Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  “You’re something else,” she said, laughing. “You and Frank Herko are quite the pair. The two of you must get that office all stirred up.”

  “Maybe we should.” For a giddy instant, Bunting saw himself and shaggy, overbearing Frank Herko conducting loud debates over the partition. He would speak as he was speaking now, and Frank would respond with delight and abandon, and the two of them would carry on their talks after work, in apartments and restaurants and bars. It was a vision of a normal and joyous life—he would call up Frank Herko at his apartment, and Frank would say, Why don’t you come on over? Bring Marty, we’ll go out to dinner, have a little fun.

  Bunting and Marty were smiling at each other.

  “You’re sort of like Frank, you know. You like saying outrageous things. You’re not at all the way I thought you were when I came in. I mean, I liked you, and I thought you were interesting, but I thought it might be kind of a long evening. You don’t mind my saying that now? I really don’t want to hurt your feelings, and I shouldn’t be, because you seem so different now. I mean, I never heard anybody talk that way before, not even Frank. It might be crazy, but it’s fascinating.”

  Nobody had ever told Bunting he was fascinating before this, especially not a young woman staring at him with wonderful blue eyes past a fall of pure black hair. He realized, and this was one of the most triumphant moments of his life, that he could very likely bring this amazing young woman back to his apartment.

  Then he remembered what his apartment—his room—actually looked like, and what he had done to it.

  “Don’t start blushing again,” Marty said. “It’s just a compliment. You’re an interesting man, and you hardly know it.” She reached across the table and rested her fingers lightly on the back of his hand. “Why don’t we finish these drinks and order some food? It’s Friday. We don’t have to go anywhere else. This is fine. I’m enjoying myself.”

  Marty’s light cool fingers felt as heavy as anvils on his skin. A wave of pure guilt made him pull his hand away. She was still smiling at him, but a shadow passed behind her wonderful eyes. “I have to do something,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let myself forget,” he said. “There must be a telephone in this place somewhere.” He began looking wildly around the restaurant.

  “You have to call someone?”

  “It’s urgent, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’ve been acting like…” Bunting wiped his face and pushed himself away from the table and stood up. He moved clumsily toward the people standing at the bar.

  “Like what!?” she asked, but he was already pushing clumsily through the crowd.

  Bunting found a pay telephone outside the men’s room. He scooped change out of his pockets and stacked it up. Then he dialed the area code for Battle Creek and his parents’ number. He dropped in most of the money. The phone rang and rang, and Bunting fidgeted and cupped his ear against the roar of voices from the bar.

  Finally his mother answered.

  “Mom! How are you? How’d it go?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Bobby. It’s Bobby.”

  “Bobby isn’t here,” she said.

  “No, I’m Bobby, Mom. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. Why wouldn’t I feel fine?”

  “Did you see the doctor today?”

  “Why would I see him?” She sounded sharp, almost angry. “That was stupid. I don’t have to see him, listen to your father gripe about the money for the rest of his life.”

  “Didn’t you have an appointment?”

  “Did I?”

  “I think so,” he said, feeling his grip on reality loosen.

  “Well, what if I did? This isn’t Russia. Your father wanted to bully me about the money, that’s all it is. I pretended—just sat in my car, that’s all I did. He wants to humiliate me, that’s what it is, thirty-seven years of humiliation.”

  “He didn’t go with you?”

  “He couldn’t, there Wasn’t any appointment. And when I came home, I drove and drove, I kept seeing Kellogg’s and the sanitarium, but I never knew where I was and so I had to keep driving, and then, like a miracle, I saw I was turning into our street, and I was so mad at him I swore I’d .never ever go to that doctor again.”

  “You got lost driving home?” His body felt hot all over.

  “Now, you stop talking about that. You sound like him. I want to know about that beautiful girlfriend of yours. Tell me about Veronica. Someday you have to bring that girl home, Bobby. We want to meet her.”

  “I’m not going out with her anymore,” Bunting said. “I wrote you.”

  “You’re just like that horrible old crosspatch. Brutal is the word for him. Brutal all his life, brutal brutal brutal. Says things just to confuse me, and then he gets upset when I want to do a little wash, acts as if I haven’t been his punching bag for the past thirty years—”

  Bunting heard only heavy breathing for a moment. “Mom?”

  “I don’t know who you are, and I wish you’d stop calling,” she said. Bunting heard his father’s voice, loud and indistinct, and his mother said, “Oh, you can leave me alone, too.” Then he heard a startled outcry.

  “Hello, what’s going on?” Bunting said. All the sounds from Battle Creek had dwindled into a muffled silence overwhelmed by the din from the bar. His father had put his hand over the mouthpiece. This almost certainly meant that he was yelling. “Someone talk to me!” Bunting shouted, and the yelling in the bar abruptly ceased. Bunting hunched his shoulders and tried to burrow into the hood over the telephone.

  “All right, who is this?” his father asked.

  “Bob, it’s Bobby,” he said.

  “You’ve got some nerve, calling up out of the blue, but you never did care much about what anybody else might be going through, did you? Look, I know you’re sensitive and all that, but this isn’t the best time to give us bullshit about your little girlfriends. You got your mother all upset, and she was upset enough already, believe me.” He hung up.

  Bunting replaced the receiver. He was not at all clear about what was going on in Battle Creek. It had seemed that his mother had forgotten who he was during the course of their worrying conversation. He pushed his way through the men and women at the bar and came out into the restaurant where a young woman with a round face framed in black hair was looking at him curiously from one of the rear tables. It took him a moment to remember her name. He tried to smile at her, but his face would not work right.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “This isn’t…um, I can’t, ah…I’m afraid that I have to go home.”

  Her faced hardened with a recognition: in an instant, all the sympathy dropped away. “We were having a nice time, and you go make a phone call, and now everything’s off?”

  Bunting shrugged and looked at his feet. “It’s a personal thing— I can’t really explain it—but, uh—”

  “But, uh, that’s it? What happened to, This is the greatest night of my life’?” She squinted at him. “Oh, boy. I guess I get it. You ran out, didn’t you? You thought you could get through an evening, and then you realized you can’t, so you called your guy. And everything you said wasn’t really you, it was just—just that crap you take. You’re pathetic.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bunting said. His misery seemed to be compounding itself second by second.

  “I know guys like you,” she said, her eyes blazing lit him. “One in particular.” She held out an imperious hand for the checkroom ticket. “I know a few inadequate children who can’t handle relationships, one in particular, but I thought I was all done hanging around a guy who spent half the night making phone calls and the other half in the bathroom—and I guess I really am done! Because I’m going!” She retrieved her coat and shoved her arms into its sleeves. People at the other tables were staring at them.

  “You must have the wrong idea about something,” Bunting said.

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. She buttoned h
er coat. Her small face seemed cold, a cold white stone with a red smear near the bottom. “Sleep on it, if you do sleep, see if you can come up with something a little snappier.” Marty walked quickly through the tables, passed the lounging headwaiter, and went outside. Frigid air swept into the restaurant as the door closed on the empty darkness.

  Bunting paid for the drinks and noticed that the waitress would not look directly at him. An artificial ‘quiet had settled on the bar. Bunting put on his coat and wandered outside, feeling lost and aimless. He had no appetite. He buttoned up his coat and watched cars stream toward him down the wide avenue. A short distance to his left, the avenue ended at a massive arch which stood at the entrance to a park. He had no idea where he was. That didn’t matter: all places were the same place. Traffic continued to come toward him out of the dark, and he realized that he was in Battle Creek, Michigan—he was back in Battle Creek, downtown in the business district, a long way from home.

  TEN

  When Jesus flew to heaven he had wounds in his hands and feet, they had torn his flesh and killed him on a cross, there was blood on the ground, and when he rolled the rock away in his dusty robe he left bloody palm prints on the rock.

  Jesus said, So you have some fucking doubts, Bobby? Take a look at this. And opened his clothes and showed Bunting the great open wound in his side. Go on, he said, stick your goddamned hand in it, stick your mitt in there, how about them goddamn apples, Bobby? You get it, you get it now, good buddy? This shit is for real.

  And Jesus walked on his bleeding feet through Battle Creek, leaving his bloodstains on sidewalks unseen by the assholes who had never been wounded by anything more serious than a third martini, and who had never wounded anyone else with a weapon deadlier than an insult. There was a savage grin on his face. He slammed the palm of a hand against the side of one of those little houses, and blood squirted onto the peeling paint. Holy holy holy. The palm print was holy, the flecks of paint were holy, the cries of pain and sorrow too.

  Go home, you little asshole, said Jesus. You’re never gonna get it, never. But neither do most people, so that part’s okay. Go home and read a book. That’ll do—it’s a piss-poor way to get there, but I guess it’s about the best you can do.

  Suffer the little children, said Jesus, suffer everybody else too. You think this shit is easy?

  Still muttering to himself, Jesus turned off on a side street, his bloody footprints following after him, his thin robe whipping around him in the wind, and Bunting saw the frame houses of working-class Battle Creek all around him. Some were covered with hideous brick-face, some with grainy tar paper that peeled away from the seams around the window frames. Most of these houses had porches where skeletal furniture turned brittle in the cold, and birdbaths and shrines to Mary stood in a few tiny front yards. Before one of these unhappy two-story frame houses his parents had posed for the only photograph ever taken of the two of them together, a testament to ignorance, incompatibility, resentment, violence, and disorder. His father scowls out from under the brim of his hat, his mother twitches. Holy holy holy. From this chaos, from this riot, the overpowering sacred bounty. He was standing on his old Street, Bunting realized, the ultimate sample in this dwindled and partial world of blazing real life. Jesus’ bloody palm print shone from the ugly wall, even uglier now in winter when the dirty chipping paint looked like a skin disease. Here was his childhood, which he had not been intended to escape—its smallness and meanness had been supposed to accompany him always.

  Bunting stared at the shabby building in which his childhood had happened, and heard the old screams, the grunts and shrieks of pain and passion, sail through the thin walls. This was the bedrock. His childhood reached forth and touched him with a cold, cold finger. He could not survive it now, he could not even bear to witness a tenth of it. But neither could he live without it.

  He turned around and found that he had left Battle Creek and walked all the way from Washington Square to the Upper West Side. Across the street, on the other side of several hundred jostling, honking cars, stood his apartment building. Home again.

  ELEVEN

  Bunting’s weekend was glacial. He had trouble getting out of bed, and remembered to eat only when he realized that the sun had gone down. He felt so tired it was difficult to walk to the bathroom, and fell asleep in front of the television, watching programs that seemed without point or plot. It was all one great formless story, a story with no internal connections, and its incoherence made it watchable.

  On Sunday afternoon Bunting scratched his face and remembered that he had not bathed or shaved since Friday evening. He took off the clothes he worn since Saturday morning, showered, shaved, dressed in gray slacks and a sports jacket, put on his coat, and went around the corner through brittle wintry air to the diner. The man at the register and the counterman treated him normally. He ordered something from the enormous menu, ate what he ordered without tasting it, and forgot it as soon as he was done. When he walked back out into the cold he realized that he could buy more baby bottles. He had to finish the wall he had begun, and there was another wall he could cover with bottles, if he chose—he was under no real compulsion to do this, he knew, but it would be like finishing an old project. Bunting had always liked to complete his projects. There were several other things he could do with baby bottles, too, once he got started.

  He walked to the cash machine and took out three hundred dollars, leaving only five hundred and change in his account. At the drugstore he bought a gross of mixed bottles and another gross of mixed nipples, and asked for them to be delivered. Then he walked again out into the cold and turned toward his building. His entire attitude toward the^ bottles, even the redecoration project, had changed—he could remember his first, passionate purchases, the haste and embarrassment, the sheer weight of the need. Bunting supposed that this calm, passive state was a dull version of what most people felt all the time. It was probably what they called sanity. Sanity was what took over when you got too tired for anything else.

  He stopped off at the liquor store and bought two liters of vodka and a bottle of cognac.

  This time when he walked out into the cold, it came to him that Veronica had never existed. Of course he had always known at some level that his executive, Swiss-born mistress was a fantasy, but it seemed to him that he had never quite admitted this to himself. He had lived with his stories for so long he had forgotten that they had begun as an excuse for not going back to Battle Creek.

  Battle Creek had come to him instead, two nights ago. Suffer the little children, suffer everybody, suffer suffer. The furious, complaining Jesus had shown what was real. This dry, reduced world was what was left when He stormed back into His cave to lie down dead again.

  Bunting walked past the leavings of bango skank and jeepy and let himself back into his room. He switched on the television and poured cold vodka into an Ama. Words and phrases of unbelievable ugliness, language murdered by carelessness and indifference, dead bleeding language, came from the television. People all over the nation listened to stuff like this every day and heard nothing wrong in it. Bunting watched the action on the screen for a moment, trying to make at least some kind of primitive sense out of it. A blond man ran down a flight of stairs and punched another man in the face. The second man, taller and stronger than the first, collapsed and fell all the way down the stairs. A car sped down a highway, and lights flashed. Bunting sighed and snapped off the television.

  Bunting wandered through the stacks of magazines and news- papers and picked up The Lady in the Lake. He wondered if the buzzing of the delivery boy would pull him out of the book and then remembered with a deepening sense of gloom—with something very close to despair—that he probably would not have to be pulled out of the book. He was sane now. Or, if that was an error of terminology, he was in the same relationship to the world that he had been in before everything had changed.

  Bunting held his breath and opened the book. He let his eyes drop to the lines of print,
which resolutely stayed on the page. He sighed again and sat down on the bed to read until the new baby bottles arrived.

  It was another book—the details were the same but all the essentials had changed. Chris Lavery was apparently still alive, and Muriel Chess had been found in Little Fawn Lake, not in the bathroom of a mountain cabin. Crystal Kingsley was Derace Kingsley’s wife, not his mother. All the particulars of weather, appearances, and speech, the entire atmosphere of the book, came to Bunting in a flawed and ordinary way, sentence by sentence. For Bunting, this way of reading was like having lost the ability, briefly and mysteriously gained, of being able to fly. He stumbled along after the sentences, remembering what had been. When the buzzer rang he put the book down with relief, and spent the rest of the night gluing bottles to his walls.

  On Monday morning, Frank Herko came into his cubicle even before going into his own. His eyes looked twice their normal size, and his forehead was still red from the cold. Static electricity had given his hair a lively, unbridled, but stiff look, as if it had been starched or deep-fried. “What the hell went on?” he yelled as soon as he came in. Bunting could feel the attention of everyone else in the Data Entry room focusing on his cubicle.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  Herko actually bared his teeth at him. His eyes grew even larger. He unzipped his down jacket, ripped it off his body, and startled Bunting by throwing it to the floor. ‘Then I’ll try to tell you,” he said, speaking so softly he was nearly whispering. “My girlfriend Lindy has a girlfriend. A person named Marty. This is a person she likes. Particularly likes. You could even go so far as to say that Marty is a person very dear to my friend Lindy, and that what affects Marty affects my girlfriend Lindy. So the little ups and downs of this person Marty’s life, who by the way is also kind of dear to me, though not of course to the extent that she is dear to my friend, these ups and downs affect my friend Lindy and therefore, in a roundabout sort of way, also affect me.” Frank leaned forward from the waist and extended his arms. “SO! When Marty has a bad experience with a guy she calls a sleazeball and blames this experience on her friend Lindy Berman and Lindy Berman’s friend Frank HERKO, then Frank HERKO winds up eating SHIT! Is it starting to fall into place, Bobby? Are you starting to get why I asked you what the HELL happened?” He planted his fists on his hips and glowered, then shook his head and made a gesture with one arm that implored the universe to witness his frustration.