Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“Interesting face he has,” Anne said, straightening her dress about her ankles before she put her feet on the jump seat.

“Interesting?” Guy asked.

“I don’t mean attractive. Just intense.”

Guy set his teeth. Intense? Couldn’t she see he was insane? Morbidly insane? Couldn’t everyone see it?

Thirty-two

The receptionist at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, handed him a message that Charles Bruno had called and left his number. It was the Great Neck number.

“Thank you,” Guy said, and went on across the lobby.

Suppose the firm kept records of telephone messages. They didn’t, but suppose they did. Suppose Bruno dropped in one day. But Horton, Horton and Keese were so rotten themselves, Bruno wouldn’t make much of a contrast. And wasn’t that exactly why he was here, steeping himself in it, under some illusion that revulsion was atonement and that he would begin to feel better here?

Guy went into the big skylighted, leather-upholstered lounge, and lighted a cigarette. Mainwaring and Williams, two of the firm’s first-string architects, sat in big leather armchairs, reading company reports. Guy felt their eyes on him as he stared out the window. They were always watching him, because he was supposed to be something special, a genius, the junior Horton had assured everybody, so what was he doing here? He might be broker than everybody thought, of course, and he had just gotten married, but quite apart from that and from the Bronx hospital, he was obviously nervous, had lost his grip. The best lost their grip sometimes, they would say to themselves, so why should they scruple about taking a comfortable job? Guy gazed down onto the dirty jumble of Manhattan roofs and streets that looked like a floor model of how a city should not be built. When he turned around, Mainwaring dropped his eyes like a schoolboy.

He spent the morning dawdling over a job that he had been on for several days. Take your time, they told him. All he had to do was give the client what he wanted and sign his name to it. Now, this job was a department store for an opulent little community in Westchester, and the client wanted something like an old mansion, in keeping with the town, only sort of modern, too, see? And he had asked especially for Guy Daniel Haines. By adjusting his brain to the level of the trick, the cartoon, Guy could have tossed it off, but the fact it was really going to be a department store kept intruding certain functional demands. He erased and sharpened pencils all morning, and figured it would take him four or five more days, well into next week, until he got anything down as even a rough idea to show the client.

“Charley Bruno’s coming tonight, too,” Anne called that evening from the kitchen.

“What?” Guy came around the partition.

“Isn’t that his name? The young man we saw at the wedding.”

Anne was cutting chives on a wooden board.

“You invited him?”

“He seems to have heard about it, so he called up and sort of invited himself,” Anne replied so casually that a wild suspicion she might be testing him sent a faint chill up his spine. “Hazel—not milk, angel, there’s plenty of cream in the refrigerator.”

Guy watched Hazel set the cream container down by the bowl of crumbled gorgonzola cheese.

“Do you mind his coming, Guy?” Anne asked him.

“Not at all, but he’s no friend of mine, you know.” He moved awkwardly toward the cabinets and got out the shoe-polish box. How could he stop him? There had to be a way, yet even as he racked his brain, he knew that the way would elude him.

“You do mind,” Anne said, with a smile.

“I think he’s sort of a bounder, that’s all.”

“It’s bad luck to turn anyone away from a housewarming. Don’t you know that?”

Bruno was pink-eyed when he arrived. Everyone else had made some comment about the new house, but Bruno stepped down into the brick-red and forest-green living room as if he had been here a hundred times before. Or as if he lived here, Guy thought as he introduced Bruno around the room. Bruno focused a grinning, excited attention on Guy and Anne, hardly acknowledging the greetings of the others—two or three looked as if they knew him, Guy thought—except for that of a Mrs. Chester Boltinoff of Muncey Park, Long Island, whose hand Bruno shook in both his as if he had found an ally. And Guy watched with horror as Mrs. Boltinoff looked up at Bruno with a wide, friendly smile.

“How’s every little thing?” Bruno asked Guy after he had gotten himself a drink.

“Fine. Very fine.” Guy was determined to be calm, even if he had to anaesthetize himself. He had already had two or three straight shots in the kitchen. But he found himself walking away, retreating, toward the perpendicular spiral stairway in the corner of the living room. Just for a moment, he thought, just to get his bearings. He ran upstairs and into the bedroom, laid his cold hand against his forehead, and brought it slowly down his face.

“Pardon me, I’m still exploring,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “It’s such a terrific house, Guy, I had to retreat to the nineteenth century for a while.”

Helen Heyburn, Anne’s friend from her Bermuda schooldays, was standing by the bureau. Where the little revolver was, Guy thought.

“Make yourself at home. I just came up for a handkerchief. How’s your drink holding up?” Guy slid out the right top drawer where lay both the gun he didn’t want and the handkerchief he didn’t need.

“Well—better than I am.”

Helen was in another “manic” period, Guy supposed. She was a commercial artist, a good one, Anne thought, but she worked only when her quarterly allowance gave out and she slipped into a depressive period. And she didn’t like him, he felt, since the Sunday evening when he hadn’t gone with Anne to her party. She was suspicious of him. What was she doing now in their bedroom, pretending to feel her drinks more than she did?

“Are you always so serious, Guy? You know what I said to Anne when she told me she was going to marry you?”

“You told her she was insane.”

“I said,‘But he’s so serious. Very attractive and maybe a genius, but he’s so serious, how can you stand it?’” She lifted her squarish, pretty blond face. “You don’t even defend yourself. I’ll bet you’re too serious to kiss me, aren’t you?”

He forced himself toward her, and kissed her.

“That’s no kiss.”

“But I deliberately wasn’t being serious.”

He went out. She would tell Anne, he thought, she would tell her that she had found him in the bedroom looking pained at 10 o’clock. She might look into the drawer and find the gun, too. But he didn’t believe any of it. Helen was silly, and he hadn’t the slightest idea why Anne liked her, but she wasn’t a troublemaker. And she wasn’t a snooper any more than Anne was. My God, hadn’t he left the revolver there in the drawer next to Anne’s all the time they had been living here? He was no more afraid Anne would investigate his half of the bureau than he was that she would open his mail.

Bruno and Anne were on the right-angled sofa by the fireplace when he came down. The glass Bruno wobbled casually on the sofa back had made dark green splotches on the cloth.

“He’s telling me all about the new Capri, Guy.” Anne looked up at him. “I’ve always wanted us to go there.”

“The thing to do is to take a whole house,” Bruno went on, ignoring Guy, “take a castle, the bigger the better. My mother and I lived in a castle so big we never walked to the other end of it until one night I couldn’t find the right door. There was a whole Italian family having dinner at the other end of the veranda, and the same night they all come over, about twelve of them, and ask if they can work for us for nothing, just if we let them stay there. So of course we did.”