The Houseguest

by Thomas Berger

  Chuck grinned too, though in his case with apparent self-satisfaction. “I’ll say this: it was like knocking overripe fruit off a tree. It is too easy. I wish I could get a challenge out of somebody, but they’re such worms. Let me demonstrate.” He stepped to the counter and found the big chef’s knife. He went around the table to a point midway between Doug and Bobby.

  “Gentlemen,” said he, extending the knife across his left forearm, point reversed, handle forward, steadying it with his right hand at the center of the blade. “Help yourself to a sword.”

  Bobby had no intention of participating in this stunt, which was surely a trick. He raised his hands in backing-off pantomime.

  His father said indignantly, “I’m not some dirty scum from the gutter! I don’t fight with knives.”

  “You don’t fight,” said Chuck. He looked at Lydia. “Q.E.D.”

  “But you don’t dare make me the same offer,” Lydia said.

  “Hell no. You’d cut me in a minute. I know that. We are the scum of the gutter, you and I.” He guffawed. “That’s why we’re eating the lobster!” He raised his hands against her protest. “All right, so you think you’re a lady. I mean underneath it all.”

  Bobby hated Chuck, but he still thought him brilliant: there was something to be said for this theory. Bobby himself had been attracted to Lydia by what he had always seen as her charter membership in a commonality to which he could never quite belong and with which the best he could manage was an accommodation always to his disadvantage.

  As the houseguest was passing her, Bobby’s mother suddenly shoved her chair back against him. Taken by surprise, Chuck temporarily lost his balance, and in recovering it he dropped the knife to the tile floor. It slid to her feet, and she picked it up.

  Though he had only just refused the knife when it was offered to him, Bobby believed that the moment for action had now arrived, for Chuck could not have included contingency plans for this misadventure. He sprang up and started around the table.

  Doug too seized this opportunity to charge the houseguest, leaping from his chair just as Bobby was coming around him, and they were first entangled in each other and next were carried by momentum into Audrey, whose grip on the chef’s knife was tenuous. Reclaiming his equilibrium, Chuck deftly stepped in and did not so much take the knife from her as relieve her of its weight.

  If Chuck had lost any emotional balance, he had regained it so quickly as not to suggest even a momentary loss. He placed the knife on the lip of the sink and, with a positive lilt in his voice, saying, “Let’s eat this dinner,” sat down at his place.

  Lydia was disgusted with the Graveses for so botching their best and perhaps only advantage, but she was also fair enough to admit that she herself had not even tried though she had been as close to the action as Doug and much closer than Bobby.

  But Chuck was unarmed now, seated and eating with keen appetite, and yet neither male Graves made a move towards him. Perhaps the three of them were playing fixed roles in a ritual of virility that she was not supposed to understand, let alone interfere in: an example of the master-slave arrangement that some said was fundamental to the homosexual experience. In any event, it was insultingly obvious that no one expected anything of her: she had been morally excluded. She suddenly became aware of the longing gaze that Audrey was directing towards her wineglass, and would have offered it to her mother-in-law had Chuck not been sitting between them—but in so thinking she was being as pusillanimous as her men.

  She made a violent effort to regain self-respect. “All right, Chuck,” she said, “we are the same kind, you and I, birds of a feather. We’ve had to fight all our lives just to hang on, whereas these people have had it all handed to them. Why should we show them any mercy?”

  But while she was aware that the Graveses had been thrown into a state of shock by this speech, Chuck was not impressed by it. He continued eating in silence for a while; then he raised a fork and stabbed the air between them.

  “Where’s your judgment?” he asked. “Did you really think I’d be taken in by a simulated change of heart—coming as it does just after the utter collapse of the only opportunity they have had, or will ever have? You’ve just given up on them, have decided to throw in with me for purely negative reasons. But don’t you think I’m smart enough to know you’d just be waiting for me to show the slightest weakness?” He lowered the fork. “By now you’ll have to do better than that. It’s gone on too long. You could have joined up at the outset. Now you’ll have to prove yourself to gain admittance.”

  So she had thoroughly compromised herself with all parties while having the highest motives. It was necessary to act decisively now or be lost forever.

  She seized the wine bottle by its neck and swung it at Chuck’s head as hard as she could. His flinch did not begin until the bottle was too close to avoid. The impact was soundless and more awful thereby: a man could be killed with no more noise than that? As he was in the (for some reason) extremely slow process of slumping in the chair, his body having (nonsensically) gone rigid before his head had (improbably) fallen to the left shoulder, in the direction from which he had been struck—she had never before sapped a human being—while watching all of this she yet was careful to return the wine bottle, contents intact, to an upright situation on the table.

  For a long moment no Graves made any response whatever. Had an observer, or a camera, been looking only at them during this episode, no emotion would have been seen to register on any countenance. Or so it seemed to Lydia, who of course had been mostly watching Chuck.

  Finally Doug asked, “Was it necessary to go that far?”

  “With the phone off,” said Audrey, “we can’t call an ambulance. And the cars aren’t in running condition.”

  “And who’s responsible for that?” Lydia screamed. But underneath it all she was already frightened by her own sympathetic feelings for the fellow man that had been downed, even though when up he had been an enemy.

  Bobby was the only one to rise. He came to stand over Chuck.

  “A goner,” said he, showing his teeth in an emotion that was hard to identify with certainty but might have been a grin of terror.

  “What,” asked Doug, remaining in his chair, “became of our idea to take him prisoner?”

  Audrey was performing a series of shrugs. “We’ve got Band-Aids and cotton, I suppose, but what first aid can mend a broken skull?”

  Lydia was being seriously threatened with panic now. She held it at bay by attacking her in-laws.

  “Cowards! You talk violently but do nothing, and then when someone else finally acts, you condemn her. You’re worthless. Go to hell!”

  But she was immediately taken aback by Doug’s reversal. “She’s got a point,” he said. He left his chair and walked in the direction of Chuck. He stopped when he reached Audrey and put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re all involved, willy-nilly, under the circumstances. In for a penny, in for a pound. We’ll have to dispose of the body.”

  Bobby seemed relieved to have a task to discuss. “He’s just a little runt,” he said. “He won’t be hard to carry, and we’ll only have to do it as far as the edge of the bluff, where he can be rolled off. Then we’ll go down and push him into the water. The undertow will take over from there.”

  Lydia was supersensitive to this reference. “Oh, no!”

  Audrey’s face was in her hands. She began to make a distant moaning sound but took it no further as she offered a suggestion of her own, one that might be called poetic. “There’s a little grove of paper birch just off the lane …”

  Bobby produced a chok-chok noise with tongue and teeth. “We’d better get going while there’s still some light outside.” He slid his hands into Chuck’s armpits and heaved. The inert body did not move. Bobby grunted, adjusted the angle of his hands and shoulder, and braced his legs in another way. “He’s heavier than I thought.” He tried again and more strenuously, his face coloring and neck tendons in evidence, but had no success
. He straightened himself.

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t budge him. Dad?”

  It was unclear whether this was an appeal for help or a rhetorical question. Doug showed no hesitation in taking it for the latter, and came no closer. “It may turn out to be necessary to get a board of some kind, or a big thick branch, to serve as a lever.” His brows came together over his nose, as if he were thinking of even more sophisticated measures by which to move the body.

  Lydia went to the sink and vomited for the second time that day. But she had eaten nothing since the first session and therefore was not relieved of any burden while her throat was once again made sore. What an outrage that it was possible for a person of her character to become a murderess merely by trying to protect her existing interests—that is, with no hope of illicit gain or any other criminal motive.

  Bobby said, “We might just leave him in the chair and slide it out the—no, we’d have to lift it when we got outside, wouldn’t we?” He sighed heavily. “What a pain in the neck! If anybody told me I’d be doing this on Sunday evening …”

  “If a ghoulish joke was needed,” said Doug, “I might say that big knife’s handy for making a large package into many small ones.” He did not accompany this with a laugh, but Bobby chuckled hollowly while backing away from the body as if avoiding temptation.

  Lydia returned. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. I’ll take full responsibility if trouble comes from this. None of you were implicated. I’ll make that clear.” She stared at each of them in turn. “I saw the chance and took it. I guess I’ll regret that the rest of my life.”

  Bobby said, “Okay, Lyd, but we’ve got a problem here that goes beyond ego.”

  Doug looked at his son with apparent respect. “Bob’s right. Any connection with this will stain us if it gets known outside this house. We must dispose of the body so that it can never be found. Now, that might sound like a simple, straightforward job, considering that we’re surrounded on three sides by dense woods and are facing an ocean, but I haven’t as yet heard of a method of burial that is one hundred percent secure against discovery. We’ll have to settle therefore on the least likely to fail quickly. Now, the undertow is attractive insofar as it will take all labor out of our hands once we get the body into the water—no grave need be dug.” He smiled. “But that same current that taketh away is quite capable of bringing back what it took. It will require hard physical labor. A grave must not only be deep but every grain of extra earth should be taken away from the site and pine needles and other normal forest-floor debris placed carefully over the area, but not so obviously as to call special attention to it. This will need some artistry. Audrey can advise us on the landscaping.” He smiled encouragingly in her direction, but his wife was seemingly preoccupied, eyes fixed on the plateful of rice before her.

  Bobby was shaking his head. “It seems that no sooner does someone hide a body in a woods than kids suddenly start playing ball nearby and soon enough one of them hits the ball into the trees, where it inevitably rolls up to the very toe of the corpse.”

  “You haven’t listened to a word I said,” his father observed, more in melancholy disappointment than in anger. “In the first place, there’s no meadow or clearing where ball could be played until you’re on the other side of the island. Then did I not say a deep grave? There’d be no exposed toe for a ball to roll up to.”

  “Animals,” said Bobby, “wild or domestic, have keen noses which can smell a decomposing body through tons of earth.”

  “So big rocks are rolled into the grave,” said Doug, in a tone that suggested his patience was thinning at last.

  Audrey raised her placid face. “Fire,” said she.

  “Oh,” said Doug, “that’s the worst, absolutely the worst idea of all.”

  “It’s the best.” She was serenely stubborn. “Don’t you see? It takes care of everything at once.”

  “Now, just let me explain why it’s not good. The furnace here only burns oil: there’s no provision in it for burning anything other than fuel oil, no place to put anything else. And I trust not even you would suggest one of the fireplaces. What does that leave, a forest fire?” He had not looked at Lydia for a while, but he did so now, showing his derisive smirk.

  “You’re not getting the point,” Lydia told him. “Audrey means burn down the entire house, leaving Chuck’s body inside. Don’t you, Audrey?” Her mother-in-law did not appear grateful for the elucidation of her plan: perhaps she had wanted to withhold it temporarily, provoking more exasperation. As it was she ignored Lydia and stared silently at her husband.

  “Are you serious?” Doug asked, dividing his glances between Lydia and Audrey, so that the former anyway could not decide who was being addressed.

  Audrey finally spoke. “Mrs. Finch, the cleaning gang, Tedesco, and Perlmutter knew that Chuck was staying here—to name only those we can be sure about. There may be others. The most certain way to call unwelcome attention to us would be to have him disappear completely.”

  “But to burn down our house!” Doug cried. “That would make big news here and certainly get back to the city among our friends and relatives. And if a body were found in the ashes, it would certainly be picked up by the city media: Sunday’s a traditionally thin news day in world events. My family is not unknown in this part of the world. Nor is your own, for that matter.”

  Bobby said, “We’d have to identify Chuck, and who might not hear about it when it hit the news? We’d be targets for his friends and family, if any.”

  “I was just getting to that,” his father noted jealously. “Can you imagine the lawsuits? Or worse, the possible pathologic individuals who might seek revenge for its own sake?”

  “It’s clear, then, that there is no answer to your problem. Fortunately for you, the problem does not exist.”

  These words were spoken by Chuck, for he was not dead. As he briskly straightened up in the chair, it seemed unlikely that he had even been hurt.

  Lydia’s relief was’almost immediately replaced by chagrin. The bottle had made so little noise in striking him because it had hardly struck him. The episode had been the kind of movie-illusion used by stuntmen in on-screen fights. From the viewer’s angle the punches find their targets, whereas really they only just miss. She was therefore not a murderess or even a true assailant. On the other hand, she was back with ineffectuality, and Chuck was in a stronger situation than ever to demand compliance from his captives.

  To the credit of all of those on the Graves side, no one even feinted in the direction of pretending that the ruthless-sounding speculations as to how to dispose of the corpse had not been serious. Both Doug and Bobby silently and promptly returned to their seats. It was Audrey who spoke.

  “We were only doing what we had to. You can’t blame us for that.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Chuck. “I’m your guest. I can blame you for everything. That’s the beauty of being in my position, you see. And by ‘everything’ I mean either failures or successes, as unlikely as it would be that you’d have any of the latter. You people give a new meaning to the word ‘inept.’ For example, why didn’t it occur to someone to take my pulse?”

  Lydia said, almost involuntarily, “I guess we were too eager to believe we had gotten rid of you!”

  The houseguest lowered his eyes briefly. When he brought them up, anyone seeing him for the first time would surely have believed him a man of guileless virtue. “You’ll say anything to me, won’t you? I’m supposed to have no feelings that can be hurt. Only you are sensitive, isn’t that it? You don’t eat my food, you insult me to my face, but why not? I’m not a member of your select little crowd. I’m not good enough for your courtesy. My room isn’t even in the main house, but rather out there in that godforsaken garage.” His face displayed what for all the world looked like genuine bitter indignation. “Let me ask you: who was your darky before I showed up?”

  This outrageous speech seemed to have no
effect whatever on her in-laws, but Lydia was provoked by it. “You’re actually pretending to be our victim?”

  Chuck shrugged. “Did I just hit any of you in the head with lethal intent? Then sit here at the dinner table, the meal going cold, and callously discuss how to get rid of the body?”

  “I didn’t try to kill you,” Lydia protested. “My God, I never before hit anyone with a bottle. I did it without thinking, because I was desperate. It was really not even personal.” She was beginning to despise herself for this pleading, but she could not stop. “It was just to get out of an impossible situation.”

  Chuck raised his brow. “I suppose it never even occurred to you simply to ask me to leave? Wouldn’t that be worth trying before you resorted to murder? You’re more depraved than I thought. Human life means so little?” He shook his head, took up knife and fork, and began to eat. But hardly had he tasted the first mouthful when he spat the food back onto his plate. “It’s cold now,” he said petulantly. “See what you’ve done? You people aren’t civilized.”

  Audrey seemed peculiarly stung by this comment. “Oh,” said she, “but you are? You? You shouldn’t even be here. You weren’t invited, and nobody knows you. We would be well within our rights to ask you to leave. I agree that murder may not be the right answer, but you have certainly tried our patience.”

  The houseguest pushed away from the table. “Isn’t that nice?” he asked. “Try to kill me and then excuse yourselves with sophistic reasons. I haven’t laid a hostile hand on anyone in this house. You people really stink.” He abruptly stood up. “Now clean up this kitchen! You’ve got fifteen minutes. That’s more than enough time for the four of you.” He strode out the passage to the dining room. His soft-soled shoes made little sound, and one could not be sure whether he had continued on or had stopped and was lurking within earshot.