Highsmith, Patricia (3 page)

“And you loved her like hell, huh?”

Why? Did he show it? Bruno’s eyes were fixed on him, missing nothing, unblinking, as if their exhaustion had passed the point where sleep is imperative. Guy had a feeling those gray eyes had been searching him for hours and hours. “Why do you say that?”

“You’re a nice guy. You take everything serious. You take women the hard way, too, don’t you?”

“What’s the hard way?” he retorted. But he felt a rush of affection for Bruno because Bruno had said what he thought about him. Most people, Guy knew, didn’t say what they thought about him.

Bruno made little scallops in the air with his hands, and sighed.

“What’s the hard way?” Guy repeated.

“All out, with a lot of high hopes. Then you get kicked in the teeth, right?”

“Not entirely.” A throb of self-pity piqued him, however, and he got up, taking his drink with him. There was no place to move in the room. The swaying of the train made it difficult even to stand upright.

And Bruno kept staring at him, one old-fashioned foot dangling at the end of the crossed leg, flicking his finger again and again on the cigarette he held over his plate. The unfinished pink and black steak was slowly being covered by the rain of ashes. Bruno looked less friendly, Guy suspected, since he had told him he was married. And more curious.

“What happened with your wife? She start sleeping around?”

That irritated him, too, Bruno’s accuracy. “No. That’s all past anyway.”

“But you’re still married to her. Couldn’t you get a divorce before now?”

Guy felt instantaneous shame. “I haven’t been much concerned about a divorce.”

“What’s happened now?”

“She just decided she wanted one. I think she’s going to have a child.”

“Oh. Fine time to decide, huh? She’s been sleeping around for three years and finally landed somebody?”

Just what had happened, of course, and probably it had taken the baby to do it. How did Bruno know? Guy felt that Bruno was superimposing upon Miriam the knowledge and hatred of someone else he knew. Guy turned to the window. The window gave him nothing but his own image. He could feel his heartbeats shaking his body, deeper than the train’s vibrations. Perhaps, he thought, his heart was beating because he had never told anyone so much about Miriam. He had never told Anne as much as Bruno knew already. Except that Miriam had once been different—sweet, loyal, lonely, terribly in need of him and of freedom from her family. He would see Miriam tomorrow, be able to touch her by putting out his hand. He could not bear the thought of touching her oversoft flesh that once he had loved. Failure overwhelmed him suddenly.

“What happened with your marriage?” Bruno’s voice asked gently, right behind him. “I’m really very interested, as a friend. How old was she?”

“Eighteen.”

“She start sleeping around right away?”

Guy turned reflexively, as if to shoulder Miriam’s guilt. “That’s not the only thing women do, you know.”

“But she did, didn’t she?”

Guy looked away, annoyed and fascinated at the same time. “Yes.” How ugly the little word sounded, hissing in his ears!

“I know that Southern redhead type,” Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.

Guy was conscious again of an acute and absolutely useless shame. Useless, because nothing Miriam had done or said would embarrass or surprise Bruno. Bruno seemed incapable of surprise, only of a whetting of interest.

Bruno looked down at his plate with coy amusement. His eyes widened, bright as they could be with the bloodshot and the blue circles. “Marriage,” he sighed.

The word “marriage” lingered in Guy’s ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam’s round terra cotta-colored mouth saying, “Why should I put myself out for you?” and it was Anne’s eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve’s long dark head, insolently smiling. Memories began to crowd in, and he wanted to put his hands up and push them back. The room in Chicago where it had all happened… He could smell the room, Miriam’s perfume, and the heat from painted radiators. He stood passively, for the first time in years not thrusting Miriam’s face back to a pink blur. What would it do to him if he let it all flood him again, now? Arm him against her or undermine him?

“I mean it,” Bruno’s voice said distantly. “What happened? You don’t mind telling me, do you? I’m interested.”

Steve happened. Guy picked up his drink. He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of the room, the image gray and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn’t it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always? For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place. Steve wasn’t the first betrayal. It was only his twenty-six-year-old pride that had exploded in his face that afternoon. He had told the story to himself a thousand times, a classic story, dramatic for all his stupidity. His stupidity only lent it humor.

“I expected too much of her,” Guy said casually, “without any right to. She happened to like attention She’ll probably flirt all her life, no matter whom she’s with ”

“I know, the eternal high school type.” Bruno waved his hand. “Can’t even pretend to belong to one guy, ever.”

Guy looked at him. Miriam had, of course, once. Abruptly he abandoned his idea of telling Bruno, ashamed that he had nearly begun. Bruno seemed unconcerned now, in fact, whether he told it or not. Slumped, Bruno was drawing with a match in the gravy of his plate. The downturned half of his mouth, in profile, was sunken between nose and chin like the mouth of an old man. The mouth seemed to say, whatever the story, it was really beneath his contempt to listen. “Women like that draw men,” Bruno mumbled, “like garbage draws flies.”

Two

The shock of Bruno’s words detached him from himself. “You must have had some unpleasant experiences yourself,” he remarked. But Bruno troubled by women was hard to imagine.

“Oh, my father had one like that. Redhead, too. Named Carlotta.” He looked up, and the hatred for his father penetrated his fuzziness like a barb. “Fine, isn’t it? It’s men like my father keep ‘em in business.”

Carlotta. Guy felt he understood now why Bruno loathed Miriam. It seemed the key to Bruno’s whole personality, to the hatred of his father and to his retarded adolescence.

“There’s two kinds of guys!” Bruno announced in a roaring voice, and stopped.

Guy caught a glimpse of himself in a narrow panel mirror on the wall. His eyes looked frightened, he thought, his mouth grim, and deliberately he relaxed. A golf club nudged him in the back. He ran his fingertips over its cool varnished surface. The inlaid metal in the dark wood recalled the binnacle on Anne’s sailboat.

“And essentially one kind of women! “Bruno went on. “Two-timers. At one end it’s two-timing and the other end it’s a whore! Take your choice!”

“What about women like your mother?”

“I never seen another woman like my mother,” Bruno declared.” I never seen a woman take so much. She’s good-looking, too, lots of men friends, but she doesn’t fool around with them.”

Silence.

Guy tapped another cigarette on his watch and saw it was 10:30. He must go in a moment.

“How’d you find out about your wife?” Bruno peered up at him.

Guy took his time with his cigarette.

“How many’d she have?”

“Quite a few. Before I found out.” And just as he assured himself it made no difference at all now to admit it, a sensation as of a tiny whirlpool inside him began to confuse him. Tiny, but realer than the memories somehow, because he had uttered it. Pride? Hatred? Or merely impatience with himself, because all that he kept feeling now was so useless? He turned the conversation from himself. “Tell me what else you want to do before you die.”

“Die? Who said anything about dying? I got a few crackproof rackets doped out. Could start one some day in Chicago or New York, or I might just sell my ideas. And I got a lot of ideas for perfect murders.” Bruno looked up again with that fixity that seemed to invite challenge.

“I hope your asking me here isn’t part of one of your plans.” Guy sat down.

“Jesus Christ, I like you, Guy! I really do!”

The wistful face pled with Guy to say he liked him, too. The loneliness in those tiny, tortured eyes! Guy looked down embarrassedly at his hands. “Do all your ideas run to crime?”

“Certainly not! Just things I want to do, like—I want to give a guy a thousand dollars some day. A beggar. When I get my own dough, that’s one of the first things I’m gonna do. But didn’t you ever feel you wanted to steal something? Or kill somebody? You must have. Everybody feels those things. Don’t you think some people get quite a kick out of killing people in wars?”

“No,” Guy said.

Bruno hesitated. “Oh, they’d never admit it, of course, they’re afraid! But you’ve had people in your life you’d have liked out of the way, haven’t you?”

“No.” Steve, he remembered suddenly. Once he had even thought of murdering him.

Bruno cocked his head. “Sure you have. I see it. Why don’t you admit it?”

“I may have had fleeting ideas, but I’d never have done anything about them. I’m not that kind of person.”

“That’s exactly where you’re wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far—and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know!”

“I don’t happen to agree,” Guy said tersely.

“I tell you I came near murdering my father a thousand times! Who’d you ever feel like murdering? The guys with your wife?”

“One of them,” Guy murmured.

“How near did you come?”

“Not near at all. I merely thought of it.” He remembered the sleepless nights, hundreds of them, and the despair of peace unless he avenged himself. Could something have pushed him over the line then? He heard Bruno’s voice mumbling, “You were a hell of a lot nearer than you think, that’s all I can say.” Guy gazed at him puzzledly. His figure had the sickly, nocturnal look of a croupier’s, hunched on shirtsleeved forearms over the table, thin head hanging. “You read too many detective stories,” Guy said, and having heard himself, did not know where the words had come from.

“They’re good. They show all kinds of people can murder.”

“I’ve always thought that’s exactly why they’re bad.”

“Wrong again!” Bruno said indignantly. “Do you know what percentage of murders get put in the papers?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“One twelfth. One twelfth! Just imagine! Who do you think the other eleven twelfths are? A lot of little people that don’t matter. All the people the cops know they’ll never catch.” He started to pour more Scotch, found the bottle empty, and dragged himself up. A gold penknife flashed out of his trousers pocket on a gold chain fine as a string. It pleased Guy aesthetically, as a beautiful piece of jewelry might have. And he found himself thinking, as he watched Bruno slash round the top of a Scotch bottle, that Bruno might murder one day with the little penknife, that he would probably go quite free, simply because he wouldn’t much care whether he were caught or not.

Bruno turned, grinning, with the new bottle of Scotch. “Come to Santa Fe with me, huh? Relax for a couple days.”

“Thanks, I can’t.”

“I got plenty of dough. Be my guest, huh?” He spilled Scotch on the table.

“Thanks,” Guy said. From his clothes, he supposed, Bruno thought he hadn’t much money. They were his favorite trousers, these gray flannels. He was going to wear them in Metcalf and in Palm Beach, too, if it wasn’t too hot. Leaning back, he put his hands in his pockets and felt a hole at the bottom of the right one.

“Why not?” Bruno handed him his drink. “I like you a lot, Guy.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a good guy. Decent, I mean. I meet a lot of guys—no pun—but not many like you. I admire you,” he blurted, and sank his lip into his glass.

“I like you, too,” said Guy.

“Come with me, huh? I got nothing to do for two or three days till my mother comes. We could have a swell time.”

“Pick up somebody else.”

“Cheeses, Guy, what d’you think I do, go around picking up traveling companions? I like you, so I ask you to come with me. One day even. I’ll cut right over from Metcalf and not even go to El Paso. I’m supposed to see the Canyon.”

“Thanks, I’ve got a job as soon as I finish in Metcalf.”

“Oh.“The wistful, admiring smile again. “Building something?”

“Yes, a country club.” It still sounded strange and unlike himself, the last thing he would have thought he’d be building, two months ago. “The new Palmyra in Palm Beach.”

“Yeah?”

Bruno had heard of the Palmyra Club, of course. It was the biggest in Palm Beach. He had even heard they were going to build a new one. He had been to the old one a couple of times.

“You designed it?” He looked down at Guy like a hero-worshiping little boy. “Can you draw me a picture of it?”

Guy drew a quick sketch of the buildings in the back of Bruno’s address book and signed his name, as Bruno wanted. He explained the wall that would drop to make the lower floor one great ballroom extending onto the terrace, the louver windows he hoped to get permission for that would eliminate airconditioning. He grew happy as he talked, and tears of excitement came in his eyes, though he kept his voice low. How could he talk so intimately to Bruno, he wondered, reveal the very best of himself? Who was less likely to understand than Bruno?