Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

Dear Guy:

This is your train friend, remember? You left your book in my room that night & I found a Texas address in it which I trust is still right. Am mailing book to you. Read some in it myself, didn’t know there was so much conversation in Plato.

A great pleasure dining with you that night & hope I may list you among my friends. It would be fine to see you in Santa Fe & if you possibly change your mind, address is: Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mex. for next two weeks at least.

I keep thinking about that idea we had for a couple of murders. It could be done, I am sure. I cannot express to you my supremest confidence in the idea! Though I know subject does not interest you.

What’s what with your wife as that was very interesting? Please write me soon. Outside of losing wallet in El Paso (stolen right off a bar in front of me) nothing has happened of note. Didn’t like El Paso, with apologies to you.

Hoping to hear from you soon,

Your friend,

Charles A. Bruno

P.S. Very sorry for sleeping late and missing you that A. M.

C. A. B.

The letter pleased him somehow. It was pleasant to think of Bruno’s freedom.

“Grits!” he said happily to his mother. “Never get grits with my fried eggs up North!”

He put on a favorite old robe that was too hot for the weather, and sat back in bed with the Metcalf Star and the teetery-legged bed tray that held his breakfast.

Afterward, he showered and dressed as if there were something he had to do that day, but there wasn’t. He had visited the Cartwrights yesterday. He might have seen Peter Wnggs, his boyhood friend, but Peter had a job in New Orleans now. What was Miriam doing, he wondered. Perhaps manicuring her nails on her back porch, or playing checkers with some little girl neighbor who adored her, who wanted to be just like her. Miriam was never one to brood when a plan went askew. Guy lighted a cigarette.

A soft, intermittent chink came from downstairs, where his mother or Ursline the cook was cleaning the silver and dropping it piece by piece onto a heap.

Why hadn’t he left for Mexico today? The next idle twentyfour hours were going to be miserable, he knew. Tonight, his uncle again, and probably some friends of his mother’s dropping over. They all wanted to see him. Since his last visit, the MetcalfStar had printed a column about him and his work, mentioning his scholarships, the Prix de Rome that he hadn’t been able to use because of the war, the store he had designed in Pittsburgh, and the little annex infirmary of the hospital in Chicago. It read so impressively in a newspaper. It had almost made him feel important, he remembered, the lonely day in New York when the clipping had arrived in his mother’s letter.

A sudden impulse to write Bruno made him sit down at his work table, but, with his pen in his hand, he realized he had nothing to say. He could see Bruno in his rust-brown suit, camera strap over his shoulder, plodding up some dry hill in Santa Fe, grinning with his bad teeth at something, lifting his camera unsteadily and clicking. Bruno with a thousand easy dollars in his pocket, sitting in a bar, waiting for his mother. What did he have to say to Bruno? He recapped his fountain pen and tossed it back on the table.

“Mama?” he called. He ran downstairs. “How about a movie this afternoon?”

His mother said she had already been to movies twice that week. “You know you don’t like movies,” she chided him.

“Mama, I really want to go!” he smiled, and insisted.

Eight

The telephone rang that night at about eleven. His mother answered it, then came in and called him from the living room where he sat with his uncle and his uncle’s wife and his two cousins, Ritchie and Ty.

“It’s long-distance,” his mother said.

Guy nodded. It would be Brillhart, of course, asking for further explanations. Guy had answered his letter that day. “Hello, Guy,” the voice said. “Charley.”

“Charley who?”

“Charley Bruno.”

“Oh!—How are you? Thanks for the book.”

“I dint send it yet but I will,” Bruno said with the drunken cheer Guy remembered from the train. “Coming out to Santa Fe?”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“What about Palm Beach? Can I visit you there in a couple weeks? I’d like to see how it looks.”

“Sorry, that’s all off.”

“Off? Why?”

“Complications. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Account of your wife?”

“N-no.” Guy felt vaguely irritated.

“She wants you to stay with her?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“Miriam wants to come out to Palm Beach?”

Guy was surprised he remembered her name.

“You haven’t got your divorce, huh?”

“Getting it,” Guy said tersely.

“Yes, I’m paying for this call!” Bruno shouted to someone. “Cheeses!” disgustedly. “Listen, Guy, you gave up that job account of her?”

“Not exactly. It doesn’t matter. It’s finished.”

“You have to wait till the child’s born for a divorce?”

Guy said nothing.

“The other guy’s not going to marry her, huh?”

“Oh, yes, he is—”

“Yeah?” Bruno interrupted cynically.

“I can’t talk any longer. We’ve got guests here tonight. I wish you a pleasant trip, Charley.”

“When can we talk? Tomorrow?”

“I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Bruno sounded lost now, and Guy hoped he was. Then the voice again, with sullen intimacy, “Listen, Guy, if you want anything done, you know, all you have to do is give a sign.”

Guy frowned. A question took form in his mind, and immediately he knew the answer. He remembered Bruno’s idea for a murder.

“What do you want, Guy?”

“Nothing. I’m very content. Understand?” But it was drunken bravado on Bruno’s part, he thought. Why should he react seriously?

“Guy, I mean it,” the voice slurred, drunker than before.

“Good-by, Charley,” Guy said. He waited for Bruno to hang up.

“Doesn’t sound like everything’s fine,” Bruno challenged.

“I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”

“Guy!” in a tearful whine.

Guy started to speak, but the line clicked and went dead. He had an impulse to ask the operator to trace the call. Then he thought, drunken bravado. And boredom. It annoyed him that Bruno had his address. Guy ran his hand hard across his hair, and went back into the living room.

Nine

All of what he had just told her of Miriam, Guy thought, did not matter so much as the fact he and Anne were together on the gravel path. He took her hand as they walked, and gazed around him at the scene in which every object was foreign—a broad level avenue bordered with giant trees like the Champs-Elysees, military statues on pedestals, and beyond, buildings he did not know. The Paseo de la Reforma. Anne walked beside him with her head still lowered, nearly matching his slow paces. Their shoulders brushed, and he glanced at her to see if she were about to speak, to say he was right in what he had decided, but her lips were still thoughtful. Her pale yellow hair, held by a silver bar at the back of her neck, made lazy movements in the wind behind her.

It was the second summer he had seen her when the sun had only begun to tan her face, so her skin about equaled in pigment the color of her hair. Soon her face would be darker than her hair, but Guy liked her best the way she was now, like something made of white gold.

She turned to him with the faintest smile of self-consciousness on her lips because he had been staring at her. “You couldn’t have borne it, Guy?”

“No. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t.” He saw that her smile stayed, tinged with perplexity, perhaps annoyance.

“It’s such a big thing to give up.”