Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  “It just didn’t work out,” Bunting said.

  “Oh, is that right? You don’t suppose you could go into a little more detail on that, could you?”

  Bunting tried to remember why his date had ended. “My mother didn’t make her doctor’s appointment.”

  Herko stared at him pop-eyed. “Your mother…Does that make sense to you? You’re out with a girl, you’re supposed to be having a good time, you say, Gee, Mom didn’t get over to the doctor’s, I guess I better SPLIT?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bunting said: “I’m not in a very good mood right now. I don’t like it when you yell at me. That makes me feel very uneasy. I wish you’d leave me alone.”

  “Boy, you got it,” Herko said. “You have got it, Bobby, in spades. But there are a few vital bits of information it has become extremely necessary for you to have in your possession, Bobby, and I am going to give them to you.”

  He stepped backward ,and saw his down jacket on the floor. He raised his eyes as if the jacket had disobediently conjured itself off a hook and thrown itself ort the carpet. He leaned over and picked it up, ostentatiously folded it in half, and draped it over one arm. All this reminded Bunting sharply, even sickeningly, of his father. The affectation of delicacy had been a crucial part of his father’s arsenal of scorn. Herko had probably reminded him of his father from the beginning; he had just never noticed it.

  “One,” Frank said. “I assumed you were going to act like a man. Funny, huh? I thought you would know that a man remembers his friends, and a man is grateful to his friends. Two. A man does not run out on a woman. A man does not leave a woman in the middle of a restaurant—he acts like a MAN, damn it, and conducts himself like he knows what he’s doing. Three. She thought you were a drug addict, did that get through to you?”

  “I didn’t leave her alone, she left me alone,” Bunting said.

  “She thought you were a junkie!” Herko was yelling again. “She thought I fixed her up with a fucking cocaine freak, right after she broke up with a guy who put a restaurant, a house, and a car up his nose! That’s …” Herko raised his arms and lifted his head, trying to find the right word. “That’s…MISERABLE! DISGUSTING!”

  Bunting stood up and grabbed his coat. His heart wanted to explode. It was not possible to spend another second in his cubicle. Frank Herko had become ten feet tall, and every one of his breaths drained all the air from Bunting’s own lungs. His screams bruised Bunting’s ears. Bunting was buttoning his coat before he realized that he was walking out of the cubicle and going home.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Herko yelled. “You can’t leave!”

  Unable to speak, nearly unable to see through the red mist that surrounded him, Bunting hurried out of the Data Entry room and fled down the corridor toward the elevator.

  As soon as he got out of the building he felt a little better, but the woman who stood next to him on the uptown bus edged visibly away.

  He could still hear Frank’s huge, punishing voice. The world belonged to people like his father and Frank Herko, and people like himself lived in its potholes and corners.

  Bunting got out of the bus and realized that he was talking to himself only when he saw himself in a shop window. He blushed, and would have apologized, but no one around him met his eye.

  He walked into the lobby of his apartment building and realized that it was not going to be possible for him to go back to work. He could never face Herko again, nor the other people who had overheard Frank’s terrible yelling. That was finished. It was all over, like the fantasy of Veronica.

  He got into the elevator, thinking that he seemed to be different from what he had thought he was, though it was hard to tell if this was for the better or the worse. In the old days, he would have been figuring out where to go to get another job, and now all he wanted to do was to get back into his room, pour himself a drink, and open a book. Of course all of these had also changed, room, drink, and book.

  By the time he pushed his key into the lock he realized that he was no longer so frightened. In the psychic background, the waves of Frank Herko’s voice crashed and rumbled on a distant beach. Bunting decided to give himself something like a week to recover from the events of the past few days, then to go out and look for another job. A week was a comfortable time. Monday.to Monday. He hung up his coat and poured a drink into a clean Ama. Then he collapsed onto his bed and let his head fall back on the pillow. He groaned with satisfaction.

  For a time he merely sucked at his bottle and let his body sink into his wrinkled sheets. In a week, he told himself, he would get out of bed. He’d shave and dress in clean clothes and go outside and nail down a new job. He’d sit in front of another computer terminal and type in a lifetime’s worth of mumbo jumbo. Soon there would be another Veronica or Carol, an Englishwoman or a Texan or a Cuban with an MBA from Wharton who was just finding her sea legs at Citibank. It would be the same thing all over again, and it would be terrible, but it would be okay. Sometimes it would even be sort of nice.

  He sucked air, and lifted the bottle in surprise and found that it was empty. It seemed that he had just declared a private holiday. Bunting rolled off the bed and went through the litter to the refrigerator. He dumped more vodka into the little bottle. Vodka could get you through these little blue periods.

  Bunting closed the freezer door, screwed the top onto the bottle, and held the nipple clenched between his teeth while he surveyed his room. One week, then back into the world. Bunting remembered his vision of the raging Jesus who had stormed through working-class Battle Creek. Suffer the little children.

  He crossed to his bed and picked up the telephone. “Okay,” he said, sucked from the bottle, and sat down. “Why not?

  “I ought to,” he said.

  He dialed the area code for Battle Creek, then the first three digits of his parents’ number.

  “Just thought I’d call,” he said,. He pulled more vodka into his mouth.

  “How are things? I don’t want to upset anybody.”

  He dialed the last four numbers and listened to the phone ring in that little house so far away. Finally his father answered, not with “Hello,” but with “Yeah.”

  “Hi, Dad, this is Bobby,” he said. “Just thought I’d call. How are things?”

  “Fine, why wouldn’t they be?” his father said.

  “Well, I didn’t want to upset anybody.”

  “Why would we get upset? You know how your mother and I feel. We enjoy your calls.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, sure. Don’t get enough of ‘em.” There was a small moment of silence. “Got anything special on your mind, Bobby?”

  It was as if the other night had never happened. This was how it went, Bunting remembered. If you forgot about something, it went away.

  “I guess I was wondering about Mom,” he said. “She sounded a little confused, the other night.”

  “Guess she was,” his father said in an abrupt, dismissive voice. “She gets that way, now and then. / can’t do anything about it, Bobby. How’re things at work? Okay?”

  “Things could be better,” Bunting said, and immediately regretted it.

  “Oh?” Now his father’s voice was hard and biting. “What happened, you get fired? They fired you, didn’t they? You screwed up and they fired you.”

  He could hear his father breathing hard, stoking himself up like a steam engine.

  For a second it seemed that his father was right: he had screwed up, and they had fired him. “No,” he said. “They didn’t. I’m not fired.”

  “But you’re not at work, either. It’s nine o’clock in the morning here, so it’s ten where you are, and Bobby Bunting is still in his apartment. So you lost your job. I knew it was gonna happen.”

  “No, it didn’t,” Bunting said. “I just left early.”

  “Sure. You left at eight-thirty on Monday morning. What do you call that, premature retirement? I call it getting fired. Just don’t try to kid me a
bout it, Bobby, I know what kind of person you are.” He inhaled. “And don’t expect any money from the old folks, okay? Remember all those meals at fancy restaurants and all those trips to Europe, and you’ll know where your money went. If you ever had any, and if any of that stuff was true, which is something I have my doubts about.”

  “I took the day off,” Bunting said. “Maybe I’ll take off tomorrow, too. I’m taking care of a few details around here.”

  “Yeah, those kind of details are likely to take care of you, if you don’t watch out.”

  “Look,” said Bunting, stung. “I’m not fired. You hear me? Nobody fired me. I took the day off, because somebody got on my back. I don’t know why you never believe me about anything.”

  “Do you want me to remind you about your whole life, back here? I know who you are, Bobby, let’s leave it at that.” His father inhaled again, so loudly it sounded as if he had put the telephone into his mouth. He was calming himself. “Don’t get me wrong, you got your good points, same as everybody else. Maybe you just ought to cut down on the wild social life, and stop trying to make up for never going out when you were a teenager, that’s all. There’s responsibilities. Responsibilities were never your strong point. But maybe you changed. Fine. Okay?”

  Bunting felt as if he had been mugged on a dark street. It was like having Frank Herko yell at him about manhood all over again.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said, and pulled another mouthful of Popov out of the Ama. “Have you ever thought that you saw what reality really was?”

  “Jesus wept.”

  “Wait. I mean something by that. Didn’t you ever have a time when you saw that everything was alive?”

  “Stop right there, Bobby, I don’t want to hear this shit all over again. Just shut your trap, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “What do you mean?” Bunting was almost yelling. “You mean I can’t talk about it? Why can’t I talk about it?”

  “Because it’s crazy, you dummy,” his father said. “I want you to hear this, Bobby. You’re nothing special. You got that? You worried your mother enough already, so keep your trap shut. For your own good.”

  Bunting felt astonishingly small. His father’s voice had pounded him down into childhood, and he was now about three feet tall. “I can’t talk anymore.”

  “Sleep it off and straighten up,” his father said. “I mean it.”

  Bunting let the phone slide back into the cradle and grabbed for the Ama.

  By the time he decided to get out of bed, he was so drunk that he had trouble navigating across the room and into the bathroom. As he peed, a phrase of his father’s came back to him, and his urine splattered off the wall. / don’t want to hear this shit all over again. All over again? If he weren’t drunk, he thought, he would understand some fact he did not presently understand. But because he was drunk, he couldn’t. Neither could he go outside. Bunting reeled back to his bed and passed out.

  He woke up in the darkness with a headache and a vast, encompassing feeling of shame and sorrow. His life was nothing—it had always been nothing, it would always be nothing. There could be no release. The things he had seen, his experiences of ecstasy, the moment he had tried to describe to Marty, all were illusion. In a week he would go back to DataComCorp, and everything would return to normal. Probably they would just take him back—he wasn’t important enough to fire. The only difference would be that Frank Herko would ignore him.

  His whole problem was that he always forgot he was nothing special.

  He promised himself that he would stop making things up. There would be no more imaginary love affairs. Bunting walked over to his window and looked down upon men and women in winter coats and hats who had normal, unglamourous, realistic lives. They looked cold. He got back into bed as if into a coffin.

  TWELVE

  The next morning, Bunting poured all of his vodka and cognac down the sink. Then he washed the dishes that had accumulated since his last washing. He looked at the sacks of garbage stowed away here and there, put the worst, of them into large plastic bags, and took them all downstairs to the street. Back in his apartment, he swept and scrubbed for several hours. He changed his sheets and organized the magazines and newspapers into neat pilesr Then he washed the bathroom floor and soaked in the tub for half an hour. He dried himself, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and went straight back to bed. One of these days, he told himself, he would begin regular exercise.

  The next day, he fought down the impulse to get another bottle of vodka and went to the supermarket on Broadway and bought a bag of carrots, a bag of celery, cartons of fruit juice and low-fat milk, a loaf of whole-grain bread, and a container of cholesterol-free margarine. Such a diet would keep the raging Jesus at bay.

  Bunting spent most of Tuesday lying down. He ate two carrots, three celery sticks, and one slice of dry bread. The bread tasted particularly good. He drank all of his fruit juice. In the evening, he tried switching on the television, but what came out was a stream of language so ugly it squeaked with pain. He fell soundly asleep at nine-thirty, was awakened by the sound of gunshots around three in the morning, and went promptly back to sleep.

  On Wednesday he rose, showered, dressed in a conservative gray suit, ate a carrot and drank two or three ounces of papaya juice, put on his coat, and went outside for the first time since Monday morning. It was a bright brisk day, and the air, though not as fresh as that of the Montana plains in 1878 or Los Angeles in 1944, seemed startlingly clean and pure. Even on Upper Broadway, Bunting thought he could smell the sea. The outline of a body had been chalked on a roped-off portion of the sidewalk, and as Bunting walked between two parked cars and stepped down onto unsanitary, untidy Broadway to walk alongside the traffic in dazzling sunlight, he merely glanced at the white outline of the body and then firmly looked away and continued moving toward the traffic light and the open sidewalk.

  Bunting walked for miles. He looked at the watches in Tourneau’s windows, at the shoes in Church Brothers, the pocket calculators and compact disc players in a string of windows on lower Fifth Avenue. He came at length to Battery Park, and sat for a moment, looking out toward the Statue of Liberty. He was in the world, surrounded by people and things; the breeze that touched him touched everyone else, too. To Bunting, this world seemed new and almost undamaged, barren in a fashion only he had once known and now wished nearly to forget.

  If a tree fell in the forest, it would not make a sound, no, none.

  He began walking back uptown, remembering how he had once sat comfortably astride a horse named Shorty and how a worried perfume executive in a flannel suit had handed him a photograph of his mother. These experiences too could be sealed within a leaden casket and pushed overboard into the great psychic sea. They were aberrations: silent and weightless exceptions to a general rule. He would get old in his little room, drinking iced tea and papaya juice out of baby bottles. He would outlive his parents. Both of them. Everybody did that.

  He took a bus up Broadway, and got off several blocks before his building because he wanted to walk a little more. On the corner a red-faced man in a shabby plaid coat sat on a camp chair behind a display of used paperback books. Bunting paused to look over the titles for a Luke Short or a Max Brand, but saw mainly romance novels with titles like Love’s Savage Bondage or Sweet Merciless Kiss. These titles, and the disturbing covers that came with them, threatened to remind Bunting of Marty seated across from him in a Greenwich Village restaurant, and he stepped back from the array to banish even the trace of this memory. A cover unlike the others met his eye, and he took in the title, Anna Karenina, and realized that he had heard of the book somewhere—of course he had never read it, it was nothing like the sort of books he usually read, but he was sure that it was supposed to be very good. He bent down and picked up and opened it at random. He leaned toward the page in the light of the street lamp and read. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard but the night sounds of the frogs that
never ceased in the marsh, and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning.

  A thrill went through his body, and he turned the page and read another couple of sentences. A slight wind rose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The gloomy moment that usually precedes the dawn had come, the full triumph of light over darkness.

  Bunting felt a strange desire to weep: he wanted to stand there for a long time, leafing through this miraculous book.

  A voice said, “World’s greatest realistic novel, hands down.”

  Bunting looked up to meet the uncommonly intelligent gaze of the pudgy red-faced man in the camp chair. “That right?”

  “Anybody says different, he’s outta his fuckin’ mind.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “One dollar.”

  Bunting fished a dollar from his pocket and leaned over the rows of bright covers to give it to the man. “What makes it so great?” he asked.