SIMON & SCHUSTER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Thomas Berger
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Berger, Thomas.
The houseguest : a novel / Thomas Berger.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title
PS3552.E719H67 1988
813.54—dc19
87-26108
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6070-1
ISBN-10: 0-7432-6070-8
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To Don Congdon
The
Houseguest
The process that led to the decision to kill Chuck Burgoyne, who for the first week of his visit had proved the perfect houseguest, began on the Sunday when, though he had promised to prepare breakfast for all (he was a superb cook), he had not yet appeared in the kitchen by half past noon.
“I’m beginning to be really worried,” said Audrey, wife of Douglass D. B. Graves and mother of Bobby, who was newly married to Lydia née Di Salvo, whose father, though prosperous enough by reason of his refuse-disposal business to send her to the expensive university at which she met Bobby Graves, was a thick-chested, coarse man who shouted at table, whereas her father-in-law, an attorney for a family corporation in the city, had gray sideburns and was impeccably attired even on an island weekend, in the flawless taste of the old school: a long-sleeved shirt in very small navy checks and white duck trousers, to which at mealtimes he would add a summer blazer of classic navy hopsack. He was now out for a walk on the beach below.
Again Audrey addressed her daughter-in-law. They were in a sitting room just off a wide deck that overlooked the ocean. “Do you think we’d be justified in tapping at his door? It’s going on twenty to one.”
“Oh, I think so,” said Lydia.
Audrey had very good skin indeed, but wincing unearthed some lines the existence of which could not have been suspected. “We’re awfully private in this family. It really goes against the grain to intrude, especially on a guest.”
“Yes, I am aware of that,” said Lydia. “And I really like it.” In her own family sometimes not even the frail lock on the bathroom door was a hindrance to a self-concerned brother who came home full of beer and had a grievous need to pee. “But I’d call this a special situation.”
“We might just go and have some toast,” said Audrey. “But that might seem rude when Chuck came out, all fired up to make his omelettes, which are really good, which I think has not that much to do with a technique that could be learned. He just has the touch. Chuck has a natural, uh, nonchalance of hand that eggs seem to respond to.” She smiled suddenly with a show of teeth that were surely capped to look so brilliant at her age. Her hair too was lustrous, without a strand of gray. Bobby would be twenty-three in a month.
He was sitting in the basket chair near the wide glass door to the deck, his big, sandaled feet separated by a yard of polished floor. He wore a Mediterranean sailor’s collarless shirt, striped horizontally in red and white, and shorts that were almost indecently tight in the crotch when he sat as he did now, his long thighs (he was six-three) making an obtuse angle. He had been reading a city paper published the day before; to get the Sunday edition someone would have to drive to the village. Bobby was apparently not suffering from a want of breakfast, but he had been up and around only since noon, Lydia, his roommate for a year and these five weeks his wife, having finally gone in and hauled him out. There seemed no limit to how long Bobby could sleep, whereas Lydia herself was sporadically insomniac.
Bobby now lowered the sheaf of newsprint, crumpling it slightly, and said, with a familiar twitch of the fleshy underlip that Lydia found both endearing and slightly repulsive, “He’ll be along any minute now.” He rose and stretched elaborately. He was hipless, a tube from armpits to knees. As it happened, Lydia found that kind of male build, conjoined with lank blond hair, to be sexually provocative. She had a carnal appetite that was robust. Had they been in their bedroom now, she might well have been tugging at his shorts. But when in the presence of others she was notably modest: she seldom even touched his shoulder or forearm, let alone held hands or snuggled in the public fashion of young couples of the milieu in which she had been raised.
“I’m not worried about eating,” said Audrey. “I’m just wondering if something might be wrong with Chuck.”
Bobby moued. “Why not go and see?”
Lydia protested. “Bobby! Why don’t you do that for your mother?”
“It’s not me that’s worried,” said he with a slack-limbed shrug and stepped out into the midday sun on the deck, where, fair as he was, he radiated light.
“I’ll be glad to go,” Lydia offered sincerely. It seemed the least she could do. Bobby was habitually rude to his parents, who were nice people insofar as Lydia could tell, though true enough she was not all that close to them nor was likely to be, given the polite conditions that were standard in this family. For example, none of them even spoke much about Chuck when he was not present. After a week of his residence, Lydia was not quite sure what his connection was to the Graveses, and she suspected it would be bad taste to ask to have it defined.
Not that she was unduly curious about Chuck Burgoyne, for whom her admiration was not nearly so ardent as that of her family-in-law. As to breakfast, her practice if let alone would have been to eat fruit exclusively, and in fact earlier this morning, before anyone else was up, she had discreetly enjoyed a banana during a long stroll on the beach. As to Chuck’s reputed charm, wit, and energy, Lydia could not see that they were so remarkable as to give him the distinction he enjoyed amongst the Graveses. Yet she was sufficiently balanced to recognize that her feelings might not be devoid of envy: obviously, Chuck had known these people, including her husband, longer than she, and was in a fundamental sense less of a stranger than she in this household.
She was not even quite sure where Chuck’s room could be found. The house, of glass and that kind of wood that looks already handsomely weathered when new, had been built to accommodate rather than dominate the bedrock that swelled here and there above the surface of the ground: there were unexpected wings, and likely a bird’s-eye view would have revealed no attempt at symmetry. Lydia and Bobby had his former bachelor quarters, down a corridor off the lesser of the two sitting rooms (in one of which Audrey remained now, that which faced the bay), and Bobby’s parents lived remotely in the rear, against the hillside, with no view at all. “But it’s always cool back there,” said Audrey, “and serene and quiet.”
But where was Chuck? Lydia could have asked, but she was sensitive about revealing her lack of familiarity with the terrain: it would be still more confirmation that she was out of place. Not to mention that the search would give her the perfect motive to explore the house, through which no Graves, including her husband, had given her a formal tour, and once again, she would not have asked. People of this sort probably did not do that kind of thing, whereas her father not only dragged all visitors to his newly installed sauna (amongst them even the laundryman and the fellow who read the electric meter), but informed one and all of the outlandish price he had paid for it.
Lydia had already
left the room when Bobby, speaking through the screen, hand cupped at his eyes, said, “Lyd, hand me my sunglasses?”
He was answered by his mother. “She’s gone to look for Chuck. Where are your glasses? I don’t see them anywhere.”
Bobby groaned and turned away, squinting. He plodded down the stairway at the end of the deck: this ended at an interim point on the bluff above the beach; if you wanted to go on down to the water, you took the little flight of steps that consisted of a sequence of bark-on logs set into cuts in the hillside. Bobby now lingered on the topmost of these, for he saw his father heading homeward just below. If he went down there, he knew by experience that his father would feel a need to make conversation without personal substance, wondering whether what seemed the eroding of the shore was rather an illusion or noting that the sun seemed laggard this year in its morning chore of burning off the fog at the mouth of the bay. On what seemed an absolute principle, throughout Bobby’s life thus far his father had never failed to avoid any subject of the least value to his son, even when there was reason to believe they shared in certain interests, for example, baseball: if Bobby entered a room in which his father sat watching a game the TV was soon extinguished, as if it had been on only by accident, and there was something in the son that obstructed him from stating forthwith that he too keenly followed the sport. Perhaps he even would inadvertently sneer at the screen. This was one of the many situations in which he was unable to represent himself truly and with justice to all. Was it not then ridiculous that his intention was to become a trial lawyer?
Not at all, said Lydia, beginning her second year as the source of his moral strength: it may well be that the ideal advocate for others is someone who cannot speak effectively for himself—he has no distractions. Bobby’s self-assessment was balanced: he knew he was not brilliant, but believed he was both kind and fair.
Though his father continued past the bottom of the steps without looking up and one could now have descended with impunity and walked in the other direction, Bobby decided instead to resist the weak impulse that had directed him to the beach, where he had no actual business, and at least consider going to the club for a few sets of tennis—that is, if the question of breakfast could ever be resolved to the general satisfaction.
He watched the slowly retreating form of his father, who was shorter than he but still a tall man and with much better posture. His father had screwed at least two of the girlfriends Bobby had brought as houseguests throughout the years, which would seem to be in violation of an old principle of human culture, but such matters could be complicated—was not an Eskimo head-of-household constrained to offer his wife to the male stranger benighted in his igloo? All the same, Bobby believed his father would be likely to respect a legal marriage and make no advances towards Lydia. But should he be in error, he had disclosed to her all the relevant facts, as well as some supposition (that, given the sexual adventuring of three decades, his father might well have contracted a venereal disease). Anyway, he and Lydia shared the same bed, which situation would rule out his father’s usual tactic of appearing in the wee hours in the room in which the girl slept alone and imposing himself upon her: not exactly rape, but perhaps the next best, or worst, thing, and it had taken Bobby two days in one case to persuade the victim not to go to the police, his most effective argument of course being that his father was a lawyer. Beyond that fact, he could not imagine the obsequious bumpkins of the island police acting adversely to his father were they to observe him committing cold-blooded murder. At least one of the local cops had worked at the house as yardman.
Bobby climbed back to the deck and looked through the screen into the sitting room. Lydia had not yet returned from her quest of Chuck—unless all of them were in the kitchen or dining room, for his mother was gone now. He entered and sat down in the chair he had occupied earlier. Now that he was alone, he could steal a seated nap. On summer Sundays, unless engaged in a game of some sort, he was sleepy all day however late he rose.
Having herself, from the front windows, observed that Doug was trudging westward along the beach, Audrey Graves had decided to take advantage of his absence and search her husband’s room for data on his current mistresses; he usually had more than one at a time and sometimes more than two. His preferred practice seemed to be playing one off against the other, all against all, though often not every participant in this competition was aware she was a player. Sometimes none were. All of them tended to assume that Audrey’s role was quite different from what it was and erroneously believed her to be their adversary, but then Doug’s taste was ever for the kind of woman so stupid as to think herself shrewd, in other words the easiest sort to manipulate by cliché. He would use his familial responsibilities as an excuse not to see Miss X on Christmas, then spend the day with Ms. Y. If this year he was regularly flying to the island on Friday night to stay the weekend, it was surely because, not being as young as he once had been, he needed a rest from his sexual enterprises on weekdays in the city, where, from Memorial Day to the celebration of Labor in early September, he was denied the residential protection of his wife. Audrey was smugly aware of her invaluable use to him. That his cunts were unaware of the extent to which he and she were tacit collaborators was her great satisfaction, probably the only such at this late date, though she had once herself known a genuine passion for the man and could well understand what other women saw in him.
Through long experience Audrey had established that Doug never carried anything of a compromising nature on his person, not so much as an address book containing the numbers at which his sexual partners could be reached. He was too prudent for that, and thus had nothing to fear should he be felled publicly by accident or sudden illness, taken to a hospital and stripped. He was probably right in thinking that the thick sheaf of legal papers to be found in his attaché case was sacrosanct to most of the world by reason of its high potential for bringing boredom. Surely not even the most greedy of thieves would thumb through that bundle. Audrey’s patience was no doubt unique, but then what she was seeking could not be called something so superficial or so readily available as material gain.
It was amidst his professional documents that Doug invariably filed souvenirs of his current sexual activities. Not only was this a place of nearly perfect concealment—for the black-leather case was clasped by a combination lock that would be proof against even the innocent intrusion of office assistants—but the practice also could be considered an expression of her husband’s wit with regard to erotic activity, indeed the only area of such manifestation, for it would probably not have been unfair to characterize Doug as virtually humorless elsewhere in life. Thus what a surprise when, on their own first date, in fact before they had finished their coffee, the until then staid young man had displayed, down on the seat of the banquette, below the line of vision of fellow diners, a little rubber monkey that when squeezed simulated masturbating a pneumatic pink phallus. Audrey would have been appalled by this and subsequent antics had she not been captivated by the sheer incongruity between the premature fogeyism displayed by Doug when his fly was closed and his capability for the outrageous act when it was open. Once when, as an affianced couple, they had dined with his old half-blind aunt, he reached below the tablecloth and brought Audrey’s hand over to bear upon that which jutted from his crotch—this while, bending over his plate, on the other side, was the young maidservant, whom, as Audrey realized only many years later, Doug had surely already enjoyed, for in remembering the incident she could recall that the girl, a newly emigrated Pole, had still been blushing when she reached Audrey with the peas, and probably not, as Audrey had then assumed, because she had seen what was happening in Doug’s lap but rather because he had simultaneously put his other hand up the girl’s skirt. He was only too capable of such a trick, and was to pull far worse. In years to come Audrey was to read an almost dementedly indecent note written to him by Didi Montrose, once her best friend, in which reference was made to what Doug had been doing to
her as the back end of the comic horse they formed together at the mock circus for the children’s hospital fund—and not just as they waited in the wings: he had persisted in his dirty work, keeping Didi in a state of ecstasy, even as they cavorted under the spotlights.
Whereas Doug might sit in silence throughout the most comic of plays, and even scowl if the humor verged remotely on the sexually suggestive.
Audrey now entered her husband’s quarters, which were beyond her own and at the very end of the hallway. Corresponding to her own little dressing room was a small study for him, with a leather-topped desk over which hung an antique map, with its quaint distortions, of the then known world. To the left of the pristine blue blotter in its black leather holder was a flat box of polished oak containing a working telephone as well as an answering machine. This instrument was used exclusively for communications from Doug’s girls, who assumed, no doubt on his assurances, that all such would be confidential and were unaware of Audrey’s regular monitoring.
She now opened the lid of the box to see that the machine’s little red light was signaling that it had recorded at least one message. Having rewound the tape and played it back, she determined that not one but three women had telephoned Doug since he had last collected his messages, which must have been only an hour or so earlier, unless he was now so disaffected as not to be moved to action by a winking red light and had allowed the calls to collect: not out of the question, for Doug could be ruthless with the overimportunate, and one of the callers, all but shrieking in resentment and self-pity, claimed to have been seeking him unsuccessfully since late Friday. Whether or not hers was a serious emergency was impossible to tell at this point, this being a new voice to Audrey, but there could be little doubt that if her style remained hysterical, whatever the legitimacy of her pains, the woman would be dumped, perhaps already had been. Doug would not tolerate emotional excess. What he provided in return was an extraordinary sexual endurance, which according to the unsolicited testimony of so many partners he retained even at the age of fifty-four. Indeed, on the very tape at hand one of the women alluded to his powers in starkly obscene language—and she too might well be a candidate for dismissal: even in private Doug was bluenosed with regard to language.