Deep Water

by Patricia Highsmith

Did you have any theories? I’d like to hear them. Theories interest me. More than fact sometimes.”

You’re like somebody waiting very patiently and one day—you’ll do something. Not explode exactly, but just—well, speak your mind.”

was against Vic’s principles, as an adult, to be firm with another adult. Granted Melinda wasn’t an adult, he still intended to go on treating her as one.

He thinks you’re odd. Well, we’re all odd, aren’t we?”

That was true love, Vic thought, even if they were only gastropoda.

“The winter’s going to be even more boring—without a break somewhere,” he said. “Oh, I don’t think it’s going to be boring,” she said. He smiled. “Is that a threat?” “Take it the way you like.” “Are you going to put arsenic in my food?” “I don’t think arsenic could kill you.”

The living room looked as if happy people lived in it now, even if happy people didn’t.

The wraithlike antagonism in his mind found an imaginary grip and tightened, and he turned a little in bed and was asleep.

What do you think I’m living on?” “Ego.” A laugh bubbled up in him, and then he was serious again. “No, not ego. Just the pieces of myself that I can put together again and hold together—by force of will.

Vic brought to bear all the tact at his command, knowing that if Melinda had her license suspended for six months, all hell would break loose in the household. Melinda incarcerated would be most unpleasant.

Vic wished he could go and take another look at the blood spots, do what he could to obliterate them, but he didn’t dare go to the quarry for fear he might be seen. It seemed the only careless, stupid thing he had ever done in his life—to leave a trace where he had not wanted to leave a trace, to have failed to do properly something of such importance.

He looked at Wilson, walking beside him, still intoning his tedious information, and, feeling very calm and happy, Vic kept looking at Wilson’s wagging jaw and thinking of the multitude of people like him on the earth, perhaps half the people on earth were of his type, or potentially his type, and thinking that it was not bad at all to be leaving them. The ugly birds without wings. The mediocre who perpetuated mediocrity, who really fought and died for it. He smiled at Wilson’s grim, resentful, the-world-owes-me-a-living face, which was the reflection of the small, dull mind behind it, and Vic cursed it and all it stood for. Silently, and with a smile, and with all that was left of him, he cursed it.