Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

Guy looked at Bruno, and Bruno lowered his eyes. Bruno was waiting, as if for him to tell him how to fall in love. “Do you know the greatest wisdom in the world, Bruno?”

“I know a lot of wisdoms,” Bruno smirked. “Which one do you mean?”

“That everything has its opposite close beside it.”

“Opposites attract?”

“That’s too simple. I mean—you give me ties. But it also occurred to me you might have the police waiting for me here.”

“F’ Christ’s sake, Guy, you’re my friend!” Bruno said quickly, suddenly frantic. “I like you!”

I like you, I don’t hate you, Guy thought. But Bruno wouldn’t say that, because he did hate him. Just as he would never say to Bruno, I like you, but instead, I hate you, because he did like him. Guy set his jaw, and rubbed his fingers back and forth across his forehead. He could foresee a balance of positive and negative will that would paralyze every action before he began it. Such as that, for instance, that kept him sitting here. He jumped up, and the new drinks splashed on the cloth.

Bruno stared at him in terrified surprise. “Guy, what’s the matter?” Bruno followed him. “Guy, wait! You don’t think I’d do a thing like that, do you? I wouldn’t in a million years!”

“Don’t touch me!”

“Guy!” Bruno was almost crying. Why did people do these things to him? Why? He shouted on the sidewalk: “Not in a million years! Not for a million dollars! Trust me, Guy!”

Guy pushed his hand into Bruno’s chest and closed the taxi door. Bruno would not in a million years betray him, he knew. But if everything were as ambiguous as he believed, how could he really be sure?

Thirty-four

“What’s your connection with Mrs. Guy Haines?”

Bruno had expected it. Gerard had his latest charge accounts, and this was the flowers he had sent Anne. “Friend. Friend of her husband.”

“Oh. Friend?”

“Acquaintance.” Bruno shrugged, knowing Gerard would think he was trying to brag because Guy was famous.

“Known him long?”

“Not long.” From his horizontal slump in his easy chair, Bruno reached for his lighter.

“How’d you happen to send flowers?”

“Feeling good, I guess. I was going to a party there that night.”

“Do you know him that well?”

Bruno shrugged again. “Ordinary party. He was one of the architects we thought of when we were talking about building a house.” That had just popped out, and it was rather good, Bruno thought.

“Matt Levine. Let’s get back to him.”

Bruno sighed. Skipping Guy, maybe because he was out of town, maybe just skipping him. Now Matt Levine—they didn’t come any shadier, and without realizing it might be useful, he had seen a lot of Matt before the murder. “What about him?”

“How is it you saw him the twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth, and thirtieth of April, the second, fifth, sixth, seventh of March, and two days before the murder?”

“Did I?” he smiled. Gerard had had only three dates the last time. Matt didn’t like him either. Matt had probably said the worst. “He was interested in buying my car.”

“And you were interested in selling it? Why, because you thought you’d get a new one soon?”

“Wanted to sell it to get a little car,” Bruno said obliviously. “The one in the garage now. Crosley.”

Gerard smiled. “How long have you known Mark Lev?”

“Since he was Mark Levitski,” Bruno retorted. “Go back a little farther and you’ll find he killed his own father in Russia.” Bruno glared at Gerard. The “own” sounded funny, he shouldn’t have said it, but Gerard trying to be smart with the aliases!

“Matt doesn’t care for you either. What’s the matter, couldn’t you two come to terms?”

“About the car?”

“Charles,” Gerard said patiently.

“I’m not saying anything.” Bruno looked at his bitten nails, and thought again how well Matt matched Herbert’s description of the murderer.

“You haven’t seen Ernie Schroeder much lately.”

Bruno opened his mouth boredly to answer.

Thirty-five

Barefoot, in white duck trousers, Guy sat cross-legged on the India’s forward deck. Long Island had just come in sight, but he did not want to look at it yet. The gently rolling movement of the ship rocked him pleasantly and familiarly, like something he had always known. The day he had last seen Bruno, in the restaurant, seemed a day of madness. Surely he had been going insane. Surely Anne must have seen it.

He flexed his arm and pinched up the thin brown skin that covered its muscles. He was brown as Egon, the half-Portuguese ship’s boy they had hired from the Long Island dock at the start of the cruise. Only the little scar in his right eyebrow remained white.

The three weeks at sea had given him a peace and resignation he had never known before, and that a month ago he would have declared foreign to him. He had come to feel that his atonement, whatever it might be, was a part of his destiny, and like the rest of his destiny would find him without his seeking. He had always trusted his sense of destiny. As a boy with Peter, he had known that he would not merely dream, as he had somehow known, too, that Peter would do nothing but dream, that he would create famous buildings, that his name would take its proper place in architecture, and finally—it had always seemed to him the crowning achievement—that he would build a bridge. It would be a white bridge with a span like an angel’s wing, he had thought as a boy, like the curving white bridge of Robert Maillart in his architecture books. It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one’s destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate? The murder that had seemed an outrageous departure, a sin against himself, he believed now might have been a part of his destiny, too. It was impossible to think otherwise. And if it were so, he would be given a way to make his atonement, and given the strength to make it. And if death by law overtook him first, he would be given the strength to meet that also, and strength besides sufficient for Anne to meet it. In a strange way, he felt humbler than the smallest minnow of the sea, and stronger than the greatest mountain on earth. But he was not arrogant. His arrogance had been a defense, reaching its height at the time of the break with Miriam. And hadn’t he known even then, obsessed by her, wretchedly poor, that he would find another woman whom he could love and who would love him always? And what better proof did he need that all this was so than that he and Anne had never been closer, their lives never more like one harmonious life, than during these three weeks at sea?

He turned himself with a movement of his feet, so he could see her as she leaned against the mainmast. There was a faint smile on her lips as she gazed down at him, a half-repressed, prideful smile like that of a mother, Guy thought, who had brought her child safely through an illness, and smiling back at her, Guy marveled that he could put such trust in her infallibility and rightness and that she could still be merely a human being. Most of all, he marveled that she could be his. Then he looked down at his locked hands and thought of the work he would begin tomorrow on the hospital, of all the work to come, and the events of his destiny that lay ahead.

Bruno telephoned a few evenings later. He was in the neighborhood, he said, and wanted to come by. He sounded very sober, and a little dejected.

Guy told him no. He told him calmly and firmly that neither he nor Anne wanted to see him again, but even as he spoke, he felt the sands of his patience running out fast, and the sanity of the past weeks crumbling under the madness of their conversing at all.