Read Online The Houseguest by Thomas Berger - Free Book Online Page A

and age only obsessive-compulsives could compete for any kind of prize: people not simply willing but fanatically eager to incinerate the self to fuel a career. Ha, Lydia would say, I’ve got too much sense for that. By now of course she was a decade too old for a sport in which you were prime at twelve.
    She brought the thermostat down to 60; in this season, despite the cool nights, the water by noon was always naturally warmer than that. But her swim had been put out of the question this afternoon. It would take hours for the temperature of the water to fall to an acceptable level—unless the ocean were considered. Why this seemed a daring, almost forbidden thought had altogether and exclusively to do with the moral atmosphere of the Graves house. Millions of human beings swam in the ocean that surrounded the islands comprising the earth, some even in places where sharks and barracuda patrolled the shore or where pollution was a scandal, or where terrorists might swoop in on rubber rafts and slaughter everybody on the sand. None of these hazards was to be feared in her in-laws’ waters.
    Lydia thereupon decided to go down and swim in the sea. The most direct route was through the house, but attired as she was, justifiably so in the open air, she felt indecent when under a roof. Why then she had failed to wear a robe from room to pool could not be explained except as defiance of her own prudery. In any event she displayed less than had Chuck when wantonly asleep. Lydia was not overfleshed at any point; there were even times when she considered herself flat-chested. She was hardly spilling out of the bathing suit.
    The beach, when she finally reached it, was floored with stones, not sand: no surprise, but what she had not been prepared for was the difference between walking here with and without shoes. Her route to the water was uncomfortable, and the ocean on her entry was so cold as to numb the lower extremities as it rose to cover them, and when nevertheless she bravely launched her body in the horizontal attitude, the frigidity of the destructive element all but paralyzed her organs of respiration. But in an instant that concern was as nothing to the awful knowledge that she was immediately the captive of a violent undercurrent that could not have been anticipated from the appearance of the modest surf.
    She was being swept away, and nothing helped that she had learned from near-Olympic feats in quiet pools. She had no technique, no self-command, and chokingly full of water, too soon (or perhaps, in another view, for it was all terror and pain, too late) she had no existence.
    â€¦ Even in the dream she was quite aware of the impossibility of puking while you were being kissed, yet that was what was happening. Next she lay prone on an unyielding bed of gravel. A creature larger than herself clung to her back, perhaps trying in some monstrous fashion to copulate with her. It was ugly and absurd. She wept.
    â€œLydia!” a stern, almost military voice cried down. It was the person, a man, who had earlier been kissing her, not for erotic purposes but to claim her for life; not trying to penetrate her sexually, but rather performing the emergency maneuvers by which she might be revived.
    He turned her over and stared down. He was still straddling her thighs. “Are you okay?” He was Chuck Burgoyne.
    She gestured feebly. He pulled her to a sitting position. Her head was almost unbearably heavy. Her air passages felt raw.
    He grimaced. “I got more than I bargained for from the kiss of life. I then used the old but still effective hands-on technique. You hadn’t been under long.” He stood up, then bent, offering both hands. “Let’s do some walking. Yes, right now! Else you’ll feel worse.”
    He did almost all the work in erecting her to her feet. She had little will for the effort and less strength.
    He supported her, but demanded, “Come on, walk!”
    She was