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  "May I say, Vic darling, that I think you're extremely patient?"

  Vic glanced at her and saw from her straining, slightly moistening eyes that she was feeling her drinks. "Oh, I don't know"

  "You are. You're like somebody waiting very patiently and one day—you'll do something. Not explode exactly, but just—well, speak your mind."

  It was such a quiet finish that Vic smiled. Slowly he rubbed at an itch on the side of his hand with his thumb.

  "I'd also like to say, since I've had three drinks and I may not have such an opportunity again, that I think you're pretty wonderful. You're 'good, Vic'," Mary said in a tone that meant he was good in a biblical sense, a tone that betrayed a little embarrassment at having used such a word in such a sense, and Vic knew she was going to ruin it by laughing at herself in another few seconds. "If I weren't married and you weren't, I think I'd propose to you right now!" Then came the laugh that was supposed to erase it all.

  Why did women think, Vic wondered, even women who had married for love and had had a child and a fairly happy married life, that they would prefer a man who demanded nothing of them sexually? It was a kind of sentimental harking back to virginity, a silly, vain fantasy that had no factual validity whatsoever. They'd be the first ones to feel affronted if their husbands neglected them in that respect. "Unfortunately, I am married," Vic said.

  "Unfortunately!" Mary scoffed. "You adore her, and I know it! You worship the ground she walks on. And she loves you, too, Vic, and don't forget it!"

  "I don't want you to think," Vic said, almost interrupting her, "that I'm so good as you put it. I have a little evil side, too. I just keep it well hidden."

  "You certainly do!" Mary said, laughing. She leaned toward him and he smelled her perfume which struck him as a combination of lilac and cinnamon. "How's your drink, Vic?"

  "This'll do for the moment, thanks."

  "You see? You're even good about drinking! What bit your hand?"

  "A bedbug."

  "A bedbug! Good lord! Where'd you get it?"

  "At the Green Mountain Hotel."

  Mary's mouth opened incredulously; then she shrieked with laughter. "What were you doing there?"

  "Oh, I put in an order weeks in advance. I said if any bedbugs turned up, I wanted them, and finally collected six. Cost me five dollars in tips. They're living in my garage now in a glass case with a piece of mattress inside for them to sleep on. Now and then I let one bite me, because I want them to go through their normal life cycle. I've got two batches of eggs now."

  "But why?" Mary demanded, giggling.

  "Because I think a certain entomologist who wrote a piece for an entomologist journal is wrong about a certain point in their reproductive cycle," Vic answered, smiling.

  "What point?" asked Mary, fascinated.

  "Oh, it's a small point about the period of incubation. I doubt if it has any value at all to anybody, though as a matter of fact insecticide manufacturers ought to—"

  "Vi-ic?" Melinda's husky voice slurred, "Do you mind?"

  Vic looked up at her with a subtly insulting astonishment, and then got up from the bench and gestured graciously toward the piano. "It's all yours."

  "You're going to play? Good!" Mary said in a delighted tone. A quintet of men was ranging itself around the piano. Melinda swooped onto the bench, a sheaf of shining hair swinging down like a curtain and concealing her face from anyone standing on her right, as Vic was. Oh, well, Vic thought, who knew her face better than he did? And he didn't want to see it anyway, because it didn't improve when she drank. Vic strolled away. The whole sofa was free now. To his distaste, he heard Melinda's wildly trilling introduction to "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," which she played abominably. Her playing was florid, inaccurate, and one would think embarrassing, yet people listened, and after they listened they liked her neither more nor less for it. It seemed to be neither a liability nor an asset to her socially. When she floundered and gave up a song with a laugh and a childish, frustrated flutter of hands, her current admirers admired her just the same. She wasn't going to flounder on "Slaughter," however, because if she did she could always switch to the "Three Blind Mice" theme and recover herself. Vic sat down in a corner of the sofa. Everybody was around the piano except Mrs. Podnansky, Evelyn Cowan, and Horace. Melinda's swingeing attack on the main theme was evoking grunts of delight from her male listeners. Vic looked at Joel Nash's back, hunched over the piano, and closed his eyes. In a sense he closed his ears also, and thought of his bedbugs.

  Finally, there was applause which rapidly died down as Melinda began "Dancing in the Dark," one of her better numbers. Vic opened his eyes and saw Joel Nash staring at him in an absent, yet intense and rather frightened way. Vic closed his eyes again. His head was back as if he were listening, enraptured, to the music. Actually, he was thinking of what might be going on now in Joel Nash's liquor-fuddled mind. Vic saw his own rather pudgy figure on the sofa, his hands peacefully clasped on his abdomen, his round face smiling a relaxed smile that by now would have become enigmatic to Joel Nash. Nash would be thinking, maybe he 'did'. Maybe that's why he's so nonchalant about Melinda and me. Maybe that's why he's so strange. He's a 'murderer'.

  Melinda played for about half an hour, until she had to repeat "Dancing in the Dark" again. When she got up from the piano, people were still pressing her to play some more, Mary Meller and Joel loudest of all.

  "We've got to be going home. It's late," Melinda said. She often left immediately after a session at the piano. On a note of triumph. "Vic?" She snapped a finger in his direction.

  Vic got up obediently from the sofa. He saw Horace beckoning to him. Horace had heard, Vic supposed. Vic went over. "What's this you told your friend, Mr. Nash?" Horace asked, his dark eyes shining with amusement.

  "My friend?"

  Horace's narrow shoulders shook with his constrained laughter. "I don't blame you a bit. I just hope he doesn't spread it around!" "It was a joke. Didn't he take it as a joke?" Vic asked, pretending to be serious. He and Horace knew each other well. Horace had often told him to "put his foot down about Melinda," and Horace was the only person Vic knew who had ever dared say that to him.

  "Seems to me he took it pretty seriously," Horace said. "Well, let him. Let him spread it around."

  Horace laughed and slapped Vic's shoulder. "Just don't get yourself in jail, old man!"

  Melinda tottered slightly as they walked out to the car, and Vic took her elbow gently to steady her. She was almost as tall as he, and she always wore flat sandals or ballet slippers, but less for his sake, Vic thought, than because they were more comfortable and because her height in flat shoes better matched the height of the average man. Even though she was a bit unsteady, Vic could feel the Amazonian strength in her tall, firm body, the animal vitality that pulled him along with her. She was heading for the car with the undeterrable thrust of a horse getting back to stable.

  "What'd you say to Joel tonight?" Melinda asked when they were in the car.

  "Nothing."

  "You must have said something."

  "When?"

  "Well, I 'saw' you talking to him," she persisted sleepily. "What were you talking about?"

  "Bedbugs, I think. Or was it Mary I was talking about bedbugs to?"

  "Oh!" Melinda said impatiently, and snuggled her head against his shoulder as impersonally as if he had been a sofa pillow. "Must've said something, because he acted different after he talked to you."

  "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, o
r 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.