Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (best books to read now .TXT) 📕

De Lisle? Vic wanted to ask Horace. You will. Probably before the Cowans' party.

       "What do you think of the new pianist?" Horace asked. "Makes our old hostelry practically like New York."

       "Pretty good, isn't it?" Vic said.

       "I'd rather have silence. Lesley's business must be good this year. I hear the rooms are all taken, and there's a pretty good crowd here today" Horace had half turned and was watching De Lisle, who was in profile to them.

       The man had a date with my wife this afternoon, Vic wanted to state in a firm voice. I don't want to look at him or hear him. "Know his name?" Horace asked.

       "No idea," Vic said.

       "He looks like an Italian." Horace turned back to his drink. He did look like an Italian of the worse type, though Vic didn't think he was, and it was an insult to the Italian race to assume that he was. He resembled no particular race, only an amalgamation of the worst elements of various Latin peoples. He looked as if he had spent all his life dodging blows that were probably aimed at him for good reason.

       "Time for the other half?" Horace asked.

       Vic woke up. "I don't think I have, Horace. I told Melinda I'd be in about six-thirty tonight."

       "All right, you be there:' Horace said, smiling.

       Vic insisted on paying the bar tab. Then they walked out into the fresh air together.

Chapter 9

The Cowans' party was a costume party. People were to come as their favorite hero or heroine, fictional or factual. Melinda was having a hard time deciding who she should be. She wasn't quite satisfied with Mary Queen of Scots, or Greta Garbo, or Annie Oakley, or Cleopatra, and she thought somebody else might go as Scarlett O'Hara, though Vic said he doubted it. Melinda went through them all, imagining the costume for each in detail. She felt there should be some character more appropriate for her, if she could only think of her.

       "Madame Bovary?" Vic suggested.

       She finally decided on Cleopatra.

       Charley De Lisle was going to play the piano at the Cowans' party. Melinda had arranged it. She told Vic with naïve triumph that she had persuaded Charley to do it for fifty dollars instead of the hundred he had wanted, and said that Evelyn Cowan hadn't thought that was a steep price at all.

       Something in Vic stirred with revulsion. "I assumed he was going as a guest."

       "Yes, but he wouldn't have played. He's very proud about his work. He says no artist should give his work away. In a room full of strangers, he wouldn't touch the piano, he says. It wouldn't be professional. I can see what he means."

       She could always see what De Lisle meant.

       Vic had made no remarks about De Lisle lately, or the time Melinda spent out of the house. The situation had not changed, though De Lisle had not come for dinner anymore, and Melinda had not stayed out all night a second time. Neither had they been to any social affair to which Melinda might have dragged Charley, so perhaps none of their friends suspected anything yet, Vic thought, though Evelyn Cowan might by now. And everybody would certainly know after the Cowan party, which was why Vic dreaded it. He longed not to go, to beg off somehow, and yet he knew his presence would have a slightly restraining influence on Melinda, and that logically it was better if he did go. There were many times when logic was of no comfort.

       Xenophon was printing. Stephen stood at the press all day, banging a page out at fifteen-second intervals. Vic relieved him three and four times a day while he rested by changing his task. Stephen's wife Georgianne had given birth to a second son after her seventh month of pregnancy. She and the child were doing well, and Stephen appeared happier than he had ever been, and his happiness seemed to pervade the shop in the month of August. Vic set up the other press so that he could print along with Stephen. They could set only five pages at a time, as they had no more Greek type, but the twenty pages alone would have taken Stephen more than a month without Vic's help. They were printing a hundred copies. Vic could match Stephen in endurance at the press, and he loved to stand in silence, hour after hour, the only sounds the final impacts of their platens against paper, with the summer sun streaming through the open windows and falling on the freshly printed sheets. All was order and progress in the plant in the month of August. At six-thirty or seven every evening, Vic stepped out of that peaceful world into a chaos. Since he had started the printing plant he had always stepped out of it in the evenings into something less peaceful, but the two worlds had never contrasted so profoundly before. The contrast had never before given him a feeling that he was being torn apart.

       Vic did not think about his costume for the Cowans' party until the day before it, and then he decided on Tiberius. The costume was simple, a toga made from one of the oatmeal-colored draperies that had used to hang at the living room windows, heelless house slippers with leather straps that crossed over the toes, two cheap but classic clips that he bought himself rather than use any of Melinda's, and that was that. He thought for decency's sake that he should wear a T-shirt and some walking shorts underneath instead of merely underwear.

       The party was on a Saturday night of a particularly warm weekend, but since it was never really warm in the Berkshires in the evenings, the lanterns set around the edge of the Cowans' lawn and around the swimming pool suggested festivity and not an unpleasant warmth. Vic and Melinda