After he left, Melinda accused Vic again of having said something to offend him.
"What could I possibly have said?" Vic demanded innocently. "Has it occurred to you that you might have said something to offend him? Or done something, or not done something?"
"I know I didn't," Melinda said, sulking. Then she made herself another drink instead of asking Vic to make it, as she usually did.
She wouldn't mind the loss of Joel Nash very much, Vic thought, because he was so new and because he wouldn't have been around very long at best, being a traveling salesman. Ralph Gosden would be another matter. Vic had been wondering if Ralph would scare as easily as Joel had, and had decided that it was worth a try. Ralph Gosden was a twenty-nine-year-old painter of fair ability in the portrait field and with a small income from a doting aunt. He had rented a house near Millettville, about twenty miles away, for one year, of which only six months were gone. For four months Ralph had been coming for dinner about twice a week—Ralph said their house was so nice, and their food was so good, and their phonograph was so good, and all in all nobody was quite so hospitable in Little Wesley or anywhere else as the Van Allens were—and Melinda had been going up to visit Ralph several afternoons a week, though she never quite admitted going there any afternoon. Finally, after two months of it, Melinda had presented her portrait painted by Ralph, apparently by way of accounting for the many afternoons and evenings when she had not been home at one o'clock, or at seven either, when Vic had come home. The portrait, a prettified, dashed-off horror, hung in Melinda's bedroom. Vic had forbidden it in the living room.
Ralph's hypocrisy was nauseating to Vic. He was forever trying to discuss things that he thought Vic would be interested in, though Ralph himself was interested in nothing beyond what the average woman was interested in, and behind this façade of friendship Ralph tried to hide the fact that he was having an affair with Melinda. It was not that he objected to Melinda's having affairs with other men per se, Vic told himself whenever he looked at Ralph Gosden, it was that she picked such idiotic, spineless characters and that she let it leak out all over town by inviting her lovers to parties at their friends' houses and by being seen with them at the bar of the Lord Chesterfield, which was really the only bar in town. One of Vic's firmest principles was that everybody—therefore, a wife should be allowed to do as she pleased, provided no one else was hurt and that she fulfilled her main responsibilities, which were to manage a household and to take care of her offspring, which Melinda did—from time to time. Thousands of married men had affairs with impunity, though Vic had to admit that most men did it more quietly. When Horace had tried to advise Vic about Melinda when he had asked him why he "put up with such behavior," Vic had countered by asking him if he expected him to act like an old-fashioned husband (or wife), spurning his spouse as unclean, demanding a divorce, wrecking a child's existence for nothing more than the petty gratification of his ego? Vic also implied to Horace or to whoever else dropped a hint about Melinda, that he considered her behavior a temporary aberration and the less fuss made about it the better.
The fact that Melinda had been carrying on like this for more than three years gave Vic the reputation in Little Wesley of having a saint like patience and forbearance, which in turn flattered Vic's ego. Vic knew that Horace and Phil Cowan and everybody else who knew the situation—which was nearly everybody—considered him odd for enduring it, but Vic didn't mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.
Melinda had been odd, too, or he never would have married her. Courting her and persuading her to marry him had been like breaking a wild horse, except that the process had had to be infinitely more subtle. She had been headstrong and spoiled, the kind who gets expelled from school time after time for plain insubordination. Melinda had been expelled from five schools, and when Vic met her at twenty-two, she had thought life was nothing but the pursuit of a good time—which she still thought, though at twenty-two she had had a certain iconoclasm and imagination in her rebellion that had attracted Vic because it was like his own. Now it seemed to him that she had lost every bit of that imagination and that her iconoclasm consisted in throwing costly vases against walls and breaking them. The only vase left in the house was a metal one, and its cloisonné had several dents. She hadn't wanted to have a child, then she had, then she hadn't, and finally after four years she had wanted one again and had produced one. The birth had not been so difficult as the average first child's, Vic had learned from the doctor, but Melinda had complained loudly before and after the ordeal, in spite of Vic's providing the best nursing for her and of his giving all his time to her for weeks, to the exclusion of his work. Vic had been overjoyed at having a child that was his and Melinda's, but Melinda had refused to give the child any but the minimum of attention or to show that she cared for it any more than she would have cared for a stray puppy that she was feeding in the house. Vic supposed that the conventionality of having a baby plus being a wife was more
