Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“Have you ever been to Metcalf?” she heard her own voice call around the partition.

“No,” Bruno replied. “No, I always wanted to. Have you?”

Bruno sipped his coffee at the mantel. Anne was on the sofa, her head tipped back so the curve of her throat above the tiny ruffled collar of her dress was the lightest thing about her. Anne is like light to me, Bruno remembered Guy once saying. If he could strangle Anne, too, then Guy and he could really be together. Bruno frowned at himself, then laughed and shifted on his feet.

“What’s funny?”

“Just thinking,” he smiled. “I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything. You know, the positive and negative, side by side. Every decision has a reason against it.” He noticed suddenly he was breathing hard.

“You mean two sides to everything?”

“Oh, no, that’s too simple!” Women were really so crude sometimes! “People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.” It thrilled him to say Guy’s words, though he hadn’t like hearing them, he remembered, because Guy had said the two people were mortal enemies, too, and Guy had meant him and himself.

Anne brought her head up slowly from the sofa back. It sounded so like Guy, yet he had never said it to her. Anne thought of the unsigned letter last spring. Charles must have written it. Guy must have meant Charles when he talked of ambush. There was no one else beside Charles to whom Guy reacted so violently. Surely it was Charles who alternated hatred with devotion.

“It’s not all good and evil either, but that’s how it shows itself best, in action,” Bruno went on cheerfully. “By the way, I mustn’t forget to tell Guy about giving the thousand dollars to a beggar. I always said when I had my own money, I’d give a thousand to a beggar. Well, I did, but you think he thanked me? It took me twenty minutes to prove to him the money was real! I had to take a hundred in a bank and break if for him! Then he acted as if he though I was crazy!” Bruno looked down and shook his head. He had counted on its being a memorable experience, and then to have the bastard look practically sore at him the next time he saw him—still begging on the same street corner, too—because he hadn’t brought him another thousand! “As I was saying anyway—”

“About good and evil,” Anne said. She loathed him. She knew all that Guy felt now about him. But she didn’t yet know why Guy tolerated him.

“Oh. Well, these things come out in actions. But for instance, murderers. Punishing them in the law courts won’t make them any better, Guy says. Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough. In fact, every man is just about everything to Guy!” He laughed. He was so tight, he could hardly see her face now, but he wanted to tell her everything that he and Guy had ever talked about, right up to the last little secret that he couldn’t tell her.

“People without consciences don’t punish themselves, do they?” Anne asked.

Bruno looked at the ceiling. “That’s true. Some people are too dumb to have consciences, other people too evil. Generally the dumb ones get caught. But take the two murderers of Guy’s wife and my father.” Bruno tried to look serious. “Both of them must have been pretty brilliant people, don’t you think?”

“So that have consciences and don’t deserve to get caught?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. Of course not! But don’t think they aren’t suffering a little. In their fashion!“He laughed again, because he was really too tight to know just where he was going. “They weren’t just madmen, like they said the murderer of Guy’s wife was. Shows how little the authorities know about real criminology. A crime like that took planning.” Out of the blue, he remembered he hadn’t planned that one at all, but he certainly had planned his father’s, which illustrated his point well enough. “What’s the matter?”

Anne laid her cold fingers against her forehead. “Nothing.”

Bruno fixed her a highball at the bar Guy had built into the side of the fireplace. Bruno wanted a bar just like it for his own house.

“Where did Guy get those scratches on his face last March?”

“What scratches?” Bruno turned to her. Guy had told him she didn’t know about the scratches.

“More than scratches. Cuts. And a bruise on his head.”

“I didn’t see them.”

“He fought with you, didn’t he?” Charles stared at her with a strange pinkish glint in his eyes. She was not deceitful enough to smile now. She was sure. She felt Charles was about to rush across the room and strike her, but she kept her eyes fixed on his. If she told Gerard, she thought, the fight would be proof of Charles’ knowledge of the murder. Then she saw Charles’ smile waver back.

“No!” he laughed. He sat down. “Where did he say he got the scratches? I didn’t see him anyway in March. I was out of town them.” He stood up. He suddenly didn’t feel well in the stomach, and it wasn’t the questions, it was his stomach. Suppose he was in for another attack now. Or tomorrow morning. He mustn’t pass put, mustn’t let Anne see that in the morning! “I’d better go soon,” he murmured.

“What’s the matter? You’re not feeling well? You’re a little pale.”

She wasn’t sympathetic. He could tell by her voice. What woman ever was, except his mother? “Thank you very much, Anne, for—for all day.”

She handed him his coat, and he stumbled out the door, gritting his teeth as he started the long walk toward his car at the curb.

The house was dark when Guy came home a few hours later. He prowled the living room, saw the cigarette stub ground on the hearth, the pipe rack askew on the end table, the depression in a small pillow on the sofa. There was a peculiar disorder that couldn’t have been created by Anne and Teddy, or by Chris, or by Helen Heyburn. Hadn’t he known?

He ran up to the guest room. Bruno wasn’t there, but he saw a tortured roll of newspaper on the bed table and a dime and two pennies domestically beside it. At the window, the dawn was coming in like that dawn. He turned his back on the window, and his held breath came out like a sob. What did Anne mean by doing this to him? Now of all times when it was intolerable—when half of himself was in Canada and the other half here, caught in the tightening grip of Bruno, Bruno with the police off his trail. The police had given him a little insulation! But he had overreached now. There was no enduring much longer.

He went into the bedroom and knelt beside Anne and kissed her awake, frightenedly, harshly, until he felt her arms close around him. He buried his face in the soft muss of the sheets over her breast. It seemed there was a rocking, roaring storm all around him, all around both of them, and that Anne was the only point of stillness, at its center, and the rhythm of her breathing the only sign of a normal pulse in a sane world. He got his clothes off with his eyes shut.

“I’ve missed you,” were the first words Anne said.

Guy stood near the foot of the bed with his hands in the pockets of his robe, clenched. The tension was still in him, and all the storm seemed gathered in his own core now.“I’ll be here three days. Have you missed me?”

Anne slid up a few inches in the bed. “Why do you look at me like that?”

Guy did not answer.

“I’ve seen him only once, Guy.”

“Why did you see him at all?”

“Because—” Her cheeks flushed as pink as the spot on her shoulder, Guy noticed. His beard had scratched her shoulder. He had never spoken to her like this before. And the fact she was going to answer him reasonably seemed only to give more reason to his anger. “Because he came by—”