Highsmith, Patricia (26 page)

On the morning of the second day, Therese came back from a tour of inspection of the hotel grounds and found Carol stooped by the bed table.

Carol only glanced at her, and went to the dressing table and looked under that, and then to the long built-in closet behind the wall panel.

“That’s that,” Carol said. “Now let’s forget it.”

Therese knew what she was looking for. “I hadn’t thought of it,” she said. “I feel like we’ve lost him.”

“Except that he’s probably gotten to Denver by now,” Carol said calmly.

She smiled, but she twisted her mouth a little. “And he’ll probably drop in down here.”

It was so, of course. There was even the remotest chance that the detective had seen them when they drove back through Salt Lake City, and followed them. If he didn’t find them in Salt Lake City, he might inquire at the hotels. She knew that was why Carol had left the Denver address, in fact, because they hadn’t intended to go to Denver. Therese flung herself in the armchair, and looked at Carol. Carol took the trouble to search for a dictaphone, but her attitude was arrogant. She had even invited trouble by coming here. And the explanation, the resolution of those contradictory facts was nowhere but in Carol herself, unresolved, in her slow, restless step as she walked to the door now and turned, in the nonchalant lift of her head, and in the nervous line of her eyebrows that registered irritation in one second and in the next were serene.

Therese looked at the big room, up at the high ceiling, at the large square, plain bed, the room that for all its modernness had a curiously old-fashioned, ample air about it that she associated with the American West, like the oversized Western saddles she had seen in the riding stable downstairs. A kind of cleanness, as well. Yet Carol looked for a dictaphone. Therese watched her, walking back toward her, still in her pajamas and robe. She had an impulse to go to Carol, crush her in her arms, pull her down on the bed, and the fact that she didn’t now made her tense and alert filled her with a repressed but reckless exhilaration.

Carol blew her smoke up into the air. “I don’t give a damn. I hope the papers find out about it and rub Harge’s nose in his own mess. I hope he wastes fifty thousand dollars. Do you want to take that trip that bankrupts the English language this afternoon? Did you ask Mrs. French yet?”

They had met Mrs. French last night in the game room of the hotel. She hadn’t a car, and Carol had asked her if she would like to take a drive with them today.

“I asked her,” Therese said. “She said she’d be ready right after lunch.”

“Wear your suede shirt.” Carol took Therese’s face in her hands, pressed her cheeks, and kissed her. “Put it on now.”

It was a six-or seven-hour trip to the Cripple Creek gold mine, over Ute Pass and down a mountain. Mrs. French went with them, talking the whole time. She was a woman of about seventy, with a Maryland accent and a hearing aid, ready to get out of the car and climb anywhere, though she had to be helped every foot of the way. Therese felt very anxious about her, though she actually disliked even touching her. She felt if Mrs. French fell, she would break in a million pieces. Carol and Mrs. French talked about the State of Washington, which Mrs. French knew well, since she had lived there for the past few years with one of her sons. Carol asked a few questions, and Mrs. French told her all about her ten years of traveling since her husband’s death, and about her two sons, the one in Washington and the one in Hawaii who worked for a pineapple company.

And obviously Mrs. French adored Carol, and they were going to see a lot more of Mrs. French. It was nearly eleven when they got back to the hotel. Carol asked Mrs. French to have supper in the bar with them, but Mrs. French said she was too tired for anything but her shredded wheat and hot milk, which she would have in her room.

“I’m glad,” Therese said when she had gone. “I’d rather be alone with you.”

“Really, Miss Belivet? Whatever do you mean?” Carol asked as she opened the door into the bar. “You’d better sit down and tell me all about that.”

But they were not alone in the bar more than five minutes.

Two men, one named Dave and the other whose name Therese at least did not know and did not care to, came over and asked to join them. They were the two who had come over last night in the game room and asked Carol and her to play gin rummy. Carol had declined last night. Now she said, “Of course, sit down.” Carol and Dave began a conversation that sounded very interesting, but Therese was seated so that she couldn’t participate very well. And the man next to Therese wanted to talk about something else, a horseback trip he had just made around Steamboat Springs. After supper, Therese waited for a sign from Carol to leave, but Carol was still deep in conversation. Therese had read about that special pleasure people got from the fact that someone they loved was attractive in the eyes of other people, too. She simply didn’t have it. Carol looked at her every now and then and gave her a wink. So Therese sat there for an hour and a half, and managed to be polite, because she knew Carol wanted her to be.

The people who joined them in the bar and sometimes in the dining room did not annoy her so much as Mrs. French, who went with them somewhere almost every day in the car. Then an angry resentment that Therese was actually ashamed of would rise in her because someone was preventing her from being alone with Carol.

“Darling, did you ever think you’ll be seventy-one, too, some day?”

“No,” Therese said.

But there were other days when they drove out into the mountains alone, taking any road they saw. Once they came upon a little town they liked and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past or future, and the night became another of those islands in time, suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.

Or perhaps it was nothing but happiness, Therese thought, a complete happiness that must be rare enough, so rare that very few people ever knew it. But if it was merely happiness, then it had gone beyond the ordinary bounds and become something else, become a kind of excessive pressure, so that the weight of a coffee cup in her hand, the speed of a cat crossing the garden below, the silent crash of two clouds seemed almost more than she could bear. And just as she had not understood a month ago the phenomenon of sudden happiness, she did not understand her state now, which seemed an aftermath. It was more often painful than pleasant, and consequently she was afraid she had some grave and unique flaw. She was as afraid sometimes as if she were walking about with a broken spine. If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else’s, and that therefore not even Carol could understand them.

In the mornings, they generally drove out somewhere in the mountains and left the car so they could climb up a hill. They drove aimlessly over the zigzagging roads that were like white chalk lines connecting mountain point to mountain point. From a distance, one could see clouds lying about the projecting peaks, so it seemed they flew along in space, a little closer to heaven than to earth. Therese’s favorite spot was on the highway above Cripple Creek, where the road clung suddenly to the rim of a gigantic depression. Hundreds of feet below, lay the tiny disorder of the abandoned mining town. There the eye and the brain played tricks with each other, for it was impossible to keep a steady concept of the proportion below, impossible to compare it on any human scale. Her own hand held up in front of her could look Lilliputian or curiously huge.

And the town occupied only a fraction of the great scoop in the earth, like a single experience, a single commonplace event, set in a certain immeasurable territory of the mind. The eye, swimming in space, returned to rest on the spot that looked like a box of matches run over by a car, the man-made confusion of the little town.

Always Therese looked for the man with the creases on either side of his mouth, but Carol never did. Carol had not even mentioned him since their second day at Colorado Springs, and now ten days had passed. Because the restaurant of the hotel was famous, new people came every evening to the big dining room, and Therese always glanced about, not actually expecting to see him, but as a kind of precaution that had become a habit. But Carol paid no attention to anyone except Walter, their waiter, who always came up to ask what kind of cocktail they wanted that evening. Many people looked at Carol, however, because she was generally the most attractive woman in the room. And Therese was so delighted to be with her, so proud of her, she looked at no one else but Carol. Then as she read the menu, Carol would slowly press Therese’s foot under the table to make her smile.

“What do you think about Iceland in the summer?” Carol might ask, because they made a point of talking about travel, if there was a silence when they first sat down.

“Must you pick such cold places? When’ll I ever work?”

“Don’t be dismal. Shall we invite Mrs. French? Think she’d mind our holding hands?”

One morning, there were three letters—from Rindy, Abby, and Dannie. It was Carol’s second letter from Abby, who had had no further news before, and Therese noticed Carol opened Rindy’s letter first. Dannie wrote that he was still waiting to hear the outcome of two interviews about jobs and reported that Phil said Harkevy was going to do the sets for the English play called The Faint Heart in March.

“Listen to this,” Carol said. “‘Have you seen any armadillos in Colorado?

Can you send me one, because the chameleon got lost. Daddy and I looked everywhere in the house for him. But if you send me the armadillo it will be big enough not to get lost.’ New paragraph. ‘I got 90 in spelling but only 70 in arithmetic. I hate it. I hate the teacher. Well I must be closing. Love to you and to Abby. Rindy. XX. p. s. Thank you very much for the leather shirt. Daddy bought me a two-wheel bike regular size that he said I was too small for Christmas. I am not too small. It is a beautiful bike.’ Period. What’s the use? Harge can always top me.” Carol put the letter down and picked up Abby’s.

“Why did Rindy say ‘Love to you and to Abby’?” Therese asked. “Does she think you’re with Abby?”

“No.” Carol’s wooden letter opener had stopped halfway through Abby’s envelope. “I suppose she thinks I write to her,” she said, and finished slitting the envelope.

“I mean, Harge wouldn’t have told her that, would he?”

“No, darling,” Carol said preoccupiedly, reading Abby’s letter.

Therese got up and crossed the room, and stood by the window looking out at the mountains. She should write to Harkevy this afternoon, she thought, and ask him if there was a chance of an assistant’s job with his group in March. She began composing the letter in her head. The mountains looked back at her like majestic red lions, staring down their noses.

Twice she heard Carol laugh, but she did not read any of the letter aloud to her.

“No news?” Therese asked when she was finished.

“No news.”

Carol taught her to drive on the roads around the foot of the mountains, where a car almost never passed. Therese learned faster than she had ever learned anything before, and after a couple of days, Carol let her drive in Colorado Springs. In Denver, she took a test and got a license. Carol said she could do half the driving back to New York, if she wanted to.

He was sitting one evening at the dinner hour at a table by himself to the left of Carol and behind her. Therese choked on nothing, and put her fork down. Her heart began to beat as if it would hammer its way out of her chest. How had she gotten halfway through the meal without seeing him? She lifted her eyes to Carol’s face and saw Carol watching her, reading her with the gray eyes that were not quite so calm as a moment ago. Carol had stopped in the middle of saying something.

“Have a cigarette,” Carol said, offering her one, lighting it for her.

“He doesn’t know that you can recognize him, does he?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t let him find out.” Carol smiled at her, lighted her own cigarette, and looked away in the opposite direction from the detective.

“Just take it easy,” Carol added in the same tone.

It was easy to say, easy to have thought she could look at him when she saw him next, but what was the use of trying when it was like being struck in the face with a cannon ball?

“No baked Alaska tonight?” Carol said, looking at the menu. “That breaks my heart. You know what we’re going to have?” She called to the waiter.

“Walter!”

Walter came smiling, ardent to serve them, just as he did every evening.

“Yes, madame.”

“Two Remy Martins, please, Walter,” Carol told him.

The brandy helped very little, if at all. The detective did not once look at them. He was reading a book that he had propped up on the metal napkin holder, and even now Therese felt a doubt as strong as in the cafe outside Salt Lake City, an uncertainty that was somehow more horrible than the positive knowledge would be that he was the detective.

“Do we have to go past him, Carol?” Therese asked. There was a door in back of her, into the bar.

“Yes. That’s the way we go out.” Carol’s eyebrows lifted with her smile, exactly as on any other night. “He can’t do anything to us. Do you expect him to pull a gun?”

Therese followed her, passed within twelve inches of the man whose head was lowered toward his book. Ahead of her she saw Carol’s figure bend gracefully as she greeted Mrs. French, who was sitting alone at a table.

“Why didn’t you come and join us?” Carol said, and Therese remembered that the two women Mrs. French usually sat with had left today.

Carol even stood there a few moments talking with Mrs. French, and Therese marveled at her but she couldn’t stand there herself, and went on, to wait for Carol by the elevators.

Upstairs, Carol found the little instrument fastened up in a corner under the bed table. Carol got the scissors and using both hands cut through the wire that disappeared under the carpet.

“Did the hotel people let him in here, do you think?” Therese asked, horrified.