Vic didn’t dance, but not for the reasons that most men who don’t dance give to themselves. He didn’t dance simply because his wife liked to dance. His rationalization of his attitude was a flimsy one and didn’t fool him for a minute, though it crossed his mind every time he saw Melinda dancing: she was insufferably silly when she danced. She made dancing embarrassing.
He was aware that Melinda twirled into his line of vision and out again, but barely aware, he thought, and it was only his familiarity with every physical detail of her that had made him realize that it was she at all. Calmly he raised his glass of Scotch and water and sipped it.
He sat slouched, with a neutral expression on his face, on the upholstered bench that curved around the Mellers’ newel post, staring at the changing pattern of the dancers and thinking that when he went home tonight he would take a look at his herb boxes in the garage and see if the foxgloves were up. He was growing several kinds of herbs now, repressing their growth by depriving them of half their normal sunlight and water with a view to intensifying their flavor. Every afternoon he set the boxes in the sun at one o’clock, when he came home for lunch, and put them back into the garage at three, when he returned to his printing plant.
Victor Van Allen was thirty-six years old, of a little less than medium height, inclined to a general firm rotundity rather than fat, and he had thick, crisp brown eyebrows that stood out over innocent blue eyes. His brown hair was straight, closely cut, and like his eyebrows, thick and tenacious. His mouth was middle-sized, firm, and usually drawn down at the right corner with a lopsided determination or with humor, depending on how one cared to take it. It was his mouth that made his face ambiguous—for one could read a bitterness in it, too—because his blue eyes, wide, intelligent, and unsurprisable, gave no clue as to what he was thinking or feeling.
In the last moments the noise had increased a decibel or so and the dancing had become more abandoned in response to the pulsing Latin music that had begun to play. The noise offended his ears, and still he sat, though he knew he could have wandered down the hall to his host’s study and browsed among the books there if he had cared to. He had had enough to drink to set up a faint, rhythmic buzzing in his ears, not entirely unpleasant. Perhaps the thing to do at a party, or at any gathering where liquor was available, was to match your drinking with the augmenting noise. Shut the noise out with your own noise. You could set up a little din of merry voices right inside your head. It would ease a great many things. Be never quite sober, never quite drunk. Dum non sobrius, tamen non ebrius. A fine epitaph for him, but unfortunately not true, he thought. The plain, dull fact was that most of the time he preferred to be alert.
Involuntarily his eyes focused on the suddenly organizing pattern: a conga line. And involuntarily he found Melinda, smiling a gay catch-me-if-you-can smile over her shoulder, and the man over her shoulder—way over it and practically in her hair, in fact—was Joel Nash. Vic sighed and sipped his drink. For a man who had been up dancing until three last night, and until five the night before, Mr. Nash was doing very well.
Vic started, feeling a hand on his left sleeve, but it was only old Mrs. Podnansky leaning toward him. He had almost forgotten she was there.
“I can’t thank you enough, Vic. You really won’t mind picking it up yourself?” She had asked him the same thing five or ten minutes ago.
“Of course not,” Vic said, smiling, standing up as she got up. “I’ll drop around tomorrow at about a quarter to one.”
Just then Melinda leaned toward him, across Mr. Nash’s arm, and said almost in Mrs. Podnansky’s face, though she looked at Vic, “Fuddy-duddy! Why don’t you dance?” and Vic saw Mrs. Podnansky jump and recover with a smile before she moved away.
Mr. Nash gave Vic a happy, slightly tipsy smile as he danced off with Melinda. And what kind of smile would you call that? Vic wondered. Comradely. That was the word. That was what Joel Nash had intended it to be. Vic deliberately took his eyes from Joel, though he had been on a certain train of thought that had to do with his face. It wasn’t his manner—hypocritical, half-embarrassed, half-assed—that irritated him so much as his face. That boyish roundness of the cheeks and of the forehead, that prettily waving light-brown hair, those regular features that women who liked him would describe as not too regular. Most women would call him handsome, Vic supposed. Vic remembered Mr. Nash looking up at him from the sofa as he handed him his empty glass for the sixth or eighth time last night, as if he were ashamed to be accepting another drink, ashamed to be staying fifteen minutes longer, and yet a certain brash insolence had predominated in his face. Up to now, Vic thought, Melinda’s boyfriends had at least had more brains or less insolence. Joel Nash wouldn’t be in the neighborhood forever, though. He was a salesman for the Furness-Klein Chemical Company of Wesley, Massachusetts, up for a few weeks of briefing on the company’s new products, he had said. If he had been going to make a home in Wesley or Little Wesley, Vic had no doubt that he would take Ralph Gosden’s place, regardless of how bored Melinda became with him or what a fluke he turned out to be in other respects, because Melinda was never able to resist what she thought was a handsome face. Joel would be more handsome than Ralph in Melinda’s opinion.
Vic looked up and saw Horace Meller standing beside him. “Hi there, Horace. Looking for a seat?”
“No, thanks.” Horace was a slight, graying man of middle height with a narrow sensitive face and a somewhat bushy black mustache. His mouth under the mustache wore the polite smile of a nervous host. Horace was always nervous, though the party was going as well as any host could have wished. “What’s happening at the plant, Vic?”
“Getting Xenophon ready,” Vic replied. In the din they could not talk very well. “Why don’t you drop around some evening?” Vic meant at the printing plant. He was always there until seven, and by himself after five, because Stephen and Carlyle went home at five.
“All right, I will,” Horace said. “Is your drink all right?”
Vic nodded that it was.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Horace said, moving off.
Vic felt a void as soon as he had left. An awkwardness. Something unsaid, and Vic knew what it was: Horace had tactfully refrained from mentioning Mr. Joel Nash. Hadn’t said Joel was nice, or welcome, or asked anything about him, or bothered with any of the banalities. Melinda had maneuvered Joel’s invitation to the party. Vic had heard her on the telephone with Mary Meller the day before yesterday: “. . . Well, not exactly a guest of ours, but we feel responsible for him because he doesn’t know many people in town . . . Oh, thanks, Mary! I didn’t think you’d mind having an extra man, and such a handsome one, too . . .” As if anyone could pry Melinda away from him with a crowbar. One more week, Vic thought. Seven more nights exactly. Mr. Nash was leaving on the first, a Sunday.
Joel Nash materialized, looming unsteadily in his broadshouldered white jacket, bringing his glass. “Good evening, Mr. Van Allen,” Joel said with a mock formality and plopped himself down where Mrs. Podnansky had been sitting. “How’re you tonight?”
“Oh, as usual,” Vic said, smiling.
“There’s two things I wanted to say to you,” Joel said with sudden enthusiasm, as if he had at that very moment thought of them. “One is I’ve been asked to stay a couple of weeks longer here—by my company—so I hope I can repay both of you for the abundant hospitality you’ve shown me in the last few weeks and—” Joel laughed in a boyish way, ducking his head.
Melinda had a genius for finding people like Joel Nash, Vic thought. Little marriages of true minds. “And the second?”
“The second—Well, the second is, I want to say what a brick I think you are for being so nice about my seeing your wife. Not that I have seen her very much, you understand, lunch a couple of times and a drive in the country, but—”
“But what?” Vic prompted, feeling suddenly stone sober and disgusted with Nash’s bland intoxication.
“Well, a lot of men would have knocked my block off for less—thinking it was more, of course. I can easily understand why you might be a little annoyed, but you’re not. I can see that. I suppose I want to say that I’m grateful to you for not punching my nose. Not that there’s been anything to punch it for, of course. You can ask Melinda, in case you’re in any doubt.”
Just the person to ask, of course. Vic stared at him with a calm indifference. The proper reply, Vic thought, was nothing.
“At any rate, I wanted to say I think you’re awfully sporting,” Nash added.
Joel Nash’s third affected Anglicism grated on Vic in an unpleasant way. “I appreciate your sentiments,” Vic said, with a small smile, “but I don’t waste my time punching people on the nose. If I really don’t like somebody, I kill him.”
“Kill him?” Mr. Nash smiled his merry smile.
“Yes. You remember Malcolm McRae, don’t you?” Vic knew that he knew about Malcolm McRae because Melinda had said that she had told Joel all about the “McRae mystery,” and that Joel had been very interested because he had seen McRae once or twice in New York on business matters.
“Yes,” Joel Nash said attentively.
Joel Nash’s smile had grown smaller. It was now a mere protective device. Melinda had undoubtedly told Joel that Mal had had quite a crush on her. That always added spice to the story.
“You’re kidding me,” Joel said.
In that instant, from his words and his face, Vic knew two things: that Joel Nash had already made love to his wife, and that his own dead-calm attitude in the presence of Melinda and Joel had made quite an impression. Vic had frightened him—not only now, but on certain evenings at the house. Vic had never shown a sign of conventional jealousy. People who do not behave in an orthodox manner, Vic thought, are by definition frightening. “No, I’m not kidding,” Vic said with a sigh, taking a cigarette from his pack, then offering the pack to Joel.
Joel Nash shook his head.
“He got a bit forward, as they say—with Melinda. She may have told you. But it wasn’t that so much as his entire personality that irked me. His cocksureness and his eternally passing out somewhere, so people’d had to put him up. And his revolting parsimony.” Vic fixed his cigarette in his holder and clamped it between his teeth.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I think you do. Not that it matters.”
“You really killed Malcolm McRae?”
“Who else do you think did?” Vic waited, but there was no answer. “Melinda told me you’d met him, or knew about him. Did you have any theories? I’d like to hear them. Theories interest me. More than fact sometimes.”
“I haven’t any theories,” Joel said in a defensive tone.
Vic noticed a withdrawal, a fear, just in the way Mr. Nash was sitting on the bench now. Vic leaned back, raised and lowered his shaggy brown eyebrows, and blew his smoke out straight in front of him.
There was a silence.
Mr. Nash was turning over various remarks in his mind, Vic knew. Vic even knew the kind of remark he would make.
“Considering he was a friend of yours,” Joel began, just as Vic had known he would, “I don’t think it’s very funny of you to joke about his death.”
“He wasn’t a friend of mine.”
“Of your wife’s.”
“A different matter, you’ll admit.”
Mr. Nash managed a nod. Then a sidewise smile. “I still think it’s a pretty poor joke.” He stood up.
“Sorry. Maybe I can do better next time. Oh, just a minute!”
Joel Nash turned.
“Melinda doesn’t know anything about this,” Vic said, still coolly leaning back against the newel post. “I’d just as soon you didn’t tell her.”
Joel smiled and waved a hand as he walked away. The hand, was limp. Vic watched him walk to the other side of the living room, near Horace and Phil Cowan, who were talking together, but Joel did not try to join them. He stood by himself and took a cigarette. Mr. Nash would wake up in the morning still believing it was a joke, Vic thought, though he would be wondering a little, too, enough to ask a few people some questions as to what Vic Van Allen’s attitude toward Malcolm McRae had been. And various people—Horace Meller, for instance, and even Melinda—would tell him that Vic and Mal had never hit it off very well. And the Cowans or Horace or Mary Meller, if pressed, would admit that they had noticed something between Mal and Melinda, nothing more than a little flirting, of course, but—
Malcolm McRae had been an advertising executive, not a very important one but there had been an obnoxious air of superiority and patronage about him. He had been the type women call fascinating and men generally loathe. Tall and lean and immaculate, with a long narrow face in which nothing stood out in Vic’s memory except a large wart on his right cheek like Abraham Lincoln’s, though his eyes were supposed to have been fascinating, too, Vic remembered. And he had been murdered, for no known reason, in his Manhattan apartment by an assailant the police had up to now failed to find. That was why Vic’s story had made such an impression on Joel.
Vic relaxed still more against the newel post and stretched his legs out in front of him, recalling with a peculiar relish now how Mal had stood behind Melinda on the golf course with his arms around her, showing her how to make a shot that she could have done better than he if she had wanted to. And that other time, around three in the morning, when Melinda had coyly retreated to her bed with a glass of milk and had asked Mal to come in to talk to her. Vic had stubbornly sat on in the living room, pretending to read, determined to stay there no matter what time it got to be, so long as Mal was in her room. There was no comparison in their intellects, Mal’s and Melinda’s, and Mal would have been bored stiff if he had ever had her for half a day to himself. But there had been the little lure of sex. There was always Melinda’s little come-on that went something like “Oh, Vic? I love him, truly I do, but just not in that way. Oh, it’s been like this for years. He doesn’t care for me that way either, so—” with the upturned, expectant, green-brown eyes. Mal had come out of Melinda’s room after twenty minutes or so. Vic was sure there hadn’t been anything between them, ever. But he remembered a certain satisfaction when he had heard that Mal had been killed last December. Or had it been January? And his first thought had been that Mal might have had it from a jealous husband.
For a few moments Vic imagined that Mal had come back to Melinda’s room that night after he had gone to his room on the other side of the garage, that he had known about it, and that he had planned the murder meticulously, gone in to New York on some pretext, called on Mal with a sash weight under his coat (the murderer must have been a friend or an acquaintance, the papers had said, because Mal had evidently let him in quietly), and had battered Mal to death. Silently and efficiently, leaving no fingerprints—neither had the real murderer—then driving back to Little Wesley the same night, giving as an alibi, in case anybody had ever asked him for one, that he had been watching a movie in Grand Central at the time Mal had been murdered, a movie that he would actually have seen, of course, at some other time.
“Victor-r?” Mary Meller bent down toward him. “What’re you pondering?”
Vic slowly stood up, smiling. “Not a thing. You’re looking very peachy tonight.” He was referring to the color of her dress.
“Thank you. Can’t we go and sit down in some corner and you talk to me about something?” Mary asked him. “I want to see you change your seat. You’ve been there all evening.”
“The piano bench?” Vic suggested, because it was the only spot in sight where two people could sit next to each other. The dancing, for the moment, had stopped. He let Mary take him by the wrist and draw him toward the piano bench. He felt that Mary didn’t particularly want to talk to him, that she was trying to be a good hostess and chat with everybody, and that she had left him to the last because he was rather difficult at parties. Vic didn’t care. I have no pride, he thought proudly. He often said it to Melinda because it irritated her.
“What were you talking to Mrs. Podnansky so long about?” Mary asked him when they had sat down.
“Lawn mowers. Hers needs sharpening, and she’s not satisfied with the job Clarke’s did for her the last time.”
“So you offered to do it, I’ll bet. I don’t know what the widows of the community would do without you, Victor Van Allen! I wonder how you have time for all your good deeds!”
“Plenty of time,” Vic said, smiling with appreciation in spite of himself. “I can find time for anything. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
“Time to read all those books the rest of us keep postponing!” She laughed. “Oh, Vic, I hate you!” She looked around at her merrymaking guests, then back at Vic. “I hope your friend Mr. Nash is having a good time tonight. Is he going to settle in Little Wesley or is he just here for a while?”
Mr. Nash was no longer having such a good time, Vic saw. He was still standing by himself, brooding at a figure in the rolled-up carpet near his feet. “No, he’s just here for a week or so, I think,” Vic said in an offhand tone. “Some kind of business trip.”
“So you don’t know him very well.”
“No. We’ve just met him.” Vic hated to share the responsibility with Melinda. Melinda had met him one afternoon in the bar of the Lord Chesterfield Inn, where she went nearly every afternoon around five-thirty more or less for the express purpose of meeting people like Joel Nash.
“May I say, Vic darling, that I think you’re extremely patient?”
Vic glanced at her and saw from her straining, slightly moistening eyes that she was feeling her drinks. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“You are. You’re like somebody waiting very patiently and one day—you’ll do something. Not explode exactly, but just—well, speak your mind.”
It was such a quiet finish that Vic smiled. Slowly he rubbed at an itch on the side of his hand with his thumb.
“I’d also like to say, since I’ve had three drinks and I may not have such an opportunity again, that I think you’re pretty wonderful. You’re good, Vic,” Mary said in a tone that meant he was good in a biblical sense, a tone that betrayed a little embarrassment at having used such a word in such a sense, and Vic knew she was going to ruin it by laughing at herself in another few seconds. “If I weren’t married and you weren’t, I think I’d propose to you right now!” Then came the laugh that was supposed to erase it all.
Why did women think, Vic wondered, even women who had married for love and had had a child and a fairly happy married life, that they would prefer a man who demanded nothing of them sexually? It was a kind of sentimental harking back to virginity, a silly, vain fantasy that had no factual validity whatsoever. They’d be the first ones to feel affronted if their husbands neglected them in that respect. “Unfortunately, I am married,” Vic said.
“Unfortunately!” Mary scoffed. “You adore her, and I know it! You worship the ground she walks on. And she loves you, too, Vic, and don’t forget it!”
“I don’t want you to think,” Vic said, almost interrupting her, “that I’m so good as you put it. I have a little evil side, too. I just keep it well hidden.”
“You certainly do!” Mary said, laughing. She leaned toward him and he smelled her perfume which struck him as a combination of lilac and cinnamon. “How’s your drink, Vic?”
“This’ll do for the moment, thanks.”
“You see? You’re even good about drinking!—What bit your hand?”
“A bedbug.”
“A bedbug! Good lord! Where’d you get it?”
“At the Green Mountain Hotel.”
Mary’s mouth opened incredulously; then she shrieked with laughter. “What were you doing there?”
“Oh, I put in an order weeks in advance. I said if any bedbugs turned up, I wanted them, and finally collected six. Cost me five dollars in tips. They’re living in my garage now in a glass case with a piece of mattress inside for them to sleep on. Now and then I let one bite me, because I want them to go through their normal life cycle. I’ve got two batches of eggs now.”
“But why?” Mary demanded, giggling.
“Because I think a certain entomologist who wrote a piece for an entomologist journal is wrong about a certain point in their reproductive cycle,” Vic answered, smiling.
“What point?” asked Mary, fascinated.
“Oh, it’s a small point about the period of incubation. I doubt if it has any value at all to anybody, though as a matter of fact insecticide manufacturers ought to—”
“Vi-ic?” Melinda’s husky voice slurred, “Do you mind?”
Vic looked up at her with a subtly insulting astonishment, and then got up from the bench and gestured graciously toward the piano. “It’s all yours.”
“You’re going to play? Good!” Mary said in a delighted tone.
A quintet of men was ranging itself around the piano. Melinda swooped onto the bench, a sheaf of shining hair swinging down like a curtain and concealing her face from anyone standing on her right, as Vic was. Oh, well, Vic thought, who knew her face better than he did? And he didn’t want to see it anyway, because it didn’t improve when she drank. Vic strolled away. The whole sofa was free now. To his distaste, he heard Melinda’s wildly trilling introduction to “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” which she played abominably. Her playing was florid, inaccurate, and one would think embarrassing, yet people listened, and after they listened they liked her neither more nor less for it. It seemed to be neither a liability nor an asset to her socially. When she floundered and gave up a song with a laugh and a childish, frustrated flutter of hands, her current admirers admired her just the same. She wasn’t going to flounder on “Slaughter,” however, because if she did she could always switch to the “Three Blind Mice” theme and recover herself. Vic sat down in a corner of the sofa. Everybody was around the piano except Mrs. Podnansky, Evelyn Cowan, and Horace. Melinda’s swingeing attack on the main theme was evoking grunts of delight from her male listeners. Vic looked at Joel Nash’s back, hunched over the piano, and closed his eyes. In a sense he closed his ears also, and thought of his bedbugs.
Finally, there was applause which rapidly died down as Melinda began “Dancing in the Dark,” one of her better numbers. Vic opened his eyes and saw Joel Nash staring at him in an absent, yet intense and rather frightened way. Vic closed his eyes again. His head was back as if he were listening, enraptured, to the music. ...
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