Deep Water

by Patricia Highsmith

“There is no better dodge than one’s own character, because no one believes in it.” –Pyotr Stepanovitch in Dostoyevsky’s THE POSSESSED

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.

Be never quite sober, never quite drunk. Dum non sobrius, tamen non ebrius.

Vic didn’t mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.

There wasn’t a word for the way he felt about Melinda, for that combination of loathing and devotion.

He felt a sudden, frightening depression, as if his soul, somewhere, had slid down a hill into darkness.

He looked as if he had spent all his life dodging blows that were probably aimed at him for good reason.

He had such slow reactions to everything. Physical danger. Emotional blows. Sometimes his reactions were weeks late, so that he had a hard time attaching them to their causes.

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.

She could always eat with a hangover, and besides it was one of her theories that the more you ate with a hangover the better you felt.