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

can I do with the life I've got?" So he talked of something else, of the possibility of going to Canada before the weather got cold. They might make some arrangement for Trixie to stay with the Petersons for ten days, Vic said.

       "Oh, I don't think I'd care for that," Melinda said, with a cool smile.

       "This summer's gone by without a real vacation for either of us," he said.

       "Let it go by. I'm sick of it."

       "The winter's going to be even more boring—without a break somewhere," he said.

       "Oh, I don't think it's going to be boring," she said. He smiled. "Is that a threat?"

       "Take it the way you like."

       "Are you going to put arsenic in my food?"

       "I don't think arsenic could kill you."

       It was a charming evening. Before they went home Vic stopped at Wesley's biggest drugstore to look over the book rack. He bought a couple of Penguin books, one on insects, the other on the installation of stained glass in church windows. Melinda went into a phone booth and made a very long call to someone Vic could hear the murmur of her voice, but he made no effort to hear what she was saying.

Chapter 13

Trixie entered the Highland School on September 7 and was put into the third grade because she could read so well. Vic was very proud of her. The school called him and Melinda in to discuss the matter of putting her into the third grade: she would need some extra help in arithmetic, geography, and probably also penmanship, and the school wanted to know if they could count on her parents to tutor her a bit at home. Vic said that he would be happy to tutor her and that he had plenty of time for it. Even Melinda gave an affirmative answer. So it was settled. As a surprise present and a reward, Vic gave Trixie the bookcase he had made, and filled its upper two shelves with new books for her, putting her old favorites in the two lower shelves. He was to tutor her two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, come hell or high water, he told her, and she seemed to be fairly impressed. The tutoring began at the end of her first week in school. Half an hour of arithmetic, half an hour of penmanship on the living room cocktail table, then a fifteen-minute break and an hour of geography, which was not quite such a mental strain on Trixie because Vic could make geography very funny.

       Vic very much enjoyed tutoring Trixie. He had been looking forward to it for years, to helping her first with arithmetic and algebra and geometry, then perhaps trig and calculus. It had always seemed the essence of parenthood and domesticity, the older generation passing down the wisdom of the race to the offspring, as birds taught their young to fly. And yet the tutoring brought into focus certain uncomfortable facts, made him realize more acutely that he was leading two lives and that the friendships he now enjoyed with Horace and Phil, for instance, existed because they did not know the truth about him. He felt more guilt about that than he had felt for killing De Lisle.

       He thought about such things as he watched Trixie's plump, uncomfortable hand trying to make a row of 'b''s, or 'q''s or 'g''s. "Aye bee see dee ee eff 'gee-ee', aitch eye jay kay ellemeno 'pee-ee'," Trixie chanted periodically to rest from the penmanship labors, because she had known the alphabet for years. Vic tried to answer the question he had not been able to answer for the past four or five years:

       where were things going with Melinda and where did he want them to go? He wanted her to himself, but she was not attractive to him as a woman; that he realized, too. Neither was she repellent. He simply felt that he could get along without her, or any other woman, physically, for the rest of his life. And had he known that before he killed De Lisle? He couldn't answer that, he couldn't remember. De Lisle's murder was like a caesura in his experience, and it was strangely hard to remember, emotionally, before that time. He remembered a knot, a dark, hard knot of repressions and resentments in himself, and it was as if his murdering De Lisle had untied the knot. He was more relaxed now and, to be perfectly honest, happier. He couldn't see himself as a criminal, a psychopath. It was, indeed, much as he had foreseen the evening he had made the shocking statement to Joel Nash. He had indulged in a fantasy that night of having killed McRae himself, assuming that McRae had provoked him sufficiently, and Vic remembered that he had started to 'feel' better immediately. A discharge of repressed hatred, perhaps that was a better metaphor than the untying of a knot. But just what had pushed him across the line from fantasy to fact that night in the Cowans' swimming pool? And would it happen again under the right circumstances? He hoped not. Obviously, it was better to let off steam here and there rather than let it build up to explosive proportions. He smiled at the simple logic of it. He could imagine many things, but he could not imagine himself very angry, as most people became angry, raising their voices and banging their fists on tables. But perhaps he should set himself to try.

       "Get some corners on those 'r''s," Vic said to Trixie. "You're making a string of croquet wickets."

       Trixie giggled, her concentration running out. "Let's play croquet!"

       "After you get through the 'r''s."

       Phil and Horace could never exactly condone his murder of De Lisle, Vic thought, so he was doomed to hypocrisy. But he could not keep himself from taking some comfort in the thought that Phil or Horace