted.”

  Fortunately Lydia had never till now found herself alone with her mother-in-law. Audrey was quite as uneasy as she. “Very good, then, I’ll be on my way to find Chuck.” She walked backwards a way so as not to seem rude.

  Audrey made a frowning mouth. “I do hope he’s all right. But if he is, we certainly won’t want to chide him for oversleeping, will we?”

  Lydia was offended by this warning. Why should Chuck be sacrosanct? That it would be rude to kid someone about a little excess sacktime was preposterous. The things that mattered to people who did nothing useful in life!

  But now she at last felt free to turn her back on Audrey and stride away, back to the central vestibule or whatever it should be termed in such a structure, from which place she chose the corridor, as directed, off which was Bobby’s former bedroom and bath, now shared by her. After a week of nights there, she still felt as though she were an adolescent sleeping over, screwing surreptitiously, as in fact she had done when she was seventeen, as houseguest of a boy in more modest circumstances, so modest indeed that he had to sleep on the living-room couch while she occupied his bedroom. He was supposed to stay out there, but as it happened, when the house was quiet he stole in and slipped between the sheets alongside her and, before she was altogether awake, had aroused her to the degree that when fully conscious she was as eager to proceed as he. This boy was the first of the only three lovers she had had before meeting Bobby; she had had no other since.

  For some reason once she had passed their room now and gone through the door at the corridor’s end and into a kind of outdoors—for not only was the breezeway roofed, but a fence of shrubs grew close by on the inland side—Lydia was suddenly conscious of her bare thighs. Perhaps it was the sea breeze. She wore shorts, but they were conservative enough, a fit that could be called neat, certainly not undecorous, and made of blue-and-white seersucker. She wore a simple white blouse above and sockless sandals below. With Bobby she had checked this costume for appropriateness and received his unqualified okay. True, he might have done as much had she appeared in a cerise playsuit, but she insisted that he remember that this was not her native milieu and asked him to be serious. Lydia by no means felt inferior when amongst the Graveses, but she abhorred nothing more than being conspicuously out of order, which was discourteous. Crude as they were, her own family had a tradition of courtesy. “If you’re served fish, Johnny, then you eat fish,” were her mother’s instructions to her older brother when he was first invited out on his own to dinner as a teenager, and her father continued to slap him for lapses in table manners till he had graduated from high school. Lydia herself had been admonished for wearing jeans so tight they showed the outline of her underpants and thus violated accepted manners. “It’s ugly, Lyd, not nice
to others,” her mother had said. “We all have to live in the world together. Who wants to see what covers your bare behind, for heaven’s sake?”

  In any event, it occurred now to Lydia that she was on her way to the isolated domain of a man she hardly knew, dressed in attire that could be called skimpy, for there was nothing beneath the shirt and shorts but a ribbonlike garment for which briefs was perhaps too substantial a term. The underwear had even evoked an amazed question from Bobby, “How come you wear something like that?” “So my pants won’t show,” said she. Of course another taboo of her mother’s concerned visible evidence of nipples, but Lydia was not weighty on top and the white shirt was not only opaque but outsized.

  Even so she felt vaguely indecent as she reached the door at the end of the breezeway, opened it, and entered a hallway of a series of pale-blue doors, all of them closed but one halfway along on the side that faced the sea. As she had no means of knowing which belonged to the guest room occupied by Chuck Burgoyne, it was most convenient for her first to look into the doorway that was open.

  When she did so, there he was, apparently sleeping soundly, in the supine position in or rather on the bed, even the sheet drawn away though the morning was not, back here in this shaded wing, cooled by the ocean breeze, really hot enough to justify that, but perhaps it was a matter of personal metabolism, for not only was he not under bedclothes, he wore no pajamas. He was in the state her father for some reason called “buck naked.” And he had a blatant erection.