Having reduced Ben Gardner's widow to tears, needled Matt Hooper and got into an argument over the phone with Larry Vaughn, Chief Brody is ready to call it a day. Before leaving his desk he does a mental tally of the effects the beach closures have been having on the community. One of the incidents - in which "two kids had rented a skiff [...and...] spent an hour ladling blood, chicken guts and duck heads overboard" - seems the most likely imspiration for the scene in the movie where an armada of ill-equipped local fisherman go chumming and turn the sea red. Another local resident - Jessie Parker - is also suspected of dumping shark bait in the ocean, but it turns out that she was simply trying to get rid of her empty vermouth bottles discretely. Brody advises her to smash the bottles with a hammer before disposing of them ("Nobody would ever know they had been bottles."). It's a tactic - along with the bottle on the string - that would be familiar to a lush - a title which was often ascribed to Benchley himself, and one which eventually became the UK title of his rehab novel Rummies. A fondness for alcohol ran in the family. The author's grandfather, humorist Robert Benchley, is often attributed with coining the witticism 'Let me get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini'.
By the time Brody gets home his kids are planted in front of the TV and his wife is in bed, slowly succumbing to a dose of Seconal, one of the drugs of choice in Jacqueline Susan's The Valley of the Dolls. Benchley devotes an entire paragraph to Brody's preparation of a sandwich from an unappealing pot roast of "brownish-gray and stringy" meat "surrounded by a scum of congealed gravy." Ellen's reaction ("Yech.") as her husband swallows the "dry and flaky" meat, which he has brought up to the bedroom, can be seen as another example of the vomiting/eating motif established in earlier chapters.
The Brodys' conversation has none of the playfulness of the bedroom-set scene early in the movie. Brody's mood is still antagonistic and he seems to be looking for a fight with his wife. When he attempts to make things up by "nuzzling her neck", his advances are checked by the Seconal. Ellen gamely suggests that he goes ahead anyway, but, unlike Guy in Rosemary's Baby, Brody snaps that he's "not very big on screwing corpses".
The bedroom scene - which reeks of what Martin Amis called "the towelly smell of marriage" - is strategically placed at the end of the novel's first part. The reader's sympathies have shifted towards Ellen, and it is with her that much of the book's second part will be preoccupied.
