The Houseguest

  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.”

  “We can all say the same,” Lydia told him.

  It seemed a piece of insolence to Audrey that the statement should be so inclusive, but she did sense that the girl’s purpose was to give some consolation to Bobby, who was not growing calmer. His mother could do no less than join in.

  “We were caught at a disadvantage by our sense of hospitality. A guest has always been sacrosanct under our roof. The mistake, if such it could really be called, was in not finding out more about the man when he first appeared, but we each assumed the other knew him well or he would not have been here in the first place.”

  “But,” said Doug, “do you think for a moment that we’d have been able to find any reliable information about him from himself? In fact, I think that if we had tried we’d have only brought this current situation about sooner.”

  “But we wouldn’t have been so vulnerable during the week, when Mrs. Finch is here every day and the cleaning women come twice.” Audrey spoke with indignation, which Doug always and in general had coming even though in this instance he bore no more guilt than anyone else. “He wouldn’t have found it so simple then to keep us prisoners.”

  Lydia gestured. “How we got into this predicament can be examined after we get out of it.”

  “If we do,” Audrey said dolefully. Her spirits, so briefly raised by the alcohol, were already falling. It was no secret to her that such was the necessary progress of drinking: the end was ever below the lowest beginning. This reflection normally would have intensified her thirst, but for once she resisted the first impulse, for her daughter-in-law had moved close to her and now took her hand and spoke with seeming sincerity as well as probable conviction.

  “We will. He’s just one man. There are four of us.”

  Bobby said desperately, “I’m willing to rush him. I don’t care about the personal consequences. I’ve got a score to settle. If he’s occupied with getting me, he won’t be able to stop the rest of you.”

  It could have been predicted that Doug would not like this idea, which made Bobby the obvious hero, even possibly the martyr. He strode about, saying, “No, no, no.”

  Lydia continued to hold Audrey’s hand. “What we don’t want is recklessness,” said she. “Remember the general who told his troops he didn’t want any of them to die for their country? ‘The idea is to get the other poor sons-of-bitches to die for their country.’ This should be a communal effort.”

  But Bobby could not accept an arrangement in which he believed he might be denied personal revenge.

  “I’m going to kill him,” he said. He addressed Lydia particularly. “I can’t accept what he did to me.”

  She dropped Audrey’s hand at last. Now she was angry. “No! No, you’re not going to get away with this. He did it to me, not you. All he did to you was tell about it.”

  “That’s worse!” cried Bobby. “Because at first I didn’t believe it even then. Then he treated me like a dog, and I thanked him. …” It seemed as if he might weep at any moment.

  Audrey was aware that a man’s amour propre was something fixed, whereas a woman’s could prove more responsive to changing conditions. But for the first time she was on Lydia’s side.

  “Bobby,” she said to her lone offspring, “everybody is aware of what you’ve been through, but now is not the time to be selfish. For a while there, Lydia was standing alone—”

  “Speak for yourself,” Doug said. “I was his first victim.”

  At this point the telephone rang inside its box. The others participated in a symbolic rush towards it, but Doug was closest, and it anyway was his property.

  Through the receiver Doug recognized the voice of the man who had called himself Perlmutter, and disregarding what he considered the false placation of the man’s most recent remarks (in which, prompted by Chuck, Perlmutter had in effect apologized), he was taken by surprise by the caller’s amiable words.

  “Doug? Jack. So how’s it going, fella? I’m glad it’s you and not You-Know-Who—or is he nearby? Can you talk freely? Just say yes or no.”

  “He’s in the kitchen.”

  “Okay, then,” said Perlmutter. “Let me take this opportunity to give you a friendly warning—or can he pick up another extension and listen in?”

  “This is my private line.”

  “In which case I’ll speak openly. Just keep your eye on that boy. Don’t turn your back on him for a second.”

  “Mr. Perlmutter, look, I don’t want to be rude, but—”

  “Please—Jack.”

  But Doug had as yet seen no reason to fraternize. “I don’t want to be rude,” he doggedly repeated, “but why would you give me, a stranger, such a warning against someone who’s apparently a friend of yours?”

  “Aha,” Perlmutter barked. “Not an unreasonable question. One, he’s not my friend: we happened to find ourselves now and again in the same place at the same time, and had the choice of either trying to cooperate or going for each other’s throat. Two, I’m trying to make up for that nasty call you got earlier today from someone who used my name. Anyone could do that, of course, and there’s not much I can do to stop them. But even though it’s irrational, I still feel as if I have a peculiar responsibility to do what I can to atone.”

  “You’re a charlatan, Perlmutter.”

  “C’mon, now, Dougie, you can’t mean that.”

  “Oh, but I do,” said Doug. “You’re either a member of Chuck’s gang, a co-conspirator in other words, or Chuck himself with an assumed voice. In either case, let me give you a warning: you’ll be dealt with.”

  Perlmutter emitted a kind of wail. “What did I do to deserve this vicious attack? You need all the friends you can get. You should learn to be more elastic. So not everybody can live up to your own high moral standards—should he then be discarded?” If one had not known better, one might have been taken in by this protest that was also a plea. Perlmutter concluded, “Everybody’s got a little good in him.” He paused. “Except your houseguest.”

  For an instant Doug was tempted to pursue this issue, but as quickly decided against it. First, he really did not wish to get involved in a medieval kind of inquiry into the strife between virtue and vice. And then he was more certain than ever that Perlmutter was a fraud.

  “No,” said he. “I don’t need and I don’t want your help.” He hung up.

  The other members of the family remained silent. Doug sat down in the desk-chair, which Audrey had been using but vacated on his hanging up the telephone. He had been struck by a feeling of intense despair, and had all he could do to suppress an impulse to say, even to scream: We haven’t a chance. We’ll none of us get out of this alive.

  “And that Mr. Tedesco I spoke with,” said Audrey. “Who can these terrible people be?”

  This provoked Doug to rally. He raised his chin. “We shouldn’t magnify the power of our enemies and let them be successful in their efforts to scare us. Because that’s all, at least at the moment, that Perlmutter and Tedesco have done: just speak on the phone. It seems to me that if they were on the premises somewhere or at a public telephone nearby, we’d have seen them by now. Why should they conceal themselves?”

  “Perhaps because it’s more terrifying that way,” said Lydia. “But I agree with you, all the same.” She turned to her husband. “What do you think, Bobby?”

  He seemed annoyed at the question and shook his head. “The target is Chuck. I don’t want to think about anything else.” He lifted his reddened eyes to his father. “You could distract him while I jump him. I’m not afraid. I know I could do it.”

  “Any hand-to-hand will be done by me,” said Doug. “I was the college boxer, after all. And I have stayed in good shape. All it would take is keeping him from his weapons.
He’s nothing otherwise.” He saw from the corner of his eye that his wife had unobtrusively placed the flask at the far end of the desk, having no doubt emptied it. For years she had been always under the influence but was almost never seen to be drunk in the slurred-speech, staggering sense. He believed he was one of the few people in the world who were in possession of this truth about Audrey: to believe it you had to have known what she was like before she drank to excess.

  “The telephone works again,” she now said quietly. “Let’s call the island police and be done with it.”

  Doug lifted the instrument, listened at it for the briefest instant, and waved it at her before hanging up. “I was prepared for that: he’s got it rigged for incoming calls only.” He brought his fists together. “All right, let’s go get him!”

  “Without a real plan?” Lydia asked.

  “We’ve got a plan!” cried Doug. “The rest of you distract him. As soon as that knife is out of his hand for a second, I’ll floor him. As soon as he goes down, I’ll get the gun from his ankle. Then we’re home free.”

  “I want a crack at him,” said Bobby. “I’m not just going to stand there.”

  “I still like my plan,” Lydia said stubbornly. “He’d be most helpless then.”

  Doug remembered that Bobby had not been present when his wife talked of luring Chuck into a bedroom, and it could be assumed that he would hardly concur. Indeed, just hearing of it might drive him over the edge.

  “We’ll try it my way, right now. We’ve got to make some progress on this matter.”

  With no more discussion they started for the kitchen, Doug first, then Bobby and Lydia, with Audrey bringing up the rear.

  When Lydia tried to take Bobby’s hand he snatched it away. Obviously he did not want to be diverted from his concentration on revenge. She herself had been in a similar state before he became a believer. But now that he had joined the cause so fervently, it had, to a degree, been taken from her—unless, looking for positives, one should see it rather as a liberation. Whichever, her former rage had become something more reasonable. All she wanted now was the subduing and not the destruction of Chuck. She was even beginning, against her will, to consider excuses for his taking her in the act of love. He had genuinely desired her; it was hard to detest him merely for that. Nor had he taken her with force. Misrepresentation was not savagery. False pretenses, while deplorable, were not necessarily felonious. And it should not be forgotten that he had, immediately before the event in question, saved her life. Did she not have an obligation to return the favor if Bobby was serious about killing him?

  That her husband was intending to commit the supreme act of violence would have been a preposterous thought only a quarter hour earlier, and perhaps even now she was foolish to entertain it: she had never known anyone with so tender a spirit as Bobby’s. But he was not given to bluster. More than once she had read that persons who speak often of suicide generally end up committing it. Could the same be true of those who spoke so easily of murder? After all, she and Bobby expected to enter law school. Whatever was done should not be such as to jeopardize their careers.

  Her father-in-law was first to enter the kitchen. The doorway was sufficiently wide to admit Lydia and Bobby simultaneously. The table was laid. Chuck stood before the stove, on which at least one vessel was still cooking with visible vapors.

  “You must be mind readers,” he said pleasantly. “I was just about to call you to dinner. We’ll eat in here this evening, if you don’t mind. It makes things simpler for me.”

  Lydia was struck by the word “evening,” which proved to be just: she was shocked to identify the waning of light outside the windows. Notwithstanding their predicament, time was playing its habitual role.

  Her fears about Bobby turned out to be needless. At the sight of Chuck, the tension had appeared to leave him. In fact he looked almost comatose.

  Audrey spoke in a crooning note. “May I help carry something?”

  “No,” said Chuck. “Sit down, all of you.” He gestured not with a knife now but with the big bland paddle-blade of a wooden spoon. He was weaponless. Why didn’t the Graves men attack him?

  Instead, both Doug and Bobby slunk to the table, which was round and therefore could not inspire considerations as to head and foot and the relative power-values of the places between. Both men took chairs on the far side, given Chuck’s situation at the stove. Audrey sat down on the curve near the refrigerator. Lydia remain standing awhile, but having lost all of her allies, she finally abandoned that posture, sitting down, willy-nilly, nearest Chuck. .

  The houseguest cheerily took a big pot from the stovetop and went around the table, serving rice to everybody with the wooden spoon. It would have been a subordinate’s role to play waiter in the dining room; in the kitchen he who dispensed food was master of those who received it. Lydia could see that her husband and his parents were obviously cowed by this maneuver in their own house.

  Having returned the rice pot to the stove, Chuck next claimed another vessel from atop a burner, but this time he served only the plate that was to be his own and that which sat before Lydia. So this was what became of those fragmented lobsters that had been quick though dead! Now their parts had been given a home within a thick sauce in which pieces of tomato were evident.

  Doug leaned forward across his rice and said, “I think I was right. Homard americaine?”

  Chuck nodded. “You used to eat that with Gloria Dentón. And then for dessert you’d eat her.”

  Doug paled and retracted himself.

  Lydia waited a moment and then when nobody else had made a sound, she said to Chuck, “We’re not going to sit here and take this, you son-of-a-bitch.”

  The houseguest looked genuinely puzzled. “What’s your complaint?” he asked, returning to the stove. “You’re getting lobster.”

  Lydia pushed away from the table and leaped up. Doug apparently interpreted this movement to mean that she was about to attack Chuck singlehanded, and he rose as well. Though Chuck’s back was momentarily turned, he could reverse himself much more quickly than her father-in-law could come around the table, and his weapon was a steaming potful of vegetables.

  He thrust it in Doug’s direction and said, “Sit down.”

  Having no taste for being scalded, Doug did as told, his morale in disarray. He turned to Audrey and said, almost whimpering, “It isn’t true, you know.”

  “What difference does it make now?” Audrey asked stoically. She picked up a fork and began to trace figures in her plateful of white grains.

  “Get going on your rice,” Chuck ordered the Graveses. “It’s more than many people have to eat this night.”

  Lydia was still standing. “Oh,” said she. “You’re a defender of the interests of the deprived?”

  With a slotted spoon Chuck was serving a green vegetable to her plate. “Sit down and eat,” he said. “When I think of what you could do in bed on an empty stomach, after almost drowning, you must be a marvel when well fed.”

  Humiliated by this observation, she obeyed him. She was aware that he would use the same moral weapon on her when she tried to resist, and there was no getting away from the fact that it was devilishly effective, more so than would have been a gun or knife, for such crude armament could change hands at any time and so alter the structure of power, but that she had enthusiastically made love with a stranger in her bed would remain true forever, even if she finally expunged the man himself.

  At the first sight of Chuck on entering the kitchen, Bobby had instantly returned to reality from the unrestrained fantasies of rage. The houseguest was not going to be overwhelmed by simple frontal assault. He had too many resources, not even counting the gun at his ankle. All manner of edged implements were at hand as well as metal vessels with boiling contents. He was at his most formidable in the kitchen. Therefore, as loathsome as Bobby found it, groveling for a while longer was obviously the only tactic that made sense.

  He dug into his plain rice. Aft
er all, it was food and not the filth that Chuck might very well have made him swallow. But it was awfully dry.

  Chuck at the moment was pouring wine for himself. Next he put some in Lydia’s glass. Bobby swallowed dolefully, hoping his parched throat would make a sound. Chuck would hardly be moved by such an appeal to compassion, but Lydia could not decently fail to respond.

  It seemed, however, that she was unaware of his presence. He began to develop a case against his wife: she could not evade all responsibility for exciting Chuck’s lust. And what of his father’s blustering insistence on leading the attack on the houseguest? The man of action! The college boxer! The notorious lecher had proved, as might have been expected, to have no courage at all. Whereas Bobby was merely pretending to be a coward while waiting for the moment to strike. That was the difference between them, and it was profound. Underneath it all, Bobby was the man, and their only hope of salvation.

  “Bobby,” said his mother, as if all were normal, “Bobby, may I have the salt and pepper?”

  Reluctant to act without permission and so bring Chuck’s wrath down upon him before he was in a position to act decisively, Bobby looked at the houseguest.

  Chuck grimaced and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

  Bobby shrugged at his mother and went back to eating his own tasteless rice and watching for a visible weakness in Chuck’s defenses.

  “I wasn’t criticizing the food,” his mother obsequiously told Chuck. “It’s just a nervous habit.”

  But the attention of the houseguest was on Lydia. “You aren’t eating.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re hurting my feelings,” Chuck said. “If you reject my food I at least deserve a reason.”

  Lydia wore a ghastly sort of grin. “You’re really a prize,” said she. “You weren’t even invited to come here, as it turns out. You aren’t anybody’s friend! And yet you take over as if you own the place and the rest of us are outsiders. And then you want to be congratulated!”