The Houseguest (13 page)

Chuck moved the lobster to a chopping block and with three decisive strokes of the big chef's knife cut the animal into four parts, each of which proceeded to assert an independent existence of its own, with much more power than had been displayed before the loss of general integrity. The tail writhed with such force that had he not seized it, it might have plunged to the floor and in inchworm fashion walked out of the kitchen. The claws continued to snap lethally.

“Hey,” Chuck said, grinning at her as he asked the disingenuous question, “how can this ever be?” To the lobster: “Why don't you lay down and die, old son?” He asked Lydia to fetch him the other one.

“For God's sake.”

“Oh,” said he in a mocking little voice, one hand on a hip, “does Missy think it's cwoo-el? Worse than boiling alive? Which takes a minute and a half to do the trick, for your information. To experience that for yourself, stick in your pinky for ninety seconds. Next time you eat a ham sandwich, reflect that the pig you're chewing had his throat cut while his buddies watched and waited for their turn.” He used the knife like a wand. “Are you ever honest about anything? You can't even admit to yourself that I brought you to a climax at least three times… . Now, get me that other lobster!”

She could endure this no longer and fled from the kitchen, her strategy in ruins.

Doug and Audrey had only just reached his room when Lydia appeared. Doug's regard for her had been highest when they had conspired alone near the hot-water heater. At that time he had been impressed by her ferocity towards Chuck. But in action she had proved disappointing, and now here she was, in distraught retreat and for a silly reason.

“Oh,” said he when they had heard her complaint, “there's nothing sinister in that. From the sound of it, he's probably making Lobster
americaine.
That's just galvanic action, you know. They're dead soon as the spinal cord is cut, however it might look.”

Lydia sat down on the straightbacked chair near the desk and met her falling face with rising hands. She spoke through her fingers.

“I'm not getting far.”

“We've just got started!” Doug noted, with false energy. “I never thought it would be easy. He's pretty well entrenched by now. We shouldn't have let that happen, but it did.” He shook a finger at Audrey, who was about to speak. “Oh, I admit I am as responsible as anyone else. He seemed harmless enough in the beginning.”

“Harmless!” Audrey cried. “You thought he was wonderful.”

“Now that makes sense,” said Doug. “We've got this criminal to contend with, and you attack
me.”

“My point is simply—”

Lydia screamed here. “Stop, stop!”

Doug nodded. “She's right. What we need now is not vindictiveness, but some constructive thinking. Here's my idea: I don't know a lot about cars, but I suppose I could recognize it if he sabotaged them in a simple way, like taking off the distributor cap. I've seen that done in a movie. I'm willing to have a try after dark.”

Audrey was hostile even to such serious planning when it was done by him. “Wouldn't that be nice?” she asked. “You drive off and look for help. What do you think Chuck will be doing to us while you're gone? Because he'll certainly hear the car.”

Doug remained amiable, surprising himself. “I see what you're getting at: you mean those left behind will be hostages. But there's an answer to that. We'll all get ready to go. I'll slip out first and see what's wrong, and if it's easily rectified, I'll do it. Then the rest of you run out, and off we go. I've just thought of a refinement: even if he has some means to get the remaining car going, I'll deflate all four of its tires.”

His wife was still grimacing bitterly towards her shoes, but Lydia said, “I prefer the first plan. I just haven't yet had time to apply it. I'll have to wait till after dinner now. But it's the best bet.”

“It's the most likely to get you hurt or killed,” Doug said. “I'm sorry I seemed to agree, earlier on. It's not a good plan, Lydia. It's too dangerous.”

Lydia gave him a look in which he thought he could recognize a certain nonerotic tenderness, something not all that familiar to him even as a young boy with a widowed mother who had been in fashion in her era.

“I know what I'm doing, Doug. I'm not afraid of him.”

Now he was disappointed again: she was too arrogant, which could never be a strength. She had too grandiose a sense of her sexual attraction, and that was pathetically ironic, for to Chuck she must now be seen as used merchandise. Lydia was that most vulnerable of females: she who believed she could dominate a man by means of sex.

“Well,
I'm
afraid of him,” he said, “because I'm unarmed. I've always hated guns, and I've seen a lot of them. My father owned a virtual armory. He hunted big game and belonged to clubs with private firing ranges and trapshooting. And one day he took one of his finest pistols, puts its muzzle into his mouth, and blew his brains out.”

“Oh, my,” said Lydia.

“I didn't want to make you feel worse,” Doug said. “You didn't know him.” He cleared his throat. “What I wanted to say was, I have always detested guns for obvious reasons, but I wish I had one now, unloaded of course; I couldn't shoot a man. I'd just use it to disarm Chuck. Once he lost his advantage, he would be nothing. He's just a skinny little squirt. He's got a few years on me, but I could take him with one hand.” This was no empty boast: Doug had boxed intercollegiately as a light heavyweight and in his city office had a silver cup to prove it. He was that rare sort who in middle age weighed five-ten pounds less than his youthful fighting weight. His left jab had been deadly of old; there was no reason to think Chuck would not buckle and drop when it hit him. If not, then the following right uppercut would lift the little skunk out of his shoes. But it was folly to think of such matters as long as the houseguest was armed and he was not.

At this point Bobby entered, using the loping stride his father hated to see in a man who was no longer a teenager.

“Oh,” said Bobby,
“here
you all are. Where's Chuck?”

Doug had neither locked nor even closed the door, for he did not want Chuck to arrive without warning, as had happened at the outside entrance to the kitchen, and he had counted on being able to hear the man's footsteps in the long uncarpeted hallway. But here was Bobby, having come silently on tennis shoes. Doug went to look up the hall. It was empty. He closed the door and turned the key. If Chuck did appear and found himself locked out, retaliation could be expected. Therefore dispatch was essential.

He spoke sternly to his daughter-in-law. “Lydia, kindly tell Bobby how serious the situation is. He won't listen to me.”

Grimacing, she complied. “Bobby, Chuck is no good. … . He's evil, he's—”

Audrey broke in. “Suffice it to say he's not the man we took him for. He swipes things. He takes advantage of our hospitality. … .”

Bobby smiled without mirth. “You're all three in it now? He's a great guy. I just don't understand why you all want to knock him. And you, of all people, Lyd!”

“Lydia,” Doug said, “it isn't my place to tell your husband what must now be told. You'll have to. Go back to the bedroom.”

Bobby followed his wife; she closed the door behind them.

“Do we really need this overdramatizing?” Audrey asked. “All that's required is that you simply go to the boy and lay down the law. I thought that's what Lydia was supposed to be doing in the kitchen.”

“Don't you yet know that Chuck raped her?”

Audrey bit her lip. She seemed angry. “I wonder if we can believe that.”

“Who would make up such a story? Isn't rape the kind of thing women tend to conceal?”

His wife shook her head. Her jaw was stubbornly prominent. “Not when it might give them prestige.”

“Something's wrong with you, Audrey.” And he knew what it was: she was cold sober.

The bedroom door opened and Bobby emerged. He wore a foolish grin. Looking at neither of his parents, he walked methodically to the door, unlocked and opened it, and left.

After a moment Lydia came out. She spoke to her father-in-law.

“He doesn't believe me,” said she. “Can you believe that?”

The more the rest of the family attacked Chuck Burgoyne, the more sympathetic Bobby found himself to the houseguest. Perhaps Chuck
had
helped himself to certain items that were, speaking legalistically, someone else's property, but if Mother had discovered a towel or two in his luggage, or even an ashtray, the primary question should be as to why she had snooped through the room! Surely it was a shocking breach of hospitality. Given his father's own moral situation, Chuck's was veritably monklike, and a few petty misdemeanors were unlikely to stain it.

Which left the outlandish charges made by Lydia. So far as Bobby was concerned, the whole business came down to this: if Chuck was guilty of raping the woman he had only just saved from drowning, then all of reality as it had been known to date had, with one event, been turned around to be precisely the reverse. Bobby disliked thinking further on this matter, for there could be no evading the possibility that his wife was suffering from a disorder of the mind, so ludicrously incredible had her story been. Were she simply being malicious (and if so, what could be her motive?), she would hardly have neglected to bring into the narrative the pistol, the existence of which was acknowledged. How could rape be accomplished without at least the threat of force? Yet until this moment Lydia had been the most rational person with whom Bobby had ever had personal association. He had now to recognize the possibility that madness might strike anyone without warning and especially in the aftershock of a brush with death. It was to be hoped that this would prove temporary and soon everything would be back to normal, at least with his wife. As to his parents, their aversion to Chuck was to be explained otherwise—and by someone other than him. Meanwhile, amends must be made to the unoffending houseguest, and there was no one left but him to make them.

When he reached the kitchen, Chuck was frying something in a big skillet.

“Making one of your gourmet concoctions?”

Chuck probed the contents of the pan with a long wooden spoon and ignored the question. He could get into a trance when he was preparing food. Bobby envied someone with such concentration and direction.

“Chuck,” he said, taking a seat at the kitchen table and addressing the back of the houseguest, who wore his usual clothing while cooking and not the pretentious long apron that males in the movies donned when at the stove or grill, and so deft was he, he apparently never got splashed. “Chuck, I realize now I was at fault in sending you to see Lydia at a time when she had not yet recovered emotionally from the experience in the water. Maybe waking up suddenly like that, she made some kind of confusion of you with the experience of drowning, and you got the blame. Pretty obviously, she was not herself. I've known her for quite a time. We were roommates at least a year before we got married.”

Chuck said, over the sound coming from the skillet and without turning, “She's one sweet piece of ass.”

Bobby heard this clearly, but he told himself that Chuck had actually, under the noise of the bubbling pan, commended Lydia for her sweetness and “class,” and that was worthy of note, for as she had confessed to Bobby, what she had worried about before meeting his parents was whether they were prepared to accept someone of her class into their family. Bobby assured her that nobody in this day and age took that sort of thing seriously. Now, in addition to having saved her life, Chuck was certifying her social position.

“Mighty decent of you to say that—” Bobby hesitated. “Actually she has a very high opinion of you. Just give her a day or so to recover, and you'll see, she'll once again be her old sunny self.”

“I want you to move her stuff from your room to mine,” Chuck said, stirring the pot. “You get that job nicely done, and I might even give you a bite to eat.”

Bobby heard these words as one hears a foreign-language conversation in which one could define the meanings of the individual words but cannot make sense of their roles in the syntax at hand. Therefore he had to fake a response.

“Great! I'm looking forward to dinner. You know, we're all impressed by your culinary prowess. It's certainly improved life around here on the weekends: it's no longer terror time on Mrs. Finch's days off. Best we used to do was eat the leftovers from the Saturday dinners made by the caterer, who's also a Finch incidentally and in fact is one of the cleaning crew that comes Mondays and Fridays. They must be the ugliest women in this part of the world, which is saying something!” Bobby chuckled and shuffled sidewise towards the door. “Well, I'll get out of your way. I understand gourmet chefs can't stand having people breathing over their shoulder …”

Chuck turned partially yet kept his dripping wooden spoon over the pan. He said, “You're virtually an idiot, aren't you? In a poorer family you'd be kept at home and given a little yardwork to do, trimming the edges, raking leaves, et cetera. They wouldn't let you marry and pass on your inferior genes.”

Bobby kept smiling, trying to pretend he was not going insane. First, Lydia's statements, now this from Chuck. He had heard of a disease, formerly exotic but nowadays not all that rare, in which the sufferer, always a person hitherto polite to the point of docility, suddenly begins to shout vileness in public places. In his case, he had begun to hear it. And it was getting worse.

He now had the terrible delusion that Chuck had said, “I'm telling you I fucked your wife! What are you doing about it?
Thanking me?”

Bobby put his hand to his head. “I'm sorry, Chuck, I'm not feeling well. I'm a little dizzy at the moment. I've got to go and lie down. Don't worry: I'm sure I'm okay. I'll be fine by dinner.” But Bobby was being politely hypocritical; he really had no faith that he could recover in time, yet it would have been inconsiderate to tell that to the guest in the house, who was obviously enjoying himself at the stove.

“I'll put yours in a doggie bowl,” Chuck said merrily. “And make you eat it on all fours.”

Bobby believed he was being called on here to laugh, and he did so, if not as heartily as he would have liked, for he felt very faint. He regretted he could not live up to expectations; he was in no condition for hijinks.

“There's always been something wrong with him,” Doug was saying.

“Yes,” said Audrey.
“You.”

Lydia kept shaking her head. “I know the truth has always made Bobby uncomfortable,” said she. “But that was in little matters. I never expected anything like this.”

Audrey cast her a sidelong glance of hatred. “Where may I ask is this thing supposed to have taken place?”

“Thing?”
asked Doug. “Are you too trying to deny it?”

Lydia continued to be touched by her father-in-law's loyalty to her cause. She would not have expected it, but she had now to rely on it.

Audrey bitterly shrugged or perhaps even shuddered. “It just seems to me that—”

“I was asking for it?” said Lydia. “I thought that was what
men
were supposed to say.”

“I don't care who's supposed to do or say what. Things seem to be falling apart in this house, which until recently went along serenely summer after summer.”

This was spoken in a manner that could only be called venomous. It was clear whom she blamed for the loss of serenity: not Chuck Burgoyne.

Though resentful, Lydia however understood that so long as the quartet of defenders was distracted by divisive, intestine matters, their cause had no hope of triumphing. This one man would continue to be successful in his campaign to bring them down. Therefore she spoke firmly to her mother-in-law.

“I really love Bobby. You might not understand why, but eventually I hope you'll at least give me the benefit of the doubt. But at the moment we've got a bigger problem than whether I am a suitable member of your family. Maybe I'm not. But right now we've got to deal with the evil man who has taken power here.”

Audrey sighed, almost plaintively. On the instant she was more melancholy than angry. “I'm not feeling very well.”

Doug went into the bedroom and shortly returned with a silver flask. He unscrewed the cap before delivering the container to his wife.

Her gratitude looked genuine. She tilted face and flask and joined them for a longer moment than expected. On no greater evidence than this episode, which comprised Doug's actions and expression, Lydia identified Audrey as an alcoholic. The information was useful: in an emergency, ignorance of one's comrades is perhaps worse than the destructive traits found amongst them, the worst of which were only human. And so was Chuck. He was mortal as well.

Since at this moment Audrey was licensed to drink openly, she was delighted to taste cognac in the flask. Vodka had to be used for its property of odorlessness, but it was an awfully boring drink day in and out. No one could criticize her for drinking at this juncture, with the house in such peril. … . Now that the worst of the pressures on her had been relieved, she could at least entertain the thought that Lydia might be more of a friend than an enemy, though she still considered the “rape” as surely exaggerated. Perhaps he had kissed Lydia against her will and done some fondling, but to take a woman carnally without her permission was the work of a street criminal, not a civilized man like Chuck, who was rude and cruel and unscrupulous but hardly a felon. Distinctions must be maintained.

In the next moment came a kind of scratching at the door, and unthinkingly Audrey unlocked and opened it, too late reflecting that it might have been Chuck, though of course if he were armed, he could not long have been kept out.

But it proved to be Bobby, who came in as if limping, though she could not identify which of his limbs was damaged so as to produce that effect.

Bobby spoke to his wife. “I'm sorry, Lyd. I'm sorrier than I can say.” Lydia tried to embrace him, but he fended her off. “No, I don't need comforting. I've got to do something. I haven't figured out what, but I've got to.”

His father spoke. “I gather you've seen the light.”

“Not really until I was halfway back here!” Bobby cried. “Can you believe it? He was humiliating me, and I still thought it was some good-natured joke. I never had an experience like that before. He posed as our
friend!”
Bobby looked pleadingly at his father. “Can't you trust
anybody
these days?”

Audrey was moved by her son's appeal. “He doesn't belong here, that's obvious. He doesn't put
us
in a bad light.” Nobody was watching her, so she took another taste of the flask.

“He's in there, making one of his fancy meals,” Bobby said. “Now would be the ideal time to jump him, while he's distracted, with his back to the door.”

“And wielding that big knife?” asked Doug. “He has the reflexes of a cat, I've noticed. I doubt he could be snuck up on, and if he spun around blade first it could be lethal.”

“Rope,” said Bobby. “Years ago, in camp, I learned how to lasso things, like a cowboy. If we can find some rope around here …”

“But if you miss,” said his father, “well be in hotter soup than we are now. The essential thing as I see it at this point is to let Chuck assume we're continuing to passively accept his outrages, that we wouldn't dare try to resist. And then when we strike, do it devastatingly, without mercy and with as little risk to ourselves as is humanly possible.”

Lydia wore an expression of dubiety. “How much experience does any of us have in dealing with a man like Chuck?”

“And what of the horrible Mr. Tedesco? Could he be lurking somewhere in the vicinity?” Audrey told them of the telephone call. “He sounded no better than a common thug.” She was still not quite ready to see Chuck as being as bad as the others characterized him, but she could easily condemn this supposed confederate of his.

“And there's another pal, named Perlmutter,” said Doug, “but I somehow don't think these people are in the neighborhood. I would say they're members of his gang in the city, though they might well be on call. When we strike, we must immobilize him quickly and unconditionally. He can't be permitted to send a signal of any kind from this house.”

Bobby was exercised. His mother had never seen that side of him, if indeed it had existed before now. “I don't think I can pretend to submit to him!” he said savagely. “It's too soon after I've really
been
doing his bidding. What a goddamn fool I was.”