Vic put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the arm chair. "Joel Nash must have believed something. He certainly disappeared, didn't he? I don't think it was very bright of him, but then I never thought he was bright."
"No. Nobody's bright but you."
Vic smiled at her good-naturedly. "What did Joel say to you?" he asked, and he saw from her shifting of her position, the way she flung herself down on the sofa, that Joel Nash had said nothing to her. "What did Ralph say?"
"That he thought you were decidedly unfriendly and he thought—"
"Decidedly unfriendly. How unusual. I was decidedly bored, Melinda, decidedly tired of wining and dining bores several times a week and sitting up all night with them, decidedly tired of listening to drivel, and decidedly tired of their thinking that I didn't know or care what they were up to with you. It was decidedly dull."
Melinda stared at him in surprise for a long moment, frowning, her mouth turned stubbornly down at the corners. Then suddenly she put her face down in her hands and let the tears come. Vic came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "Honey, is it worth crying about? Are Joel Nash and Ralph worth crying about?"
She flung her head up. "I'm not crying over them. I'm crying over the injustice."
"'Sic'," Vic murmured involuntarily.
"Who's sick?"
He sighed, really trying to think of something to say to comfort her. No use saying, "'I'm' still here, I love you." She wouldn't want him now, perhaps never would. And he didn't want to be a dog in the manger. He wouldn't object to her having a man of some stature and self-respect, a man with some ideas in his head, as a lover, Vic thought. But he was afraid Melinda would never choose that kind or that that kind would never choose her. Vic could visualize a kind of charitable, fair-minded, civilized arrangement in which all three of them might be happy and benefit from contact with one another. Dostoyevsky had known what he meant. Goethe might have understood, too.
"You know, just the other day in the paper," Vic began conversationally, "I read a piece about a ménage à trois in Milan. Of course I don't know what kind of people they were, but the husband and the lover, who were very good friends, were killed together in a motorcycle accident, and the wife had them buried together with a niche in the same tomb for herself when she dies. Over the tomb she put the inscription: 'They lived happily together.' So you see, it can be. I just wish you'd choose a manor even several men, if you like—who have some brains in their heads. Don't you think that's possible?"
"Yes," she said tearfully, and he knew she wasn't even thinking about what he had said.
That was Sunday. Four days later, Melinda was still sulking, but he thought she would come out of it in a few days if he handled her properly. She was too energetic and too fond of having a good time to sulk for very long. He bought tickets for two musical comedies in New York, though he would rather have seen two other plays that were on. There would be time for the other plays later, he thought. There was all kinds of time now that Melinda wasn't busy or exhausted in the evenings. On the day he had gone to New York to buy the tickets, he had also paid a visit to the newspaper division of the Public Library and had reread the McRae story, because he had forgotten many of the details. He learned that the elevator operator in McRae's apartment house was the only person who had seen the murderer, and he had described him very vaguely as being rather heavy set and not very tall. That fitted him, too, and Vic remarked this to Horace.
Horace smiled a little. He was a chemist in a medical analytical laboratory, a cautious man, accustomed to speaking in understatements. He thought Vic's story was fantastic and even a little dangerous, but he was for anything that would "straighten Melinda out." "I've always said all Melinda needed to straighten herself out was a little firmness from you, Vic," Horace said. "She's been asking for it for years—just a little sign that you care what she does. Now don't lose the ground you've gained. I'd like to see you two happy again."
Horace had seen them happy for three or four years, but it seemed so long ago, Vic was surprised that Horace even remembered. The ground that he had gained. Well, Melinda was staying home, and willy-nilly she had more time for Trixie and for him. But she was not yet happy about it. Vic took her for cocktails several times at the bar of the Lord Chesterfield Inn, thinking that since even Sam the barman knew about the McRae story, Melinda would not have liked to go there alone: she had so often sat in the Lord Chesterfield bar with Ralph or Larry or Jo-Jo. Vic had tried to interest Melinda in two designs he had brought with him one afternoon, both Blair Peabody's, for the cover of Xenophon's 'Country Life and Economics'. Blair Peabody, a leather worker whose shop was in a barn in Connecticut, had done the tooling on all the leather-bound books that Vic had published. These two designs of Blair's were based on Greek architectural motifs, one somewhat more decorative and less masculine than the other, both beautiful in Vic's opinion, and he had thought Melinda would enjoy choosing between the two, but he had hardly been able to make her look at them for five seconds. For politeness' sake, which was really to insult him by its carelessness, she had expressed a preference for one over the other. Vic had
