The barb was wasted. He went without her, and came back
glowing. The stupid bastard was getting a tan.
She had not even enjoyed their evenings of bridge in the
downstairs recreation room, and that was most unlike her. She was
something of a barracuda at bridge, and if it had been ladylike to
play for stakes in mixed company, she could have brought a cash
dowry to her marriage (not that she would have, of course). Bill
was a good bridge partner, too; he had both qualifications: He
understood the basic rules and he allowed Lottie to dominate him.
She thought it was poetic justice that her new husband spent most
of their bridge evenings as the dummy.
Their partners at the Overlook were the Compsons occasionally,
the Vereckers more frequently. Dr. Verecker was in his early 70s, a
surgeon who had retired after a near-fatal heart attack. His wife
smiled a lot, spoke softly, and had eyes like shiny nickels. They
played only adequate bridge, but they kept beating Lottie and Bill.
On the occasions when the men played against the women, the
men ended up trouncing Lottie and Malvina Verecker. When
Lottie and Dr. Verecker played Bill and Malvina, she and the
doctor usually won, but there was no pleasure in it because Bill
was a dullard and Malvina, could not see the game of bridge as
anything but a social tool.
Two nights before, after the doctor and his wife had made a bid of
four clubs that, they had absolutely no right to make, Lottie had
mussed the cards in a sudden flash of pique that was very unlike
her. She usually kept her feelings under much better control.
'You could have led into my spades on that third trick!' she rattled
at Bill. 'That would have put a stop to it right there!'
'But dear,' said Bill, flustered , 'I thought you were thin in
spades.'
'If I had been thin in spades, I shouldn't have bid two of them,
should I? Why I continue to play this game with you I don't.
know!'
The Vereckers blinked at them in mild surprise. Later that evening
Mrs. Verecker, she of the nickel-bright eyes, would tell her
husband that she had thought them such a nice couple, so loving,
but when she rumpled the cards like that she had looked just like a
shrew.
Bill was staring at her with jaws agape.
'I'm very sorry,' said Lottie, gathering up the reins of her control
and giving them an inward shake. 'I'm off my feed a little, I
suppose. I haven't been sleeping well.'
'That's a pity,' said the doctor. 'Usually this mountain air-we're
almost 12,000 feet above sea level, you know is very conducive to
good rest. Less oxygen, you know. The body doesn't-'
'I've had bad dreams,' Lottie told him shortly.
And so she had. Not just bad dreams but nightmares. She had
never been much of one to dream (which said something
disgusting and Freudian about, her psyche, no doubt), even as a
