Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

Guy shook his head.

“Great town to relax in.” He smiled, showing poor teeth. “Mostly Indian architecture there, I guess.”

A conductor stopped in the aisle, thumbing through tickets. “That your seat?” he asked Bruno.

Bruno leaned possessively into his corner. “Drawing room next car.”

“Number Three?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

The conductor went on.

“Those guys!” Bruno murmured. He leaned forward and gazed out the window amusedly.

Guy went back to his book, but the other’s obtrusive boredom, a feeling he was about to say something in another instant, kept him from concentrating. Guy contemplated going to the diner, but for some reason sat on. The train was slowing again. When Bruno looked as if he were going to speak, Guy got up, retreated into the next car, and leapt the steps to the crunchy ground before the train had quite stopped.

The more organic air, weighted with nightfall, struck him like a smothering pillow. There was a smell of dusty, sun-warm gravel, of oil and hot metal. He was hungry and lingered near the diner, pacing in slow strides with his hands in his pockets, breathing the air deeply, though he disliked it. A constellation of red and green and white lights hummed southward in the sky. Yesterday, Anne might have come this route, he thought, on her way to Mexico. He might have been with her. She had wanted him to come with her as far as Metcalf. He might have asked her to stay over a day and meet his mother, if it had not been for Miriam. Or even regardless of Miriam, if he had been another sort of person, if he could be simply unconcerned. He had told Anne about Miriam, about almost all of it, but he could not bear the thought of their meeting. He had wanted to travel alone on the train in order to think. And what had he thought so far? What good had thinking or logic ever been where Miriam was concerned?

The conductor’s voice shouted a warning, but Guy paced till the last moment, then swung himself aboard the car behind the diner.

The waiter had just taken his order when the blond young man appeared in the doorway of the car, swaying, looking a little truculent with a short cigarette in his mouth. Guy had put him quite out of mind and now his tall rust-brown figure was like a vaguely unpleasant memory. Guy saw him smile as he sighted him.

“Thought you might have missed the train,” Bruno said cheerfully, pulling out a chair.

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Bruno, I’d like some privacy for a while. I have some things to think over.”

Bruno stabbed out the cigarette that was burning his fingers and looked at him blankly. He was drunker than before. His face seemed smeared and fuzzy at the edges. “We could have privacy in my place. We could have dinner there. How about it?”

“Thanks, I’d rather stay here.”

“Oh, but I insist. Waiter!” Bruno clapped his hands. “Would you have this gentleman’s order sent to Drawing Room Three and bring me a steak medium rare with French fries and apple pie? And two Scotch and sodas fast as you can, huh?” He looked at Guy and smiled, the soft wistful smile. “Okay?”

Guy debated, then got up and came with him. What did it matter after all? And wasn’t he utterly sick of himself?

There was no need of the Scotches except to provide glasses and ice. The four yellow-labeled bottles of Scotch lined up on an alligator suitcase were the one neat unit of the little room. Suitcases and wardrobe trunks blocked passage everywhere except for a small labyrinthine area in the center of the floor, and on top of them were strewn sports clothes and equipment, tennis rackets, a bag of golf clubs, a couple of cameras, a wicker basket of fruit and wine bedded in fuchsia paper. A splay of current magazines, comic books and novels covered the seat by the window. There was also a box of candy with a red ribbon across the lid.

“Looks kind of athletic, I guess,” Bruno said, suddenly apologetic.

“It’s fine. ” Guy smiled slowly. The room amused him and gave him a welcome sense of seclusion. With the smile his dark brows relaxed, transforming his whole expression. His eyes looked outward now. He stepped lithely in the alleys between suitcases, examining things like a curious cat.

“Brand-new. Never felt a ball,” Bruno informed him, holding out a tennis racket for him to feel. “My mother makes me take all this stuff, hoping it’ll keep me out of bars. Good to hock if I run out, anyway. I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don’t you think?” The highballs arrived, and Bruno strengthened them from one of his bottles. “Sit down. Take off your coat.”

But neither of them sat down or removed his coat. There was an awkward several minutes when they had nothing to say to each other. Guy took a swallow of the highball that seemed to be all Scotch, and looked down at the littered floor. Bruno had odd feet, Guy noticed, or maybe it was the shoes. Small, light tan shoes with a long plain toecap shaped like Bruno’s lantern chin. Somehow old-fashioned-looking feet. And Bruno was not so slender as he had thought. His long legs were heavy and his body rounded.

“I hope you weren’t annoyed,” Bruno said cautiously, “when I came in the diner.”

“Oh, no.”

“I felt lonely. You know.”

Guy said something about its being lonely traveling in a drawing room alone, then nearly tripped on something: the strap of a Rolleiflex camera. There was a new white scratch deep down the side of its leather case. He was conscious of Bruno’s shy stare. He was going to be bored, of course. Why had he come? A pang of conscience made him want to return to the diner. Then the waiter arrived with a pewter-covered tray, and snapped up a table. The smell of charcoal-broiled meat cheered him. Bruno insisted so desperately on paying the check that Guy gave it up. Bruno had a big mushroom-covered steak. Guy had hamburger.

“What’re you building in Metcalf?”

“Nothing,” Guy said. “My mother lives there.”

“Oh,” Bruno said interestedly. “Visiting her? Is that where you’re from?”

“Yes. Born there.”

“You don’t look much like a Texan.” Bruno shot ketchup all over his steak and French fries, then delicately picked up the parsley and held it poised. “How long since you been home?”

“About two years.”

“Your father there, too?”

“My fathers dead.”

“Oh. Get along with your mother okay?”

Guy said he did. The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art. “Where do you live in Long Island?”

“Great Neck.”

Anne lived much farther out on Long Island.

“In a house I call the Doghouse,” Bruno went on. “There’s dogwood all around it and everybody in it’s in some kind of doghouse, down to the chauffeur.” He laughed suddenly with real pleasure, and bent again over his food.

Looking at him now, Guy saw only the top of his narrow thinhaired head and the protruding pimple. He had not been conscious of the pimple since he had seen him asleep, but now that he noticed it again, it seemed a monstrous, shocking thing and he saw it alone. “Why?” Guy asked.

“Account of my father. Bastard. I get on okay with my mother, too. My mother’s coming out to Santa Fe in a couple days.”

“That’s nice.”

“It is,” Bruno said as if contradicting him. “We have a lot of fun together—sitting around, playing golf. We even go to parties together.” He laughed, half ashamed, half proud, and suddenly uncertain and young. “You think that’s funny?”

“No,” said Guy.

“I just wish I had my own dough. See, my income was supposed to start this year, only my father won’t let me have it. He’s deflecting it into his own exchequer. You might not think so, but I haven’t got any more money now than I had when I was in school with everything paid for. I have to ask for a hundred dollars now and then from my mother.” He smiled, pluckily.