Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“You want it big.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Let’s have it big.” She relaxed in his arms. They both sighed, like one person, and she laughed a little as he wrapped her closer.

It was the first time she had agreed to the size of the house. The house was to be Y-shaped, and the question had been whether to dispense with the front arm of it. But the idea sang in Guy’s head only with both arms. It would cost much, much more than twenty thousand, but Palm Beach would bring a flock of private commissions, Guy expected, that would be fast, well-paid jobs. Anne had said her father would like nothing better than to make them a wedding present of the front wing, but to Guy that seemed as unthinkable as removing it. He could see the house shining white and sharp against the brown bureau across the room. It projected from a certain white rock he had seen near a town called Alton in lower Connecticut. The house was long, low, and flat-roofed, as if alchemy had created it from the rock itself, like a crystal.

“I might call it ‘The Crystal,’” Guy said.

Anne stared up reflectively at the ceiling. “I’m not so fond of naming houses—houses’ names. Maybe I don’t like ‘Crystal.’”

Guy felt subtly hurt. “It’s a lot better than ‘Alton.’ Of all the insipid names! That’s New England for you. Take Texas now—”

“All right, you take Texas and I’ll take New England.” Anne smiled, stopping Guy in his tracks, because in reality she liked Texas and Guy liked New England.

Guy looked at the telephone, with a funny premonition it was going to ring. He felt rather giddy in his head, as if he had taken some mildly euphoric drug. It was the altitude, Anne said, that made people feel that way in Mexico City. “I feel as if I could call up Miriam tonight and talk to her and everything would be all right,” Guy said slowly, “as if I could say just the right thing.”

“There’s the telephone,” Anne said, perfectly serious.

Seconds passed, and he heard Anne sigh.

“What time is it?” she asked, sitting up. “I told Mother I’d be back by twelve.”

“Eleven-seven.”

“Aren’t you sort of hungry?”

They ordered something from the restaurant downstairs. Their ham and eggs were an unrecognizable dish of vermilion color, but quite good, they decided.

“I’m glad you got to Mexico,” Anne said. “It’s been like something I knew so well and you didn’t, something I wanted you to know. Only Mexico City isn’t like the rest.” She went on, eating slowly, “It has a nostalgia like Paris or Vienna and you want to come back no matter what’s happened to you here.”

Guy frowned. He had been to Paris and Vienna with Robert Treacher, a Canadian engineer, one summer when neither of them had any money. It hadn’t been the Paris and Vienna Anne had known. He looked down at the buttered sweet roll she had given him. At times he wanted passionately to know the flavor of every experience Anne had ever known, what had happened to her in every hour of her childhood. “What do you mean, no matter what’s happened to me here?”

“I mean whether you’ve been sick. Or robbed.” She looked up at him and smiled. But the lamp’s light that made a glow through her smoke-blue eyes, a crescent glow on their darker rims, lent a mysterious sadness to her face. “I suppose it’s contrasts that make it attractive. Like people with incredible contrasts.”

Guy stared at her, his finger crooked in the handle of his coffee cup. Somehow her mood, or perhaps what she said, made him feel inferior. “I’m sorry I don’t have any incredible contrasts.”

“Oh-ho-ho!“Then she burst out in a laugh, her familiar gay laugh that delighted him even when she laughed at him, even when she had no intention of explaining herself.

He sprang up. “How about some cake. I’m going to produce a cake like a jinni. A wonderful cake!” He got the cookie tin out of the corner of his suitcase. He had not thought of the cake until that moment, the cake his mother had baked him with the blackberry jam he had praised at his breakfasts.

Anne telephoned the bar downstairs and ordered a very special liqueur that she knew of. The liqueur was a rich purple like the purple cake, in stemmed glasses hardly bigger around than a finger. The waiter had just gone, they were just lifting the glasses, when the telephone rang, in nervous, iterant rings.

“Probably Mother,” Anne said.

Guy answered it. He heard a voice talking distantly to an operator. Then the voice came louder, anxious and shrill, his mother’s voice: “Hello?”

“Hello, Mama.”

“Guy, something’s happened.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s Miriam.”

“What about her?” Guy pressed the receiver hard against his ear. He turned to Anne, and saw her face change as she looked at him.

“She’s been killed, Guy. Last night—” She broke off.

“What, Mama?”

“It happened last night.” She spoke in the shrill, measured tones that Guy had heard only once or twice before in his life. “Guy, she was murdered.”

“Murdered!”

“Guy, what?” Anns asked, getting up.

“Last night at the lake. They don’t know anything.”

“You’re—”

“Can you come home, Guy?”

“Yes, Mama.—How?” he asked stupidly, wringing the telephone as if he could wring information from its two old-fashioned parts. “How?”

“Strangled.” The one word, then silence.

“Did you—?” he began. “Is—?”

“Guy, what is it?” Anne held to his arm.

“I’ll be home as fast as I can, Mama. Tonight. Don’t worry. I’ll see you very soon.” He hung up slowly and turned to Anne. “It’s Miriam. Miriam’s been killed.”

Anne whispered, “Murdered—did you say?”

Guy nodded, but it suddenly struck him there might be a mistake. If it were just a report— “When?”

But it was last night. “Last night, she said.”

“Do they know who?”

“No. I’ve got to go tonight.”

“My God.”

He looked at Anne, standing motionless in front of him. “I’ve got to go tonight,” he said again, dazedly. Then he turned and went to the telephone to call for a plane reservation, but it was Anne who got the reservation for him, talking rapidly in Spanish.

He began to pack. It seemed to take hours getting his few possessions into his suitcase. He stared at the brown bureau, wondering if he had already looked through it to see if everything were out of its drawers. Now, where he had seen the vision of the white house, a laughing face appeared, first the crescent mouth, then the face—Bruno’s face. The tongue curved lewdly over the upper lip, and then the silent, convulsed laughter came again, shaking the stringy hair over the forehead. Guy frowned at Anne.

“What’s the matter, Guy?”

“Nothing,” he said. How did he look now?

Fourteen

Supposing Bruno had done it? He couldn’t have, of course, but just supposing he had? Had they caught him? Had Bruno told them the murder was a plan of theirs? Guy could easily imagine Bruno hysterical, saying anything. There was no predicting what a neurotic child like Bruno would say. Guy searched his hazy memory of their conversation on the train and tried to recall if in jest or anger or drunkenness he had said anything that might have been taken as a consent to Bruno’s insane idea. He hadn’t. Against this negative answer, he weighed Bruno’s letter that he remembered word for word: that idea we had for a couple of murders. It could be done, I am sure. I cannot express to you my supremest confidence— From the plane window, Guy looked down into total blackness. Why wasn’t he more anxious than he was? Up the dim cylinder of the plane’s body, a match glowed at someone’s cigarette. The scent of Mexican tobacco was faint, bitter, and sickening. He looked at his watch: 4:25.