The Man in the Net Read Online Free PDF Page B

with your little friend. What a pity about poor dear Linda, Mr. Hamilton. And we’ve brought our Sicily slides, too. Aren’t people who travel dreadful, persecuting their friends? But Mr. Carey insisted …”
    The rest of them had drifted back from the French windows and were settling down in the wrought-iron chairs. The party—the typical Carey-set party—was under way.
    Stubbornly hiding his still unconquered anxiety about Linda, John sat holding his drink while the conversation shifted to the Lake Disaster. Every year Carey parties had their standard topics of conversation. This summer the primary topic was Mr. Carey’s automobile accident, the splendidness of his recent and total recovery from several months of hospitalization and the inferiority of all men, less positive-minded than he, who failed to face up squarely to misfortune. The secondary topic was the Lake Disaster. Certain aggressive selectmen, ignoring the Careys’ moral right to privacy, were anxious to sell the north shore to a promoter of summer hotels, and in three days’ time it was going to be put to the vote at a town meeting.
    Soon Mr. Carey was pontificating.
    “It’s sticking together that counts. All of us are going to that town meeting—yes, sir, all of us; even you, Hamilton. Every little counts. I’m not scared for a minute. One way or another, I can put pressure on half those selectmen. Young Standon, for example …”
    They had their second martinis and then their extra half. The extra half was a traditional birthday excess and a great deal of playful argument went on as to whether the halves had been equably divided by Brad. Then they went in to dinner where family jokes started to spark.
    Death was ritualistically drunk to the sponsors of the hotel scheme, and the private world got more and more private.
    Although John was, both by his own choice and theirs, only a courtesy member of this private world, he could understand why it meant so much to Linda. This was precisely the life she wanted for herself, shielded from any need to compete by wealth and a comfortable conviction of superiority. Almost certainly, in the excitement of his first show’s success last year, when she had urged him to quit Raines and Raines, it had been this sort of existence she had visualized, with herself at the center of it miraculously converted into a Celebrity’s Wife with him at her side as a kind of glorified Gordon Moreland.
    While Gordon told amusing stories about the primitiveness of the hotel in Agrigento, interspersing unintelligible phrases of Sicilian dialect, John thought of Linda lying on their bed in the dark bare bedroom. “If it’s double what you were getting before, it would be twenty-five thousand, wouldn’t it?” That was what would be tantalizing her. That more than anything. With all that money, she would be thinking, I could dress far better than Mary Raines; I could snub the Parkinsons; I could give the most elegant dinner parties …
    This vivid, unwanted glimpse into his wife’s reveries threw him off balance. There wasn’t, on the face of it, anything unreasonable about them. Gordon Moreland would sympathize with her. So would old Mr. Carey. For that matter, almost everyone would sympathize. He tried to imagine the faces around the table if he announced he’d just turned down a twenty-five-thousand-dollar job, plus bonuses, merely because he was determined to paint the pictures which, in the Carey set, were considered so “wrong” that they were never even mentioned.
    Suddenly the anxiety was back. Was he, after all, just a self-deluding egomaniac? Was he only kidding himself that a return to New York would be fatal to Linda? Dr. MacAllister had given his warning. But if she had a lot more money and the confidence which went with it, mightn’t it be the one thing that would put her on her feet again?
    The worm was back, nibbling at him.
    After dinner Mr. Carey