THE GLASS HOUSE

by DAVID ST.CYR

It all began the day Martin and Tom moved into the house. As their interest. in sexual matters was not quite that of the two families who already lived in the house, their presence from the very first day aroused a certain amount of agitation among the other residents, whose reactions, however, varied a good deal.

The house, built to hold three families, was one of those onestorey, sprawling and sterile glass things, which at the cost of a small fortune monthly according to the house agent offered luxury only equalled in Hollywood. More than anything else it looked like three huge transparent bricks not quite in line with each other and surrounded by rose-filled pergolas and tiny terraces where even in summer it was too cold to sit. Expansive, shiny parquet floors usually made a deep impression on would-be tenants until they were informed of the rent and their illusions as to the architect's idealistic intent faded away. As it were, it had taken the house agent almost a year of intensive advertising to hook any tenants.

The arrival of a new family in the glass house naturally would be greeted with inquisitive interest. As the family consisted of two young men, interest turned into something more than mere curiosity. Dorrit, who lived in the centre block, felt a tingling delight at the thought of two men sleeping on the other side of the wall of her sitting room. Frank, her husband, sensed her excitement when she handed him his coffee after dinner, lips slightly apart, hands positively fluttering, and he felt it again when later in the evening she put her book down and turned off the light. It irritated him, but it also fascinated him, as in common with his wife... and, for that matter, with most other people... he nourished a furtive interest in everything that lay outside the beaten track.

»Odd,< he said to Dorrit that evening. She was stacking some logs in the open fireplace and inwardly cursed this architectural refinement, which gave her so much extra work. »Odd, he repeated, as she rose and faced him, but then, of course, it takes all kinds ...<

Dorrit had seen one of the two young men carry a zebra skin into the house from the moving van. He was tall, had dark hair and looked very masculine If it really were true that those two were homosexuals and surely they must be when they lived together well, all she could say was that it really was a most unfair fate which had bestowed so much virile, almost brutal charm on

the fellow. Rather like hanging gold brocaded tapestry in a pig sty, or something equally idiotic; in fact, utterly absurd and above all totally unnecessary.

>>What do you think they actually do?« she asked lightly, and tried to blow life into the fire with the result that a whole coud of paper ashes ascended to slowly cover her with black confetti. »What did you say?« her husband looked up from his book, sch, really, darling, I hav'rt the faintest idea.<<

This actually, was not strictly true. Frank had been educated at a private boarding scholl where ro pleasures or experiments had gone untried, but there were things one simply did not talk about. Dorrit, perfectly familiar with the various particular cravings of her husband, therefore had no inkling of his first adventures, and was unlikely ever to hear of them as he feared that she would be so shocked that she would deny him his marita right if those, in retrospect rather embarrassing, incidents were now to be revealed. Frank, in fact was a bad psychologist.

Poul, however, the lord and master of the third section of the glass house, knew quite well that many women, and particularly those of Dorrit's type, would view a few homosexual incidents, concealed in the darkness of the past, as an added spice a means by proxy to extend her gains to include something of the other men. Poul had no such confessions to make which secretely he regretted... and his relations with Dorrit in any event were not so close that he could have told her, had there been anything to tell. This distance between them was a bore, as she really was a most attractive woman, and he frequently discussed her with his wife, Astrid, whose detached interest in the matter revealed her indifference to his sufferings. Astrid wrote books, and had already produced eight long volumes, which, having wandered for years from one publisher to another, now served as a water absorbing layer beneath a leaking aquarium. >>Do you know what I am going to do?« she asked that evening, and stopped the clatter of her typewriter. Evidently, this was a rhetorical question, because she went on at once: »I'll let the Court suffer from maniacal depression. During his period of depression next week, I'll let him cut his wife's wrist with a pair of embroidery scissors, and then, at the next change of the moor, when he enters his maniac period, I'll let him give himself up to the police. What to you think of that?<

>Splendid, my dear. Splendid.<<

Poul a few months before had called at a bookshop to buy a manual on the training of domesticated birds, but on his return home found that he had been given a wrong parcel, which contained Freud's Psychoanalysis. Astrid at once had taken possession of the book, since, wher her novels no longer dealt with the platonic dreams of the miller's daughter about the squire's son, they concentrated on the fetiches of schizophrenic landlords obsessed with the curls of small negro girls. It was all most interesting.

That two young men had moved into the glass house suited her admirably, but it was most annoying that the Court throughout her novel had displayed a never wearying interest in the female sex when now she had a matchless opportunity

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