Harassment at Matt Kellner's Guesthouse and the Break Between Matt and Bret

In September 1981, Bret’s visit to Matt Kellner’s guesthouse on Haskell Avenue turns a set of unexplained disturbances into a personal rupture. Matt believes Bret has been calling and entering his room; Bret denies it, but cannot persuade Matt to trust him. The confrontation ends when Matt tells Bret to stay away and rejects the possibility that their sexual relationship could make them boyfriends. Bret leaves in tears, facing the fact that his feelings for Matt were not returned in the same way.

The altered guesthouse

Bret arrives at the guesthouse after driving from home and finds it empty at first. The room seems unusually bare, and he wonders whether furniture has been removed or merely rearranged. The aquarium is fully drained, the television is on with its volume turned down, and Alex the cat is nowhere to be seen. The room still smells of marijuana, but less strongly than Bret expects.

A Foreigner 4 poster above the hamper draws Bret’s attention. Matt had said he found the promotional poster rolled up in the mailbox and did not know who had left it. Now a newly drawn pentagram appears in one corner. The image, which otherwise centers on the large black number four against an off-white and gray field, has become evidence of a disturbance that Matt says he did not create. Together with the moved furniture and drained aquarium, it makes the guesthouse feel less like a familiar private space than a room someone has entered and altered.

Matt is on the bed, which has been moved beside the entrance; Bret had passed him without seeing him. Matt asks why Bret keeps calling. He says the calls have continued all week, including six calls that morning in which the caller let the phone ring and then said nothing. Bret denies making them and points out that Matt rarely answers. Matt nevertheless insists that Bret has been unusually persistent.

Accusations and warning

Matt’s suspicion extends beyond the calls. He asks whether Bret has been coming over and going through his things, then gestures toward the displaced furniture and says he did not arrange the room that way. When Bret suggests that Matt’s mother or the housekeeper might have moved things, Matt rejects the suggestion and directly asks whether Bret moved the bed and pushed the other belongings across the room. Bret continues to deny it; the evidence in the scene does not establish who is responsible for the changes.

Bret responds by suggesting that Matt may have become intoxicated and rearranged the room or drawn the pentagram himself. He also warns Matt to stay away from Robert Mallory, saying he believes something is seriously wrong with him. Bret asks what Robert had been asking about him during their earlier conversation in a parking lot, but the warning does not repair the growing mistrust. Matt tells Bret to stop calling and not to come over again. The accusation and counter-accusation leave both the room’s disturbances and the calls unresolved.

A relationship breaks

The argument changes abruptly when Bret reaches toward Matt, intending to initiate sex. Matt’s response is not the easy acceptance Bret had come to expect: he looks at Bret with alarm and asks what he is doing. He says their involvement was never serious and challenges the assumption that they might become boyfriends. As Bret moves closer, Matt physically pushes him back and tells him to get away.

For Bret, this is the worst moment he has shared with Matt. He recognizes in Matt an anger and emotional directness he had not seen before, but that glimpse comes at the point their connection ends. Bret leaves the pool house and reaches his car on Haskell Avenue before breaking down in tears. He understands that Matt had never felt for him what he felt for Matt, a rejection whose significance extends beyond this afternoon even though Bret cannot yet know that.

Aftermath and retrospective weight

The break leaves Bret to manage the loss by trying to act as if life is normal. The next morning he decides to establish a strict routine, limit drinking, stop using marijuana and Valium, and avoid reminders of Matt. Yet the objects from the guesthouse resist that attempted erasure: Bret discovers that he has taken a pair of white jockey shorts from the pool house and puts them in a desk drawer. He also finds a note from Matt’s desk bearing the initials RM and a phone number, which he slips into his jacket.

Bret already knows from photographs shown to him by Matt’s father that Matt is gone, and he treats that knowledge as conclusive. The shorts and the note nevertheless preserve links to the room and to Matt even as Bret tries to turn toward the future. Later, the recording of Matt’s final night reveals that he was subjected to a terrifying ordeal, giving the earlier disturbance and disappearance a darker context without resolving who made the phone calls or rearranged the room. As an event in the story, the guesthouse confrontation joins private mistrust to the larger violence surrounding Matt’s fate: the relationship ends in a single afternoon, but its unanswered questions persist.