Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

Guy awakened to Bruno’s presence in the dark, though he heard nothing. After the first small start at the suddenness, he felt no surprise at all. As he had imagined, in nights before this, he was quite happy that Bruno had come. Really Bruno? Yes. Guy saw the end of his cigarette now, over by the bureau.

“Bruno?”

“Hi,” Bruno said softly. “I got in on a pass key. You’re ready now, aren’t you?” Bruno sounded calm and tired.

Guy raised himself to one elbow. Of course Bruno was there. The orangey end of his cigarette was there. “Yes,” Guy said, and felt the yes absorbed by the darkness, not like the other nights when the yes had been silent, not even going out from him. It undid the knot in his head so suddenly that it hurt him. It was what he had been waiting to say, what the silence in the room had been waiting to hear. And the beasts beyond the walls.

Bruno sat down on the side of the bed and gripped both his arms above the elbows. “Guy, I’ll never see you again.”

“No.” Bruno smelled abominably of cigarettes and sweet brilliantine, of the sourness of drink, but Guy did not draw back from him. His head was still at its delicious business of untying.

“I tried to be nice to him these last couple days,” Bruno said. “Not nice, just decent. He said something tonight to my mother, just before we went out—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Guy said. Time and again he had stopped Bruno because he didn’t want to know what his father had said, what he looked like, anything about him.

They were both silent for several seconds, Guy because he would not explain, and Bruno because he had been silenced.

Bruno snuffled with a disgusting rattle. “We’re going to Maine tomorrow, starting by noon positively. My mother and me and the chauffeur. Tomorrow night is a good night but any night except Thursday night is just the same. Any time after 11…”

He kept talking, repeating what Guy knew already, and Guy did not stop him, because he knew he was going to enter the house and it would all come true.

“I broke the lock on the back door two days ago, slamming it when I was tight. They won’t get it fixed, they’re too busy. But if they do—” He pressed a key into Guy’s hand. “And I brought you these.”

“What is it?”

“Gloves. Ladies’ gloves, but they’ll stretch.” Bruno laughed.

Guy felt the thin cotton gloves.

“You got the gun, huh? Where is it?”

“In the bottom drawer.”

Guy heard him stumble against the bureau and heard the drawer pull out. The lampshade crackled, the light came on, and Bruno stood there huge and tall in a new polo coat so pale it was nearly white, in black trousers with a thin white strip in them. A white silk muffler hung long around his neck. Guy examined him from his small brown shoes to his stringy oiled hair, as if from his physical appearance he could discover what had caused his change of feeling, or even what the feeling was. It was familiarity and something more, something brotherly. Bruno clicked the gun shut and turned to him. His face was heavier than the last time Guy had seen it, flushed and more alive than he remembered ever having seen it. His gray eyes looked bigger with his tears and rather golden. He looked at Guy as if he tried to find words, or as if he pled with Guy to find them. Then he moistened the thin parted lips, shook his head, and reached an arm out toward the lamp. The light went out.

When he was gone, it hardly seemed he was gone. There were just the two of them in the room still, and sleep.

A GRAY GLARING LIGHT FILLED THE ROOM when Guy awakened. The clock said 3:25. He imagined more than remembered that he had gotten up to go to the telephone that morning, that Myers had called to ask why he had not come in, and that he had said he didn’t feel well. The devil with Myers. He lay there blinking his dullness away, letting it seep into the thinking part of his brain that tonight he was going to do it, and after tonight it would all be over. Then he got up and slowly went about his routine of shaving, showering, and dressing, aware that nothing he did mattered at all until the hour between 11 and midnight, the hour there was neither hurry nor delay about, that was coming just as it should. He felt he moved on certain definite tracks now, and that he could not have stopped himself or gotten off them if he had wanted to. In the middle of his late breakfast in a coffee shop down the street, an eerie sensation came over him that the last time he had seen Anne he had told her everything that he was going to do, and that she had listened placidly, knowing she must for his sake, because he absolutely had to do what he was going to do. It seemed so natural and inevitable, he felt everyone in the world must know it, the man sitting beside him unconcernedly eating, Mrs. McCausland, sweeping her hall as he went out, who had given him an especially maternal smile and asked if he was feeling well. March 12 FRIDAY, said the day-by-day calendar on the coffeeshop wall. Guy stared at it a moment, then finished his meal.

He wanted to keep moving. He decided by the time he walked up Madison Avenue, then Fifth to the end of Central Park, down Central park West to Pennsylvania Station, it would be time to catch the train to Great Neck. He began to think of his course of action for tonight, but it bored him like something in school he had already studied too much, and he stopped. The brass barometers in a Madison Avenue window had a special appeal now, as if he were soon to have a holiday and possess them and play with them. Anne’s sailboat, he thought, didn’t have a barometer as handsome as any of these, or he would have noticed it. He must get one before they sailed south on their honeymoon. He thought of his love, like a rich possession. He had reached the north end of Central Park, when it occurred to him he didn’t have the gun with him. Or the gloves. And it was a quarter to 8. A fine, stupid beginning! He hailed a cab and hurried the driver back to his house.

There was plenty of time after all, so much that he wandered about his room absently for a while. Should he bother to wear crepe-soled shoes? Should he wear a hat? He got the Luger out of the bottom drawer and laid it on the bureau. There was a single plan of Bruno’s under the gun and he opened it, but immediately every word was so familiar, he threw it into the wastebasket. Momentum smoothed his movements again. He got the purple cotton gloves from the table by his bed. A small yellow card fluttered from them. It was a ticket to Great Neck.

He stared at the black Luger which more than before struck him as outrageously large. Idiotic of someone to have made a gun so big! He got his own little revolver from the top drawer. Its pearl handle gleamed with a discreet beauty. Its short slender barrel looked inquisitive, willing, strong with a reserved and gallant strength. Still, he mustn’t forget he’d been going to leave the Luger in the bedroom, because it was Bruno’s gun. But it didn’t seem worth it now, to carry the heavy gun just for that. He really felt no enmity toward Bruno now, and that was the odd thing.

For a moment, he was utterly confused. Of course take the Luger, the Luger was in the plan! He put the Luger in his overcoat pocket. His hand moved for the gloves on the bureau top. The gloves were purple and the flannel bag of his revolver was lavender. Suddenly it seemed fitting he should take the small revolver, because of the similar colors, so he put the Luger back in the bottom drawer and dropped the little revolver into his pocket. He did not check to see if anything else should be done, because he could simply feel, having gone over Bruno’s plans so often, that he had done everything. At last he got a glass of water and poured it into the ivy in the wall brackets. A cup of coffee might make him more alert, he thought. He would get one at the Great Neck station.