Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“I think so.” Guy gripped the bicycle’s, front wheel with his knees and straightened the handlebars, feeling the child’s curious eyes on his own violently trembling hands.

“Thanks,” said the boy.

Guy watched him mount the bicycle and pedal off as if he watched a miracle. He looked at Anne and said quietly, with a shuddering sigh, “I can’t drive anymore today.”

“All right,” she replied, as quietly as he, but there was a suspicion in her eyes, Guy knew, as she turned to go around to the driver’s seat.

Guy apologized to the Faulkners as he got back into the car, and they murmured something about such things happening to every driver now and then. But Guy felt their real silence behind him, a silence of shock and horror. He had seen the boy coming down the side road. The boy had stopped for him, but Guy had swerved the car toward him as if he had intended to hit him. Had he? Tremulously, he lighted a cigarette. Nothing but bad coordination, he told himself, he had seen it a hundred times in the past two weeks—collisions with revolving doors, his inability even to hold a pen against a ruler, and so often the feeling he wasn’t here, doing what he was doing. Grimly he reestablished what he was doing now, driving in Anne’s car up to Alton to see the new house. The house was done. Anne and her mother had put the drapes up last week. It was Sunday, nearly noon. Anne had told him she had gotten a nice letter from his mother yesterday, and that his mother had sent her three crocheted aprons and a lot of homemade preserves to start their kitchen shelves. Could he remember all that? All he seemed to remember was the sketch of the Bronx hospital in his pocket, that he hadn’t told Anne about yet. He wished he could go away somewhere and do nothing but work, see no one, not even Anne. He stole a glance at her, at her coolly lifted face with the faint arch in the bridge of the nose. Her thin strong hands swung the wheel expertly into a curve and out. Suddenly he was sure she loved her car more than she loved him.

“If anybody’s hungry, speak up now,” Anne said. “This little store’s the last place for miles.”

But no one was hungry.

“I expect to be asked for dinner at least once a year, Anne,” her father said. “Maybe a brace of ducks or some quail. I hear there’s some good hunting around here. Any good with a gun, Guy?”

Anne turned the car into the road that led to the house.

“Fair, sir,” Guy said finally, stammering twice. His heart was flogging him to run, he could still it only by running, he was sure.

“Guy!” Anne smiled at him. Stopping the car, she whispered to him, “Have a nip when you get in the house. There’s a bottle of brandy in the kitchen.” She touched his wrist, and Guy jerked his hand back, involuntarily.

He must, he thought, have a brandy or something. But he knew also that he would not take anything.

Mrs. Faulkner walked beside him across the new lawn. “It’s simply beautiful, Guy. I hope you’re proud of it.”

Guy nodded. It was finished, he didn’t have to imagine it anymore as he had in the brown bureau of the hotel room in Mexico. Anne had wanted Mexican tiles in the kitchen. So many things she wore from time to time were Mexican. A belt, a handbag, huarachas. The long embroidered skirt that showed now below her tweed coat was Mexican. He felt he must have chosen the Hotel Montecarlo so that dismal pink-and-brown room and Bruno’s face in the brown bureau would haunt him the rest of his life.

It was only a month until their marriage now. Four more Friday nights, and Anne would sit in the big square green chair by the fireplace, her voice would call to him from the Mexican kitchen, they would work together in the studio upstairs. What right had he to imprison her with himself? He stood staring at their bedroom, vaguely aware that it seemed cluttered, because Anne had said she wanted their bedroom “not modern.”

“Don’t forget to thank Mother for the furniture, will you?” she whispered to him. “Mother gave it to us, you know.”

The cherry bedroom set, of course. He remembered her telling him that morning at breakfast, remembered his bandaged hand, and Anne in the black dress she had worn to Helen’s party. But when he should have said something about the furniture, he didn’t, and then it seemed too late. They must know something is the matter, he felt. Everyone in the world must know. He was only somehow being reprieved, being saved for some weight to fall upon him and annihilate him.

“Thinking about a new job, Guy?” Mr. Faulkner asked, offering him a cigarette.

Guy had not seen his figure there when he stepped onto the side porch. With a sense of justifying himself, he pulled the folded paper from his pocket and showed it to him, explained it to him. Mr. Faulkner’s bushy, gray and brown eyebrows came down thoughtfully. But he’s not listening to me at all, Guy thought. He’s bending closer only to see my guilt that is like a circle of darkness about me.

“Funny Anne didn’t say anything to me about it,” Mr. Faulkner said.

“I’m saving it.”

“Oh,” Mr. Faulkner chuckled. “A wedding present?”

Later, the Faulkners took the car and went back for sandwiches from the little store. Guy was tired of the house. He wanted Anne to walk with him up the rock hill.

“In a minute,” she said. “Come here.” She stood in front of the tall stone fireplace. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face, a little apprehensive, but still glowing with her pride in their new house. “Those are getting deeper, you know,” she told him, drawing her fingertip down the hollow in his cheek. “I’m going to make you eat.”

“Maybe need a little sleep,” he murmured. He had told her that lately his work demanded long hours. He had told her, of all things, that he was doing some agency jobs, hack jobs, as Myers did, in order to earn some money.

“Darling, we’re—we’re well off. What on earth’s troubling you?”

And she had asked him half a dozen times if it was the wedding, if he wanted not to marry her. If she asked him again, he might say yes, but he knew she would not ask it now, in front of their fireplace. “Nothing’s troubling me,” he said quickly.

“Then will you please not work so hard?” she begged him, then spontaneously, out of her own joy and anticipation, hugged him to her.

Automatically—as if it were nothing at all, he thought—he kissed her, because he knew she expected him to. She will notice, he thought, she always notices the slightest difference in a kiss, and it had been so long since he had kissed her. When she said nothing, it seemed to him only that the change in him was simply too enormous to mention.

Thirty

Guy crossed the kitchen and turned at the back door. “Awfully thoughtless of me to invite myself on the cook’s night out.”

“What’s thoughtless about it? You’ll just fare as we do on Thursday nights, that’s all. ” Mrs. Faulkner brought him a piece of the celery she was washing at the sink. “But Hazel’s going to be disappointed she wasn’t here to make the shortcake herself. You’ll have to do with Anne’s tonight.”

Guy went out. The afternoon was still bright with sun, though the picket fence cast long oblique bars of shadow over the crocus and iris beds. He could just see Annie’s tied-back hair and the pale green of her sweater beyond a crest in the rolling sea of lawn. Many times he had gathered mint and watercress there with Anne, from the stream that flowed out of the woods where he had fought Bruno. Bruno is past, he reminded himself, gone, vanished. Whatever method Gerard had used, he had made Bruno afraid to contact him.

He watched Mr. Faulkner’s neat black car enter the driveway and roll slowly into the open garage. What was he doing here, he asked himself suddenly, where he deceived everyone, even the colored cook who liked to make shortcake for him because, once perhaps, he had praised her dessert? He moved into the shelter of the pear tree, where neither Anne nor her father would easily see him. If he should step out of Anne’s life, he thought, what difference would it make to her? She had not given up all her old friends, hers and Teddy’s set, the eligible young men, the handsome young men who played at polo and, rather harmlessly, at the night clubs before they entered their father’s business and married one of the beautiful young girls who decorated their country clubs. Anne was different, of course, or she wouldn’t have been attracted to him in the first place. She was not one of the beautiful young girls who worked at a career for a couple of years just to say they had done it, before they married one of the eligible young men. But wouldn’t she have been just the same, herself, without him? She had often told him he was her inspiration, he and his own ambition, but she had had the same talent, the same drive the day he met her, and wouldn’t she have gone on? And wouldn’t another man, like himself but worthy of her, have found her? He began to walk toward her.