Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  He got out of his car and pounded on the cabin door, and a man named Bill Chess came limping into view. Bunting gave Bill Chess a drink from a pint of rye in his pocket and they sat on a flat rock and talked. Bill Chess’s wife had left him and his mother had died. He was lonely in the mountains. He didn’t know anything about Derace Kingsley’s mother. Eventually, they went up the heavy wooden steps to Kingsley’s cabin and Chess unlocked the door and they went inside to the hushed warmth. Bunting’s heart was breaking. Everything he saw looked like a postcard from a world without grief. The floors were plain and the beds were neat. Bill Chess sat down on one of the cream-colored bedspreads while Bunting opened the door to the bathroom. The air was hot, and the stink of blood stopped him as soon as he stepped inside. Bunting moved to the shower curtain, knowing that what was left of Crystal Kingsley’s body lay inside the tub. He held his breath and grasped the curtain. When he pushed it aside, Bill Chess cried out behind him. “Muriel! Sweet Christ, it’s Muriel!” But there was no body in the tub, only a bloodstain hardening as it oozed toward the drain.

  NINE

  At seven-thirty on Friday night, Bunting sat at a table facing the entrance of One Fifth Avenue, alternately checking his watch and looking at the door. He had arrived fifteen minutes before, dressed in one of his best suits, showered, freshly shaved, black wingtips and teeth brushed, his mouth tingling with Binaca. To get to the bar, which was already crowded, you had to walk past the tables, and Bunting planned to get a good look at this woman before she saw him. After that he would know what to do. The waitress came around, and he ordered another vodka martini. Bunting thought he felt comfortable. His heart was beating fast, and his hands were sweaty, but that was okay, Bunting thought—after all, this was his first date, his first real date, since he had broken up with Veronica. In another sense, one he did not wish to consider, this was his first date in twenty years. Every couple of minutes, he went to the men’s room and splashed water on his face. He fluffed up his hair and buffed his shoes with paper towels. Then he went back to his table and sipped his drink and watched the door.

  He wished that he had thought of secreting an Ama in one of his pockets. Even a loose nipple would work: he could tuck it into his mouth whenever he felt anxious. Or just keep it in his pocket!

  Bunting shot his cuffs, ran a hand over his hair, looked at his watch. He leaned on his elbows and stared at the people in the bar. Most of them were younger than himself, and all of them were talking and laughing. He checked the door again. A young woman with black hair and round glasses had just entered, but it was still only twenty minutes to eight—far too early for Marty. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, wondering if he ought to go back into the bathroom and splash more water on his face. He felt a little bit hot. Still okay, but just a tad hot. He advised himself to think about all those times he had gone to fancy places with Veronica, and shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to remember the exact feelings of walking into Quaglino’s beside his tall, executive girlfriend.…

  “Bob? Bob Bunting?” someone said in his ear, and he jumped forward as if he had been jabbed with a fork. His chest struck the table, and his glass wobbled. He stabbed out a hand to grasp the drink and knocked it over. Clear liquid spilled out and stained the tablecloth dark. Two large olives rolled across the table, and one of them fell to the floor. Bunting uttered a short, mortifying shriek. The woman who had spoken to him was laughing. She placed a hand on his arm. He whirled around on his chair, bumping his elbow on the table’s edge, and found the black-haired woman who had just entered the restaurant staring down him with a quizzical alarm.

  “After all that, I hope you are Bob Bunting,” she said.

  Bunting nodded. “I hope I am, too,” he said. “I don’t seem to be too sure, do I? But who are you? Do we know each other?”

  “I’m Marty,” she said. “Weren’t you waiting for me?”

  “Oh,” he said, understanding everything at last. She was a short, round-faced young woman with a restless, energetic quality that made Bunting instantly feel tired. Her eyes were very blue and her lipstick was very red. At the moment she seemed to be inwardly laughing at him. “Excuse me, my goodness,” he said, “yes, of course, how nice to meet you.” He got to his feet and held out his hand.

  She took it, not bothering to conceal her amusement. “You been here long?”

  She had a strong New York accent.

  “A little while,” he confessed.

  “You wanted to check me out, didn’t you?”

  “Well, no. Not really.” He thought with longing of his room, his bed, his wall of bottles, and The Lady in the Lake. “How did you know who I was?”

  “Frank described you, how else? He said you’d be dressed like a lawyer and that you looked a little shy. Do you want to have another drink here, now that I made you spill that one? I’ll have one, too.”

  He took her coat to the checkroom, and when he returned he found a fresh martini at his place, a glass of white wine in front of Marty, and a clean tablecloth on the table. She was smiling at him. He could not decide if she was unusually pretty or just disconcerting.

  “You did get here early to check me out, didn’t you?” she asked. “If you didn’t like the way I looked, you could duck out when I went into the bar.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “Why not? I would. Why do you think I got here so early? I wanted to check you out. Blind dates make me feel funny. Anyhow, I knew who you were right away, and you didn’t look so bad. I was afraid you might be real stuffy, from what Frank said about you, but I knew that anybody as nervous as you couldn’t really be stuffy.”

  “I’m not nervous,” Bunting said.

  “Then why did you go off like a bomb when I said your name?”

  “You startled me.”

  “Well, I couldn’t have startled you if you weren’t nervous. It’s okay. You never saw me before, either. So tell me the truth—if you saw me walk in the door, and if I didn’t notice you, would you have cut out? Or would you have gone through with it?”

  She raised her glass and sipped. Her eyes were so blue that the color had leaked into the whites, spreading a faint blue nimbus around the irises. He saw for the first time that she was wearing a black dress that fit her tightly, and that her eyebrows were firm black lines. She seemed exotic, almost mysterious, startlingly good-looking. Then he suddenly saw her naked, a vision of smooth white skin and large soft breasts.

  “Oh,” he said, “I would have gone through with it, of course.”

  “Why are you blushing? Your whole face just turned red.”

  He shrugged in an agony of embarrassment. He was certain that she knew what he had been thinking. He gulped at his drink.

  “You’re not exactly what I expected, Bob,” she said in a very dry voice.

  “Well, you’re not quite what I expected, either,” was all he could think to say. Unable to look at her, he was sitting straight upright on his chair and facing the happy crowd in the bar. How were those men able to be so casual? How did they think of things to say?

  “How well do you know Frank and Lindy?” she asked.

  “I work with Frank.” He glanced over at her, then looked back at the happy, untroubled people in the bar. “We’re in the same office.”

  “That’s all? You don’t see him after work?”

  He shook his head.

  “You made a big impression on Frank,” she said. “He seems to think…Bob, would you mind looking at me, Bob? When I’m talking to you?”

  Bunting cleared his throat and turned to face her. “Sorry.”

  “Is anything wrong? Anything I should know about? Do I look just like the person you hated most in the fourth grade?”

  “No, I like the way you look,” Bunting said.

  “Frank acted like you were this real swinger. This wild man. ‘Long fangs, Marty,’ he says to me, ‘this guy has got long, long fangs,’ you know how Frank talks. This means he likes you. So I
figured if Frank Herko liked you so much, how bad could you be? Because Frank Herko acts like a real asshole, but underneath, he’s a real sweetheart.” She sipped her wine and continued looking at him coolly. “So I got all dolled up and took the train into Manhattan, figuring at least I might get some fun out of the evening, go to some clubs, maybe a good restaurant, meet this wild man, if I have to fight him off when it’s all-over, well, I can do that. But it’s not like that, is it? You don’t know any clubs—you don’t really go out much, do you, Bobby?”

  Bunting stood up and took a twenty out of his wallet. He was blushing so hard his ears felt twice their normal size. He put the money down on the table and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to waste your time.”

  Marty grinned. “Hold on, will you?” She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. “Don’t act that way, I’m just saying you’re different from what I expected. Sit down. Please. Don’t be so…”

  Bunting sat down, and she let go of his wrist. He could still feel her fingers around him. The sensation made him feel slightly dizzy. He was looking at her pale clever pretty face.

  “So scared” she said. “There’s no reason for that. Let’s just sit here and talk. In a while, we can go out and eat somewhere. Or we could even eat here. Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, recovering. “We can just sit here and talk.”

  “So say something,” Marty said. She frowned. “Do you always sweat this much? Or is it just me?”

  He wiped his forehead. “I, uh, had a kind of funny week. Things have been affecting me in an odd way. I broke up with somebody a little while ago.”

  “Frank told me. Me, too. That’s why he thought we ought to meet each other. But I think you ought to think of another topic.”

  “I don’t have any topics,” Bunting said.

  “Guys all talk about sports. I like sports. Honest, I really do. I’m a Yankee fan from way back. And I like Islanders games. But basketball is my favorite sport. Who do you like? Larry Bird, I bet— you look like a Larry Bird type. Guys who like Larry Bird never like Michael Jordan, I don’t know why.”

  “Michael who?” Bunting said.

  “Okay, football. Phil Simms. The Jets. The good old Giants. Lawrence Taylor.”

  “I hate football.”

  “Okay, what about music? What kind of music do you like? You ever hear house music?”

  Bunting imagined a house like a child’s drawing, two windows on either side of a simple door, dancing to notes spilling from the chimney attached to its pointed roof.

  Marty tilted her head and smiled at him. “On second thought, I bet you like classical music. You sit around in your place and listen to symphonies and stuff like that. You make yourself a little martini and then you put on a little Beethoven, right? And then you’re right in the groove. I like classical music sometimes too, I think it’s good.” “People are too interested in sports and music,” Bunting said. “All they talk about is some game they saw on television, or some series, or some record. It’s like there isn’t anything else.” “You forgot one,” she said. “You forgot money.” “That’s right—they pay too much attention to money.” “So what should they pay attention to?”

  “Well …” He looked up, for the moment wholly distracted from his embarrassment and discomfort. It seemed to him that there existed an exact answer to this question, and that he knew it. “Well, more important things.” He raised his hands, as if he could catch the answer while it flew past him.

  “More important than sports, television, and music. Not to mention money.”

  “Yes. None of that is important at all—it’s worthless, when you come right down to it.”

  “So what is important?” She looked at him with her eyes narrowed behind her big glasses. “I’m dying to hear about it.”

  “Um, what’s inside us.”

  “What’s inside us? What does that mean?”

  Bunting made another large vague gesture with his hands. “I sort of think God is inside us.” This sentence came out of his mouth by itself, and it startled him as much as it did Marty. “Something like God is inside us. Outside of us, too.” Then he found a way to say it. “God is what lets us see.”

  “So you’re religious.”

  “No, the funny thing is, I’m not. I haven’t gone to church in twenty-five years.” He flattened his hands against his eyes for a moment, then took them away. His whole face had a naked look, as if he had just taken off a pair of eyeglasses. “Let’s say you’re just walking down the street. Let’s say you’re not thinking about anything in particular. You’.re trying to get to work, and you’re even a little worried about something—the rent, or the way your boss was acting, or something. You’re absolutely, completely, inside the normal world. And then something happens—a car backfires, or a woman with a gorgeous voice starts to sing behind you—and suddenly you see what’s really there—that everything, absolutely everything is alive. The whole world is one living thing, and that living thing is just beating with life. Every rock, every blade of grass, every speck of dust, every raindrop, even the windshield wipers and the headlights, it’s like you’re floating in space, or no, it’s like you’re gone, disappeared, like you don’t really exist anymore in the old way at all because you’re the same as everything else, no more alive, no more conscious, just as alive, just as conscious, everything is overflowing, light streams and pours out of every little detail…” Bunting fought down the desire to cry.

  “I’ll give you one thing, it makes a double play against Los Angeles sound pretty small.”

  “The double play would be part of it, too,” he said, understanding that too now. “Us sitting here is part of it. We’re talking, and that’s a big part of it. If churches were about what they’re supposed to be about, they’d open their windows and concentrate on us sitting here. Look at that, they’d say, look at all that beauty and feeling, look at that radiance, that incredible radiance, that’s what’s holy. But do you know what they say instead?” He hitched his chair closer to her, and took another big gulp of his drink. “Maybe they really know all this, I think some of them must know it, it must be their secret, but instead, what they say is just the opposite. The world is evil and ugly, they say—turn your back on it. You need blood, they say—you need sacrifice. We’re back to savages jumping around in front of a fire. Kill that child, kill that goat, the body is sinful and the world is bad. Ignore it long enough and you’ll get a reward in heaven. People get old believing in this, they get sick and forgetful, they begin to fade out of the world without ever having seen it.”

  Marty was looking at him intently, and her mouth was open. She blinked when he stopped talking. “I can see why Frank is impressed with you. He can go on like this for hours. You must have a great time at work.”

  “We never talk about this at work. I never talked about it with anybody until now.” It came to Bunting that he was sitting at a table with a pretty woman. He was in the world and enjoying himself. He was on a date, talking. It was not a problem. He was like the men in the bar behind him, talking to their dates. He wondered if he could tell Marty about the baby bottles.

  “Didn’t you talk like this with your old girlfriend?”

  Bunting shook his head. “She was only interested in her career. She would have thought I was crazy.”

  “Well, I think you’re crazy, too,” Marty said. “But that’s okay. Frank is crazy in another way, and among other, less harmless things, my old boyfriend was crazy about doo-wop music. Johnny Maestro? He worshipped Johnny Maestro. He thought it summed it all up.”

  “I suppose it did,” Bunting said. “But no more than anything else.”

  “Did you get a lot of this stuff out of books? Do you read a lot?”

  Another flare went off in Bunting’s brain, and he took another gulp of his drink, waving his free hand in the air, semaphoring that she hadn’t quite understood matters, but that he had plenty to say about her question. “Books!” he said after he had swallowed
. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve…”He shook his head. She was smiling at him. “Think about what reading a book is really like. A novel, I mean—you’re reading a novel. What’s happening? You’re in another world, right? Somebody made it, somebody selected everything in it, and so suddenly you’re not in your apartment anymore, you’re walking along this mountain road, or you’re sitting on top of a horse. You look out and you see things. What you see is partly what the guy put there for you to see, and partly what you make up on the basis of that. Everything means something, because it was all chosen. Everything you see, touch, feel, smell, everything you notice and everything you think, is organized to take you somewhere. Do you see? Everything glows In paintings too, don’t you suppose? There’s some force pushing away at all the details, making them bulge, making them sing. Because the act of painting or writing about a leaf or a house or whatever, if the guy does it right, amounts to saying: I saw the amazing overflowing life in this thing, and now you can see it too. So wake up!” He gestured with both arms, like a conductor calling for a great swell of sound.

  “Have you ever thought about becoming a teacher?” Marty asked. “You get all fired up, Bobby, you’d be great in a classroom.”

  “I just want to say something.” Bunting held his hands over his heart. “This is the greatest night of my life. I never really felt like this before. At least, not since I was really small, three or four, or something. I feel wonderful!”

  “Well, you’re certainly not nervous anymore,” Marty said. “But I still say you’re religious.”

  “I never heard of any religion that preaches about this, did you? If you hear of one, let me know and I’ll sign up. It has to be a church that says, Don’t come in here, stay outside in the weather. Wake up and open your eyes. What we do in here, with the crosses and stuff, that’s just to remind you of what’s really sacred.”