The Houseguest Page 5

  Lydia shrugged. “Good to know such things.”

  Bobby grinned lazily. “We don’t get tidal waves here. Sometimes there’s the tail end of a hurricane, but you’re safer inside this house than out where you could get hit by falling trees.”

  “You didn’t happen to check the tailpipe after the car stopped?”

  “Why should I have done that?”

  “Oh,” said Lydia, “I was just thinking if something, some foreign object, had been stuck in there, the result would have been just about what happened. The engine would stop if the exhaust was blocked.”

  He smiled smugly. “You’re as knowledgeable as Chuck. No, I wouldn’t have thought of that. But Chuck already said it was flooded: that’s something else entirely, though, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like you’re headed for a nap,” Lydia observed, changing the subject. “Mind if I join you?”

  “No, but I really am drowsy.”

  “You mean I should keep my hands to myself?”

  He laughed helplessly. It was flattering to him to be always in such demand.

  After the belated (and, in truth, rotten) breakfast Doug told Audrey that he must repair to his study forthwith for the purpose of catching up on some work, in the course of which he might well be telephoning business associates in the city.

  “The private line certainly comes in handy,” said his wife. He narrowed his eyes at her. “Otherwise,” she hastily explained, “somebody might tie up one phone with mere chatter.” She rippled the surface of her forehead. “Though, it’s true that I haven’t heard from anybody for ever so long. You’d think nobody had gotten here yet. Since we decided to cancel the party I don’t want to call anyone else first, or they’ll assume I’m calling to invite them, you see, and then I’ll have to explain, and I would have to do that again with every person I called. Better just to stay silent until someone gets in touch with me. I had expected someone would by now. After all, the party was an institution. But then, it’s only been a few days. The inquiries will come next week.”

  “I’m sure wrists will be slashed all over the island,” said Doug as he left. When he reached his study he locked the door behind him. It had been unfortunate that Chuck had found such easy access to the place at just the moment Connie phoned. In his years of venery he had never been caught out in such a fashion.

  Connie was a real pain, but never would he have wanted any harm to come to her, or in any event, none for which he had somehow set the stage. He was troubled by what Chuck had said, ridiculous as it was to find sinister implications in the sympathetic response of a houseguest and friend of the family to an intimate matter concerning the head of that family. Chuck would hardly be under this roof were he capable of criminality.

  And yet Doug found himself doing now that which would have been most unlikely in any other situation: namely, phoning a woman whom he had determined to discard.

  She answered on the second ring, simultaneously relieving him and putting him under a new threat. Her voice sounded normal enough. If he identified himself, he would be right back in the soup. He silently hung up and consulted his pocket address book for a number at which he could reach Chrissy Milhaven, who was some sort of distant cousin of his on his mother’s side. He had read an announcement of her forthcoming marriage in Friday’s newspaper, in town. Whether he and Audrey would be invited to this ceremony was doubtful: he had had no association with that branch of the family for years and had not seen Chrissy since she was a very plain thirteen. But the photograph in the paper showed the comely face of a person of twenty-three. It seemed worth his while to renew old ties of blood.

  He called the number he had for Chrissy’s parents, for apparently she still lived at home, in the vast apartment they maintained in the city, with its roof garden that went around three sides of the building.

  Luckily a maid answered, so he did not have to speak with Millicent, Chrissy’s mother, an acerb woman with whom he had simply never hit it off.

  “Hi, cousin,” said he when Chrissy came on the telephone. He identified himself. “Just saw your announcement.” He answered some commonplace, lackluster questions. “Yes, fine. Yes, everybody. That’s right, he did get married, privately. Very privately; some country courthouse. Uh-huh. She’s from—out of town. But say, Chrissy, I must say you’ve become quite a beauty since we last got together. We have some catching up to do before you tie the knot, I should say. It’s been too long.” He suggested they have a drink when he was back in town, middle of the week.

  “You’ll like Stephen,” said Chrissy, with the slight lisp she had retained over the years.

  Doug had always felt superior to a man with impedimented speech, but he found it erotic in a female. Also, he was unusually attracted to women who were soon to be married, and there was something special with a person he could remember as an almost ugly little girl. Finally, that he was at least remotely related to her added its own excitement. The result was a growing lust for Chrissy. He was never gross in a situation of this kind: the force of his passion would be exerted subliminally, concealed within or beneath banalities, but if she were the right subject, she would receive these messages with clarity and make an appropriate response. If not, then no harm was done: she might not even be certain that an overture had been made. In his career of lechery Doug had to date made perhaps a half dozen such attempts on the virtue of a newly created financée. He had been successful only once, but even he considered it astonishing that nobody amongst these young women had apparently been offended by his attentions. Two pretended not to understand him, but three professed to be flattered. As to his successful project, it continued throughout the first year of the bride’s marriage, for the husband while an amiable companion proved intimately enervate.

  “I thought just the two of us,” Doug said now, “you and me, for old times’ sake, to catch up on things. After all, we’re family. Then comes Steve.”

  His intonation was that of near levity. But Chrissy’s response proved humorless.

  “As you might expect, I’m awfully rushed these days. When we get back from abroad we’ll have you and Audrey over for a sip or a bite.”

  As if the general rudeness was not sufficient to discourage him, he despised women who employed such little phrases. Also, it was really difficult to suppose that in only a few years she had been transformed from that repulsive child into an attractive woman. He regretted having called her, the probable result of which would be that he and Audrey would now get an invitation to the wedding.

  He heard a splash outside, and went to the high little window in the alcove to look out at the pool, the northern half of which could be seen from this perspective. Audrey, not he, had wanted this house of unorthodox perspectives: she had had a crush on the architect, an imperious, leonine-headed man who was a celebrity in his field and charged an appropriate fee.

  Suddenly a swimsuited girl with an exquisite behind walked into his field of view. For a moment Doug had no idea whatever of who she was, even found himself hoping she might be a trespasser, perhaps one of the young female Finches, of whom there was always a new supply, probably dim-witted owing to the poor genes circulated throughout generations of intermarriage. Doug had seen such youthful slatterns over the summers since his own pubescence, but owing to his fear of the males of their blood, and also a certain delicacy of taste that gave preference to flesh of better breeding, he had not had a struggle with himself to abstain from making a personal approach.

  But this one, whoever she could be, was on his property.

  Then she turned her face so that it could be identified, within its tight white bathing cap, in profile, and of all people this person was his daughter-in-law. How had he failed until this moment to notice that she had the cutest little ass on the island? Because she habitually wore loose skirts or oversized shorts, and he had never before seen her attired for swimming.

  He decided to join her at poolside, but before he could leave the room the telephone produced an ele
ctronic tone within the polished wooden box in which it was kept. There were only two such tones before the answering machine took over. Chuck’s story of happening to be present when Connie Cunningham called and surrendering to the typically human impulse to answer a ringing phone was difficult to accept: to reach the instrument before the machine was activated, he would have had to work quickly for one who was presumably a stranger to Doug’s communications center.

  Doug now manipulated the volume control on the answering device, so that he could listen to the voice of the caller, if indeed any came, for one of the useful functions of the machine in dealing with the likes of Connie Cunningham was to discourage them from leaving any message or even an identification.

  But the voice proved to be that of a man, an unpleasant, cynical man if his current mode of expression was representative.

  “Pick it up, you fucker you. I know you’re there. Don’t jerk me off.”

  Though Doug included amongst his acquaintances nobody who could have spoken in this style except in jest, he felt an inexplicable obligation to reveal his presence at the other end of the line.

  “I’m afraid,” he said into the instrument, “you have the wrong number. That is—”

  He was interrupted brutally before reaching the first digit.

  “No,” said the voice, “you got the wrong phone, sonny boy. Now put it down and get me Chaz.”

  Offended by the man’s tone, Doug hung up. Hell with it, why give civility when it wasn’t returned. He put the phone back into the box. In another instant the machine was accepting another call. After listening to his own recorded voice announce the number and ask for a message, he again heard the voice of the previous caller. This time it was even uglier.

  “You do that to me again, dicklicker, and I’ll make you scream for mercy. Now you go find him. You tell him Jack Perlmutter says okay. You do that and maybe I won’t hurt you.” Perlmutter, assuming it was he and not some spokesman for him, rang off abruptly.

  Though Doug had every reason to be furious, he was mostly frightened. To speak so to a man whom he did not know, Perlmutter obviously possessed considerable power. Else how could he so easily assume that Doug would not prove dangerous if provoked? Unless of course the man was a nut case of the sort it was routine to encounter in the city. There are persons who if denied what they believe is their right of way will leap from their car, draw a pistol, and shoot down the other driver. One read in the papers that on public transport a passenger will knife another who trips on his foot, and Doug had had personal experience of cabdrivers who verbally abuse their passengers and threaten to do worse if any complaint is sounded. How is it that the target of the aggressor never happens to be one of the other violent people at large? Is it never dangerous for the threatener, on whose approach the intended victim might draw his own gun and get off the first shot? Not only would such reversal of roles seem to violate a basic law of human intercourse, but the Perlmutters of the world have an unerring sense of when to strike. Doug was no coward, but he had been taken utterly offguard.

  He went into his bedroom and lay down. Had Chuck been spying on him? Only now did it occur to him to wonder whether Chuck might be Perlmutter’s “Chaz.” Or rather, only now did he summon up the courage to entertain that possibility: underneath it all, he had never been in doubt.

  Lydia’s family had the biggest pool in town, and there were always relatives in the water who would teach a younger child to swim. Bobby’s story of being purposely almost drowned by a malicious larger cousin could be matched by nothing in the history of Lydia’s childhood.

  The Graveses’ pool was of normal size, and therefore if only one more person shared it with her, she felt crowded: this was true even if the other person happened to be Bobby, who however—and unexpectedly, given his proficiency at the other summer sports—seldom entered the pool, and when he did so, swam none too well. As to the nearby ocean, no one from the Graves family went into or on it, and when Lydia once asked about this abstention, Bobby failed to give a real answer, mumbled something about currents and shrugged lugubriously, and hoping as she did to overcome the influence of her mother, who on any pretext would querulously question her father to the point at which he lost his temper, Lydia did not pursue the matter, though it seemed unusual that people would spend their summers surrounded by an element into which they would not dip their toes.

  By now the day had become warmer and more humid than it looked when one faced the inland greenery. There were individual air-conditioners in the rooms, but it went against Lydia’s grain to resort to unnatural cooling at oceanside. However, when she plunged into the pool she found the water sickeningly warm as soup. This could not have been the effect of mere sunlight, which owing to the nearby trees fell directly on only about half of the surface.

  God’s sake, was the pool heater on? She climbed up and out on the chromium ladder at the deep end and walked drippingly to the little structure that contained the filtering mechanism and the heater, here of utilitarian design and screened by bushes, not the miniature Swiss chalet her father had had specially designed and conspicuously situated.

  Indeed, the thermostat was set at 92 degrees, and why, when the older Graveses never swam there, and Bobby’s style was to paddle briefly at the shallow end, then climb up to sit on the rim, long shins in the water, to watch her racing dive and three fast laps, each in another style: breast, butterfly, crawl. That she might have been Olympic material had been routinely pointed out by relatives and friends, and nowadays her husband as well, but the truth was that in this day and age only obsessive-compulsives could compete for any kind of prize: people not simply willing but fanatically eager to incinerate the self to fuel a career. Ha, Lydia would say, I’ve got too much sense for that. By now of course she was a decade too old for a sport in which you were prime at twelve.

  She brought the thermostat down to 60; in this season, despite the cool nights, the water by noon was always naturally warmer than that. But her swim had been put out of the question this afternoon. It would take hours for the temperature of the water to fall to an acceptable level—unless the ocean were considered. Why this seemed a daring, almost forbidden thought had altogether and exclusively to do with the moral atmosphere of the Graves house. Millions of human beings swam in the ocean that surrounded the islands comprising the earth, some even in places where sharks and barracuda patrolled the shore or where pollution was a scandal, or where terrorists might swoop in on rubber rafts and slaughter everybody on the sand. None of these hazards was to be feared in her in-laws’ waters.

  Lydia thereupon decided to go down and swim in the sea. The most direct route was through the house, but attired as she was, justifiably so in the open air, she felt indecent when under a roof. Why then she had failed to wear a robe from room to pool could not be explained except as defiance of her own prudery. In any event she displayed less than had Chuck when wantonly asleep. Lydia was not overfleshed at any point; there were even times when she considered herself flat-chested. She was hardly spilling out of the bathing suit.

  The beach, when she finally reached it, was floored with stones, not sand: no surprise, but what she had not been prepared for was the difference between walking here with and without shoes. Her route to the water was uncomfortable, and the ocean on her entry was so cold as to numb the lower extremities as it rose to cover them, and when nevertheless she bravely launched her body in the horizontal attitude, the frigidity of the destructive element all but paralyzed her organs of respiration. But in an instant that concern was as nothing to the awful knowledge that she was immediately the captive of a violent undercurrent that could not have been anticipated from the appearance of the modest surf.

  She was being swept away, and nothing helped that she had learned from near-Olympic feats in quiet pools. She had no technique, no self-command, and chokingly full of water, too soon (or perhaps, in another view, for it was all terror and pain, too late) she had no existence.

  … Even in
the dream she was quite aware of the impossibility of puking while you were being kissed, yet that was what was happening. Next she lay prone on an unyielding bed of gravel. A creature larger than herself clung to her back, perhaps trying in some monstrous fashion to copulate with her. It was ugly and absurd. She wept.

  “Lydia!” a stern, almost military voice cried down. It was the person, a man, who had earlier been kissing her, not for erotic purposes but to claim her for life; not trying to penetrate her sexually, but rather performing the emergency maneuvers by which she might be revived.

  He turned her over and stared down. He was still straddling her thighs. “Are you okay?” He was Chuck Burgoyne.

  She gestured feebly. He pulled her to a sitting position. Her head was almost unbearably heavy. Her air passages felt raw.

  He grimaced. “I got more than I bargained for from the kiss of life. I then used the old but still effective hands-on technique. You hadn’t been under long.” He stood up, then bent, offering both hands. “Let’s do some walking. Yes, right now! Else you’ll feel worse.”

  He did almost all the work in erecting her to her feet. She had little will for the effort and less strength.

  He supported her, but demanded, “Come on, walk!”

  She was offended by the tone, but in the next instant remembered it was he who had saved her life and so acquired a certain authority over it. She wept softly, humiliated by the memory of the powerlessness into which she had fallen with the first grasp of the undertow.

  He misinterpreted the tears. “You’re all right now!”

  She smelled the vomit on herself, and cried more bitterly.

  He walked her to and fro. He was right: she felt somewhat better. He was wrong: she felt much worse.

  “I’m a good swimmer,” she said resentfully. “I could have—” She struggled for self-possession. She thanked him for saving her life.