"Vic!"
"What, darling?"
"Don's coming!" she gasped. "Don't do anything to me, Vic!" He struck her on the side of the head. "So Don's coming and who else and who else? Cameron and Charley and all the rest?"
He struck her again.
She reached for the cloisonné vase on the top of the phonograph, and knocked it off. Then he struck her again, and she was on her hands and knees on the floor.
"Vic!—Help!"
Always that cry to other people! His hands closed around her throat and he shook her. The stupid terror in her open eyes made his hands tighten all the more. Then suddenly he released her."Get up," he said. After all, he did not want to kill her. She was coughing. "Melinda—"
Then he heard a car outside and the last barrier of his anger broke and he threw himself on her. He imagined he saw Wilson's lank figure and scowling face coming in the door, and he put all the pressure he could on her throat, furious because she had made him furious. He could have won, he thought, without her. He could have won without the telephone that had brought Jo-Jo and Larry and Ralph and De Lisle and Cameron to the house: Ralph the mama's boy, Cameron the pachyderm—
There was a shout at the front door, and then Wilson, self-righteous, unsmiling, meddling, was bending over Melinda, talking to her. Her lips had parted. There was a bluish look about her eyelids, or was it mascara? Or an illusion? Vic heard Wilson mutter to the empty air that she was dead, and then following the direction in which Wilson had looked, Vic saw a policeman standing.
"What're you smiling at?" the policeman demanded, unsmiling.
Vic was about to tell him—"At faith, hope, and charity"— when the policeman took him by the arm. Vic stood up, enduring the loathsome touch, which after a moment became comical, like Melinda's panic, with his usual amenableness. Wilson was babbling behind him, and Vic heard the words "quarry" and "De Lisle" and "Cameron's blood," and he kept on walking with the men who were not fit to black his boots. He saw Trixie romping up the lawn and stopping in surprise as she saw him with the policeman, but frowning at the lawn, Vic could see that she wasn't really there. The sun was shining and Trixie was alive, somewhere.
But Melinda is dead and so am I, he thought. Then he knew why he felt empty: because he had left his life in the house behind him, his guilt and his shame, his achievements and failures, the failure of his experiment, and his final, brutal gesture of petulant revenge.
He began to walk with a spring in his step (the walk to the policeman's car at the bottom of the driveway seemed endless), and he began to feel free and buoyant, and guiltless, too. He looked at Wilson, walking beside him, still intoning his tedious information, and, feeling very calm and happy, Vic kept looking at Wilson's wagging jaw and thinking of the multitude of people like him on the earth, perhaps half the people on earth were of his type, or potentially his type, and thinking that it was not bad at all to be leaving them. The ugly birds without wings. The mediocre who perpetuated mediocrity, who really fought and died for it. He smiled at Wilson's grim, resentful, the-world-owes-me-a-living face, which was the reflection of the small, dull mind behind it, and Vic cursed it and all it stood for. Silently, and with a smile, and with all that was left of him, he cursed it.
The End
