Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault

dark hair, and his face that was pale in the reflection against the night and yet was brown from the summer sun—both figures moving across the panes to the blaring jangle of the music.
    At the moment she turned to watch them, Russell slipped himself between David and the woman, holding his arms up high in exaggerated homage to her and dancing away with her in his small-footed way that was always just a beat off. David sat for a while watching them, then went upstairs while everyone was dancing. After he left, although the records continued to fall into place and the music blared on and the vocalists sang on or whispered on, there was no more dancing.
    Russell mixed a drink for them all that he called a golden viper. “This’ll stone you on the first swallow,” he warned them. The bank manager’s wife sipped with a little girl’s curiosity, her eyes big over the rim of her glass. Russell, Vivian saw, made the most of this small sway over them; from the secret of the viper he went on to revealanother secret—where and for what a low price he had purchased the cut glass from which they drank, holding up his glass to the light and turning it in his fingers, conscious, she knew, that she was watching him critically. While he sat on the edge of the table, the center of the group, host and entertainer, she remembered the times she had driven him home after parties, listening while he incoherently probed his depths and deplored his friends’ shallowness. The loan officials who peopled his days, he condemned when alone with her. They respected him for what they called his genius, and their appraisers overvalued the hotels and apartment houses so that the loans they made to him were larger than warranted; he ate lunch with them in the best restaurants and drank with them in the best bars, and was, she knew, always his charming, boyish, shrewd, and witty self; and at night he ridiculed them for a tie, for suede shoes, and for their very shrewdness that saw him as the one to put their money on.
    While they were talking about the war in Korea, with the bank manager predicting that the Chinese were going to overrun the world, Vivian left them and went up the stairs. The heat of the day was pocketed in the upstairs hallway; all the bedroom doors, and David’s door at the end of the hallway, were closed. He was lying under the sheet, the blankets thrown off onto the floor, reading under the metal lamp fixed to the bed. His head was tilted against the headboard, the pillow stuffed under his neck.
    â€œYou were the life of the party and now they’re just talking,” she told him, collapsing into the canvas chair and resting her feet on the bed. The room had a meager look; it was more a sanctum than his room at home. “Silly rug looks like it’s eaten all around the edge by mouse teeth,” she said, lowering one leg to kick up the edge of the rug. “Read a little to me,” she said, closing her eyes.
    â€œIt’s just about birds,” he said.
    â€œGo on, read to me if it’s about birds,” she urged. “I’m interested in birds.”
    â€œWhat part?” he asked, embarrassed, she saw, about reading aloud, knowing that her interest was feigned. He flipped through the pages to lose deliberately the page that he had been reading, leading her away from himself by leading her away from the part that had absorbed him. “The hummingbird can’t glide,” he said. “You want that important bit of information?”
    â€œAh, poor things, can’t glide,” she said. “Go on. But what do they need to glide for?”
    â€œYou act like a teacher,” he said. “They ask you questions and spoil everything.”
    â€œMe a teacher?” she cried in mock distress. “I came in here to learn a few things and you accuse me of acting like a teacher. Baby, I’m ignorant,” she pleaded. “I don’t know anything about