Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

He and Anne were going to spend the day driving, walking in the woods, and tomorrow drive up to Alton. The house would be finished by the end of March, which would give them a leisurely two months before the wedding to furnish it. Guy smiled as he gazed out the train window. Anne had never said she wanted a June wedding; it was simply drifting that way. She had never said she wanted a formal wedding, only, “Let’s not have anything too slapdash.” Then when he had told her he wouldn’t mind a formal wedding if she wouldn’t, she had let out a long”Oh-h!” and grabbed him and kissed him. No, he didn’t want another three-minute wedding with a stranger for a witness. He began sketching on the back of an envelope the twenty-story office building he had learned last week he had a good chance of being commissioned for, that he had been saving as a surprise for Anne. He felt the future had suddenly become the present. He had everything he wanted. Running down the platform steps, he saw Anne’s leopard coat in the little crowd by the station door. Always he would remember the times she waited for him here, he thought, the shy dance of impatience she did when she caught sight of him, the way she smiled and half turned round, as if she wouldn’t have waited half a minute longer.

“Anne!” He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek.

“You didn’t wear a hat.”

He smiled because it was exactly what he had expected her to say. “Well, neither did you.”

“I’m in the car. And it’s snowing.” She took his hand and they ran across the crisp ash lane toward the cars. “I’ve got a surprise!”

“So have I. What’s yours?”

“Sold five designs yesterday on my own.”

Guy shook his head. “I can’t beat that. I’ve just got one office building. Maybe.”

She smiled and her eyebrows went up. “Maybe? Yes!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” he said, and kissed her again.

That evening, standing on the little wooden bridge over the stream back of Anne’s house, Guy started to say, “Do you know what Bruno sent me today? A gun.” Then, not that he had come close to saying it, but the remoteness of Bruno and his connection with him from his and Anne’s life shocked him with a terrible realization. He wanted no secrets from Anne, and here was one bigger than all he had told her. Bruno, the name that haunted him, would mean nothing to Anne.

“What is it, Guy?”

She knew there was something, he thought. She always knew. “Nothing.”

He followed her as she turned and walked toward the house. The night had blackened the earth, made the snowy ground hardly distinguishable from woods and sky. And Guy felt it again—the sense of hostility in the clump of woods east of the house. Before him, the kitchen door spilled a warm yellow light some way onto the lawn. Guy turned again, letting his eyes rest on the blackness where the woods began. The feeling he had when he gazed there was discomforting and relieving at once, like biting on an ailing tooth.

“I’ll walk around again,” he said.

Anne went in, and he turned back. He wanted to see if the sensation were stronger or weaker when Anne was not with him. He tried to feel rather than see. It was still there, faint and evasive, where the darkness deepened at the baseline of the woods. Nothing of course. What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

He slipped his hands into his overcoat pockets and moved stubbornly closer.

The dull snap of a twig plummeted his consciousness to earth, focused it at a certain point. He sprinted toward it. A crackling of bushes now, and a moving black figure in the blackness. Guy released all his muscles in a long dive, caught it, and recognized the hoarse intake of breath as Bruno’s. Bruno plunged in his arms like a great powerful fish underwater, twisted and hit him an agonizing blow on the cheekbone. Clasping each other, they both fell, fighting to free arms, fighting as if they both fought death. Bruno’s fingers scratched frenziedly at his throat, though Guy kept his arms straight. Bruno’s breath hissed in and out between his drawn-back lips. Guy hit the mouth again with his right fist that felt broken, that would no longer close.

“Guy!” Bruno burst out indignantly.

Guy caught him by the front of his collar. Suddenly they both stopped fighting.

“You knew it was me!” Bruno said in a fury. “Dirty bastard!”

“What’re you doing here?” Guy pulled him to his feet.

The bleeding mouth spread wider, as if he were going to cry. “Lemme go!”

Guy shoved him. He fell like a sack to the ground and tottered up again.

“Okay, kill me if you want to! You can say it’s selfdefense!” Bruno whined.

Guy glanced toward the house. They had struggled a long way into the woods. “I don’t want to kill you. I’ll kill you next time I find you here.”

Bruno laughed, the single victorious clap.

Guy advanced menacingly. He did not want to touch Bruno again. Yet a moment before, he had fought with “Kill, kill!” in his mind. Guy knew there was nothing he could do to stop Bruno’s smile, not even kill him. “Clear out.”

“You ready to do that job in two weeks?”

“Ready to turn you over to the police.”

“Ready to turn yourself over?” Bruno jeered shrilly. “Ready to tell Anne all about it, huh? Ready to spend the next twenty years in jail? Sure, I’m ready!” He brought his palms together gently. His eyes seemed to glow with a red light. His swaying figure was like that of an evil spirit’s that might have stepped from the twisted black tree behind him.

“Get someone else for your dirty work,” Guy muttered.

“Look who’s talking! I want you and I’ve got you! Okay!“A laugh. “I’ll start. I’ll tell your girl friend all about it. I’ll write her tonight.” He lurched away, tripped heavily, and staggered on, a loose and shapeless thing. He turned and shouted, “Unless I hear from you in a day or so.”

Guy told Anne he had fought with a prowler in the woods. He suffered only a reddened eye from the battle, but he saw no way to stay on at the house, not go to Alton tomorrow, except by feigning injury. He had been hit in the stomach, he said. He didn’t feel well. Mr. and Mrs. Faulkner were alarmed, and insisted to the policeman who came to look over the grounds that they have a police guard for the next few nights. But a guard was not enough. If Bruno came back, Guy wanted to be there himself. Anne suggested that he stay on Monday, so he would have someone to look after him in case he were sick. Guy did stay on.

Nothing had ever shamed him so much, he thought, as the two days in the Faulkner house. He was ashamed that he felt the need to stay, ashamed that on Monday morning he went into Anne’s room and looked on the writing table where the maid put her mail to see if Bruno had written. He hadn’t. Anne left each morning for her shop in New York before the mail was delivered. On Monday morning, Guy looked through the four or five letters on her writing table, then hurried out like a thief, afraid the maid might see him. But he often came into her room when she was not there, he reminded himself. Sometimes when the house was filled with people, he would escape to Anne’s room for a few moments. And she loved to find him there. At the threshold, he leaned his head back against the door jamb, picking out the disorder in the room—the unmade bed, the big art books that didn’t fit in the bookshelves, her last designs thumbtacked to a strip of green cork down one wall, on the corner of the table a glass of bluish water that she had neglected to empty, the brown and yellow silk scarf over the chair back, that she had evidently changed her mind about. The gardenia scent of the cologne she had touched to her neck at the last moment still lingered in the air. He longed to merge his life with hers.