Deep Water (5 page)

       Vic smiled at Melinda. "Maybe I'd better make those eggs. He looks as if he could use something."

       "He's fine!" Melinda said defiantly.

       Whistling a Gregorian chant, Vic went into the kitchen and put a kettle of water on for coffee. He held up the bourbon bottle and saw that Ralph had finished about four-fifths of it. He went back into the living room. "How do you like your eggs, Ralph—besides juggled?"

       "How do you like your eggs, darling?" Melinda asked him.

       "I jus' like 'em—like 'em juggled fine," Ralph mumbled. "One order of juggled eggs," Vic said. "How about you, puss?" "Don't call me 'puss'!"

       It was an old pet name of Vic's for her that he hadn't used in years. She was glaring at him from under her strong blond eyebrows, and Vic had to admit she was not quite the little puss she had been at the time he married her, or even at the earlier part of this evening. Her lipstick was smeared, and the end of her long, upturned nose was shiny and red, as if some of her lipstick had got on it. "How do you want your eggs?" he asked.

       "Do' want any eggs."

       Vic scrambled four eggs with cream for himself and Melinda, since Ralph was in no condition to eat any, but he made only one piece of toast, because he knew Melinda would not eat toast now. He didn't wait for the coffee, which was not quite dripped through, because he knew Melinda wouldn't drink coffee at this hour either. He and Mr. Gosden could drink the coffee later. He brought the scrambled eggs, lightly salted and peppered, on two warm plates. Melinda again refused hers, but he sat beside her on the sofa and fed them to her in small amounts on a fork. Every time the fork approached, she opened her mouth obediently. Her eyes, staring at him all the while, had the look of a wild animal who trusts the human food-bringer just barely enough to accept the food at arm's length, and then only if there is nothing in sight that resembles a trap and if every movement of the food-bringer is slow and gentle. Mr. Gosden's red-blond head was now in her lap. He was snoring in an unaesthetic way with his mouth open. Melinda balked at the last bite, as Vic had known she would.

       "Come on. Last bite," Vic said.

       She ate it.

       "I suppose Mr. Gosden had better stay here," Vic said, because there was nothing else to say about Mr. Gosden.

       "I have every intention of 's shtaying here," Melinda said. "Well, let's stretch him out."

       Melinda got up to stretch him out herself, but his shoulders were too heavy for her in her condition. Vic put his hands under Ralph's arms and pulled him so that his head was just short of the sofa arm.

       "Shoes?" Vic asked.

       "Don't you touch 's shoes!" Melinda bent over Ralph's feet wobblingly and began to untie his shoelaces.

       Ralph's shoulders shook. Vic could hear the faint chatter of teeth.

       "He's cold. I'd better get a blanket," Vic said.

       "I'll get the blanket," Melinda staggered toward her bedroom but evidently forgot her purpose, because she detoured into the bathroom.

       Vic removed the remaining shoe, then went into Melinda's bedroom to get the plaid lap rug that was always lying somewhere in the room. Now it was on the floor at the foot of the unmade bed. The lap rug had been one of Vic's presents to Melinda on her birthday about seven years ago. Seeing it reminded him of picnics, of a happy summer they had spent in Maine, of one winter evening when for some reason there had been no heat and they had lain under it on the floor in front of the fireplace. He stopped a moment, vaguely debating taking the green woolen blanket from her bed instead of the lap rug, then decided that was meaningless and he might as well take the lap rug. Melinda's room, as usual, was in a state of disorder that both repelled him and interested him, and he would have liked to stand there a few moments looking at it—he almost never went into Melinda's bedroom—but he did not permit himself even a complete glance around it. He went out and closed the door behind him. He heard the water running in the bathroom as he passed the door. He hoped she wasn't going to be sick.

       Ralph was sitting up now with unfocusing eyes, his body shaking as if he had a chill.

       "Would you care for some hot coffee?" Vic asked him.

       Ralph said nothing. Vic draped the lap rug around his shaking shoulders, and Ralph lay back feebly on the sofa and tried to drag his feet up. Vic lifted both his feet and tucked the blanket under them.

       "You're a good egg," Ralph mumbled.

       Vic smiled a little and sat down at the end of the sofa. He thought he heard Melinda being sick in the bathroom.

       "Shoulda thrown me out a long time ago," Ralph murmured. "Anybody who doesn't know how much he can take—" He moved his legs as if to get off the sofa, and Vic casually leaned on his ankles.

       "Think nothing of it," Vic said soothingly. "Ought to be sick—ought to die." There were tears in Ralph's blue eyes that made them look even glassier. His thin eyebrows trembled. He seemed to be in some self-flagellant trance in which he might really have enjoyed being hurled out of the house by the seat of his pants and his collar.

       Vic cleared his throat and smiled. "Oh, I don't bother throwing people out of the house if they annoy me." He leaned a little closer. "If they annoy me in that way—with Melinda—" he nodded meaningly toward the bathroom—"I kill them."

       "Yes," Ralph said seriously, as if he understood. "You should. Because I do want to keep you and Melinda as friends. I like you both. I mean it."

       "I do kill people if I don't like them," Vic said even more quietly, leaning toward Ralph and smiling.

       Ralph smiled, too, fatuously.

       "Like Malcolm McRae, for instance. I killed him." "Ma'colm?" Ralph asked puzzledly.

       Vic knew he knew all about Mal. "Yes. Melinda's told you about McRae. I killed him with a hammer in his apartment. You probably saw something in the papers last winter about it. He was getting too familiar with Melinda."

       Whether it was sinking very far in or not, Vic couldn't tell.

       Ralph's eyebrows drew slowly together. "I remember ... You killed him?"

       "Yes. He began flirting with Melinda. In public." Vic tossed Melinda's cigarette lighter up and caught it, two, three, and four times. It was sinking in. Ralph was up on one elbow.

       "Does Melinda know you killed him?"

       "No. Nobody knows," he whispered. "And don't tell Melinda, will you?"

       Ralph's frown deepened. It was a little too much for Ralph's brain to cope with, Vic thought, but Ralph had grasped the threat and the hostility. Ralph clenched his teeth and jerked his feet suddenly from under Vic's arm. He was leaving.

       Vic handed him his shoes without a word. "Like me to drive you home?"

       "I can drive myself," Ralph staggered around, trying to get his shoes on, and finally had to sit down to do it. Then he got up and stumbled toward the door.

       Vic followed him and handed him his magenta-banded straw hat.

       "G'night. I had a very nice time," Ralph said, running his words together.

       "Glad you did. Don't forget. Don't say anything to Melinda about what I told you. Good night, Ralph." Vic watched him crawl into his open convertible and zoom off, skidding the car's rear end off the road and righting it again as he went on down the lane. Vic didn't care if he drove the car into Bear Lake. The sun was coming up in a bright orange glow above the woods straight ahead.

       Vic heard no sounds from the bathroom now, which meant that Melinda was probably sitting on the floor, waiting for another attack of nausea. She did that whenever she got sick, and it was impossible to persuade her to move from the floor until she was sure the attack was over. Finally, he got up from his chair, went to the bathroom, and called, "Are you all right, honey?" and got a reasonably clear murmur that she was. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He loved coffee and it almost never kept him awake when he wanted to sleep.

       Melinda came out of the bathroom in her robe, looking better than she had half an hour before. "Where's Ralph?"

       "He decided to go home. He said to say good night and that he had a very nice time."

       "Oh." She looked disappointed.

       "I tucked the blanket around him, and he felt better after a while," Vic added.

       Melinda came over and put her hands on his shoulders. "I think you were very sweet to him tonight."

       "That's good. You said earlier you thought I was rude." "You're never rude." She gave him a kiss on his cheek. "G'night, Vic."

       He watched her walk to her room. He wondered what Ralph was going to say to Melinda tomorrow. Ralph would tell her, of course. He was that type. Melinda would probably telephone him in a few minutes, as she always did when he left, if she didn't fall asleep first. He didn't think Ralph would tell her over the telephone, though.

Chapter 4

It was astonishing to Vic how quickly the story traveled, how interested everybody was in it—especially people who didn't know him well—and how nobody lifted a finger or a telephone to tell the police about it. There were, of course, the people who knew him and Melinda very well, or fairly well, knew why he had told the story, and found it simply amusing. Even people like old Mr. Hansen, their grocer, found it amusing. But there were people who didn't know him or Melinda, didn't know anything about them except by hearsay, who had probably pulled long faces on being told the story, and who seemed to take the attitude that he deserved to be hauled in by the police, whether it was true or not. Vic deduced that from some of the looks he got when he walked down the main street of the town.

       Within four days of telling the story to Ralph, people Vic had never seen or at least never noticed before were looking at him intently when he passed them in his car—an old, well-kept Oldsmobile that was an eye-catcher anyway in a community where most people had much newer cars—and pointing him out with whispers to other people. He seldom saw a smile among the strangers, but all he saw was smiles among his friends.

       During those four days he saw nothing of Ralph Gosden. On the Sunday after the dawn departure, Ralph had called Melinda and insisted on seeing her, Melinda said, and she had left the house to meet him somewhere. Vic and Trixie had picnicked alone that day on the shore of Bear Lake, and Vic had chatted with the boat-keeper there and arranged for Trixie to rent a canoe for all summer. When he and Trixie had come back to the house, Melinda had been there and all hell had broken loose. Ralph had told her what he had said. Melinda had screamed at Vic, "It's the most 'stupid—vulgar—idiotic' thing I've ever heard of!" Vic took her vituperation calmly. He knew she was furious probably because Ralph had shown himself a coward. Vic felt that he could have written their conversation. Ralph: "I 'know' it isn't true, darling, but it's obvious he doesn't want me hanging around any more, so I thought —" Melinda: "I don't care what he wants! All right, if you're too much of a coward to face up to him—" And Melinda would have realized, during their talk, that he must have said the same thing to Joel Nash.

       "Does Ralph really think I killed McRae?" Vic asked.

       "Of course he doesn't. He just thinks you're an ass. Or else out of your head."

       "But he doesn't think it's funny." Vic shook his head regretfully. "That's too bad."

       "What's funny about it?" Melinda was standing in the living room, her hands on her hips and her moccasined feet wide apart. "Well—I suppose you'd have to hear it the way I said it to find it funny."

       "Oh, I see. Did Joel find it funny?"

       "Apparently he didn't. Seems to have scared him out of town."

       "That's what you wanted to do, wasn't it?"

       "Well, yes, frankly."

       "And Ralph, too. You wanted to scare him, didn't you?"

       "I found them both terrible bores and terribly beneath you I think. So Ralph's scared, too?"

       "He's not scared. Don't be silly. You don't think anyone would believe a story like that, do you?"

       Vic put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the arm chair. "Joel Nash must have believed something. He certainly disappeared, didn't he? I don't think it was very bright of him, but then I never thought he was bright."

       "No. Nobody's bright but you."

       Vic smiled at her good-naturedly. "What did Joel say to you?" he asked, and he saw from her shifting of her position, the way she flung herself down on the sofa, that Joel Nash had said nothing to her. "What did Ralph say?"

       "That he thought you were decidedly unfriendly and he thought—"

       "Decidedly unfriendly. How unusual. I was decidedly bored, Melinda, decidedly tired of wining and dining bores several times a week and sitting up all night with them, decidedly tired of listening to drivel, and decidedly tired of their thinking that I didn't know or care what they were up to with you. It was decidedly dull."

       Melinda stared at him in surprise for a long moment, frowning, her mouth turned stubbornly down at the corners. Then suddenly she put her face down in her hands and let the tears come. Vic came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "Honey, is it worth crying about? Are Joel Nash and Ralph worth crying about?"

       She flung her head up. "I'm not crying over them. I'm crying over the injustice."

       "'Sic'," Vic murmured involuntarily.

       "Who's sick?"

       He sighed, really trying to think of something to say to comfort her. No use saying, "'I'm' still here, I love you." She wouldn't want him now, perhaps never would. And he didn't want to be a dog in the manger. He wouldn't object to her having a man of some stature and self-respect, a man with some ideas in his head, as a lover, Vic thought. But he was afraid Melinda would never choose that kind or that that kind would never choose her. Vic could visualize a kind of charitable, fair-minded, civilized arrangement in which all three of them might be happy and benefit from contact with one another. Dostoyevsky had known what he meant. Goethe might have understood, too.