Deep Water (24 page)

       "Isn't this a new departure for you?" Horace asked.

       Then Vic looked and saw Melinda standing with Ralph Gosden and the man she had danced with a couple of times this evening. "Yes," Vic said. "But it's time I had one. The married daughter in South America sent me the manuscript. It's an absolute fluke, you see. She said she read about the Greenspur Press in some South American publication and learned that I printed things in other languages besides English, so she was sending me her mother's diary, she said, in case I might be interested. It was a charming letter. Very modest and very hopeful at the same time. I'm thinking of printing the book half in Italian and half in English, as I did Xenophon. So 'few' people would be able to understand this dialect."

       "How do you manage to read it? Do you know Italian that well?" Horace asked.

       "No, but I can read it reasonably well with a dictionary, and I happen to have a dictionary of Italian dialects at home. Picked it up in New York secondhand years ago, God knows why, but now it comes in handy. I can make out nearly everything. The woman's handwriting is very clear, thank God."

       Horace shook his head. "The man of many parts."

       Looking toward Melinda, Vic caught the eye of the heavyset man she had been dancing with, who was just then staring at him. Even from far across the room Vic saw that the man's stare was naïvely curious. Perhaps Melinda had just been pointing him out to the man. Ralph was standing 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 take the man off his hands. "Just a minute. I'll see if my wife's lip." Vic went into the house from the garage.

       Melinda's door was still closed.

       "Melinda?" he called. Then he knocked firmly. When there was still no answer, he opened the door. "Melinda."

       She was lying on her side with her back to him. She slowly straightened and turned, with one stretching movement, like an animal.

       "You've a gentleman caller," Vic said.

       She jerked her head up from the pillow. "Who?"

       "Mr. Cameron, I believe it is? I wish you'd come out and take care of him. Or ask him in. He's outside."

       Melinda frowned, reaching for her slippers. "Why don't you ask him in?"

       "I don't 'want' to ask him in," Vic said, and Melinda glanced at him, surprised but unconcerned. He went out to Mr. Cameron, who was bouncing on his heels in the middle of the driveway, whistling, and said, "My wife'll be out in a minute or so. Would you like to wait in the living room?"

       "Oh, no. I'll take the air. Is that where you live?" he asked, nodding toward the projecting wing off the far side of the garage.

       "Yes," Vic said, pulling the corners of his mouth into a smile. He went back to his snail cleaning. It was an unattractive aspect of snail raising, cleaning their mess off the glass sides of the tank with a razor blade, and he loathed it when Mr. Cameron strolled over to watch him, still whistling. To Vic's surprise, he was whistling part of a Mozart concerto.

       "Where'd you get all those?" he asked.

       "Oh—most of them were born here. Hatched."

       "How do they breed? In the water?"

       "No, they lay eggs. In the ground." Vic was washing the inside of a tank with a rag and soap and water. Delicately, he detached a young snail that had crawled up on the part of the glass he was washing, and set it down on the earth inside the tank.

       "Look like they'd be good to eat," Mr. Cameron remarked. "Oh, they are. Delicious."

       "Reminds me of New Orleans. Ever been to New Orleans?"

       "Yes," Vic said, with finality. He began on another tank, first detaching with his hands or the razor blade the snails of all sizes that were sleeping on the sides of the glass. He looked over at Mr. Cameron and said, "I wish you wouldn't take the screen off, if you don't mind. They crawl out very easily.'

       Mr. Cameron straightened up and slid the screen top back with a carelessness that made Vic wince, because he felt sure that a baby snail or two must have been crushed. Mr. Cameron probably hadn't even seen the tiny baby snails. His eyes didn't focus that small. He was coming toward Vic in an aimless way with his affable little smile when Melinda opened the door from the hall, and he turned to her.

       "Hello, Tony! Good afternoon! How nice of you to stop by!" "Hope you folks don't mind," he said, walking slowly toward her. "I was just cycling around, thought I'd drop in."

       "Drop in here and have a drink!" Melinda said gaily, opening the door wider.

       "I'll have a beer, if you got it."

       Mr. Cameron stayed for brunch at about four o'clock, and then for dinner at nine, both of which meals Vic prepared almost single-handed. He drank nine cans of beer. At six o'clock, when Vic had returned to the living room from his own room to get some of the Sunday paper, Cameron had been sitting with Melinda on the sofa, bellowing out a story about how he acquired his name.

       "What's your real name?" Melinda asked.

       "Oh, it's Polish. You wouldn't even be able to pronounce it!" Mr. Cameron told her with a roar of laughter.

       He was like a phonograph turned on too loudly. Vic had sat for a while in the living room with them. He had put on a clean shirt and freshly pressed slacks, in hopes that Cameron might think they had an engagement for the evening, but Cameron evidently considered the change of clothing in his honor and that his visit was just beginning. The strange thing was that Melinda seemed to be enjoying it, though she had grown a little tight in the course of curing a hangover by sipping Bloody Marys all day. Mr. Cameron switched from describing a dynamiting process, with violent gestures, to enumerating the demands some clients made on him to provide a view plus shelter from the wind, plus a place for a swimming pool and a tennis court and a lawn, all on three acres of ground.

       "Oh, they ask me for everything except a graveyard for when they die!" Mr. Cameron finished, guffawing. It was a typical finish of his stories. Mr. Cameron was outdoing himself. He was like a small boy trying to impress a girl by flourishing a knife or by setting a kerosene-soaked cat on fire.

        Vic sat with his cheek in his hand, waiting.

       The Petersons brought Trixie and the puppy back from their house, where Trixie had been all afternoon, but the Petersons refused to come in when they saw that they had company.

       "'Please' come in," Vic pleaded, but in vain. The Petersons were shy people. It was then that Vic slammed the front door shut in his anger, and said, taking a wild chance that Cameron would leave on it, "Well, I suppose it'll soon be time for dinner."

       Mr. Cameron did not say "Good!" but something very much like it.

       During what might have been called the cocktail hour, when the Idaho potatoes were baking and the biggest steak Vic had been able to find in the deep freezer was thawing on the drainboard, Mr. Cameron suddenly stood up and announced that he had a treat for them. "I'll be right back. I just want to get something from my bike!"

       "What's he getting?" asked Vic, who had just come in from the kitchen.

       "I don't know."

       "I wish you wouldn't laugh so hard at his damned stories. It's a bit late now to mention it, I suppose."

       "And maybe I enjoy his stories," Melinda replied in an ominously calm voice. "I think he's very interesting, and a very 'real guy'."

       Vic could say nothing, because Mr. Cameron was back, with a clarinet in his hand.

       "Here it is," he said, tossing to the floor the opaque plastic bag it had evidently been in." I always take it with me when I bike around. I like to stop in the woods and play it awhile. Did you say you had the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A?"

       "Oh, yes, Vic, look for it, will you?"

       Vic went to the record cabinet and looked for it. They had had it for years. It was a seventy-eight.

       "Let's try the second movement!" Mr. Cameron said, lifting the horn to his lips and beginning to tootle. His fingers looked like splayed bunches of bananas on the chromium keys.

       Vic looked for the second movement, found it, and put it on the machine. Mr. Cameron began at once, playing the theme along with the orchestra, coming down on the notes hard but accurately. In a pause, he smiled triumphantly and looked at Melinda.

       "I shouldn't come in so soon, but I like the music," he said, "How's this?"