The Houseguest Read Online Free PDF Page B

Therefore, having entered by one of the doors which in a conventional dwellingplace would have been more obviously assigned to tradesmen, he was in the kitchen.
    Here he stood bewildered for a moment before the large brushed-steel refrigerator that the designer had obtained, if memory served, from a firm whose routine clients were commercial restaurants. It was easy to assume that one could just go ahead and feed oneself, but aside from pouring cornflakes from a box, splitting a muffin and buttering it, and applying mustard to layered ham and cheese, Doug had never his life long been personally responsible for the preparing of that which he chewed and swallowed, and thus he found himself on alien terrain at the moment, without a legible map. He had never even tried frying a slice of bacon, and had an idea, based on scenes in comic movies, that it could seldom be performed by a beginner. To prepare his favorite form of egg, poached, divine intervention was probably to be implored, for even those of his women who were adepts at cookery made cloudy, oysterish messes unless they cheated and brought into play those little steaming-cups from which the eggs came looking as if effigies molded in rubber.
    But Chuck’s poached eggs were as though formed in God’s hand, translucent, veiled, quivering, scarcely over the threshold of solidity. Dammit, where was the fellow now?
    Right there: he came out of the butler’s pantry.
    â€œChuck!” Doug cried in happy surprise and frank affection.
    The houseguest failed to reply in kind. He frowned and scraped his lower lip with chisel-teeth. He carried two slices of white bread, inserted them into the twin slots of the toaster. Apparently this was to constitute his breakfast-making today.
    Chuck asked, “Bobby went to the club?”
    â€œI saw him outside a little while ago.”
    Chuck made it a statement this time. “He went to the club.”
    Doug rubbed his hands together. “Toast looks like a good idea. IVe been up for hours but haven’t yet eaten a bite.” He gave his speech a rising inflection so as to imply that this denial had been his own idea.
    With excessive force Chuck pulled one of the chairs away from the kitchen table and dropped into it. “Have a seat,” he said to Doug. “The womenfolk are elsewhere.”
    It occurred to Doug that Chuck sometimes used quaint terms, especially with respect to females, had heard him actually say “gentler sex” once.
    He took a chair as asked. He could not remember having previously sat in this kitchen; on his brief visits he was wont to lean against a counter.
    Chuck put a fist on the tabletop between them. “I don’t know whether you’re aware, Connie’s got to the point at which she’s threatening to make real trouble.”
    Doug felt a reaction at the base of his skull, as if he had been seized, with pliers, at the nape. “Connie?”
    â€œCunningham,” Chuck said impatiently. “I’ve talked with her. Obviously it’s my intention to be discreet—else I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
    Connie Cunningham was a divorcee with whom Doug had lately had some six weeks of ardent sexual encounters. She was skinny, almost emaciated, with breasts consisting of little more than nipples, and her behind was flat, but her vulva could only be called inexhaustible. Indeed, the trouble had apparently been that none of her three husbands had been able to maintain the pace she demanded. Only Doug, eight to ten years older than the eldest of these men, had ever been her match. Anyway so she had assured him, and at first this news proved aphrodisiac. Lately it had been anything but, and as the weeks passed, Connie became ever rougher, seizing him painfully at the crotch on his entry into her apartment, in bed nipping at his glans with her horsey front teeth, riding him as if he were a recalcitrant bronco, bruising his ribs.
    Connie had not yet