The Houseguest

by Thomas Berger

  “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.

  Fortunately, his formerly elongated body had lately dwindled to be hardly more than hers, and with a great heave that used more strength than she ordinarily commanded, she dislodged him and rolled out from under, over the edge of the bed, hit the floor, and was up instantly and in a rage.

  But he was not Bobby. He was Chuck Burgoyne.

  Lydia was aware that she had license to faint at this moment: it was not fair that all these things could happen at once, if ever, to a person like her, who always tried to do the right thing. But she was also aware that on awakening again she would never be able to find more than a few fragments of her former self.

  Chuck was spread-eagled on the tangled bedclothes, which included the damp towel in which she had earlier come from the shower. He too was visibly damp at the groin, with matted hairs, and some of this wetness was surely of her own secretion, her property, to be dispensed only of her own volition. He was therefore a house-breaker.

  He grinned and spoke genially. “You must have liked it: you came three or four times.” He reached for her at the lower thigh and was rapidly ascending as she jumped away.

  She went even farther from the bedside, but made no move towards her clothing or even to cover herself, modesty being beside the point now. “I could kill you for this,” she said. Her breast was stinging where he had bitten her, but that was the least of it.

  At last he began to suspect that her reaction did not honor him. He jeered. “Kill me? I just saved your life. That means you’re mine, I’ve got a right to you. Just think about it, and you’ll have to agree.”

  “No, I don’t!” she cried. “I don’t have to do anything.”

  The statement made him smile. “Come on, we’ve got something, you and me. We’re not like them.”

  Lydia was breathing as rapidly as if she were still performing the act of copulation. “I’m not like you,” she said. “Don’t ever think that.”

  “Hell,” said Chuck, stretching, yawning, “you don’t know me. But that can be easily corrected. Meanwhile, just get back over here. Don’t worry about that prize husband of yours: he’s occupied. He won’t walk in on us—not that I’d care much if he did.”

  In truth she had not yet given Bobby a thought, but now, guiltily, she cried, “You haven’t hurt him?”

  He guffawed. “What would you care? You’re out to take him for all he’s got. You haven’t fooled me for a minute.”

  “Where is he? Have you done something to him?”

  Chuck compressed his lips, then opened them to say archly, “You’ve got to come over here to find out.”

  Lydia was beginning to feel her nakedness in a moral way. She backed towards the built-in dresser drawer that held her underwear. Somehow she believed her least vulnerable side was that which gave clearest access to her sex organs, perhaps because he had already used them. She bent slightly at the knee, and with a hand behind her, opened the drawer. Funny how vanity could not be forgotten altogether no matter the extremity: by touch alone she tried to find one of her more attractive pairs of pants. Obviously this was not for the purpose of inciting his ardor, but rather an honoring of her mother’s principle that the victim of an accident need never feel shame when wearing clean underwear. For what had happened here was a terrible accident, of which she had clearly been victim and not perpetrator, but then why did she suffer from such guilt? How could she, in a state of pristine ignorance, have failed to respond to him? Oh, retroactively it was easy enough to recognize the many differences in touch and rhythm and warmth and texture and on and on, including smell, Bobby being virtually odorless while Chuck had in recent memory used shaving lotion or cologne and soon exuded the natural musky scent of sex. But in the heat of the encounter details were as nothing; ripeness was all.

  Damn, she could find nothing identifiable with the groping hand behind her back. She turned and seized any old pair and climbed into them. She whirled around, now in the white hip-huggers but still bare-breasted, and shouted at him, “All right, you saved my life. You have a right to my gratitude, but not to my person! I don’t care what your theory is!”

  “I hope,” said Chuck, “you’re not going to claim you didn’t enjoy it.” At least he was finally limp by now, and consequently not quite as arrogant, and he had lost his grin. His hair had stayed perfectly combed. Lydia’s own was undoubtedly a mess: soaked in the sea and then the shower, roughly rumpled by towel, then slept on, then whatever happened to it during the act. She could not yet bear to look at herself in a mirror.

  She stared at Chuck. “You raped me, you bastard. I was sleeping!” Which though not exactly true in particular, did support the general incontestable point, namely, that one’s body was one’s own, and lawful access to it by another could be gained only by permit, real or genuinely implied. Nowadays not even marriage provided unconditional license to one spouse to use the other without the latt
er’s agreement. “I never did one thing to suggest I wanted your sexual attentions. Not one thing! God damn you.”

  There was an awful feeling in the crotch of her underpants. For an instant she believed she had, humiliatingly, urinated in the emotion of the moment, but suddenly understood that it was instead the emerging of the semen that had been injected into her, under false pretenses, by the man on her bed, and she was on no contraceptive medication; Bobby nowadays used condoms, his idea: the constriction helped keep him firm… . God, she was full of the stuff, her pants were soaked, and one only microscopic spermatazöon could do the job of procreation. What if she became pregnant by reason of this scum’s scum?

  She rushed into the bathroom, tore off the pants, used the toilet, then quickly douched, but the complexities of the process of generation were such that none of this provided any insurance whatever. At last she stared at herself in the mirror. She looked exactly like somebody who had been drowned, brought to life, and raped.

  Chuck entered while she was so engaged, marched to the toilet bowl, and grossly, with a powerfully pressured torrent, began to empty his bladder. Had she possessed a weapon, the time to get him would have been now, as he spread-legged himself before the toilet bowl. But if the weapon had a keen edge, what a mess there would be! A bludgeon might be aesthetically preferable, but would she have had the strength to deliver a lethal blow? That he would get away with this vile deed, however, was insupportable. It went without saying that her father and brothers would be eager to avenge her, but this was precisely the kind of shame that she would do anything to keep secret from those of her own blood, for irrespective of the necessity for revenge, no male of her family would really believe her account, given the peculiar circumstances. To begin with, her father had always thought her too tarty ever since the onset of her pubescence. First she had been indecently premature in wearing a brassiere and makeup; then when, after a few years, she gave up the former altogether and the latter in part and shortened her hair, she “looked like a boy,” and that was perhaps even more immoral. Taking up with Bobby Graves was the ultimate example of character failure: the Graveses would have been unpleasantly astonished to know how poorly they measured on the gauges of religion, culture, and even social status when the criterion was “our own kind.” “You know what they would call that,” Lydia had blurted in sheer exasperation. “Gangsters!” At which her mother said her mouth should be washed out with soap, and her father had not subsequently spoken to her though had sent an outlandishly large check on hearing she had married the guy. They had yet to meet Bobby. On this visit she was meeting his parents for the first time. And within a week she had been raped by another guest under the same roof.