Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

Author:Patricia Highsmith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-05-16T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Trixie entered the Highland School on September 7 and was put into the third grade because she could read so well. Vic was very proud of her. The school called him and Melinda in to discuss the matter of putting her into the third grade: she would need some extra help in arithmetic, geography, and probably also penmanship, and the school wanted to know if they could count on her parents to tutor her a bit at home. Vic said that he would be happy to tutor her and that he had plenty of time for it. Even Melinda gave an affirmative answer. So it was settled. As a surprise present and a reward, Vic gave Trixie the bookcase he had made, and filled its upper two shelves with new books for her, putting her old favorites in the two lower shelves. He was to tutor her two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, come hell or high water, he told her, and she seemed to be fairly impressed. The tutoring began at the end of her first week in school. Half an hour of arithmetic, half an hour of penmanship on the living room cocktail table, then a fifteen-minute break and an hour of geography, which was not quite such a mental strain on Trixie because Vic could make geography very funny.

Vic very much enjoyed tutoring Trixie. He had been looking forward to it for years, to helping her first with arithmetic and algebra and geometry, then perhaps trig and calculus. It had always seemed the essence of parenthood and domesticity, the older generation passing down the wisdom of the race to the offspring, as birds taught their young to fly. And yet the tutoring brought into focus certain uncomfortable facts, made him realize more acutely that he was leading two lives and that the friendships he now enjoyed with Horace and Phil, for instance, existed because they did not know the truth about him. He felt more guilt about that than he had felt for killing De Lisle.

He thought about such things as he watched Trixie's plump, uncomfortable hand trying to make a row of 'b''s, or 'q''s or 'g''s. "Aye bee see dee ee eff 'gee-ee', aitch eye jay kay ellemeno 'pee-ee'," Trixie chanted periodically to rest from the penmanship labors, because she had known the alphabet for years. Vic tried to answer the question he had not been able to answer for the past four or five years:

where were things going with Melinda and where did he want them to go? He wanted her to himself, but she was not attractive to him as a woman; that he realized, too. Neither was she repellent. He simply felt that he could get along without her, or any other woman, physically, for the rest of his life. And had he known that before he killed De Lisle? He couldn't answer that, he couldn't remember. De Lisle's murder was like a caesura in his experience, and it was strangely hard to remember, emotionally, before that time.

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