Free Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith Page A

up on one elbow, all her sleepiness gone. "Did they? Who was it?"
           Vic had the paper under his arm. He handed it to Melinda. She read it avidly, with a twinkling amusement that kept Vic staring at her. "Well, what do you know," she said finally.
           "I trust you're pleased," Vic said, managing a pleasant tone. She shot a look at him, hard and quick as a bullet. "Aren't 'you'?"
           "I doubt if I'm as pleased as you," Vic said.
           She sprang out of bed and for a moment she stood beside him in white pajamas, on bare feet with crimson nails, looking at herself in the mirror, pushing her hair back from her face. "That's right, you're not. You couldn't be." Then she ran into the bathroom, as agilely as Trixie might have run.
           The telephone rang by Melinda's bed, and at once Vic suspected it was Horace. Horace subscribed to the 'Times', too. Vic went out, crossed the living room to the hall phone and picked it up. "Hello?"
           "Hello, Vic. Did you see the paper this morning?" Horace had a smile in his voice, but a friendly smile, not a malicious one. "Yes, I saw it."
           "Did you know the man?"
           "No, I've never heard of him."
           "Well—" Horace waited for Vic to speak. "This'll end all the talking, anyway."
           "I haven't heard much of this talking," Vic said rather crisply. "Oh-h—I have, Vic. It hasn't been entirely good."
           "Well, Melinda's very happy, of course."
           "You know my opinion on that, Vic." Horace hesitated again, but now he was groping for words. "I think you've—Well, I think she's come a long way in these last couple of months. I hope it keeps up."
           Vic listened to the shower running in the bathroom. Melinda was in the bathroom, hadn't picked up the telephone in her room, he knew, but still he found himself tongue-tied. He couldn't discuss his personal problems with Horace. "Thanks, Horace," he said 'finally'.
           Usually Vic was at the plant by a quarter past nine or nine-thirty, but he sat in the living room now, at ten past nine, waiting for Melinda to finish dressing, waiting for her to say whatever else she was going to say to him this morning, waiting to find out where she was going. He could tell by the haste of her preparations that she had some objective. He heard her dial a number on her telephone, but her voice did not come through the closed door, and he would not have wished to hear what she was saying, anyway.
           Vic couldn't see her going back to Ralph, really, after he'd shown himself such a coward. Joel was in New York, but that was not an impossible distance if Melinda was determined to see him. Vic took a cigarette from the box on the rosewood cocktail table. He had just made the table, had polished its very subtly concave top as carefully as if it had been a lens. He had made it to replace the old cocktail table which he had also made, that dated from Larry Osbourne and had become so stained with cigarette burns and alcohol, in spite of the protective waxes he had always kept on it, that he had had no desire to refinish it. He wondered how soon the rosewood table was going to be stained with rings from highball glasses and burns from neglected cigarettes. When he heard Melinda's door open he sat down on the sofa so that he would appear deep in his newspaper when she came in.
           "Are you memorizing that thing?" she asked him.
           "I was reading something else. There's a new book on mountain climbing I'd like to buy."
           "There's a nice safe sport for you. Why don't you try it?" She took a cigarette from the box and lit it. She had on a white shirt, her flaring brown corduroy skirt, her brown moccasins. She slapped her key case into one empty, restless hand. She looked nervous and wild, the way he had seen her look many times at the start of an affair. This was the kind of mood that always got her