When Beatrice was about two years old, Melinda began an affair with Larry Osbourne, a young and not very bright instructor at a riding academy not far from Little Wesley. She had been in a kind of sulking, puzzled state of mind for months before, though whenever Vic had tried to get her to talk about what was bothering her she had never had anything to say. After she began the liaison with Larry, she became gayer and happier and more pleasant to Vic, especially when she saw how calmly he took it. Vic pretended to take it more calmly than he did, though he asked Melinda if she wanted to divorce him. Melinda hadn't wanted to divorce him.
Vic invested $50 and two hours' time in talking the situation over with a psychiatrist in New York. The psychiatrist's opinion was that since Melinda scorned the counsel of a psychiatrist for herself she was going to bring unhappiness to Vic and eventually a divorce, unless he was firm with her. It was against Vic's principles, as an adult, to be firm with another adult. Granted Melinda wasn't an adult, he still intended to go on treating her as one. The only new idea the psychiatrist put into his head was that Melinda, like many women who have a child, might be "finished" with him as a man and as a husband, now that he had given her the child. It was rather funny to think of Melinda's being so primitively maternal as this, and Vic smiled whenever he remembered that statement of the psychiatrist's. Vic's explanation was that plain contrariness had motivated her in rejecting him: she knew he still loved her, so she chose to give him no satisfaction by showing that she loved him in return. Perhaps love was the wrong word. They were devoted to each other, dependent on each other, and if one was gone from the house, he or she was missed by the other, Vic thought. There wasn't a word for the way he felt about Melinda, for that combination of loathing and devotion. The rest of what the psychiatrist had told Vic about the "intolerable situation" and of his heading for a divorce—all that only inspired Vic to prove him wrong. He would show the psychiatrist and the world that the situation was not intolerable and that there would be no divorce. Neither was he going to be miserable. The world was too full of interesting things.
During Melinda's five-month affair with Larry Osbourne, Vic moved from the bedroom into a room he had had especially built for himself, about two months after the affair began, on the other side of the garage. He moved as a kind of protest against the stupidity of her affair (that was about all he had ever criticized Larry for, his stupidity), but after a few weeks when he had his microscope and his books in the room with him and he discovered how easy it was to get up in the night without worrying about disturbing Melinda and look at the stars or watch his snails that were more active at night than in the daytime, Vic decided that he preferred the room to the bedroom. When Melinda gave up Larry—or, as Vic suspected, Larry gave her up—Vic did not move back into the bedroom, because Melinda showed no sign of wanting him back and because by then he didn't want to move back anyway. He was content with the arrangement, and Melinda seemed to be, too. She was not so cheerful as she had been when Larry was around, but within a few months she found another lover—Jo-Jo Harris, a rather hyperthyroidal young man who started a short-lived record shop in Wesley. Jo-Jo lasted from October to January. Melinda bought several hundred dollars' worth of records from him, but not enough to keep him in business.
Vic knew that some people thought Melinda stayed with him because of his money, and perhaps that did influence Melinda to some extent, but Vic considered it of no importance. Vic had always had an indifferent attitude toward money. He hadn't earned his income, his grandfather had. The fact that Vic's father and he had money was due only to an accident of birth, so why shouldn't Melinda, as his wife, have an equal right to it? Vic had an income of $40,000 a year, and had had it since his twenty-first birthday. Vic had heard it implied in Little Wesley that people tolerated Melinda only because they liked him so much, but Vic refused to believe this. Objectively, he could see that Melinda was likable enough, provided one didn't demand conversation. She was generous, a good sport, and she was fun at parties. Everybody disapproved of her affairs, of course, but Little Wesley—the old residential parent town of the newer and more commercial town of Wesley, four miles away—was singularly free of prudery, as if everybody bent over backward to avoid the stigma of New England puritanism, and not a soul, as yet, had ever snubbed Melinda on a moral count.
Chapter 3
Ralph Gosden came for dinner on Saturday night, a week after the Mellers' party, his old gay, confident self, even gayer than usual because, having been away at his
