Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“But she did, didn’t she?”

Guy looked away, annoyed and fascinated at the same time. “Yes.” How ugly the little word sounded, hissing in his ears!

“I know that Southern redhead type,” Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.

Guy was conscious again of an acute and absolutely useless shame. Useless, because nothing Miriam had done or said would embarrass or surprise Bruno. Bruno seemed incapable of surprise, only of a whetting of interest.

Bruno looked down at his plate with coy amusement. His eyes widened, bright as they could be with the bloodshot and the blue circles. “Marriage,” he sighed.

The word “marriage” lingered in Guy’s ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam’s round terra cotta-colored mouth saying, “Why should I put myself out for you?” and it was Anne’s eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve’s long dark head, insolently smiling. Memories began to crowd in, and he wanted to put his hands up and push them back. The room in Chicago where it had all happened… He could smell the room, Miriam’s perfume, and the heat from painted radiators. He stood passively, for the first time in years not thrusting Miriam’s face back to a pink blur. What would it do to him if he let it all flood him again, now? Arm him against her or undermine him?

“I mean it,” Bruno’s voice said distantly. “What happened? You don’t mind telling me, do you? I’m interested.”

Steve happened. Guy picked up his drink. He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of the room, the image gray and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn’t it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always? For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place. Steve wasn’t the first betrayal. It was only his twenty-six-year-old pride that had exploded in his face that afternoon. He had told the story to himself a thousand times, a classic story, dramatic for all his stupidity. His stupidity only lent it humor.

“I expected too much of her,” Guy said casually, “without any right to. She happened to like attention She’ll probably flirt all her life, no matter whom she’s with ”

“I know, the eternal high school type.” Bruno waved his hand. “Can’t even pretend to belong to one guy, ever.”

Guy looked at him. Miriam had, of course, once. Abruptly he abandoned his idea of telling Bruno, ashamed that he had nearly begun. Bruno seemed unconcerned now, in fact, whether he told it or not. Slumped, Bruno was drawing with a match in the gravy of his plate. The downturned half of his mouth, in profile, was sunken between nose and chin like the mouth of an old man. The mouth seemed to say, whatever the story, it was really beneath his contempt to listen. “Women like that draw men,” Bruno mumbled, “like garbage draws flies.”

Two

The shock of Bruno’s words detached him from himself. “You must have had some unpleasant experiences yourself,” he remarked. But Bruno troubled by women was hard to imagine.

“Oh, my father had one like that. Redhead, too. Named Carlotta.” He looked up, and the hatred for his father penetrated his fuzziness like a barb. “Fine, isn’t it? It’s men like my father keep ‘em in business.”

Carlotta. Guy felt he understood now why Bruno loathed Miriam. It seemed the key to Bruno’s whole personality, to the hatred of his father and to his retarded adolescence.

“There’s two kinds of guys!” Bruno announced in a roaring voice, and stopped.

Guy caught a glimpse of himself in a narrow panel mirror on the wall. His eyes looked frightened, he thought, his mouth grim, and deliberately he relaxed. A golf club nudged him in the back. He ran his fingertips over its cool varnished surface. The inlaid metal in the dark wood recalled the binnacle on Anne’s sailboat.

“And essentially one kind of women! “Bruno went on. “Two-timers. At one end it’s two-timing and the other end it’s a whore! Take your choice!”

“What about women like your mother?”

“I never seen another woman like my mother,” Bruno declared.” I never seen a woman take so much. She’s good-looking, too, lots of men friends, but she doesn’t fool around with them.”

Silence.

Guy tapped another cigarette on his watch and saw it was 10:30. He must go in a moment.

“How’d you find out about your wife?” Bruno peered up at him.

Guy took his time with his cigarette.

“How many’d she have?”

“Quite a few. Before I found out.” And just as he assured himself it made no difference at all now to admit it, a sensation as of a tiny whirlpool inside him began to confuse him. Tiny, but realer than the memories somehow, because he had uttered it. Pride? Hatred? Or merely impatience with himself, because all that he kept feeling now was so useless? He turned the conversation from himself. “Tell me what else you want to do before you die.”

“Die? Who said anything about dying? I got a few crackproof rackets doped out. Could start one some day in Chicago or New York, or I might just sell my ideas. And I got a lot of ideas for perfect murders.” Bruno looked up again with that fixity that seemed to invite challenge.

“I hope your asking me here isn’t part of one of your plans.” Guy sat down.

“Jesus Christ, I like you, Guy! I really do!”

The wistful face pled with Guy to say he liked him, too. The loneliness in those tiny, tortured eyes! Guy looked down embarrassedly at his hands. “Do all your ideas run to crime?”

“Certainly not! Just things I want to do, like—I want to give a guy a thousand dollars some day. A beggar. When I get my own dough, that’s one of the first things I’m gonna do. But didn’t you ever feel you wanted to steal something? Or kill somebody? You must have. Everybody feels those things. Don’t you think some people get quite a kick out of killing people in wars?”

“No,” Guy said.

Bruno hesitated. “Oh, they’d never admit it, of course, they’re afraid! But you’ve had people in your life you’d have liked out of the way, haven’t you?”

“No.” Steve, he remembered suddenly. Once he had even thought of murdering him.

Bruno cocked his head. “Sure you have. I see it. Why don’t you admit it?”

“I may have had fleeting ideas, but I’d never have done anything about them. I’m not that kind of person.”

“That’s exactly where you’re wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far—and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know!”

“I don’t happen to agree,” Guy said tersely.

“I tell you I came near murdering my father a thousand times! Who’d you ever feel like murdering? The guys with your wife?”

“One of them,” Guy murmured.

“How near did you come?”