Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

Anne telephoned him the next morning to say that a telegram had come for him. “I just happened to hear them paging you,” she said. “They were about to give it up.”

“Would you read it to me, Anne?”

Anne read:‘“Miriam suffered miscarriage yesterday. Upset and asking to see you. Can you come home? Mama.’—Oh, Guy!”

He felt sick of it, all of it. “She did it herself,” he murmured.

“You don’t know, Guy.”

“I know.”

“Don’t you think you’d better see her?”

His fingers tightened on the telephone. “I’ll get the Palmyra back anyway,” he said. “When was the telegram sent?”

“The ninth. Tuesday, at 4 P.M.”

He sent a telegram off to Mr. Brillhart, asking if he might be reconsidered for the job. Of course he would be, he thought, but how asinine it made him. Because of Miriam. He wrote to Miriam:

This changes both our plans, of course. Regardless of yours, I mean to get the divorce now. I shall be in Texas in a few days. I hope you will be well by then, but if not, I can manage whatever is necessary alone.

Again my wishes for your quick recovery.

Guy

Shall be at this address until Sunday.

He sent it airmail special delivery.

Then he called up Anne. He wanted to take her to the best restaurant in the city that night. He wanted the most exotic cocktails in the Ritz Bar to start with, all of them.

“You really feel happy?” Anne asked, laughing, as if she couldn’t quite believe him.

“Happy and—strange. Muy extranjero!’

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t think it was fated. I didn’t think it was part of my destiny. The Palmyra, I mean.”

“I did.”

“Oh, you did!”

“Why do you think I was so mad at you yesterday?”

He really did not expect an answer from Miriam, but Friday morning when he and Anne were in Xochimilco, he felt prompted to call his hotel to see if a message had come. There was a telegram waiting. And after saying he would pick it up in a few minutes, he couldn’t wait, once he was back in Mexico City, and telephoned the hotel again from a drugstore in the Socalo. The Montecarlo clerk read it to him: ‘“Have to talk with you first. Please come soon. Love, Miriam.’”

“She’ll make a bit of a fuss,” Guy said after he repeated it to Anne.“I’m sure the other man doesn’t want to marry her. He’s got a wife now.”

“Oh.”

He glanced at her as they walked, wanting to say something to her about her patience with him, with Miriam, with all of it. “Let’s forget it,” he smiled, and began to walk faster.

“Do you want to go back now?”

“Certainly not! Maybe Monday or Tuesday. I want these few days with you. I’m not due in Florida for another week. That’s if they keep to the first schedule.”

“Miriam won’t follow you now, will she?”

“This time next week,” Guy said, “she won’t have a single claim on me.”

Ten

At her dressing table in Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, Elsie Bruno sat removing the night’s dry skin cream from her face with a cleansing tissue. Now and then, with wide, absent blue eyes, she leaned closer to the mirror to examine the little mesh of wrinkles below her lids and the laugh lines that curved from the base of her nose. Though her chin was somewhat recessive, the lower part of her face projected, thrusting her full lips forward in a manner quite different from Bruno’s face. Santa Fe, she thought, was the only place she could see the laugh lines in the mirror when she sat all the way back at her dressing table.

“This light around here—might as well be an X-ray,” she remarked to her son.

Bruno, slumped in his pajamas in a rawhide chair, cast a puffy eye over at the window. He was too tired to go and pull the shade down. “You look good, Mom,” he croaked. He lowered his pursed lips to the glass of water that rested on his hairless chest, and frowned thoughtfully.

Like an enormous walnut in feeble, jittery squirrel hands, an idea, bigger and closer than any idea he had ever known, had been revolving in his mind for several days. When his mother left town, he intended to crack open the idea and start thinking in earnest. His idea was to go and get Miriam. The time was ripe, and the time was now. Guy needed it now. In a few days, a week even, it might be too late for the Palm Beach thing, and he wouldn’t.

Her face had grown fatter in these few days in Santa Fe, Elsie thought. She could tell by the plumpness of her cheeks compared to the small taut triangle of her nose. She hid the laugh lines with a smile at herself, tilted her curly blond head, and blinked her eyes.

“Charley, should I pick up that silver belt this morning?” she asked, as casually as if she spoke to herself. The belt was two hundred and fifty something, but Sam would send another thousand on to California. It was such a good-looking belt, like nothing in New York. What else was Santa Fe good for but silver?

“What else is he good for?” Bruno murmured.

Elsie picked up her shower cap and turned to him with her quick broad smile that had no variations. “Darling,” coaxingly.

“Ummm?”

“You won’t do anything you shouldn’t while I’m gone?”

“No, Ma.”

She left the shower cap perched on the crown of her head, looked at a long narrow red nail, then reached for a sandpaper stick. Of course, Fred Wiley would be only too happy to buy the silver belt for her—he’d probably turn up at the station with something atrocious and twice as expensive anyway—but she didn’t want Fred on her neck in California. With the least encouragement, he would come to California with her. Better that he only swore eternal love at the station, wept a little, and went straight home to his wife.

“I must say last night was funny though,” Elsie went on. “Fred saw it first.” She laughed, and the sandpaper stick flew in a blur. Bruno said coolly, “I had nothing to do with it.”

“All right, darling, you had nothing to do with it!” Bruno’s mouth twisted. His mother had awakened him at 4 in the morning, in hysterics, to tell him there was a dead bull in the Plaza. A bull sitting on a bench with a hat and coat on, reading a newspaper. Typical of Wilson’s collegiate pranks. Wilson would be talking about it today, Bruno knew, elaborating on it till he thought of something dumber to do. Last night in La Placita, the hotel bar, he had planned a murder—while Wilson dressed a dead bull. Even in Wilson’s tall stories about his war service, he had never claimed to have killed anybody, not even a Jap. Bruno closed his eyes, thinking contentedly of last night. Around ten o’clock, Fred Wiley and a lot of other baldheads had trooped into La Placita half crocked, like a musical comedy stagline, to take his mother to a party. He’d been invited, too, but he had told his mother he had a date with Wilson, because he needed time to think. And last night he had decided yes. He had been thinking really since Saturday when he talked to Guy, and here it was Saturday again, and it was tomorrow or never, when his mother left for California. He was sick of the question, could he do it. How long had the question been with him? Longer than he could remember. He felt like he could do it. Something kept telling him that the time, the circumstances, the cause would never be better. A pure murder, without personal motives! He didn’t consider the possibility of Guy’s murdering his father a motive, because he didn’t count on it. Maybe Guy could be persuaded, maybe not. The point was, now was the time to act, because the setup was so perfect. He’d called Guy’s house again last night to make sure he still wasn’t back from Mexico. Guy had been in Mexico since Sunday, his mother said.

A sensation like a thumb pressing at the base of his throat made him tear at his collar, but his pajama jacket was open all the way down the front. Bruno began to button it dreamily.