The Houseguest Page 3

  Lydia remained just long enough to determine that he was genuinely asleep. He seemed to be.

  Somehow Audrey had foreseen that when Chuck finally appeared in the main house, he would not refer to breakfast.

  Instead he looked sternly at her and asked whether there had been a telephone call for him.

  She answered guiltily. “In fact, there was.” It was fortunate that Doug remained away on his walk. “On Doug’s private phone. It was just by chance that I—”

  “It wasn’t Perlmutter?” Chuck’s bright blue eyes seemed to show an unparticularized resentment.

  “Actually, someone named Tedesco. He didn’t leave a number. He said—”

  “I can imagine what he said.” Chuck was a man of slightly under medium height, of average-to-slight figure. He had a ruddy face that anyone would have called handsome, below neatly cut, straight, very dark hair. “If he calls again, tell him I’ve left.”

  “It’s not likely I’ll be the one to answer if he uses that number. It’s really Doug’s private one. He doesn’t like others to use it. I wonder how Mr. Tedes—” But Audrey stopped here; she would not be rude.

  Chuck sat down in the chair that Bobby had earlier vacated in favor of the deck. Parts of the newspaper lay where they had been dropped. Chuck retrieved them, stacked them on his lap, but did not so much as glance at the headlines.

  “Tedesco’s not a man to trifle with,” said he. “If anybody is looking for trouble, Tedesco will supply it.”

  Why then would he have given the man Doug’s private number? was the question that persisted with Audrey. But she could neither ask it nor mention the subject tabooed by the law of hospitality: namely, were the plans for breakfast now definitely shelved?

  “He called you Charley,” she said at last, and when Chuck looked at her as if puzzled, she added, “Mr. Tedesco.”

  Chuck, who had seemed to be brooding, now brightened. “It’s a matter of choice. The name you’re called by others is not exactly your own property, is it? Charley, Chuck, Chaz. It’s the name you can do that with. But Audrey is not, I think?” Chuck took the matter seriously. It was this sort of thing that made him so ingratiating.

  “Actually, Audrey’s not my first name, as it happens,” said his hostess. “I don’t like it much but it’s preferable to Wilhelmina, which is one of those names one is given to please some relative who might leave money to a younger person of the same name.”

  Chuck leaned towards her. He still held the newspapers, which he had stacked, she assumed, merely to serve his sense of order. He wore leather loafers, with socks, and apparently had not brought along a pair of sports shoes of any kind, nor jeans or shorts. He provided quite a contrast with Bobby’s style, and not only in clothing. “You’re a desirable woman, Willie,” he said in a voice of intensity but low volume. Having made that startling speech, he rose and left the room at a smart pace, carrying with him the stack of newspapers.

  Audrey had assumed she had forgotten how to blush, so long had it been, perhaps even since the days of the squint. While Doug’s courtship antics had shocked her, she had never been embarrassed by them, but the difference there was that she had been a participant, a collaborator even if involuntarily. At the moment she had been given no role, and sat alone with her blazing face. Whether it was cruel or considerate of Chuck to leave so decisively would have been difficult to say. She was fifty-one and he might be somewhat older than her son but was still under thirty. With another intonation, his words now might well have been interpreted indecently. As it was, they sounded almost businesslike. His departure suggested ruthlessness. With no supporting evidence Audrey might have applied to Chuck what he had said of his friend or perhaps enemy named Tedesco, who should not be trifled with nor frequented unless one was looking for trouble. That certainly had never been true of Audrey. Her style was to avoid conflict, and thus, unlike almost everyone else she knew, she was still on her first marriage.

  Lydia too had colored by reason of Chuck Burgoyne, but her flush represented anger. Only a scoundrel would sleep naked with an open bedroom door, even if quartered in the remotest part of the house. The weekday housekeeper, Mrs. Finch, surely went back there routinely as did the team of cleaning women who made regular Monday and Friday visits, not to mention those persons on missions such as that of Lydia only just concluded, or mere wanderers-through-hallways. But what infuriated her most was her inability to decide whether in so establishing the opportunity for self-exhibition Chuck was showing insolent indifference or narcissistic intent. Each would have been offensive, but perhaps the first was the more obnoxious.

  Lydia could not abide inconsiderate persons, those who performed as if they were alone in the universe. But until now it could never have been said of Chuck Burgoyne that he operated with indifference to those around him: he was all too aware of others. He was always manipulating the Graveses, inducing them to alter practices that had apparently been lifelong, e.g., it had been their custom to breakfast severally and not collect around the table as a family so early in the day. He was singlehandedly responsible for the canceling of the traditional cocktail party with which the family had celebrated the opening of the season each year for the last seventy-odd, if the count began with Doug’s grandfather, whose enormous house had not been at the shore, which in those days was considered too remote a site for a residence, but rather in the town overlooking the harbor. But it had been Audrey, not Doug, who cared about tradition, and the latter made no vocal objection when she announced that, as Chuck had rightly pointed out, the party when seen unsentimentally was no more than, when the time for planning and preparing was included, many dollars of expense and days of hard work for a few hours of tedium.

  On the other hand, if it were Chuck’s intention to exhibit himself, it could have been supposed that he would have done so under conditions more propitious for success. How could he have assumed that anyone would go back that way on a Sunday? And then what if the visitor had been Bobby or Doug? Presumably the sight would not have been so shocking to another man, certainly not to Bobby, who had told her of some of the contests that had gone on in his day as an adolescent in the locker rooms of the club. Males then actually did concern themselves with size, as she noted derisively. Ah, said he, then women are indifferent to measurements of breast and butt and thigh? He professed not to understand the fundamental difference involved.

  To Lydia the sight of Chuck’s tumid organ was anything but erotic. It simply represented the ultimate in effrontery.

  She had stopped off at her own quarters to collect herself. A bright sitting room faced the sea; the bedroom, behind it on the land side, was always cool and dark and tranquil. The house had been built just as Bobby entered prep school, and his tennis and golf trophies from those years to the present stood on a teak shelving system that had probably been designed for books. Bobby owned few of the latter, being no reader, but with Lydia’s assistance he had when necessary summoned up sufficient intellectual effort to get passing grades in his college courses, though they would probably not have been high enough to get him accepted by a law school not heavily endowed by his great-grandfather. All three of the Graveses known to Lydia considered themselves virtually impoverished because they did not have the grand estate of his forebear, with its scores of servants, a property that today had long been a monastery, with grounds ever dwindling as the monkish order, in need of funds in an impious era, sold more of the acreage for tract houses and a shopping mall.

  Lydia stood before the big window and sought to be calmed by the sight of the expanse of water: the ocean was a great flat gray sheet at the moment. It was perhaps incongruous to seek emotional balance by gazing at such a potentially violent medium, but this measure never failed even in a storm. Presumably a hurricane might provide a different story, but anything less, if one were safe behind plate glass, did not fail to bring—well, reassurance might be the name for it: what did not seem petty in view of that liquid magnitude?

  Lydia was a s
uperb swimmer, but riding on the surface of the sea was another thing. She was the poorest of sailors on her father’s big cabin cruiser, large enough for ocean-roaming but used by him exclusively on the meagerly proportioned and rather brackish Lake Winkeemaug, if not altogether a manmade body of water, then at least enhanced by dredge. Aboard that vessel the pubescent Lydia was capable of getting the vapors before the anchor was hoisted, and spent much of any voyage in the toilet, whose door, needless to say, was labeled “The Head.”

  The two men Lydia loved the most were the same for whom she felt the most contempt: her father and her husband. But perhaps this was normal enough.

  Had his daughter-in-law moved closer to the glass she could have seen Doug returning from his walk, ascending the steps from the beach. She would have been in an ideal situation from which to admire the fecundity of his scalp, on which the hair grew as thick as when he had been a boy.

  He now had decided that there could be no more waiting for Chuck’s appearance: he was too hungry. And if the houseguest did subsequently, belatedly, arise and prepare breakfast, it would be within one’s capacity to eat twice: the salt air would see to that. Therefore, having entered by one of the doors which in a conventional dwellingplace would have been more obviously assigned to tradesmen, he was in the kitchen.

  Here he stood bewildered for a moment before the large brushed-steel refrigerator that the designer had obtained, if memory served, from a firm whose routine clients were commercial restaurants. It was easy to assume that one could just go ahead and feed oneself, but aside from pouring cornflakes from a box, splitting a muffin and buttering it, and applying mustard to layered ham and cheese, Doug had never his life long been personally responsible for the preparing of that which he chewed and swallowed, and thus he found himself on alien terrain at the moment, without a legible map. He had never even tried frying a slice of bacon, and had an idea, based on scenes in comic movies, that it could seldom be performed by a beginner. To prepare his favorite form of egg, poached, divine intervention was probably to be implored, for even those of his women who were adepts at cookery made cloudy, oysterish messes unless they cheated and brought into play those little steaming-cups from which the eggs came looking as if effigies molded in rubber.

  But Chuck’s poached eggs were as though formed in God’s hand, translucent, veiled, quivering, scarcely over the threshold of solidity. Dammit, where was the fellow now?

  Right there: he came out of the butler’s pantry.

  “Chuck!” Doug cried in happy surprise and frank affection.

  The houseguest failed to reply in kind. He frowned and scraped his lower lip with chisel-teeth. He carried two slices of white bread, inserted them into the twin slots of the toaster. Apparently this was to constitute his breakfast-making today.

  Chuck asked, “Bobby went to the club?”

  “I saw him outside a little while ago.”

  Chuck made it a statement this time. “He went to the club.”

  Doug rubbed his hands together. “Toast looks like a good idea. IVe been up for hours but haven’t yet eaten a bite.” He gave his speech a rising inflection so as to imply that this denial had been his own idea.

  With excessive force Chuck pulled one of the chairs away from the kitchen table and dropped into it. “Have a seat,” he said to Doug. “The womenfolk are elsewhere.”

  It occurred to Doug that Chuck sometimes used quaint terms, especially with respect to females, had heard him actually say “gentler sex” once.

  He took a chair as asked. He could not remember having previously sat in this kitchen; on his brief visits he was wont to lean against a counter.

  Chuck put a fist on the tabletop between them. “I don’t know whether you’re aware, Connie’s got to the point at which she’s threatening to make real trouble.”

  Doug felt a reaction at the base of his skull, as if he had been seized, with pliers, at the nape. “Connie?”

  “Cunningham,” Chuck said impatiently. “I’ve talked with her. Obviously it’s my intention to be discreet—else I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  Connie Cunningham was a divorcee with whom Doug had lately had some six weeks of ardent sexual encounters. She was skinny, almost emaciated, with breasts consisting of little more than nipples, and her behind was flat, but her vulva could only be called inexhaustible. Indeed, the trouble had apparently been that none of her three husbands had been able to maintain the pace she demanded. Only Doug, eight to ten years older than the eldest of these men, had ever been her match. Anyway so she had assured him, and at first this news proved aphrodisiac. Lately it had been anything but, and as the weeks passed, Connie became ever rougher, seizing him painfully at the crotch on his entry into her apartment, in bed nipping at his glans with her horsey front teeth, riding him as if he were a recalcitrant bronco, bruising his ribs.

  Connie had not yet accepted the truth that she had been dumped: hence the anguished telephone messages on the tape in his answering machines at island and city addresses. Fortunately she had never learned the name of the firm; nowadays he routinely kept that a secret when he could. In the past he had too often been embarrassed before his relatives, who usually managed to make a spy of his secretary, for after all, they and not he held the effective power in the firm. “For God’s sake, Douglass,” said his uncle Whitson K. T. Graves III, who in addition to being on the boards of universities and hospitals had once been a wartime commanding officer of an elite regiment of the National Guard as well as, for the final eighteen months of one administration, ambassador to a little authoritarian state in Latin America. “Douglass, we all wet our whackers now and again, but we don’t wave them out the window!”

  “I had gone back to look for you,” said Chuck. “When the phone rang I answered it. I hadn’t been given any special instructions.” He stared at Doug. “She assumed I was you, and gave me quite a earful.”

  Doug raised his chin. “You see, I—”

  “Look,” said Chuck, “it’s better it happened this way. I gather you’ve given this person the boot, but she’s resisting.”

  “I—”

  The houseguest raised his slender hand, making it into a pistol, the muzzle of the index finger pointed at Doug’s chin. “This is something that requires no effort at all on your part. I’ll see it’s taken care of.”

  “Oh,” said Doug, “that won’t be—”

  “Please,” said Chuck, waving the hand that was still extended. “It’s the least I can do.” A bell sounded at the toaster, followed by a clicking metallic noise. The houseguest went to the counter.

  Doug’s embarrassment continued to grow. That he had no clear sense of what Chuck was proposing made it worse. And while Chuck was not as young as Bobby, he had yet to be born when Doug first had carnal knowledge of a female. With all respect to the young man, it did not seem right that he would assume authority in this matter—even though he might well be competent enough.

  Chuck returned along a route that included the refrigerator, from which he took a covered butter dish of thick glass.

  “She’s making too much of it,” said Doug.

  Chuck had reclaimed his seat and, working neatly, knifed shavings of butter off the firm stick and put them to melt on each piece of toast. “You don’t need that sort of thing, Doug: a man in your position.” He smiled. “Let’s drop the subject. It’s been taken care of.”

  This was news. Just a moment earlier he had put the statement in the future tense. What had happened since?

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Doug. “You’ve said something to Connie?”

  Chuck shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I just arrange things. I’m an idea man or maybe a diagnostician.” He crunched his teeth into the buttered toast. It was probably not his place to offer the other piece to Doug, for after all it was Doug’s kitchen, Doug who owned all the bread on the premises.

  Before another attempt could be made to get to the truth of the matter at hand, Audrey entered the ki
tchen.

  “Here you are,” said she, and it could be taken to refer to either one of them or both. “Golly, the toast smells goood.” She marched to the refrigerator. “How about some scrambled eggs to go with it?”

  Doug considered this to be one of the great suggestions of the era, but Chuck said, “A little late in the day for me, Audrey, but you go right ahead.”

  That was enough to discourage her even from preparing toast for herself and Doug. She sat down at the table, making a trio that might seem to the onlooker to be positively familial. “Well, what have you fellows been up to?” she asked as if jovially.

  Chuck had already devoured the first piece of toast. “Oh,” said he, and took time to lick several fingertips, though with a certain grace that seemed boyish, not coarse, “oh, Doug and I are involved in a conspiracy.” He grinned at his so-called partner. “And it wouldn’t be a conspiracy if we told you.” Perhaps because the emphasis seemed rude in retrospect, he added, after a pause, “Boy-talk.”

  But so far as Doug was concerned, that note made it worse. Said he to his wife, “Sports. Baseball. That’s the secret. It’s not as if we’re plotting a murder.”

  Chuck raised his eyebrows inscrutably.

  “I predict,” Audrey said suddenly, “that this will be a twenty-win year for the Soldier Boy.”

  “You might be right,” replied Chuck. “It’s certainly within the range of possibility, if that bone-chip problem can be licked.”

  It seemed to Doug as though they had begun to converse in a code for the reason of discomfiting him: he who was still shaken by Chuck’s being privy to the matter of Connie Cunningham.

  “Since when,” he indignantly asked Audrey, “have you been interested in baseball?”

  “Oh, I don’t know I can name a date. And I still haven’t actually ever seen a game except on television.”

  Doug wondered whether he should be offended: this was news to him. He was not the sort of man who liked women who were keen on sports, even if simply as spectators. Of course female athletes, drenched with sweat, were out of the question.