Deep Water

by Patricia Highsmith

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.

“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.”

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

She wanted him to go to bed. Vic smiled at her. “I’m memorizing the editorial page poem for today. ‘Employees serve the public and They have to keep their place. But being humble in this world Is never a disgrace. And many times I ask myself—’ ” “Oh, stop it!” Melinda said. “It’s by your friend Reginald Dunlap. You said he wasn’t a bad poet, remember?” “I’m not in the mood for poetry.” “Reggie wasn’t either when he wrote this.”

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