The Houseguest Read Online Free PDF

announced that, as Chuck had rightly pointed out, the party when seen unsentimentally was no more than, when the time for planning and preparing was included, many dollars of expense and days of hard work for a few hours of tedium.
    On the other hand, if it were Chuck’s intention to exhibit himself, it could have been supposed that he would have done so under conditions more propitious for success. How could he have assumed that anyone would go back that way on a Sunday? And then what if the visitor had been Bobby or Doug? Presumably the sight would not have been so shocking to another man, certainly not to Bobby, who had told her of some of the contests that had gone on in his day as an adolescent in the locker rooms of the club. Males then actually did concern themselves with size, as she noted derisively. Ah, said he, then women are indifferent to measurements of breast and butt and thigh? He professed not to understand the fundamental difference involved.
    To Lydia the sight of Chuck’s tumid organ was anything but erotic. It simply represented the ultimate in effrontery.
    She had stopped off at her own quarters to collect herself. A bright sitting room faced the sea; the bedroom, behind it on the land side, was always cool and dark and tranquil. The house had been built just as Bobby entered prep school, and his tennis and golf trophies from those years to the present stood on a teak shelving system that had probably been designed for books. Bobby owned few of the latter, being no reader, but with Lydia’s assistance he had when necessary summoned up sufficient intellectual effort to get passing grades in his college courses, though they would probably not have been high enough to get him accepted by a law school not heavily endowed by his great-grandfather. All three of the Graveses known to Lydia considered themselves virtually impoverished because they did not have the grand estate of his forebear, with its scores of servants, a property that today had long been a monastery, with grounds ever dwindling as the monkish order, in need of funds in an impious era, sold more of the acreage for tract houses and a shopping mall.
    Lydia stood before the big window and sought to be calmed by the sight of the expanse of water: the ocean was a great flat gray sheet at the moment. It was perhaps incongruous to seek emotional balance by gazing at such a potentially violent medium, but this measure never failed even in a storm. Presumably a hurricane might provide a different story, but anything less, if one were safe behind plate glass, did not fail to bring—well, reassurance might be the name for it: what did not seem petty in view of that liquid magnitude?
    Lydia was a superb swimmer, but riding on the surface of the sea was another thing. She was the poorest of sailors on her father’s big cabin cruiser, large enough for ocean-roaming but used by him exclusively on the meagerly proportioned and rather brackish Lake Winkeemaug, if not altogether a manmade body of water, then at least enhanced by dredge. Aboard that vessel the pubescent Lydia was capable of getting the vapors before the anchor was hoisted, and spent much of any voyage in the toilet, whose door, needless to say, was labeled “The Head.”
    The two men Lydia loved the most were the same for whom she felt the most contempt: her father and her husband. But perhaps this was normal enough.

    Had his daughter-in-law moved closer to the glass she could have seen Doug returning from his walk, ascending the steps from the beach. She would have been in an ideal situation from which to admire the fecundity of his scalp, on which the hair grew as thick as when he had been a boy.
    He now had decided that there could be no more waiting for Chuck’s appearance: he was too hungry. And if the houseguest did subsequently, belatedly, arise and prepare breakfast, it would be within one’s capacity to eat twice: the salt air would see to that.