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

and talking to Melinda, his hands crossed in front of him, his limber body making a slight arc. Insubstantiality personified. Mr. Gosden was not looking his way. Surely most of the people in the room knew that Ralph had been Melinda's lover, Vic thought. Now Ralph was laughing. He was behaving quite bravely tonight. Then Vic saw the stocky man spread his arms in an invitation to Melinda to dance, and they moved gracefully onto the floor. And Ralph Gosden watched them, or perhaps watched only Melinda, with his old fatuous smile. Vic saw that Horace had followed his eyes and he looked down at his drink again.

       "Is that Ralph Gosden?" Horace asked.

       "Yes. Dear old Ralph," Vic said.

       Horace began to talk about the lobotomized brain of an epileptic that had come into his laboratory for analysis, about the irregularity of the lesions because during the operation, which had been under a local anesthetic, the patient had moved. Horace was particularly interested in brain injury, brain surgery, and brain diseases, and so was Vic. It had always been their favorite subject of discussion. They were still talking about the behavior report of the frontal lobotomy case, when Melinda walked up with the man she had been dancing with.

       "Vic," she said, "I'd like you to meet Mr. Anthony Cameron. Mr. Cameron, my husband."

       Mr. Cameron stuck out a big hand. "How do you do?" "How do you do?" Vic said, shaking his hand.

       "And Mr. Meller?"

       Horace and Mr. Cameron also exchanged a "How do you do?"

       "Mr. Cameron's a contractor. He's up here to look for some land to build a house on. I thought you might like to talk to him," Melinda said, with a faint singsong in her delivery that told Vic this was not the main reason she had introduced Mr. Cameron to I hem.

       Mr. Cameron had staring, pale-blue eyes whose smallness contrasted with the bulk of the rest of him. He was not very tall and his head looked square and huge, as if it were made of something other than the usual flesh and bone. When he paused to listen to someone else speak, his mouth hung a little open. Horace was telling him about the pocket of land with a hill on it between northern Little Wesley and the bulge of the midtown section. The hill had a view of Bear Lake, Horace said.

       "I've looked at it and it's not high enough," Mr. Cameron said, smiling at Melinda afterwards as if he had uttered a bon mot.

       "There's not much high land around here unless you actually take to the mountains," Vic said.

       "Well, we may do that!" Mr. Cameron rubbed his heavy hands together. His wavy, dark-brown hair looked greasy and as if it smelled unpleasantly sweet.

       Then they got into the fishing possibilities of the region. Mr. Cameron said he was a great fisherman and boasted of always coming home with a full creel. Vic discovered he had never heard of a quite commonplace fly for brook fishing. Still, he demonstrated his technique with a couple of full swings of his arms. Horace was beginning to eye him with distaste.

       "Can I offer you a drink?" Vic asked.

       "No, no, thanks. Never touch it!" Mr. Cameron said in the loud voice of the outdoor man, beaming. He had small regular teeth, each one like the other. "Well, this is a great party tonight, isn't it?" He looked at Melinda. "Want to dance again?"

       "Delighted," Melinda said, lifting her arms.

       "So long, Mr. Van Allen, Mr. Meller," Cameron said as he danced away. "Nice to meet you."

       "So long," Vic said. Then he exchanged a look with Horace, but each of them was a little too polite to smile or make any comment.

       He and Horace talked about something else.

       Ralph Gosden did not dance with Melinda all the evening, and Mr. Cameron claimed most of Melinda's dances. Melinda became rather high around two in the morning and began dancing more or less by herself, waving the very long, bright green scarf that in the earlier part of the evening she had worn around her shoulders as a stole. Her dress was of pink satin—really an old dress, and he thought she had chosen it for this evening with a kind of martyrdom in mind—and with the green scarf it suggested the colors of a dainty, virginal apple blossom, though her face above the dress looked neither dainty nor virginal. Her hair had a wild charm, Vic supposed, streaked with lighter blond strands from the summer sun, and waving loose as she moved. It would appeal to a man like Cameron, and so would her strong, supple body and her face that had lost much of its makeup now and was just a slightly drunken, down-to-earth, happy-looking face. At least Mr. Cameron would think it happy. Vic could see the defiance in her dancing, in the wildly waving scarf which twice circled another couple around the necks. It was a defiance of everybody in the room. First, she had wanted to show herself to the community as a martyr, and in no time at all she had reversed to a pretense of devil-may-care revelry, equally determined to show everybody that she was having a better time than anybody else. Vic sighed, pondering the oscillations of Melinda's mind.

       The next afternoon, while Vic was in the garage cleaning his snail aquaria, Mr. Cameron walked up in shirt sleeves.

       "Anybody home?" Mr. Cameron asked cheerfully.

       Vic was a bit startled, not having heard a car arrive. "Well, I am," he said. "My wife's still asleep, I think."

       "Oh," said Mr. Cameron. "Well, I was just passing by your road, and your wife said any time I was in the neighborhood to drop in. So here I am!"

       Vic didn't know what to say for a moment.

       "What've you got there?"

       "Snails," Vic said, wondering if Melinda were possibly awake o