"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?"
Benny Goodman was coming in now, and so was M Cameron. Mr. Cameron was louder. He closed his little eyes, and swayed like an elephantine Pan. He did the runs in the variations quite well. There was not a single mistake. There was just no quality.
"I think you're 'marvelous'!" Melinda cried.
Mr. Cameron took a moment out to grin at her. "I only hid three lessons in my life," he said quickly and corked his mouth again with the instrument.
There followed the slow movement of the Third Brandenburg, the second movement of Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto, and the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. After the Brandenburg, Vic left Melinda to find the records for him, because he had to cook the steak and make the salad. During the dinner Mr. Cameron talked of the pleasures of bicycling and of how he combined work and pleasure by cycling around on nearly all his jobs. He was friendly and open to Vic, glancing at him every few moments to include him in his audience, with a condescension that showed that he considered Vic just a household companion of Melinda's, just an old uncle or a bachelor brother. He was still performing for Melinda.
Trixie sat at the table staring at him with a certain puzzlement hat Vic could easily understand. She had stared at him while he played his clarinet, making no comment and not attempting to talk to him—which was next to impossible because Mr. Cameron hardly shut up for a moment. Decibels of vocal cords, laughter, or the clarinet burst from him constantly. He emanated noise.
"I've had it," Vic murmured to Melinda after the dinner, as they were carrying the dishes back to the kitchen. "Can you manage the rest of the dishes? I'm going into my room where it's quiet."
"Please do," Melinda said a trifle fuzzily.
Vic went into the living room to say good night to Mr. Cameron, who was walking about restlessly, hands in his pockets, talking in a cheerful, roaring tone to the boxer puppy, since there was no one else around to talk to.
"Good night, Mr. Cameron," Vic said, with a little smile. "If you'll excuse me—I have some work to do."
"Oh, sure," he said sympathetically. "I understand. Say, that certainly was a good dinner. I enjoyed it!"
"I'm glad you did."
Vic plunged into the Sicilian grandmother's diary again, consulting his Italian dialect dictionary almost constantly. He succeeded in keeping out the duet of Melinda on the piano and Mr. Cameron on the clarinet while he was reading but when he stopped reading it intruded again. Melinda was making mistakes and pounding on the keys afterward to correct them. Mr. Cameron's happy guffaws came clearly through Vic's partly opened window.
Chapter 19
Melinda suddenly developed a taste for contracting. She began to spend her days with Mr. Cameron, driving him about wherever he cared to go, and calling on their friends with him and asking them to advise him. In the evening, during dinner, she talked all the time now, talked about the ground rise, drainage, the view, and the water table of some land east of Little Wesley that Mr. Cameron had selected for his client. The client was coming up on Saturday to look at the land, and Tony had to have a complete description of the physical nature of the property for him to read when he got here.
"Don't you think water tables are fascinating?" Melinda asked. "Tony explained to me how you can tell a false table from a real one. One kind of hill from the other, I mean. Some people think when there's a slight rise of ground there's a water table under it."
Vic frowned a little. "Do you mean simply water maybe? Or water supply? There's a water table everywhere."
Melinda scowled across the table at him. "What do you mean there's a water table everywhere? There's a water table where there's water!"
"Well, then there's water everywhere," Vic said. "The definition of water table is the upper limit of the ground that is saturated with water. Every kind of ground has its water table. There's a water table in the Sahara Desert, it just happens to be pretty low. I don't know what Tony's been telling you, but that's the way it is."
Melinda said nothing for a while, quite a long while. When she spoke again it was about the white stone that Tony was now trying to locate.
"Tell him to try around Vermont," Vic said.
"'That's' an idea! They've got beautiful stone up there! Remember that—"
"It isn't the marble of Paros, but it might do," Vic said crisply, buttering a radish.
Then it was the drainage system. Tony had a wonderful idea for the drainage that would make an artificial brook through the property. Vic never quite understood where all the water would come from in the first place, but he was not impressed by Tony's idea, which Melinda thought original because Tony had evidently told her it was original.
"The Romans were doing that two thousand years ago," Vic said. "They did it in Avignon."
"Where's Avignon, Daddy?" Trixie asked.
Vic suddenly realized that Trixie had missed her Sunday tutoring on account of Mr. Cameron. "Avignon is in southern France. It used to be the residence of the popes, oh—five hundred years ago, I guess. You'll have to go there some day. And they have a song: ''Sur le pont d'Avignon—l'on y danse, l'on y danse—sur le pont d'Avignon—l'on y danse tout en rond—''" He got her to sing it with him. They went on and on while they set the dessert on the table, on and on while Melinda frowned as if the singing were giving her a headache. Trixie never got tired of something like this, and they sang and sang through the dishwashing, and Vic taught her the second verse, and they sang that until Melinda burst out:
"Oh, for God's sake, Vic, 'stop' it!"
When Vic next saw Horace, on Saturday morning in the hardware store in Little Wesley, Horace brought up Mr. Cameron. They were walking out of the store together toward their cars in the king lot next to the supermarket. Horace said:
"Well, I understand Ferris is going to buy the land over near the Cowans' place." Ferris was the name of the wealthy New Yorker who was Cameron's client.
"Yes. How'd you know?"
"Phil told me. He said Melinda stopped by one day with the contractor. I understand she's been helping him out."
"It gives her something to do," Vic said quickly, and in an uninterested tone.
Horace nodded, and if he had been going to say anything else about Melinda and Cameron, he didn't say it. When they reached their cars, Horace said, "Mary and I are going to try our luck with a sparerib barbecue tomorrow night. The MacPhersons were coming over, but they can't make it. Why don't you and Melinda come by around five o'clock?"
Vic would have enjoyed it ordinarily, sitting around the Mellers' lawn, watching the sun go down, and sniffing the charcoal aroma of the roasting spareribs. Now the first thing that came to his mind was that Melinda might not be free. It was the first time he had let himself realize it, that she was spending nearly every afternoon, had spent half this morning and was still out somewhere with Tony Cameron. "Thanks, Horace. Can I let you know? As far as I know, we can."
"Fine," Horace said, smiling. "I hope you can. It's going to be winter soon. No more outdoor barbecues."
Vic went home, the back of his car full of groceries for the weekend—Melinda wasn't doing much marketing lately—and with a new bit for his auger. He had broken a bit the other day when he had been angry, or rather when he had been thinking maddening thoughts. His thoughts had been playing around Tony and Melinda: What were their friends going to say about this? When were they going to start talking? Had Cameron and Melinda had an affair yet? They had had enough time and opportunity to, and Cameron's unchanged manner toward him would he quite in character with Cameron. Cameron the pachyderm. At moments Vic could smile at the situation. Cameron was so uncomplex. There was something even appealingly naive and innocent about his big square face, and something very juvenile and open in the way he assumed it was perfectly all right if he went off with another man's wife and kept her for eight hours at a stretch. Vic knew, of course, that Melinda was encouraging him in this direction with her usual line, "Oh, yes, I love Vic, but—" Not that Melinda necessarily wanted Cameron as a lover—Vic found that impossible to believe—but she wanted a romantic atmosphere to surround them when they were together, wanted to keep the road clear.
Melinda was not in when he got home. Trixie was away at the movies. Roger greeted him at the door, his stubby tail wagging, and Vic let him out on the lawn, watched him absently as he sat down and made a puddle. Well, Vic thought, Mr. Cameron was here for only another two weeks. His work on the Ferris house would be finished the end of November. Cameron himself had said that.
Melinda came in at six-thirty, with Cameron. Cameron had acquired a glowing pink sunburn. When he smiled his face seemed to blaze with joy and self-satisfaction.
"Brought my own beer this time!" Cameron said, swinging up a carton of half-quart cans.
"Good! Fine!" Vic said in the tone he might have used to a child. Then to Melinda, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" She came into the kitchen with him.
"We're invited to the Mellers' tomorrow at five for a barbecue. Would you like to go?"
Her face, flushed and excited from her outing with Cameron, brightened still more. "Sure! Love to!"
"Okay, I'll tell Horace," Vic said, relieved. He smiled, too. "I suppose I can bring Tony if I want to, can't I?"
Vic turned back to her. He had been going to the telephone. "No, I don't think you can bring Tony."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't think he's the Mellers' cup of tea."
"Oh, la-dee-da!" Melinda tossed her head. "Since when do you say what's the Mellers' cup of tea?"
"I happen to know."
"I'll ask them myself," Melinda said, starting off for the phone.
Vic caught her arm and jerked her back. He closed the swinging kitchen door behind him. "Oh, no, you won't. The Mellers don't care for him and that's that. They've asked us."
"I'll take him along whether they like it or not!"
"I don't think you will, Melinda," he said quietly, though he heard his voice shake with anger.
"How're you going to stop me?"
Vic closed his lips, ashamed of his own anger, and baffled by Melinda's abrupt fury. "All right. Let's let it go," he said.
Melinda looked at him a moment, then apparently taking his words as a concession of victory for herself, the corner of her mouth went up, and she walked past Vic out of the kitchen.
"Tony, don't you need a beer opener?" she asked, and Vic remembered that she had picked one up while she had been talking to him, that she had been holding it in her hand.
Vic did not go to the Mellers' barbecue the next day. He had left it up to Melinda to accept the invitation and he did not know what she had told them, but at the last minute he told her he was not going. Cameron arrived, not on his bicycle but in his cafe au lait–colored Plymouth station wagon, in which he carried his bicycle around when he traveled, Vic supposed. Both Cameron and Melinda looked long-faced when he said he was not going.
"What's the matter?" asked Cameron. He was in a freshly pressed summer suit and white shoes, out to make a good impression on the Mellers.
"Nothing. I just have some things I'd like to do. You two go ahead."
"What're the Mellers going to think?" Melinda asked a little blankly.
"I don't know. You'll have to wait and see," Vic said, with a disarming chuckle.
Mr. Cameron's expression did not change. "Sure wish you'd change your mind."
Vic walked away from them on the lawn. "You two go on. Have a good time and give the Mellers my regards." Melinda's hands were fidgeting with her car keys, Vic saw. He went into his room.
A moment later the two cars left.
Vic reminded himself that Cameron probably wasn't having Anything to do with Melinda—physically speaking. He really believed that. But it didn't help. And as he sat there in his room after they had left, trying to compose himself so that he could read, he almost regretted that he had been so childish as to refuse to go to the Mellers'. He could still go, he thought. But that seemed more childish now. No, he would not go. But he knew it would mean another painful or awkward conversation with Horace.
Melinda did not come home until one in the morning. Vic was in his room, reading in bed, and he did not go into the house to see her. He didn't want to see her, anyway. She was probably drunk. The time of her coming home, ten past one, made Vic think that she had been sitting with Cameron in some bar in the latter part of the evening, because all the bars closed punctually at one.
Horace called on him at twenty to seven the next evening, when Vic was at the plant. Vic had predicted that he would get a visit from Horace today, and he had predicted the expression on Horace's face.
"What happened to you yeste
rday?" Horace asked. "We called you at home. You didn't answer."
Vic felt himself flush with shame as if he had been caught out in a serious lie. He had heard the telephone ring last evening and he had not answered it. "I took a little walk after Melinda left. I wasn't in the house."
"Well, we certainly missed you."
"Oh, I wanted to think over some things. You know. I thought Mr. Cameron could handle my share of the barbecue." "That he did!"
"Was it good?"
"Oh, it was fine. Mr. Cameron entertained us with his clarinet."
"Yes, I've heard him, too," Vic said.
"You don't care for him, I gather. Neither do I."
Vic felt another stab of shame, but he kept his face calm and pleasant. "What do you mean?"
"Shall I say it straight, Vic? I don't like Cameron and I don't like the way he acts around Melinda. And I don't like the way you're just taking a back seat again, waiting for things to blow over."
"Well, don't they usually?" Vic asked, smiling, but he felt trapped and uncomfortable.
"You weren't there last night. Melinda got pretty tight and said several things—such as that she thought Cameron was the answer to her prayer. Cameron acts as if he—"
There was a gentle rap on the door.
"Come in," Vic said.
Stephen Hines opened the door. "Oh, hello, Mr. Meller. How are you?"
"Fine, thank you, and you?"
"Fine, too. Carlyle took the truck," Stephen continued to Vic. "He's going to call at the post office tomorrow morning and see if that new roller's come."
"All right. There's no hurry on that," Vic said, mechanically reckoning that it would be three weeks before they used the new roller on Ryder's poems. Vic had deliberately allowed an ink roller to rust in order to get a texture effect when he printed directly onto the paper with it.
"Is there anything else?" Stephen asked.
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