Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

about the "depths of iniquity." He wished she weren't quite so crude. She hadn't always been so crude. That was the fault of the company she kept, of course. Why had she said anything at all if she hadn't done anything with De Lisle or didn't intend to? When a woman as attractive as Melinda handed it to them on a platter, why should a man like De Lisle resist? The morals to resist didn't come very often any more. That was for people like Henri III of France, after his wife the Princesse de Conde died. There was devotion, Henri sitting in his library the rest of his life, with his memories of the Princesse, creating designs of skulls and crossbones for Nicolas Eve to put on book covers and title pages for him. Henri would probably be called psychotic by modern psychiatrists.
           Charley De Lisle came twice to the house for dinner during the following week, and one evening the three of them went to an outdoor concert at Tanglewood, though Charley had had to leave before it was over in order to be at the Hotel Lincoln by eleven. One of the evenings he dined with them was a Monday, when he didn't work and could stay later than eleven, and Vic obligingly said good night around ten o'clock, went to his own room, and did not come back. Charley and Melinda had been sitting at the piano, but the piano stopped, Vic noticed, as soon as he left. Vic finally went to bed and to sleep, though the sound of Charley's car leaving awakened him, and he looked at his wristwatch and saw that it was a quarter to four.
           The next morning Vic knocked on Melinda's door at about nine o'clock, carrying a cup of coffee for her. He had had a call from Stephen a few minutes before, saying that his wife was not feeling well and that he didn't want to leave her alone. Stephen had asked if Melinda could possibly come and spell him, because two other women he might have called on were out of town with their husbands on vacation. Melinda didn't answer his knock, and Vic pushed the door open gently. The room was empty. The beige cover on the bed looked unusually taut and smooth. Vic carried the coffee back to the kitchen and poured it down the sink.
           Then he went on to the plant. He called Stephen and told him that Melinda had had an early appointment to go shopping with a friend in Wesley, but that she ought to be back by noon, and that he would call him again. Vic called home at eleven and at twelve. She was in at twelve, and he asked her, in a perfectly ordinary voice, how she was, and then told her about Georgianne. Georgianne was pregnant, six or seven months pregnant, Vic thought. Stephen had had a doctor for her, and they didn't think it was going to be a miscarriage, but Georgianne needed somebody with her.
           "Sure, I'll be glad to go," Melinda said. "Tell Stephen I can be there in about half an hour."
           She sounded very willing to go, both to expiate her sins of last night, Vic supposed, and also because she really did like doing things for people, doing errands of mercy. It was one of the nice things about Melinda, perhaps one of the curious things, that she loved taking care of people who were sick, anybody who was sick, loved helping a stranger in distress—someone with a flat tire, an uncashable check, or a nose bleed. It was the only direction in which she showed her maternal instinct, toward the stranger in distress.
           Melinda's staying out all night was not going to be mentioned, Vic thought, but Charley De Lisle would be just a little different the next time Vic saw him, because De Lisle hadn't the aplomb to be quite the same. He'd be a little more servile and furtive. It was the fact that De Lisle would dare to face him at all that angered Vic.
           The evening at Tanglewood had come two days later, and Vic was very calm and amiable that night, even paid for the refreshments in the intermission, though the Van Allen family had provided the tickets, too. Mr. De Lisle