Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

And how could he sit at his desk thinking of murder, when in less than ten days he would be with Anne on a white ship? Why had he been given Anne, or the power to love her? And had he agreed so readily to the cruise only because he wanted to be free of Bruno for three weeks? Bruno, if he wanted to, could take Anne from him. He had always admitted that to himself, always tried to face it. But he realized that since he had seen them together, since the day of the wedding, the possibility had become a specific terror.

He got up and put on his hat to go out to lunch. He heard the switchboard buzz as he crossed the lobby. Then the girl called to him.

“Take it from here if you like, Mr. Haines.”

Guy picked up the telephone, knowing it was Bruno, knowing he would agree to Bruno’s seeing him sometime today. Bruno asked him to have lunch, and Guy promised to meet him at Marios Villa d’Este in ten minutes.

There were pink and white patterned drapes in the restaurants window. Guy had a feeling that Bruno had laid a trap, that detectives would be behind the pink and white curtain, but not Bruno. And he didn’t care, he felt, didn’t care at all.

Bruno spotted him from the bar and slid off his stool with a grin. Guy walking around with his head in the air again, he thought, walking right by him. Bruno laid his hand on Guy’s shoulder.

“Hi, Guy. I’ve got a table the end of this row.”

Bruno was wearing his old rust-brown suit. Guy thought of the first time he had followed the long legs, down the swaying train to the compartment, but the memory brought no remorse now. He felt, in fact, well-disposed toward Bruno, as he sometimes did by night, but never until now by day. He did not even resent Bruno’s evident gratification that he had come to lunch with him.

Bruno ordered the cocktails and the lunch. He ordered broiled liver for himself, because of his new diet, he said, and eggs Benedict for Guy, because he knew Guy liked them. Guy was inspecting the table nearest them. He felt a puzzled suspicion of the four smartly dressed, fortyish women, all of whom were smiling with their eyes almost closed, all of whom lifted cocktail glasses. Beyond them, a well-fed, European-looking man hurled a smile across the table at his invisible companion. Waiters scurried zealously. Could it all be a show created and enacted by madmen, he and Bruno the main characters, and the maddest of all? For every movement he saw, every word he heard, seemed wrapped in the heroic gloom of predestination.

“Like ‘em?” Bruno was saying. “I got ‘em at Clyde’s this morning. Best selection in town. For summer anyway.”

Guy looked down at the four tie boxes Bruno had opened in their laps. There were knitted, silk and linen ties, and a pale lavender bowtie of heavy linen. There was a shantung silk tie of aqua, like a dress of Anne’s.

Bruno was disappointed. Guy didn’t seem to like them. “Too loud? They’re summer ties.”

“They’re nice,” Guy said.

“This is my favorite. I never saw anything like this.” Bruno held up the white knitted tie with the thin red stripe down the center. “Started to get one for myself, but I wanted you to have it. Just you, I mean. They’re for you, Guy.”

“Thanks.” Guy felt an unpleasant twitch in his upper lip. He might have been Bruno’s lover, he thought suddenly, to whom Bruno had brought a present, a peace offering.

“Here’s to the trip,” Bruno said, lifting his glass.

Bruno had spoken to Anne this morning on the telephone, and Anne had mentioned the cruise, he said. Bruno kept telling him, wistfully, how wonderful he thought Anne was.

“She’s so pure-looking. You certainly don’t see a—a kind-looking girl like that very often. You must be awfully happy, Guy.” He hoped Guy might say something, a phrase or a word, that would somehow explain just why he was happy. But Guy didn’t say anything, and Bruno felt rebuffed, felt the choking lump traveling from his chest up to his throat. What could Guy take offense at about that? Bruno wanted very much to put his hand over Guy’s fist, that rested lightly on the edge of the table, just for a moment as a brother might, but he restrained himself. “Did she like you right away or did you have to know her a long time? Guy?”

Guy heard him repeat the question. It seemed ages old. “How can you ask me about time? It’s a fact.” He glanced at Bruno’s narrow, plumpening face, at the cowlick that still gave his forehead a tentative expression, but Bruno’s eyes were vastly more confident than when he had seen them first, and less sensitive. Because he had his money now, Guy thought.

“Yeah. I know what you mean.” But Bruno didn’t, quite. Guy was happy with Anne even though the murder still haunted him. Guy would be happy with her even if he were broke. Bruno winced now for even having thought once that he might offer Guy money. He could hear the way Guy would say, “No,” with that look of drawing back in his eyes, of being miles away from him in a second. Bruno knew he would never have the things Guy had no matter how much money he had or what he did with it. Having his mother to himself was no guarantee of happiness, he had found out. Bruno made himself smile. “You think Anne likes me all right?”

“All right.”

“What does she like to do outside of designing? Does she like to cook? Things like that?” Bruno watched Guy pick up his martini and drain it in three swallows. “You know. I just like to know the kind of things you do together. Like take walks or work crossword puzzles.”

“We do things like that.”

“What do you do in the evenings?”

“Anne sometimes works in the evenings.” His mind slid easily, as it never had before with Bruno, to the upstairs studio where he and Anne often worked in the evenings, Anne talking to him from time to time, or holding something up for him to comment on, as if her work were effortless. When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter.

“I saw her picture in Harper’s Bazaar a couple months ago with some other designers. She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

“Very good.”

“I—” Bruno laid his forearms one above the other on the table. “I sure am glad you’re happy with her.”

Of course he was. Guy felt his shoulders relax, and his breathing grow easier. Yet at this moment, it was hard to believe she was his. She was like a goddess who descended to pluck him from battles that would certainly have killed him, like the goddesses in mythology who saved the heroes, yet introduced an element at the end of the stories that had always struck him, when he read them as a child, as extraneous and unfair. In the nights when he could not sleep, when he stole out of the house and walked up the rock hill in pajamas and overcoat, in the unchallenging, indifferent summer nights, he did not permit himself to think of Anne. “Dea ex machina,” Guy murmured.

“What?”

Why was he sitting here with Bruno, eating at the same table with him? He wanted to fight Bruno and he wanted to weep. But all at once he felt his curses dissolve in a flood of pity. Bruno did not know how to love, and that was all he needed. Bruno was too lost, too blind to love or to inspire love. It seemed all at once tragic.

“You’ve never even been in love, Bruno?” Guy watched a restive, unfamiliar expression come into Bruno’s eyes.

Bruno signaled for another drink. “No, not really in love, I guess.” He moistened his lips. Not only hadn’t he ever fallen in love, but he didn’t care too much about sleeping with women. He had never been able to stop thinking it was a silly business, that he was standing off somewhere and watching himself. Once, one terrible time, he had started giggling. Bruno squirmed. That was the most painful difference he felt separating him and Guy, that Guy could forget himself in women, had practically killed himself for Miriam.