Deep Water (3 page)

       "What did he say?"

       "It's not what he said, it's the way he 'a-a-acted'," she drawled. Then she was asleep.

       She lifted her head when he shut off the motor in the garage and, as if walking in her sleep got out, said, "G'night, dear," and went into the house through the door at the side of the garage that opened into the living room.

       The garage was big enough for five cars, though they had only two. Vic had had it built so that he could use part of it as a workroom, keep his tools and his boxes of plants, his snail aquaria, or whatever else he happened to be interested in or experimenting with that took space, all in apple-pie order, and still have enough room to walk around in. He slept in a room on the opposite side of the garage from the house, a room whose only door opened into the garage. Before he went to his door he bent over the herb boxes. The foxgloves were up—six or eight pale-green sprigs already forming their characteristic triad leaf clusters. Two bedbugs were crawling around on their piece of mattress, looking for flesh and blood, but he was not in the mood to offer his hand tonight, and the two dragged their flat bodies off slowly in search of cover from his flashlight beam.

Chapter 2

Joel Nash came for a cocktail three days after the Mellers' party, but he didn't stay to have dinner with them, though Vic asked him and Melinda pressed him. He said he had an engagement, but anyone could have seen that he hadn't. He announced smilingly that he wasn't staying another two weeks after all, but was leaving the following Friday. He smiled more than ever that evening and was on a defensive tack of being facetious about everything. It was an indication to Vic of how seriously Mr. Nash had taken him.

       After he left, Melinda accused Vic again of having said something to offend him.

       "What could I possibly have said?" Vic demanded innocently. "Has it occurred to you that you might have said something to offend him? Or done something, or not done something?"

       "I know I didn't," Melinda said, sulking. Then she made herself another drink instead of asking Vic to make it, as she usually did.

       She wouldn't mind the loss of Joel Nash very much, Vic thought, because he was so new and because he wouldn't have been around very long at best, being a traveling salesman. Ralph Gosden would be another matter. Vic had been wondering if Ralph would scare as easily as Joel had, and had decided that it was worth a try. Ralph Gosden was a twenty-nine-year-old painter of fair ability in the portrait field and with a small income from a doting aunt. He had rented a house near Millettville, about twenty miles away, for one year, of which only six months were gone. For four months Ralph had been coming for dinner about twice a week—Ralph said their house was so nice, and their food was so good, and their phonograph was so good, and all in all nobody was quite so hospitable in Little Wesley or anywhere else as the Van Allens were—and Melinda had been going up to visit Ralph several afternoons a week, though she never quite admitted going there any afternoon. Finally, after two months of it, Melinda had presented her portrait painted by Ralph, apparently by way of accounting for the many afternoons and evenings when she had not been home at one o'clock, or at seven either, when Vic had come home. The portrait, a prettified, dashed-off horror, hung in Melinda's bedroom. Vic had forbidden it in the living room.

       Ralph's hypocrisy was nauseating to Vic. He was forever trying to discuss things that he thought Vic would be interested in, though Ralph himself was interested in nothing beyond what the average woman was interested in, and behind this façade of friendship Ralph tried to hide the fact that he was having an affair with Melinda. It was not that he objected to Melinda's having affairs with other men per se, Vic told himself whenever he looked at Ralph Gosden, it was that she picked such idiotic, spineless characters and that she let it leak out all over town by inviting her lovers to parties at their friends' houses and by being seen with them at the bar of the Lord Chesterfield, which was really the only bar in town. One of Vic's firmest principles was that everybody—therefore, a wife should be allowed to do as she pleased, provided no one else was hurt and that she fulfilled her main responsibilities, which were to manage a household and to take care of her offspring, which Melinda did—from time to time. Thousands of married men had affairs with impunity, though Vic had to admit that most men did it more quietly. When Horace had tried to advise Vic about Melinda when he had asked him why he "put up with such behavior," Vic had countered by asking him if he expected him to act like an old-fashioned husband (or wife), spurning his spouse as unclean, demanding a divorce, wrecking a child's existence for nothing more than the petty gratification of his ego? Vic also implied to Horace or to whoever else dropped a hint about Melinda, that he considered her behavior a temporary aberration and the less fuss made about it the better.

       The fact that Melinda had been carrying on like this for more than three years gave Vic the reputation in Little Wesley of having a saint like patience and forbearance, which in turn flattered Vic's ego. Vic knew that Horace and Phil Cowan and everybody else who knew the situation—which was nearly everybody—considered him odd for enduring it, but Vic didn't mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.

       Melinda had been odd, too, or he never would have married her. Courting her and persuading her to marry him had been like breaking a wild horse, except that the process had had to be infinitely more subtle. She had been headstrong and spoiled, the kind who gets expelled from school time after time for plain insubordination. Melinda had been expelled from five schools, and when Vic met her at twenty-two, she had thought life was nothing but the pursuit of a good time—which she still thought, though at twenty-two she had had a certain iconoclasm and imagination in her rebellion that had attracted Vic because it was like his own. Now it seemed to him that she had lost every bit of that imagination and that her iconoclasm consisted in throwing costly vases against walls and breaking them. The only vase left in the house was a metal one, and its cloisonné had several dents. She hadn't wanted to have a child, then she had, then she hadn't, and finally after four years she had wanted one again and had produced one. The birth had not been so difficult as the average first child's, Vic had learned from the doctor, but Melinda had complained loudly before and after the ordeal, in spite of Vic's providing the best nursing for her and of his giving all his time to her for weeks, to the exclusion of his work. Vic had been overjoyed at having a child that was his and Melinda's, but Melinda had refused to give the child any but the minimum of attention or to show that she cared for it any more than she would have cared for a stray puppy that she was feeding in the house. Vic supposed that the conventionality of having a baby plus being a wife was more than her constitutional rebelliousness could bear. The child had implied responsibility, and Melinda balked at growing up. She had taken out her resentment by pretending that she didn't care for him in the same way anymore, "not in a romantic way," as she put it. Vic had been very patient, but the truth was that she had begun to bore him a little, too. She was not interested in anything he was interested in, and in a casual way he was interested in a great many things—printing and bookbinding, bee culture, cheese making, carpentry, music and painting (good music and good painting), in stargazing, for which he had a fine telescope, and in gardening.

       When Beatrice was about two years old, Melinda began an affair with Larry Osbourne, a young and not very bright instructor at a riding academy not far from Little Wesley. She had been in a kind of sulking, puzzled state of mind for months before, though whenever Vic had tried to get her to talk about what was bothering her she had never had anything to say. After she began the liaison with Larry, she became gayer and happier and more pleasant to Vic, especially when she saw how calmly he took it. Vic pretended to take it more calmly than he did, though he asked Melinda if she wanted to divorce him. Melinda hadn't wanted to divorce him.

       Vic invested $50 and two hours' time in talking the situation over with a psychiatrist in New York. The psychiatrist's opinion was that since Melinda scorned the counsel of a psychiatrist for herself she was going to bring unhappiness to Vic and eventually a divorce, unless he was firm with her. It was against Vic's principles, as an adult, to be firm with another adult. Granted Melinda wasn't an adult, he still intended to go on treating her as one. The only new idea the psychiatrist put into his head was that Melinda, like many women who have a child, might be "finished" with him as a man and as a husband, now that he had given her the child. It was rather funny to think of Melinda's being so primitively maternal as this, and Vic smiled whenever he remembered that statement of the psychiatrist's. Vic's explanation was that plain contrariness had motivated her in rejecting him: she knew he still loved her, so she chose to give him no satisfaction by showing that she loved him in return. Perhaps love was the wrong word. They were devoted to each other, dependent on each other, and if one was gone from the house, he or she was missed by the other, Vic thought. There wasn't a word for the way he felt about Melinda, for that combination of loathing and devotion. The rest of what the psychiatrist had told Vic about the "intolerable situation" and of his heading for a divorce—all that only inspired Vic to prove him wrong. He would show the psychiatrist and the world that the situation was not intolerable and that there would be no divorce. Neither was he going to be miserable. The world was too full of interesting things.

       During Melinda's five-month affair with Larry Osbourne, Vic moved from the bedroom into a room he had had especially built for himself, about two months after the affair began, on the other side of the garage. He moved as a kind of protest against the stupidity of her affair (that was about all he had ever criticized Larry for, his stupidity), but after a few weeks when he had his microscope and his books in the room with him and he discovered how easy it was to get up in the night without worrying about disturbing Melinda and look at the stars or watch his snails that were more active at night than in the daytime, Vic decided that he preferred the room to the bedroom. When Melinda gave up Larry—or, as Vic suspected, Larry gave her up—Vic did not move back into the bedroom, because Melinda showed no sign of wanting him back and because by then he didn't want to move back anyway. He was content with the arrangement, and Melinda seemed to be, too. She was not so cheerful as she had been when Larry was around, but within a few months she found another lover—Jo-Jo Harris, a rather hyperthyroidal young man who started a short-lived record shop in Wesley. Jo-Jo lasted from October to January. Melinda bought several hundred dollars' worth of records from him, but not enough to keep him in business.

       Vic knew that some people thought Melinda stayed with him because of his money, and perhaps that did influence Melinda to some extent, but Vic considered it of no importance. Vic had always had an indifferent attitude toward money. He hadn't earned his income, his grandfather had. The fact that Vic's father and he had money was due only to an accident of birth, so why shouldn't Melinda, as his wife, have an equal right to it? Vic had an income of $40,000 a year, and had had it since his twenty-first birthday. Vic had heard it implied in Little Wesley that people tolerated Melinda only because they liked him so much, but Vic refused to believe this. Objectively, he could see that Melinda was likable enough, provided one didn't demand conversation. She was generous, a good sport, and she was fun at parties. Everybody disapproved of her affairs, of course, but Little Wesley—the old residential parent town of the newer and more commercial town of Wesley, four miles away—was singularly free of prudery, as if everybody bent over backward to avoid the stigma of New England puritanism, and not a soul, as yet, had ever snubbed Melinda on a moral count.

Chapter 3

Ralph Gosden came for dinner on Saturday night, a week after the Mellers' party, his old gay, confident self, even gayer than usual because, having been away at his aunt's in New York for about ten days, he perhaps felt that his welcome at the Van Aliens' was not so threadbare as it had been just before he left. After dinner Ralph abandoned a discussion with Vic of H-bomb shelters, of which he had seen an exhibition in New York and evidently still knew nothing about, and Melinda put on a stack of records. Ralph looked in fine fettle, good for four in the morning at least, Vic thought, though this morning might be his last at the Van Allen house. Ralph was one of the worst offenders about staying late, because he could sleep the next morning if he cared to, but Vic usually matched him, staying up until four or five or even seven in the morning, simply because Ralph would have preferred him to retire and leave him alone with Melinda. Vic also could sleep late in the mornings if he wanted to, and he had the edge over Ralph in endurance, both because two or three in the morning was Vic's average hour of retiring and because Vic never drank enough to make him particularly sleepy.

       Vic sat in his favorite armchair in the living room, looking at the 'New Wesleyan', and now and then glancing over the top of the newspaper at Ralph and Melinda, who were dancing. Ralph was wearing a white dacron suit that he had bought in New York and was as pleased as a girl with the slim, trim figure it gave him. There was a new aggression in the way he clasped Melinda around the waist at the beginning of each dance, a foolhardy self-assurance that made Vic think of a male insect blithely dancing its way through its last moments of pleasure before sudden, horrible death. And the insane music Melinda had put on was so appropriate. The record was "The Teddybears," one of her recent purchases. For some reason, the words lilted maddeningly through Vic's head every time he stood under his shower: