"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
