The Houseguest (9 page)

Audrey now advanced on him and laughed in his face. Doug slapped her across the left cheek, and she recoiled against the vanity.

Slowly returning to the upright position, she used an idiom that was unique for her. “You motherfucker.” She groped at the top of the dressing table and came up with a tiny cuticle scissors. “I'll cut your balls off if you touch me again.”

But her husband was once again in the state in which he seemed unable to see or hear her responses. “He's just a little runt,” said he, “but what chance would I have against a gun? I'm no coward, but neither am I suicidal.”

“Get out of here, you cocksucker,” Audrey cried. “And don't ever come back.” All the same, she had a terrible sense of powerlessness: never in her life had she voiced such language and thus now suspected it lacked the passionate conviction with which it was delivered by those to whom the gutter was home. In any event she always cowered when she heard it directed to others of their own kind by base types in the city, people with tattoos, shirts with the arms severed at the shoulders, caps bearing indecipherable devices, pushing wheeled contrivances or operating heavy machinery.

Doug continued to remain deaf to her speech. Could she be only
imagining
she spoke aloud? Of course she had for some years been given to abusing him tacitly in these terms, which strangely enough had seemed much stronger in the unspoken medium.

“But maybe, just maybe,” Doug was saying, “if his attention could be diverted for a moment, he could be successfully jumped. I don't know. I've kept myself in good shape, but he's at least twenty-five years younger.” He glared at her. “God Almighty, Audrey, must I be asked to perform a miracle?”

So the obscenities had not been of service. Audrey therefore returned to her old style, though she was still holding the cuticle scissors. “You're overwrought,” said she. “That woman has got you running in circles. You don't have the self-possession of years ago when you chased jailbait. You may be over the hill, Doug: you don't seem to know when it's over.”

Her husband was obliviously squinting past her. “You know, Aud,
you
could distract him. You have a motherly effect on him, Audrey! I've noticed that. He likes to impress you. That's what the cooking is all about.” He stared at the ceiling, as if exasperated at heaven. “What a pretty pass, when a man has to ask his wife for help in this kind of matter and can't expect any from his son, who is a gutless wonder.”

Audrey wondered whether to try to defend Bobby. The trouble here was that she basically agreed with Doug's assessment of their son. And Doug had just ignored her worst, which accurately reflected her genuine emotions. Furthermore, she still did not believe Doug's charges against Chuck. But that he was authentically exercised seemed obvious.

“All right,” she said for motives of practicality, and sighed. “Okay, I'll take it up with him if that will calm you down. There's nothing at all wrong with Chuck. He happens to be the nicest houseguest we've ever had. He's sweet and kind and, and …” She really did not want to praise him to someone whom she despised: it was the worst of taste. She at last found the nerve to look at herself in the dressing-table mirror, and was amazed not to be able to discern the mark of Doug's blow, which she still could feel—or had that too been only imaginary?

Doug now astonished her by saying, with apparent gratitude, “That's all I ask.”

“Just don't do anything desperate,” Audrey said. “There's a reasonable explanation for all of this, I'm sure. It's an optical fantasy or something. You'll see.” There was something here that might be puzzling but it could hardly be sinister. The fact was that Doug, despite his bluster, was a coward. Small wonder where Bobby got his own character. Were Audrey to take any of this seriously, she might well hope that Chuck would use his so-called gun to shoot her husband.

Bobby's search for Chuck was quickly successful. As he came in from the greenhouse after the outrageous encounter with his father, he saw the houseguest on the point of entering the sitting room off the deck, and he followed him.

Without turning to see who was behind, Chuck said, “Sit down. I want to talk to you.”

They chose facing chairs. Chuck spoke in a lowered voice. “Bobby, I'm sorry to say that I have been made to feel unwelcome here, and I'm leaving.”

“Aw,” Bobby groaned. “It's gone that far? Listen,
he's
the one that will be leaving any minute now. He always flies back on Sunday evenings. Stay till next Friday, anyway. He won't be back till then.
Everybody
wants you to stay.” Bobby had been right to refuse to take seriously Lydia's lack of enthusiasm for the houseguest: the next thing Chuck had done was save her life!

Chuck was shaking his head. “I'm afraid that would miss the point. There's a matter of pride, you know, of honor.” He crossed his legs. The cuff of his trousers rode up, exposing the gun in the ankle holster.

Bobby's reaction to this phenomenon was as it would have been to Chuck's sudden exposing of his genitals apropos of nothing. Blood suffused his face. It took all his strength not to permit his eyes to descend again, and the gun-bearing leg, supported by the other knee, was within the lower margin of his proper field of vision unless he stared above the houseguest's sleek scalp.

Bobby did what he could to steady his voice, but he was none too successful. “I wanted to, uh, say how grateful I am—we all are, even Dad had to admit that—” His voice cracked here, and he tried to clear his palate. Finally he shouted, in physical and moral desperation, “You saved Lydia's life, for God's sake!”

Chuck nodded silently.

“Well,” said Bobby, “there you are. We can't tell you how grateful we are, we all are. …” He had successfully brought his voice under control, but now it rose again to a shout. “
It never happened before:
a guest saving anyone's life!” That his father had been right, that Chuck carried a gun did not necessarily mean that he did so with criminal intent, but the problem was how to ask him about it without being offensive and inhospitable.

And Chuck was not helping. He continued to nod in silence.

“With my father you have to consider the source. He's jealous. Everything manly has to be done by him. He couldn't forgive you for saving the life of a young female, furthermore his daughter-in-law. He sees that as reflecting adversely on
him.”

Chuck leaned forward with an arched eyebrow and spoke at last. “What are you saying, Bobby? That he and Lydia—?”

Funny, Bobby had quarreled with his father in response to a suggestion that Lydia and Chuck might be sexual partners. “Oh, no,” he said hastily. “Nothing like that.”

“Then he's changed his ways?”

How could Chuck have known? Bobby had never mentioned his father's nasty habits to anyone but … Lydia. He shook his head violently. “No,” he repeated. “That's not true.”

“What's not true?” Chuck asked. “That he never made advances to the girls you brought here in the past, some of them underaged? Or that he simply hasn't got around to putting the make on your wife?”

Bobby hated the turn the conversation had taken, because it required him to defend his father. “Really, Chuck,” he said, “I think you've got the wrong impression, with all respect. Dad might not be perfect, but—”

“There's a lot of deceit in this house,” Chuck said. “That's what strikes me as a guest: how much you all lie to one another. Unless you're all simply that insensitive and unobservant.”

He might very well be correct, but Bobby felt awfully squeamish about considering such a theory with a stranger, which apparently was not an unfair designation for Chuck, whom it had been established that neither his father, Lydia, nor he had known prior to Chuck's self-institution as houseguest … unless of course Lydia was lying.

Bobby found the courage to ask, “Are you an old friend of my mother's?”

“Q.E.D.,” said Chuck with an air of triumph. “Now, what is that, mere insensitivity?”

Bobby was embarrassed. “Well,” he said finally, “the important thing is we all want you to stay. Don't pay any attention to my father. He goes off half-cocked.”

“I haven't had any trouble with Doug. Far from it! He's been a perfect host.” Chuck frowned. “If you must know, Bobby, it's Lydia. She seldom misses an occasion to make it clear she dislikes me.”

Bobby felt enormous relief. He cried out in false exasperation, “And you just saved her life!”

“I'm afraid that hasn't made much difference,” said Chuck. “She has some kind of basic aversion, I guess. Perhaps it's a visceral thing.”

“Oh, that isn't true at all! All she can talk about now is what a hero you were.”

Chuck said sadly, “I'm afraid she hasn't told me.”

It was not right for Lydia to withhold her gratitude from the very man who most should hear it. A new facet of her character was here being revealed. When with Bobby, she talked only of Chuck's feat. She was using this thing as an instrument of power. Bobby usually submitted to her wishes, but he could not put up with this situation, which placed him in a sensitive situation with Chuck, and Chuck, for whatever reason, carried a gun.

Bobby therefore decided to pass the buck to his wife. “Say,” he told the houseguest now, “you go and knock on her door. She's just napping. Go and tell her you're leaving, and you just see what she says.”

“I don't know,” said Chuck. “Isn't that somewhat degrading?”

“I don't think so. She really ought to do the right thing, and I'll say this: it isn't like Lydia to neglect something like that.”

“Oh,” asked Chuck, “you thought I was referring to myself?”

The question was too cryptic for Bobby, who shrugged and said, “Please do it, Chuck, and please don't leave. We need you.” The houseguest had long since crossed his legs the other way, but the cuff at his armed ankle had caught on the butt of the pistol and had not descended. Bobby had been peripherally looking at the weapon throughout the conversation, but he still lacked the nerve to ask about it.

Chuck slowly smiled at him. “You may be right. Still …”

“Oh, don't worry about waking her up. Look, but for you she wouldn't be safely napping in a dry bed.”

“Maybe you should lead the way.”

“Oh, no,” said Bobby. “This is something between you and her. It would be bad taste for me to intervene.” Furthermore, he had missed completing his own nap, from which he had been harshly awakened by Lydia with the news of her near-drowning, and the encounter with his father had exhausted him further. If left alone he could easily snooze while slumped in the wicker chair in the far corner of the room, away from the deck.

“It's your idea then,” said Chuck. “You have only yourself to blame.”

His father had turned out to be right about the houseguest's carrying a gun, but was it likely that a criminal would be so emotionally vulnerable as Chuck had proved? Leaving a house because his feelings were hurt? Wouldn't a criminal simply shoot the offending person? Not that Bobby did not pay the revolver the respect it deserved. It was just that he saw no reason to panic. This was an appropriate era in which to possess an effective means of self-protection. The so-called martial arts were useless against a vicious assailant. The college karate champ, on a visit to the city, was all but killed when attacked, on a crowded midtown street, by a crazed man wielding a souvenir dagger.

Whatever the ambiguities with respect to Chuck, he had done a certifiable job of lifesaving—or, at any rate, according to Lydia, and what motive would she have had to lie?

“You'll see,” Bobby told the departing Chuck. “She thinks the world of you.”

*   *   *

Lydia was experiencing that kind of sleep that is profound yet does not delude the sleeper into believing for a moment that it is routine consciousness: the bogeyman cannot appear, and one does not suffer from a sense of one's unpunished criminality or a monstrous passion for a near blood-relative. It is the sleep that, with luck, sometimes follows the worst phase of an illness, signifying a definite turn towards recovery. That she now enjoyed it rather than a nightmare suggested the basic soundness of her being, body and spirit. In her sleep she began to develop a conviction that she was invulnerable. A Chuck would inevitably appear to pluck her back from the brink of catastrophe. Hers was a charmed life.

Therefore when Bobby changed his mind and came back and got into bed with her, she determined not to wake up more than just enough to receive him, for with thorough consciousness would come the reasonable recognition that she was as mortal as ever, if not, given the near-drowning, more so. But her slow opening of legs was not quick enough to meet his unprecedented impatience. He spread them violently and with little preamble thrust himself into the closest of all connections, even hurting her a little, though she never could be called tardy in response, and she approved of this new brutality, at the outset anyway, as an appropriate sequel to her brush with dying.

Weary, she easily relinquished the self-command ordinarily at stake here: at the moment it was more sensible to serve than to lead. Only a determination not to wake up made it possible for her to admit to no amazement at Bobby's transformation into a savage lover, but then everything in existence was all at once unprecedented since her death and miraculous rebirth. Her husband furthermore was now proving inexhaustible, he who formerly had come and gone so briskly, and even in her somnolence she was undergoing a series of intensities, each nearer the edge of paroxysm than the last, and had each not been accompanied by more distracting pain of a nonerotic nature, she might have expired of pleasure … but the fact remained that while he made “love,” he was mutilating the skin of her back and buttocks with bladelike fingernails and then, without disengaging at the pelvis, managed to writhe into a position in which his teeth were embedded in a sizable piece of her breast.