Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  “It’s obvious, it goes without saying,” Herko said. “You don’t even have to tell me.”

  Bunting shrugged.

  “What’s her last name?”

  “Even,” Bunting said. “Carol Even. It’s an English name.”

  “At least English is her first language. She’s a product of your own culture, of course she’s more your type than some Swiss money machine. Tell me about the other two.”

  “Oh, you know,” Bunting said. He sipped from the Styrofoam container of coffee. “It’s the usual kind of thing.”

  “Do they all work in art galleries? Do you boff ‘em all at once, or do you just take them one by one? Where do you go? Do you make the club scene? Concerts? Or do you just invite them back to your place for a nice soulful talk? He was chewing frantically as he talked, waving his free hand. A pink paste filled his mouth, a pulp of compressed roast beef, mayonnaise, and whole-grain bread. “You’re a madman, Bunting, you’re a stone wacko. I always knew it—I knew you were gonzo from the moment you first walked into this place. You can fool all these old ladies with your fancy clothes, but I can see your fangs, my friend, and they are long, long fangs.” Herko swallowed the mess in his mouth and twinkled at Bunting.

  “You could see that, huh?”

  “First thing. Long fangs, my friend. Now tell me about these other women.” He suppressed a burp. “Go on, we only got a couple of minutes.”

  Lunch ended twenty minutes later, and the day slid forward. Though Bunting felt tired, his odd exhilaration had returned—an exhilaration that seemed like a freedom from some heavy, painful responsibility—and as his fingers moved across the keyboard to his computer, he thought about the women he had described to Frank Herko. Images of the wonderful new baby bottles back in his room flowed in and out of his fantasies.

  He found he was making a surprising number of typing mistakes.

  Late in the afternoon^ Herko’s head appeared over the top of the partition separating their two cubicles.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Slowly,” Bunting said.

  “Forget about it, you’re still convalescing. Listen, I had a great idea. You’re not really going out with Veronica anymore, right?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Bunting said.

  “You know what I mean. You’re basically a free man, aren’t you? My friend Lindy has this girlfriend, Marty, who wants to go out with someone new. Marty’s a great kid. You’d like her. That’s a promise, man. If I could, I’d take her out myself, but Lindy would kill me if I did. No kidding—I wouldn’t put you on about this, I think you’d like her a lot and you could have a good time with her, and if everything works out, which I don’t see why it should not, all four of us could go somewhere together.”

  “Marty?” Bunting asked. “You want me to go out with someone named Marty?”

  Frank snickered. “Hey, she’s really cute, don’t act that way with me. This is actually Lindy’s idea, I guess I talked about you with her, and she thought you sounded okay, you know, so when her friend Marty started saying this and that, she was breaking up with a guy, she asked me about you. And I said no way, this guy is all wrapped up. But since you’re going wild, you really ought to check Marty out. I’m not kidding.”

  He was not. His head looked even bigger than usual, his beard seemed to jump out of his skin, his hair foamed from his scalp, his eyes bulged. Bunting had a brief, unsettling image of what it would be like to be a girl, fending off all this insistent male energy.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Great. Do I have your phone number? I do, don’t I?”

  Bunting could not remember having given Herko his telephone number—he very rarely gave it out—but he recited it to the eager head looking down at him, and the head disappeared below the partition as Herko went to his desk to write down the number. A moment later, the head reappeared. “You’re not going to be sorry about this. I promise!” Herko disappeared behind the partition.

  Bunting’s entire body went cold. “Now, wait just a second. What are you going to do?” He could feel his heart racing.

  “What do you think I’m going to do?” Herko called over the partition.

  “You can’t give anybody my number!” Bunting heard his own voice come up in a squeaky wail, and realized that everybody else in the Data Entry room had also heard him.

  Herko’s upper body appeared leaning around the door to Bunting’s cubicle. He was frowning. “Hey, man. Did I say I was going to give anybody your number?”

  “Well, don’t,” Bunting said. He felt as though he had been struck by a bolt of lightning a second ago. He looked down at his hands and saw that they, and presumably the rest of his body, had turned a curious lobster-red flecked with white spots.

  “You’re going to piss me off, man, because you ought to know you can trust me. I’m not just some jerk, Bunting. I’m trying to do something nice for you.”

  Bunting stared furiously down at his keyboard.

  “You’re starting to piss me off,” Herko said in a low, quiet voice.

  “Okay, I trust you,” Bunting said, and continued staring at his keyboard until Herko retreated into his own cubicle.

  At the end of the day Bunting left the office quickly and took the staircase to avoid having to wait for the elevator. When he reached the ground floor, he sensed two elevators opening simultaneously off to his right, and hurried toward the door, dreading that someone would call out his name. Bunting spun through the door and walked as quickly as he could to the corner, where he turned off on a deeply shadowed crosstown street. He pulled his sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. Strangers moved past him, and even the Oriental rug outlets and Indian restaurants that lined the street seemed interchangeable and anonymous. His pace slowed. It came to him that, without consciously planning to do so, he was walking away from his bus stop. Bunting experienced every sensation of running away from something, but had no clear idea of what he was running from. It was all an illusion: there was nothing to run from. Herko? The idea was absurd. He certainly did not have to run from fuzzy, noisy Frank Herko.

  Bunting ambled along, too tired to walk all the way back to his building but aware of some new dimension, an anticipatory expectancy, in his life that made it pleasant to walk along the crosstown street.

  He crossed Broadway and kept walking, thinking that he might even try to figure out which subway could take him uptown. Bunting had taken the subway only once, shortly after his arrival in New York, and on the hot, crowded train he had felt in mortal danger. Every inch of the walls had been filled with lunatic scribbling; every other male on the subway had looked like a mugger. But Frank Herko took the subway in from Brooklyn every day. According to the newspapers, all the subway graffiti had been removed. Bunting had lived in New York for a decade without getting mugged, he walked all alone down dark streets, the subway could not possibly seem so threatening to him now. And it was much faster than the bus.

  Bunting passed the entrance to a subway station just as he had these thoughts, and he paused to look at it. Stairs led down to a smoky blackness filled with noise: up the filthy steps floated a stench of zoo, of other people’s private parts.

  Bunting twitched away like a cat and kept walking west, committed now to walking to Eighth Avenue. He suddenly felt nearly bad enough to hail a cab and spend five dollars on the trip home. It had come to him that Frank Herko and his friend Lindy were going to set about making him go out on a date with a girl named Marty, and that this must have been the vague pleasure that had lightened his mood only minutes ago.

  Nothing was right about this, the whole idea was nightmarishly grotesque.

  But why did the idea of a date have to be grotesque? He was a well-dressed man with a steady job. His looks were okay—definitely on the okay side. Worse people had millions of dates. Above all, Veronica had given him a kind of history, a level of experience no other data clerk could claim. He had spent hundreds of hours talking to Veronica
in restaurants, another hundred in airplanes. He had traveled to Switzerland and stayed in luxury hotel suites.

  Bunting realized that if something happened in your mind, it had happened—you had a memory of it, you could talk about it. It changed you in the same way as an event in the world. In the long run, there was very little difference between events in the world and events in the mind, because one reality inhabited them both. He had been the lover of a sophisticated Swiss woman named Veronica, and he could certainly handle a date with a scruffy acquaintance of Frank Herko’s. Named Marty.

  In fact, he could see her. He could summon her up. Her name and her friendship with Frank evoked a short, dark-haired, undemanding girl who liked to have a good time. She would be passably pretty, wear short skirts and fuzzy sweaters, and go to a lot of movies. A passive, good-hearted quality would balance her occasional crude-ness. He would appear patrician, aloof, ironic to her—a sophisticated older man.

  He could take her out once, in some indeterminate future time. The differences between them would speak for themselves, and he and Marty would part with a mixture of regret and relief. It was this infinitely postponable scenario that had hovered about him with such delightful vagueness.

  Bunting turned up Eighth Avenue smiling to himself. When he saw that he was walking past a drugstore he turned in and moved through the aisles until he came to a large display of baby bottles. Here beside the three kinds of Evenflo and the Playtex hung bottles he had never heard of—no sturdy Prentisses, but squat little blue bottles and bottles with patterns and flags and teddy bears, a whole new range of baby bottles made by a company named Ama. Bunting saw instantly that Ama was a wonderful company. They were located in Florida, and they had a sunny, inventive, Floridian sensibility. Bunting began scooping up the bottles, and ended by carrying an awkward armful to the counter.

  “How many babies you got?” the young woman behind the register asked him.

  “These are for a project,” Bunting said.

  “Like a collection?” she asked. Her head tilted prettily in the dusty light through the big plate-glass window on Eighth Avenue.

  “Yes, like a collection,” Bunting said. “Exactly.” He smiled at her bushy hair and puzzled eyes.

  Outside the drugstore, he moved to the curb and raised his hand for a cab. With the same heightened sense of self that came when he bought his splendid suits, he rode back to his building in the ripped backseat of a bouncing, smelly taxi, splurging another fifteen cents every time the meter changed.

  FOUR

  hat night he ate a microwaved Lean Cuisine dinner and divided his attention between the evening news on his television set and the array of freshly washed bottles on both sides of it. The news seemed outmoded and repetitious, the bottles various and pristine. The news had happened before, the same murders and explosions and declarations and demonstrations had occurred yesterday and the day before and the week and month before that, but the bottles existed in present time, unprecedented and extraordinary. The news was routine, the bottles possessed wonder. It was difficult for him to take his eyes from them.

  How many bottles, he wondered, would it take to fill up his table? Or his bed?

  For an instant, he saw his entire room festooned, engorged with cylindrical glass and plastic bottles—blue bottles covering one wall, yellow ones another, a curving path between bottles on the floor, a smooth cushion of nippled bottles on his bed. Bunting blinked and smiled as he chewed on turkey. He sipped Spanish burgundy from one of the new glass Evenflos.139

  When he had dumped the Lean Cuisine tray in the garbage and dropped his silverware in the sink, Bunting scrubbed out the bottle, rinsed the nipple, and set them on his draining board. He put a kettle of hot water on the stove, two teaspoons of instant coffee in one of his new bottles, and added boiling water and cold milk before screwing on the nipple. He poured a generous slug of cognac into another new bottle, a squat, pink, friendly-looking little Ama, and took both bottles to his bed along with a pen and a pad of paper. t Bunting pulled coffee, then cognac, into his mouth, and let the little pink Ama dangle from his mouth while he wrote.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  There have been some changes that I ought to tell you about. For some time there have been difficulties between Veronica and me which I haven’t told you about because I didn’t want you to worry about me. I guess what it all boils down to is that I’ve been feeling you could say stultified by our relationship. This has been difficult for both of us, after all the time we’ve been together, but things are finally resolved, and Veronica and I are only distant friends now. Of course there has been some pain, but I felt that my freedom was worth that price.

  Lately I have been seeing a girl named Carol, who is really great. I met her in an art gallery where she works, and we hit it off right away. Carol makes me feel loved and cared for, and I love her already, but I’m not going to make the mistake of tying myself down so soon after breaking up with Veronica, and I’m going out with two other great girls too. I’ll tell you about them in the weeks to come.

  Unfortunately, I still will not be able to come for Christmas, since New York is getting so expensive, and my rent just went up to an astronomical sum...

  If nobody hears the tree falling down in the forest, does it make any sound?

  Does the air hear?

  When his letter was done, Bunting folded it into an envelope and set it aside to be mailed in the morning. It was two hours to bedtime. He removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and slipped off his shoes. He thought of Veronica, sitting on the edge of a bed on the east side of town. A Merlin phone on a long cord sat beside her.

  Veronica’s eyes were dark and hard, and a deep vertical line between her harsh thick eyebrows cut into her forehead. Bunting noticed for the first time that her calves were skinny, and that the loose skin beneath her eyes was a shade darker than the rest of her face. Without his noticing it, Veronica had been getting old. She had been hardening and drying like something left out in the sun. It came to him that he had always been unsuitable for her, and that was why she had chosen him. In her personal life, she set up situations destined from the first to fail. He had spent years “with” Veronica, but he had never understood this before.

  He had been an actor in a psychic drama, and he had done no more than to play his role.

  It came to him that Veronica had deliberately introduced him to a way of life he could not afford by himself in order to deprive him of it later. If he had not broken off with her, she would have dropped him. Veronica was a poignant case. Those winks and flashes of leg in office meetings had simply been aspects of a larger plan unconsciously designed to leave him gasping with pain. Without Bunting, she would find someone else—an impoverished young poet, say—and do the whole thing all over again, dinner at the Blue Goose and first-class trips to Switzerland (Bunting had not told his parents about traveling first class), orchestra seats at Broadway plays, until what was twisted in her made her discard him.

  Bunting felt sort of…awed. He knew someone like that.

  He washed the Evenflo, refilled the pink little bottle with cognac, and picked up his novel and went back to bed to read. For a moment he squirmed around on top of his sheets, getting into the right position. He sucked cognac into his mouth, swallowed, and opened the book.

  The lines of print swam up to meet him, and instantly he was on top of a quick little gray horse named Shorty, looking down the brown sweep of a hill toward a herd of grazing buffalo. An enormous, nearly cloudless sky hung above him; far ahead, so distant they were colorless and vague, a bumpy line of mountains rose up from the yellow plain. Shorty began to pick his way down the hill, and Bunting saw that he was wearing stained leather chaps over his trousers, a dark blue shirt, a sheepskin vest, and muddy brown boots with tarnished spurs. Two baby bottles had been inserted, nipple-down, into the holsters on his hips, and a rifle hung in a long sheath from the pommel of his saddle. Shorty’s muscles moved beneath his legs, and a strong smell of h
orse came momentarily to Bunting, then was gone in a general wave of fresh, living odors from the whole scene before him. A powerful smell of grass dominated, stronger than the faint, tangy smell of the buffalo. From a long way off, Bunting smelled fresh water. Off to the east, someone was burning dried sod in a fireplace. The strength and clarity of these odors nearly knocked Bunting off his horse, and Shorty stopped moving and looked around at him with a large, liquid brown eye. Bunting smiled and prodded Shorty with his heels, the horse continued walking quietly down the hill, and the astonishing freshness of the air sifted around and through him. It was the normal air of this world, the air he knew.

  Shorty reached the bottom of the hill and began moving slowly alongside the great herd of buffalo. He wanted to move into a gallop, to cut toward the buffalo and divide them, and Bunting pulled back on the reins. Shorty’s hide quivered, and the short coarse hairs scratched against Bunting’s chaps. It was important to proceed slowly and get into firing range before scattering the buffalo. A few of the massive bearded heads swung toward Bunting and Shorty as they plodded west toward the front of the herd. One of the females snorted and pushed her way toward the center of the herd, and the other grunted and moved aside to let her pass. Bunting slipped his rifle from its case, checked to be sure it was fully loaded, and held it across his lap. He stuffed six extra shells in each pocket of the sheepskin vest.

  Shorty was ambling away past the front of the herd now, something like fifty yards away from the nearest animals. A few more of the buffalo watched him. Their furry mouths drizzled onto the grass. When he passed out of their immediate field of vision, they did not turn their heads but went back to nuzzling the thick grass. Bunting kept moving until he was far past the front of the herd, and then cut Shorty back around in a wide circle behind them.